On a chilly evening in early spring, Chatham gathers to honor one of its own. Terry Hillard, a 20-year resident of the neighborhood, has been named Chicago police superintendent by Mayor Richard M. Daley, and the community is celebrating.
The reception is in the upper room of the new Northern Trust Bank branch at 78th and State Streets, but it has the feel of a church social. Or a block party. Or the wedding of someone’s daughter.
Everyone seems to know everyone. Smiles and hugs abound. Spirits are high, but not too high. Chatham is nothing if not decorous.
Without question, the neighborhood is proud of Hillard. But success is no rare thing for the community. Among the well-wishers this night is former Mayor Eugene Sawyer, a longtime Chatham resident. And, just three days earlier, Chathamites and the rest of the 6th Ward had given another neighbor, former Illinois Atty. Gen. Roland Burris, 94 percent of their votes in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
The 54-year-old Hillard is a lot like Chatham. With his soft, soft voice and preternaturally calm demeanor, he’s easy to underestimate. But this is a former Marine who served in Vietnam, a cop who took two bullets in a shootout and won the Police Department’s highest award for valor, and a leader who, as a district commander and chief of detectives, won the hearts of his men–and, against the odds, gained Daley’s respect and the city’s top police job.
He and his wife, Dorothy, moved into Chatham–to a small Georgian home near 83rd Street and Martin Luther King Drive–in 1977, before Hillard had begun making his way up the promotion ladder. In an interview in his new office at police headquarters, Hillard was asked if, over the intervening two decades, he had ever thought of moving somewhere else.
“I’m perfectly satisfied with Chatham,” he said. “That’s where we raised our kids. Folks, when they move up in the world, they go from one house to another house. I just added on to my house.”
A few days later, at the reception in his honor, Hillard delights the friends and neighbors gathered around him by telling them of the question and his answer. “This community,” he tells them, “is where I set my roots. I will be here until I’m six feet under. I love this community.”
Such affection for–and commitment to–Chatham is not unusual. Around the room are many men and women who moved into the neighborhood more than 40 years ago when the area first opened to African-Americans. They moved in and they stayed. They stayed and created a middle-class community where the lawns are immaculately groomed and the bungalows stand like stolid sentries to a way of life grounded in such traditional values as hard work, thrift and self-reliance.
Chatham looks like a sleepy enclave of comfort and ease. And its people, proud of what they have done with their lives, can come across as self-satisfied.
But settling, stabilizing and maintaining Chatham has been far from easy. For nearly half a century, it has been a battle that Chathamites have waged unceasingly, under threat of crime, poverty, discrimination, gangs, official neglect and the myriad other forces that undermine urban communities.
Chatham is a neighborhood that won’t take no for an answer. It’s a neighborhood that stands up for itself, a pugnacious community always ready to flex its muscles, always demanding to be given its due. Thirty-five years ago, it was described as “probably the fussiest, most finicky neighborhood in the city.” And what was true then is true today.
No other Chicago neighborhood has faced and overcome the challenges that Chatham has. And the fight goes on. With the original black settlers–those who poured their lives into keeping the community strong–now in their 70s and 80s, Chatham is at a turning point. New families are starting to move in, and community leaders are working overtime to indoctrinate them into the spirit of Chatham, a spirit that mixes self-sacrifice with self-interest.
It’s a spirit that Dorothy Hillard, a school counselor as lively and outgoing as her husband is quiet, captures in her brief remarks at the Northern Trust reception.
She thanks those assembled for their continued support and prayers, and then, with the help of a quote from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., articulates the principle that underlies the neighborhood in which they all live:
“You know, in essence, we have to depend on each other and work with each other. That’s what we’re already doing in Chatham. A great philosopher said, “We are bound together in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever hurts one directly affects all indirectly.” We can keep our community strong by working together.”
The only thing missing is someone shouting, “Amen!”
Answered prayers
Karma Reaves remembers going to bed that first night in her family’s new home, a squat, three-bedroom bungalow at 8110 S. Indiana Ave.
“I lay down and said, `Thank you, God. You answered our prayers.’ “
To be sure, it’s a home that needs a lot of work, mostly redecorating. The wooden cabinets in the kitchen date from the 1950s, as do the red linoleum on the floor and the furniture–odds and ends left by the previous owner.
But the home that Karma and her husband, Joe, bought (on the same day as Terry Hillard’s party) has a semi-finished basement, a garage out back, and a fenced-in back yard for the couple’s children, Jocelyn, 4 1/2, and Justin, nearly 2.
Standing on the front steps, drinking in the nighttime scene, with nary a car passing by and with each house up and down the street looking snug and secure behind long, green lawns, Joe says, “It’s beautiful . . . and it’s quiet. We got what we wanted.”
Joe, a student adviser at the University of Illinois at Chicago who’s working on a master’s degree in counseling, grew up in Chatham and knew its attractions. But Karma, a physical therapist who, like Joe, is 27, was initially more interested in several other South Side neighborhoods, particularly those nearer the lake where new homes were being built.
“I grew up in West Englewood,” Karma says as she sits amid the clutter of boxes in her living room a few days after moving in, while Justin plays nearby with a ride-on toy horse. “I grew up in an all-black neighborhood that went downhill, and I was scared it would happen here.”
Then she noticed that her real estate agent had 10 pages of homes for sale in some communities but never more than a single sheet, with three or four listings, for Chatham.
“That showed me this was a solid neighborhood,” Karma says.
Actually, a large section of the black area of the South Side is filled with solid neighborhoods–not that many non-residents are aware of this. White Chicagoans and suburbanites often equate this part of the city with the deep concentrations of poverty and crime at the public housing developments that form a long wall of concrete and glass along the east side of the Dan Ryan Expressway from 55th Street north to Cermak Road.
Yet across the middle of the South Side and off toward the southwestern corner of Chicago are African-American communities that are as middle-class as “Leave It to Beaver.” These are neighborhoods–such as Pill Hill, Roseland, Washington Heights and Gresham–with few apartment buildings, many two-flats and even more of those badges of respectability, bungalows. This is the Black Bungalow Belt, where homeowners are every bit as concerned about property values, weeds and the American Dream as their white counterparts.
“A lot of black folks have grown up in communities where crime wasn’t a daily ritual,” notes Paul Davis, managing editor of the Chatham Citizen. “We grew up in two-parent households. We went to school. When I went to school, no one ever got shot. When I hear whites say they’re afraid to go through some (low-income, high-crime) neighborhoods, blacks have that fear, too.”
Among the communities that make up the Black Bungalow Belt and cover an area of more than 20 square miles, Chatham stands out.
The neighborhood is centered in the area bordered by 75th Street, Cottage Grove Avenue, 87th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway, but the name Chatham is often attached to nearby areas as well. It’s an affluent community, although not the most affluent. It’s tidy, but no more tidy than other middle-class black neighborhoods.
What sets Chatham apart is its location along the northernmost edge of the Black Bungalow Belt. Here, it acts as a bulwark–for itself and for all of the communities to the south–against the forces of deterioration, disinvestment and discrimination that destroyed many of the neighborhoods to the north.
A time of trial
The 1950s were a time of trial for neighborhoods throughout Chicago. Restrictive covenants in property deeds, used for decades to keep blacks out of white areas, were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948. This opened the floodgates for waves of African-American families, many of them middle class, to escape overcrowded ghettos.
Meanwhile, in that post-World War II era, many young white families, flush with prosperity, were taking the new superhighways to new homes in new suburbs, leaving the city far behind. What this meant was that suddenly the number of potential white home-buyers for even the finest of homes in Chicago was sharply reduced, creating a vacuum into which stepped those African-Americans looking for better housing.
David Brown was one of them.
In 1955, he and his wife, Frances, paid $18,500 for the small bungalow at 8110 S. Indiana Ave., the bungalow that he would sell 43 years later to Karma and Joe Reaves for $95,000. The purchase coincided with the birth of their only child, a son they named David.
But the couple’s early days as homeowners weren’t all sweetness and light.
“When we first moved in here, the neighborhood was mostly white. They didn’t like it at all when we first moved in here.”
Brown, now 74 and ailing, is sitting in his kitchen a few days after selling his home and a few hours before leaving for Ft. Worth to live with his son and family. He is sipping spoonfuls of chicken soup and recalling the reactions of some of his white neighbors.
“A lot of them–they’d line up on the sidewalk and tell us to move back to our neighborhood, and yell obscenities and things like that. But I’d bought the house, and I didn’t intend to leave. It was hard to take it at the time.
“I called the FBI and told them I wasn’t running out of here. I wanted them to know: Any bricks or things through my windows, I was going to rebel against it.”
Luckily, it never came to that.
Given the high degree of segregation in Chicago then–somewhat reduced but still high today–a certain amount of tension, friction and even violence was unavoidable. But the already volatile situation was exacerbated by panic-peddlers who stirred up racial animosities to make a quick buck.
The result was that many neighborhoods changed from all-white to all-black in only a couple of years. And those new African-American communities, no matter their character, were quickly redlined by financial institutions and insurance companies–essentially designated as dead zones where no loans would be granted or policies written. City services, such as garbage pickup and snow removal, were cut. Stores closed. And, eventually, as new opportunities opened up, the original black middle-class settlers moved away to formerly white areas or even to the suburbs, leaving behind large numbers of the poor and near-poor.
It was a formula for disaster, and it turned virtually the entire West Side and much of the South Side into huge slums. In neighborhood after neighborhood, it brought ruination.
But not in Chatham.
`Stop horsing around’
Washington Burney says he didn’t know what he was getting himself into when he and another new black Chatham homeowner, John Sloan, walked into that big neighborhood meeting at the local YMCA in March 1955.
“We just wanted to be part of this community,” Burney says mildly.
Well, maybe. It’s just that it’s hard to believe that it all just sort of happened, since what he and Sloan did was so in character with the pugnacious, take-no-guff attitude that has distinguished Chatham ever since. It would be even more in keeping with that spirit–and easier to believe–if Burney and Sloan had met ahead of time with other new black Chathamites, decided on their course and then had the chutzpah to carry it off. But never mind.
What Burney and Sloan did was this: They walked into the meeting in the “Y’s” gymnasium where there were more than 300 white Chatham residents and no blacks but themselves. They made no fuss, but their sheer presence was enough to disrupt the meeting.
Was Burney frightened?
“No, no, it’s just not my nature. John Sloan was in the second class of the Tuskegee Airmen (in World War II), so he wasn’t going to be frightened by any community meeting.”
Not that anyone was impolite or even loud. Just the opposite. Rev. John Hayes, the chaplain of Mercy High School, a local Roman Catholic institution, dealt with one matter after another, giving each an exaggerated importance, because he and most of the other whites felt embarrassed to bring up what was really on everyone’s mind.
Finally, Burney recalls, “One of the men stood up and said, `Stop horsing around. How are we going to keep these colored people from moving into our neighborhood?’ “
The meeting was quickly adjourned.
A month or so later, a follow-up meeting was held at Mercy High School, again attended by more than 300 whites. But this time, Burney and Sloan were joined by 75 other blacks, and the African-American migration into the community was fully discussed.
And the surprising consensus: “That we could co-exist,” Burney says. “People really didn’t want to run.”
But run they eventually did.
“Within two months’ time, the exodus started,” says Burney, who, at 82, still stands as ramrod straight as he did back then. “Once it started, it was just like a flood. You’d wake up and see a van in front of the house next door, and wonder what happened to the Olsens. They moved out in the middle of the night, and the Joneses moved in.”
So the effort at creating an integrated Chatham collapsed. But all was not for naught. At the second meeting, those present, white and black, decided to create an organization to address the problems of the community.
It was–and still is–called the Chatham-Avalon Park Community Council, even though the involvement of Avalon Park, the neighborhood immediately to the east, in the group lasted only a short time.
For the next 40 years, the council was Chatham’s first line of defense against the forces that threatened its good life. It still is.
Not bashful
Jeff Norkiewicz on the Chatham-Avalon Park Community Council:
“They’re a dynamic group. They’re certainly not bashful to express their concerns. They believe in their community.”
Norkiewicz should know. He’s an area director for Dominick’s Finer Foods Inc., overseeing 29 stores on the South Side and throughout the southern and southwest suburbs. Every three months, he sits down with the council leaders to discuss how things are going at the Dominick’s at 122 W. 79th St.–and what the neighborhood wants done.
It’s an unusual arrangement, dating back to the mid-1980s when Dominick’s decided to build a store in Chatham. Usually, such plans are greeted with glee by local people, whether in the city or suburbs. A full-service, top-quality grocery is considered a plum by most communities. But in Chatham, the reaction was: Not so fast! And it caught Dominick’s by surprise.
“We were not used to it,” Norkiewicz says. “In a strip mall, you’re the anchor. You’re the big hitter. You’re not used to being hit with a list of demands.”
But that’s what the Chatham group presented to the supermarket chain: No store unless (1) the manager is African-American, (2) more than 80 percent of the management team is African-American, (3) the rank-and-file employees are hired from the neighborhood and (4) top company officials meet with the council every three months.
Dominick’s agreed. Not only that, but, for the first couple of years, it was Mr. D himself, the company chairman, the late Dominick DiMatteo Jr., who headed the Dominick’s contingent at the meetings.
And the chain is still attentive to the neighborhood’s desires.
Recently, Keith Tate, the council’s president, asked Norkiewicz if Dominick’s would be interested in putting a brand of barbecue sauce, marketed by a local deli, on its shelves. Normally, the chain doesn’t deal with such small-time operators, but Norkiewicz cut some red tape, and Curt’s Hometown Barbeque sauce went on sale at the 79th Street store and a Dominick’s at 71st Street and Jeffery Boulevard. The product was so successful that it’s now being sold at Dominick’s stores in suburbs such as Matteson, Calumet City and Merrionette Park.
The reason for such attentiveness to local wishes is simple: After decades of writing off African-American neighborhoods, such major companies as Dominick’s, Home Depot and even the movie chain Cineplex Odeon have begun to recognize that many of these communities are large untapped markets. And few of those markets are as potentially lucrative as Chatham.
Yet, don’t expect Chatham to bow down in thanksgiving. It’s a neighborhood that wants to use its new leverage to the utmost–and won’t be anyone’s pawn.
“Often, (business) people want to come in our community,” Tate says. “That’s the point when you need to be pro-active to make sure our community’s not taken advantage of. In too many communities, things begin to happen. The wrecking ball is there, and people say: “What’s going on?” This community is not like other communities. We don’t want to sit and take a wait-and-see attitude.”
`Black suburbia’
Segregation helped Chatham and hurt it.
In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the neighborhood was one of the few places in the metropolitan region where middle-class blacks, moving from the slums farther north, could settle. So doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers–many schoolteachers–put down roots in the community, giving Chatham a high degree of worldliness, savviness and knowledge of how to get things done.
For these new residents, moving to Chatham was like moving to the suburbs. In fact, it was called black suburbia. The neighborhood was dominated by single-family homes. There was no high-rise public housing. Indeed, there were no high-rises at all, and few apartment buildings of any sort.
True, the white world, including city government, often tried to write off the community as it wrote off other African-American neighborhoods, but Chatham knew how to get the attention of movers and shakers. One of the key ways was at the ballot box.
In 1967, Chathamites helped elect two black independents to the City Council: William Cousins, the former president of the Chatham-Avalon Park Community Council and now a justice on the Illinois Appellate Court, in the 8th Ward, and A.A. “Sammy” Rayner, a funeral director who was the first black independent in the city’s history to beat a black Democratic Party regular, in the 6th Ward.
In 1983 and again in 1987, it was the 6th Ward, centered in Chatham, that gave Harold Washington his highest vote total in the Democratic primary and the general election. And year in, year out, the 6th routinely ranks first or second among Chicago’s African-American wards–and above the citywide average–in terms of voter turnout.
And residents aren’t shy about using even more direct means of getting their voices heard.
“We organized block clubs early on, and we still have them,” says Charles Gaines, who, as a state representative from the area from 1975 to 1981, was the General Assembly’s only black Republican.
“It was a nice residential neighborhood where people knew each other and sat on their porches and visited,” he said.
Yet, when necessary, Chathamites were quick to leave their porches for the picket line, as they did in the late 1960s and early 1970s to win a new library, named for Whitney Young, for the community or to protest an attempt by a major street gang to invade the neighborhood.
“When (outsiders) wanted to saturate the area with gas stations, we stopped it and made them put a library in,” Gaines says, “and we made sure black contractors did a lot of the work; and, when they said they couldn’t find enough, we went out and found black contractors who would do the work.
“We rebuffed the Blackstone Rangers when they tried to come in. When they tried to organize Ruggles School, we told the police (that) if they didn’t run them out, we would. We are better organized than the gangs.”
The top of the rock
A quarter of a century ago, when John Clark decided to open a pizzeria called Reggio’s, he chose a storefront on 87th Street in Chatham. It wasn’t a difficult decision. For one thing, Chatham didn’t have a pizza parlor. Even more, it was simply the place to be in black Chicago.
“This used to be the mecca of middle-class African-American families,” Clark recalls, behind his cluttered desk in his company’s headquarters and plant at 340 W. 83rd St. “At one time, if you were African-American and lived in Chatham, you had arrived. That was the top of the rock.”
Today, there are four Reggio’s restaurants in and around Chatham, dealing mainly in carry-out orders. They represent, however, only a tiny percentage of Clark’s business, which now centers on frozen pizza and similar products. Reggio’s pizzas–with the “world famous butter crust,” according to its packaging–can be found in the frozen-food sections of Dominick’s, Jewel, Kroger and hundreds of other supermarkets in 24 states. Another Reggio’s product, a pizza turnover called calzone, is served at 30,000 feet above the Earth by United Airlines. Each year, the airline serves about a million of Reggio’s calzones.
Much has changed in Chatham–and the world–since Clark first opened Reggio’s, and he acknowledges that, if he were starting out in the pizza business today, he would have a harder time deciding where to locate.
“There are other places now where I could go that would support a pizzeria,” Clark says. “I would be welcome in the south suburban area where a lot of middle-class African-Americans now live. In ’72, that would not have been a viable alternative.”
That, for Chatham, has been the downside of the civil rights movement. As opportunities for African-Americans have opened throughout much of Chicago and the suburbs, Chatham and the rest of the middle-class South Side find themselves as only one of several possible housing choices.
Not that Chatham is being avoided. Far from it. Many homes, passed down to family members or friends, never go on the market. And those that do usually have no trouble finding a buyer. David Brown, for example, received three bids for his home on Indiana after just a single showing.
And across the street from the home he sold to the Reaves family is Chatham Park Place, a 52-unit townhouse development, built in the early 1990s by longtime real estate developer and Chatham resident Dempsey Travis. Units there sell for $300,000 to $500,000, and Travis is planning nine more townhouses, even more pricey, at that site.
The question, however, is whether the new residents will be as gung-ho for the neighborhood, as active and energetic in maintaining the quality of life, as demanding in the upkeep of standards, as the original black settlers.
“The young must do what we had to do,” says Washington Burney.
Keith Tate, who replaced Burney as president of the Chatham-Avalon Park Community Council in 1992, has been active in the council’s work since he was a boy.
“My dad took me to the meetings with him as a child,” the 48-year-old Tate remembers. “I saw a lot of debates, and Robert’s Rules of Order, and what it takes to keep and maintain a community.”
Some of the old problems have eased. Redlining, for example, is now illegal, and financial institutions are working overtime, under federal pressure, to make up for lost time.
But crime, schools and the community’s business strips are worries. The crime rate, for example, is nowhere near as high as in the low-income neighborhoods to the north, but it’s higher than in some other middle-class communities because of Chatham’s proximity to those poorer areas. Most Chatham houses, even the home of Police Supt. Terry Hillard, are equipped with decorative steel entrance doors and bars on basement windows.
The schools, once a selling point, aren’t bad–as far as Chicago schools go. McDade Classic, a magnet school, is one of the best in the city, and four of the five other elementary schools rank in the top 20 percent. But only McDade consistently scores above statewide averages.
Much new commercial development has taken place along the western edge of the Dan Ryan, bringing such stores as Home Depot and new movie theaters into the community. But it’s the business strips along 79th Street, 87th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue that cause concern.
On the plus side, they’re livelier than the commercial streets in many Chicago neighborhoods. Empty storefronts and vacant lots are relatively few, and the community is blessed with a wide range of restaurants. Yet, the facades of many stores have a worn-out look, and there are many sorts of stores–dress shops, men’s stores, bath shops, office supply stores–that Chatham people would like to see represented.
Community leaders keep a close watch on the situation, and, recently, when the local Pizza Hut closed after 12 years in the community, they were peeved that company officials had failed to alert them.
“We’d like to know why it closed, because maybe it could help some other business in the area,” says Joseph Caldwell, whose three TailoRite stores do the clothes cleaning chores for the Chicago White Sox as well as for much of Chatham. “I see it like almost an exit interview for an employee.”
An “exit interview”? Such conscientiousness, such nosiness, such finickiness may seem overdone to people in other neighborhoods. But, in Chatham, it’s a way of life–a way of life the longtime residents vow to instill in the coming wave of new settlers.
“Everyone has a part in helping us maintain what people built in this community,” Tate says. “When you put the onus of that on anybody but yourself, that’s when a community goes by the wayside.
“If we don’t do it, who will?”
`We’ll survive’
The social room at Crerar Memorial Presbyterian Church at 8100 S. Calumet Ave. is a combination theater and gymnasium. At one end is the stage; at the other, a basketball rim, attached to an ancient piece of plywood.
On this evening, around a table in the otherwise empty room, sit the block club presidents of sub-area 4.
Chatham is divided into seven sub-areas by the Chatham-Avalon Park Community Council. And each has its committee of block club presidents who meet regularly, trade notes and decide what they want–and don’t want.
It’s an organizational structure of long standing, but one that had atrophied somewhat in recent years as block club leaders grew older and less interested in going out at night for yet another meeting. Now, the council is reinvigorating the block clubs and the sub-area structure.
Of the 28 blocks in sub-area 4, only 18 have block clubs. And tonight’s meeting is just the second for this reconstituted group of club presidents.
Nonetheless, the members are quickly getting up to speed.
During the meeting, the group, which includes former Chicago Park District Supt. Jesse Madison as the representative of the Chatham Park Place block, decides to oppose a plan by the owner of a McDonald’s on Cottage Grove Avenue to relocate his restaurant to 79th Street and King Drive. The reason: too much traffic, too much trash.
“The only person who would probably benefit from the move would be the owner,” says one participant.
The block club presidents also agree that a proposal by Osco to build a drugstore on the southeast corner of 79th and State Streets is unacceptable. Another liquor outlet is the last thing Chatham wants, after fighting for years to drive out more than two dozen such establishments.
“I don’t think we should have anyone come into the community and shove an idea down our throats,” says Tyrone Williams, the committee chairman.
Williams talks about his hopes for a community center at that corner with commercial space on the first floor for maybe a bookstore and “a Starbucks-type coffee bar.” Another committee member raises the question of safety in the residential sections of the community, after an attack on one of her neighbors.
The committee members listen attentively to newly appointed Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th), who has dropped in to introduce herself. Then they go back to work.
Carl Lewis is overjoyed.
Lewis is the conservation chairman for the Chatham-Avalon Park Community Council, a post that Roland Burris once held before launching his political career. Lewis is the one spearheading the effort to give the block club and sub-area structures a jump-start.
“It’s very important that we unite,” he tells the club presidents. “To see you here together discussing the future of our neighborhood is great.
“It means we’ll survive.”
