On a recent sunny morning, TV camera crews jostled to get a shot of Chicago Housing Authority officials who stood beaming in front of the tower at 3919 S. Federal St. as the wrecking ball began to swing.
The CHA leaders’ satisfaction seemed understandable as an eyesore started to fall, the first of several buildings in the Robert Taylor Homes doomed to tumble like dominoes over the next few years. A nearby target is the tower from which 5-year-old Eric Morse was dropped to his death in 1994, a slaying symbolic of the chaos and misery that seem endemic to the city’s public housing.
But not all residents see it that way.
In meetings and protest marches over the past few months, many of them have expressed qualms over the CHA’s plan, fears that go beyond the natural trepidation about being left out in the cold. Many, it seems, will miss the slums.
What kind of psychology makes people look back on their lives in public housing complexes with fondness? Nostalgia would seem to be a weakness now. With so many housing developments slated for destruction, survival in the urban landscape may favor residents with the least emotional investment in the past.
Marchez Lofton, 22, will not fare well in that case.
Lofton, short and slightly built with a ready grin and a thoughtful manner, was born on the 11th floor at 3919 S. Federal. As it began to crumble, he stood across the street recalling how neighborhood kids would greet the coming of night–not with terror, but excitement.
“When the sun went down and the street lights came on, all the kids used to shout, `Aw, yeah!’ ” he said.
The chorus signaled the start of a CHA-imposed curfew for children in Lofton’s building. Undaunted, he and his friends merely would move their play inside the building’s long hallways.
Now, as his birthplace was torn down, he could do nothing more than clutch the wire fence separating onlookers from the demolition. Ten feet away stood the playground from which CHA officials had made their triumphant morning speeches.
“They’re taking away a lot of memories,” Lofton murmured.
To an outsider, Lofton’s lament may sound like a French prisoner bemoaning the fall of the Bastille. Yet who can sit in judgment on the feelings of another? Lofton’s voice was filled with love.
Perhaps love in Lofton’s case was a product of wishful thinking. Much of modern psychology dwells on the human capacity for self-delusion, the way we can fool ourselves into thinking our lives are better than they really are. Most recently, advocates of a bizarre phenomenon called “repressed memory syndrome” proposed that some people selectively forget years of childhood abuse as a mechanism to cope as adults.
Lofton was able to reminisce just feet from the spot where one of his friends, a boy he called Le Duke, was killed in a drive-by shooting. How could he do that? It may be an instinctual human reaction to shove aside awful memories and focus instead on something that represents security and stability, even if it means hanging sentiment on a place like 3919 S. Federal–called simply “3919” by many of its residents.
Evidence suggests, however, that while people may wipe out memories of specific traumatic events, no one can completely repress a prolonged period of misery. Lofton has not lost the memories of events such as Le Duke’s and Eric Morse’s deaths, a fact that makes his love for the place all the more remarkable.
In fact, the vocabulary of modern psychology, more attuned to statistical description than emotional subtleties, is ill-suited to explain love as most people experience it. Psychologists say that people tend to like things that are familiar, but that does not explain Lofton’s conflicting emotions, or why other former residents drove from all parts of the city to pay their respects to 3919 the day the tower fell.
Psychological language sometimes misses the truth that not all extraordinary leaps of the imagination are pathological. Lofton and his old neighbors nurtured a sense of community where others might believe no community could possibly exist. Through what some would call self-delusion, they gave themselves hope.
A better analogy for what the residents achieved may be the output of poet Siegfried Sassoon and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who produced some of the 20th Century’s most sublime work while foot soldiers in World War I. Trying circumstances only occasionally turn people into murderous monsters. Instead, such conditions can make even the most simple accomplishments seem like defiant acts of transcendence.
The coming destruction of many housing developments, for the good it may do in the long run, will make simple feats like Lofton’s loyalty to his home more difficult.
Lofton grew up when it still seemed conceivable that public housing developments would endure. Even during the Reagan presidency, when he came of age, it seemed that the money for such projects would never dry up. Lofton’s tower would stand for as long as the pyramids.
Other former residents echoed this belief. “The soul’s still in there,” said one man as he witnessed the demolition; a woman with him referred to 3919 as “a mountain.” Such words usually are reserved for things that will be around forever.
A younger generation of public housing dwellers may be shaking off such misconceptions.
Jonathan Tolliber, a high school freshman, walked to the demolition site from his building to the south. More than any of the adults who had lived in 3919, he seemed clear-eyed about what its demise meant.
“This ain’t nothing but a step to the future,” he said. “All these buildings are gonna come down.”
He sees his tower home as temporary, the way that any public housing development, including Robert Taylor Homes, was meant to be, not as some eternal refuge.
Compared to Lofton, Tolliber’s lack of attachment is almost chilling. He cannot say where he will wind up once his building comes down. He seems to know only that no real home will be waiting for him.
That feeling, or the lack of feeling, may reflect hopelessness so deep as to be pathological. At least Lofton has memories of how people in his tower, striving to make a home for themselves, used to block off their street for summer parties and organized baseball games in the courtyard. His allegiance to the place fostered an ennobling human quality, one that society would do well not to squash in young minds.
Tolliber is not likely to make himself vulnerable by putting his faith in a heap of government-owned bricks. The predominantly conservative trend in Washington would allow few such delusions to last anyway.
As the TV crews departed what was left of 3919 S. Federal, Lofton still was gazing up at bricks plummeting from his old 11th floor, looking at them in a way that, nearby, the 10-year-old carting away souvenir bricks on his bike never could.
The reason for Lofton’s longing is not so mysterious, though its object is. He can only hope that the next place he calls home will prove more worthy of his affection.
In the courtyard where Lofton and his friends used to play, yellow-orange smoke was rising as demolition workers dismantled a jungle gym with a blowtorch. Playground equipment, one worker explained, will not be taken to new sites. “Once you pull it up, you can’t use it again,” he said.
