Content Objectives
The study will be broken into stories of conception, habitation, and elimination. The stories will be stories of perspectives/roles, names/labels, plans/land/places, and events/activities.
Conception
To research the conception of Ickes, students will learn about whom Harold Ickes was, with a focus on the words of his speech, "What is an American?" 6 They will learn about Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP who designed and constructed the Ickes Towers, The Sears Tower, the John Hancock Tower, and the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale University. They'll have a chance to view original blueprints and drawings of Ickes. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP own blueprints and images of Ickes conception. The plans are held at the research and records office in Chicago on South Michigan Avenue. I will be able to use a few of the original scannings of the drawings for educational purposes only. The drawings list, as sent by Karen Widi of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP, consists of interior and exterior images and prints of each of the Ickes Towers. I will be able to choose four of them to use in actual size and have the remaining in electronic (scaled down) form. 7
My students will read about the history of Bronzeville's interest in sociology and the arts. The Chicago Black Renaissance happened in Bronzeville, a "Black Mecca" 8 for culture and the arts. According to the text The Muse in Bronzeville by Bone and Courage, Bronzeville became a rich center for documentary. 9 Students will read poetry and narratives exploring the themes of home and human dignity by authors such as Alex Kotlowitz, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sandra Cisneros. 10
In Chapter Four (Residence), Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline, breaks down strategies and tactics of Chicago city planning in ecological terms. There are the banks and saving and loan institutions determining what neighborhoods will have funds and space allotted to them. Municipal zoning regulations focus on the types of housing allowed in certain areas. Government agencies' focus is solely on the public housing. Real estate agencies "steer" the public and in Chicago this is done with consideration of race. The federal government deals with funding through urban renewal or grants. Chicago Housing Authority makes decisions about the locations of the buildings. Social policies are written for housing for the public and the courts are the final hoops that must be jumped through. Courts determine whether the policy is "constitutionally appropriate". 11
Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill conceived the Harold Ickes Towers in 1955. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP was incorporated in Chicago in 1936. In 1974 the firm designed the Sears Tower in Chicago, tallest skyscraper in the world at that time and part of Chicago's master plan as The Man Made City that "gets things done". 12 The firm is world-wide now. As I've mentioned, they also designed the John Hancock Tower and Yale University's Beinecke Library of Rare Books. The difference between the four structures is worth noting. The private monies that backed buildings like the Sears Tower, John Hancock Tower, and the Beinecke Library were quite abundant in opposition to the Harold Ickes Homes and other public housing projects in Chicago.
The space of the Ickes Towers was set-up as a grid. There were four sections of an eleven-building complex, which at the onset housed a thousand families: 22nd on State, 23rd on State east & the 23rd west, and 24th off of State. There were no gates around the individual towers. Each part had six towers and each tower had nine floors. The first floor of every building was set-aside for the larger families. The apartments on these floors had five bedrooms for ten or more children. The towers were named after the Secretary of Interior for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had been in Chicago and obtained his federal position before WWII in 1941. Ickes gave a speech in Central Park during that year entitled, "What is an American?" He spoke of the people of Germany being liberty-loving people who were now oppressed and who now have the will to destroy gangsters, referring to the Nazis. He asked the question again and again, "What constitutes an American?" He labeled Americans as idealists, neighbors, voices, allies, and humans. The Germans were militarized and isolated under the Nazi government's policies. The entire world was living with a common enemy, according to Harold Ickes. He concluded that an American is one who loves justice and believes in the dignity of man. This speech and the man were striking to me. I make a special note of the invisibility of the Harold Ickes Homes today and the invisibility/isolation of the population of the Ickes when they were inhabited.
Habitation
Imagine having a communal Utopia with resources and people to fill life with joy and purpose, never a dull moment, and people looking out for each other. The Ickes were a utopia for many years because at the heart of the community, families came together and knew how to solve problems. 13 For the habitation of Ickes, students will listen to sections of interviews with JP and Audrey. They will participate in the interviewing of Amy Rome and Roy Sanders (D.J. Roy) as well. JP has been security at NTA since its doors opened. He grew up in The Dearborns, the connecting public housing to Ickes, which are still in existence. Audrey is a parent of four NTA students and grew up in Ickes. Amy Rome was the principal of NTA for eleven years and worked in education in Bronzeville for eighteen years. Roy was a parent at NTA and deejayed all of the skating parties, stepping parties, and old school parties in the community, as well as our talent shows currently.
JP was one of the members of the Ickes/Dearborn community that actually walked into the middle of the war. He spent years walking up to gang members in the midst of fighting, young boys and leaders of the gangs drawing guns, and he dragged them into Chicago Park District space (the locker room at The Blue Court, Chicago's Rucker's Park on the Ickes site), locked the doors and told them to settle the issue themselves. He says that gang leaders respected him because, at the time he was growing up, they still respected a man who stood up for himself. He asked them the question, "What would you do if you shot your own loved one? Who would you go after?" That stopped them in their tracks. I will be proposing this question to my students during a classroom activity. JP came a long way while growing up in the Dearborns, which were related to Ickes, sharing families and schools. He didn't talk at all when he was a kid. He simply observed, because of fear and interest. Drugs and guns were a part of his household, but as he says, "None of that fascinated me." JP also says that some important role models saw something "good" in him. Something about him made it so that no one could quite figure him out, so he became a role model and among whatever craziness was going on in the community people would say, "Oh, that's JP and the kids," and let them be. His role is that of the shield, mediator, regulator, president, and oldest brother. He's also a player, or a mean "stepper" (dancer). Audrey thinks so at least, and she says everyone in the neighborhood does too.
Audrey Johnson is a parent of one of my students and leader of our Parent Advisory Council (PAC), a child of Ickes, "a mean piece who made changes", as she describes herself. I'm reminded of gender-role metaphors in so much literature, women and the moon, ever changing. She certainly made changes and is a role model at NTA, especially for our aggressive girls. Audrey now has four children who have all attended NTA. I currently teach her beloved baby-girl, Season, her only girl. Audrey grew up in "the suburbs," what they called the Ickes on 24th. Her mother moved them there when she was a baby. Her mom graduated high school at age 12, reads the Sun Times cover to cover everyday, and is incredibly humble. Audrey's father was the life of the party. He played Santa Claus every Christmas in the common areas of Ickes. Of the families, the good true families that knew how to stick together and solve problems, the Johnsons were not one of the largest, but they were quite popular. 14 Audrey shifted her demeanor after a few years of being involved with our school. She says she changed for the better and that she doesn't know why she was the way she was, "a mean piece." She swears she turned our old principal, Amy Rome, into a "thug."
I wanted to interview characters, people who had grown up in the Ickes and had been deeply rooted in both the school community and the community at large. Both JP and Audrey are very interesting people. JP is so warm and loving! He is the man you see immediately when you walk through our school doors. He inevitably has a smile on his face and is patting a student on the back, or he's having a serious-toned discussion with a student about a negative choice they made. He is the face of NTA, an extremely visible figure, but there are many rumors that are passed in the community about him because he keeps his business to himself. It was JP who informed me of the purpose of the public housing towers in Chicago. He said that when he began working for CHA (Chicago Housing Authority) as a teen, he learned that the housing was meant to be transitional. Families could stay in the public housing temporarily, while they saved money to buy an actual home. It is important for the teaching of this unit to understand the land plan, policy and design, of the towers.
Audrey, on the other hand, is hard and closed when you meet her in person. She is built like a warrior. Her brow is always furrowed unless you are one of her friends or her man laughing at some inside joke in the halls or on the playground. This year, though, in teaching her daughter Season, Audrey and I formed a connection and I found out a bit about her childhood. That bit included the fact that she grew up in the Ickes. Audrey spent the year assisting with the integration of our new students. She pulled aside one of my homeroom girls everyday. This bugged me at first, because this girl had been consistently disrespectful to our learning environment, but Audrey motivated her to change her tone with adults. So I wanted to know more about JP and Audrey because I find them interesting and because their stories seemed to mesh with our students' lives. I want our students to know and see that character, the dignity that Audrey and JP have fought for.
Let's answer the unit's essential question: Where does a place go that is no longer there? The ambience of that place never seems to leave, geographically and ethereally. There is definitely heaviness in the space that was left behind by the Ickes community, as if haunted. I chose to open this unit, after nicknaming the work "Vacant Lot", with a quotation by Lucy Tapahonso (Native American poet), "This thing called memory is like nothing else. Once you remember something, it never leaves you. It's how we know that we have lived." 15 The memories of Ickes are rich, so rich in fact that they, the stories, evoke extreme emotion through laughter and tears. Memories also flood the papers in the drawers of the architecture firm that drew the plans for the conception of the Ickes Community. Memory cries out as it emanates from words printed and spoken about the conception, habitation, and elimination of a place.
What do people remember about the Ickes Homes? The 24s were called "the suburbs". A lot of seniors and families with young children lived there. They had a Chicago Public Library in the 24s on the first floor where children and their families spent a great deal of time for computer access, activities, and good old-fashioned reading. The paramedics were also on site for any medical needs and residents had friendly relations with the staff there. Police were on site, at least during the 1980s and 1990s, and residents described them as "officer friendly types". Later on, JP describes a couple of "bad cops" that the community called "Cagney and Lacey," one of which had a heart attack while chasing a resident off of the property ("and people weren't sad about that," according to JP).
The throughway was a connector between Ickes building tower sites and the Dearborns. This was a street without cars that ran parallel to State Street. Also, there was a half a million-dollar basketball court built on the site of the 23rd street Ickes. It was called the Blue Court and it was Chicago's Rucker's Park. Everybody played basketball and everybody played on the blue court, according to JP. JP's job was to run the Chicago Park District site at the courts. He says he took care of that court night and day: scrubbing it, mopping it, sweeping it, polishing his pride and joy. He hired teenagers from the community to help him out. One of those teenagers is the mother of a student of mine, Miracle.
JP takes pride in knowing Miracle's mom continued to find work after working for him and that she raised a girl who uses her intelligence. When the courts weren't being used for basketball, they were used for community events, such as the Old School Parties. Every Sunday (weather permitting) afternoon and evening, families from Ickes and Dearborns put on a party. People brought their grills out, DJ Roy brought out his turntables, the seniors of the Ickes were brought down to sit in comfortable lawn chairs, balls for games were brought out, and young and old just enjoyed each other. When sundown came it was adult time and people danced together, the players came out and stepped to Roy's music while the children and seniors headed to bed. The Old School Parties had themes. Audrey's two favorite were an all white party and a seventies theme party. The parties were shut down in 2010 and JP and Audrey swear it's because the city didn't know what to do with "that many African Americans just getting along." The memory lives on, loud and proud, among neighborhood residents.
Each Tower had a playground. They were "just the original playground," according to Audrey. To me this means a cement floor, swings, a slide, and monkey bars. She remembered all of the activities they played in the yard: pole to pole, a piece of glass to ride the slide, whoopin' mama, foursquare, and skating "most of all". Every kid had their "street king" skates and skated on the cement lot and in the laundry room. At The Dearborns down the block, they had an outdoor skating rink instead of a playground. The kids skated at the rink during the day and at night DJ Roy set up and the players came out to "step." DJ Roy is a true establishment in the community, which is why the students and I will take advantage of his knowledge and experience through a group interview. We will also invite him to participate in our re-enactment, the finale of this unit.
The Henry Booth House, "Boo House", was just behind the towers and across the street (west). On Monday Audrey had cooking, Tuesday was swimming, Wednesday was modern dance, Thursday was sewing, and Friday was the skating party, again with DJ Roy. You had to line up to get chips to come in. Boys got blue chips and girls got red. The kids usually dressed a little nice and skated the night away. This activity along with the Old School Parties stood out in both Audrey and JP's minds.
The Fight
Audrey's comedy, when I interviewed her, was a fight that she still cannot believe happened to this day. To her, it was funny because it was incomprehensible, but I truly believe this story encapsulates the perception of real people and real lives, just as JP and Audrey expressed after the Old School Parties were closed down due to the city's perception of such a large group of the community in one place. The city saw loud music, noisy voices, large numbers of people who were black, and bottles floating around in this common area, full of life. The city had trouble interpreting that, as in the city Zoe (Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino) where it is claimed travelers just have one city in their mind full of the roles that get filled no matter where they are. 16 Large groups of noisy people who are black fill the role of trouble in the city's mind, and the city just doesn't know what to do. So shut it down is their answer.
Audrey describes a fight between two young teenage girls and fifty gang members. This is the event that we will re-enact in a site-specific performance to inform the answer to our essential question: Where does a place go that is no longer there? This event (the fight), though invisible to the eye currently, is regularly remembered and is visible to people thirty years later.
The fight takes place on the throughway at first. The throughway was a street without traffic that linked three of the Ickes home sites. This is how the kids got from place to place and hung out in the neighborhood without fear of being hit by the traffic on State Street. The girls are minding their own business walking and talking on this throughway just as a group of gang members are trying to do business. They ask the girls to leave. Audrey, "mean piece" that she is, walks right up to one of the boys and challenges him saying, "I'm not scared of you. I live here." He in turn pushes her. She begins to "wail on him" with her friend Joyce. In Audrey's words she is crying and fighting and screaming and hitting and kicking and yelling and crying and crying and then he's on the ground. She had beaten him up to the point of collapse. Just as she's trying to catch her breath and the tears are still streaming down her face, people begin to notice. It's dusk but the sky is clear, just beginning to get dark. The large group of boys, gang members with loaded weapons, begin to notice what has happened, and they start running towards Audrey and Joyce from further down the throughway.
Audrey's friend Joyce was from a large family, The Pleasants, who lived on the first floor of an Ickes Tower and a few of her ten siblings were turning on lights and looking out of the windows to see the action. The boys are running toward Audrey and Joyce. Audrey calls to Joyce and then whispers to her, "We got to get down and ball up. Just do what I do!" She proceeds to ball herself up, getting into fetal position on the ground. I'd like to comment on the comfort of the womb at this point, the femininity that provides security in a trying moment. 17 Joyce does the same and the boys end up running right over them, trying to turn around to get to them, but there are too many. They trip over each other and end up hitting and kicking each other. Confused and hurt, they all collapse. I'm reminded of the image from the civil war in Syria, visualized by seminar leader Joseph Roach, when artists covered hoards of ping-pong balls with subversive messages and tipped them off the peak of a hill so they rolled in a swarm through the city streets, authorities trying their best to catch the balls in a chaotic and physically comedic fashion.
By and large, this means that Audrey and Joyce had indeed beat fifty gang members. Then the Reej, Omar, the head of the entire gang The Disciples, comes down to talk to Audrey who is still so caught up in the adrenalin of the fight and self-defense that she decides to "pop him in the jaw". He takes it and asks what happened. He's enraged that one of his boys would hit a girl. That's when Omar, those boys, and even guys in the penitentiary start to give Audrey "juice" or "props," and they don't mess with her. To this day, they don't mess with her. And Joyce and Audrey can't run into each other without keeling over with laughter at the hilarity, the unexpectedness, of that event.
That story, which Audrey names a comedy, is extremely significant to me in my exploration of this public housing community, this place that is no longer there, this place that lives on in the peoples' memory. Knowing the description of Audrey fighting physically completely shifted my perspective on fighting, having never truly experienced this myself. She perceives the land, the throughway, as her own because she lives in this space, and it is important enough to her to fight for. She stands up for the residents of the community and sees the gang members trying to take over as an injustice at such a young age. She has a rage inside her because of this. Then the Reej ends up supporting her. He follows rules and guidelines. He is angry that those rules were broken. Her strength and conviction get raised up in her community because of her fight, even among those that have ended up in jail.
Elimination
What would Harold Ickes have done if he lived during the 1990s when federal funding was being taken away from public housing? Would he have supported (according to Suttles's The Man Made City) the Gautreaux 18 decision in 1966, when no further construction was allowed in black areas and mandated new construction was put in place? How would he have increased neighborliness for instance? Would he have recognized the "common enemy" of the thousand families that ended up being relocated from their homes in public housing? The "common enemy" might be considered the gangs and drugs infiltrating the space, but we know more. We know that decisions were made to take away resources, services, and security when the "common enemy" reared its head. This resulted in a tragic elongated elimination of homes.
For the elimination of Ickes, we'll read about the progressive growth of crime, lack of funding for social organizations, and the disconnect between HUD and CHA. We'll explore concepts of self in the community such as many residents' tendencies to mind their own business, publicly at least. Students will have a chance to read the poem "Chicago's Congo" by Frank Marshall Davis and dissect the text in relation to the slow death of Ickes, the tragedy and the comedy.
On CHA's website, there is still a page for the Ickes Towers. It states that the eleven-building complex housed 1,000 families and began closing in 2007-2010. In 2007, the buildings began to have crime and maintenance challenges. The site says that families chose to relocate, 100% by April 2010. What remained in the months directly after the elimination of the towers was a working group composed of residents, city of Chicago officials, community leaders and other stakeholders who met regularly to determine the future of the site.
Since the Ickes' slowly declined and its resources and facilities were eliminated and taken away from the community, there is no longer a space to mediate. JP told that families were still able to solve problems, but the space wasn't safe, there was no Blue Court, no Boo House, and common areas weren't as well taken care of. JP says there was just nothing to do and people got frustrated. Families had problems inside, 19 but before the space became "out of sync...a lot of tragedy (was in the air, but) good decent families (like us)...(we stuck around) and we never forgot our roots." JP discusses a phenomenon that models good teaching at its best. He speaks of family, "You tell them the positive things they do. You never look at them different. You encourage. You never talk down." If only he could be with me in the classroom, constantly, to aid me in teaching during those trying moments with students' outright disrespect, I would be forever grateful. This comment on judgment might be taken for granted, but I see it as an amazing moment of socialization made visible. If only the policy makers in the city of Chicago could spend a day with this role model.
Social policy has many faces to the people directly affected by its path, which seems to be quick and dirty, like a tornado, in pockets of time and space. But in the pockets of time and space that receive tornadic social policy, such as public housing in Chicago, the real people and actual lives do not always know the details of the policies that decide their futures.
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