area referred to Altgeld as “the Gardens” for short, although it wasn’t until later that I considered the irony of the name,
its evocation of something fresh and well tended-a sanctified earth.
True, there was a grove of trees just south of the project, and running south and west of that was the Calumet River,
where you could sometimes see men flick fishing lines lazily into darkening waters. But the fish that swam those
waters were often strangely discolored, with cataract eyes and lumps behind their gills. People ate their catch only if
they had to.
To the east, on the other side of the expressway, was the Lake Calumet landfill, the largest in the Midwest.
And to the north, directly across the street, was the Metropolitan Sanitary District’s sewage treatment plant. The
people of Altgeld couldn’t see the plant or the open-air vats that went on for close to a mile; as part of a recent
beautification effort, the district maintained a long wall of earth in front of the facility, dotted with hastily planted
saplings that refused to grow month after month, like hairs swept across a bald man’s head. But officials could do
nothing to hide the smell-a heavy, putrid odor that varied in strength depending on the temperature and the wind’s
direction, and seeped through windows no matter how tightly they were shut.
The stench, the toxins, the empty, uninhabited landscape. For close to a century, the few square miles surrounding
Altgeld had taken in the offal of scores of factories, the price people had paid for their high-wage jobs. Now that the
jobs were gone, and those people that could had already left, it seemed only natural to use the land as a dump.
A dump-and a place to house poor blacks. Altgeld may have been unique in its physical isolation, but it shared with
the city’s other projects a common history: the dreams of reformers to build decent housing for the poor; the politics
that had concentrated such housing away from white neighborhoods, and prevented working families from living there;
the use of the Chicago Housing Authority-the CHA-as a patronage trough; the subsequent mismanagement and neglect.
It wasn’t as bad as Chicago’s high-rise projects yet, the Robert Taylors and Cabrini Greens, with their ink-black
stairwells and urine-stained lobbies and random shootings. Altgeld’s occupancy rate held steady at ninety percent, and
if you went inside the apartments, you would more often than not find them well-kept, with small touches-a patterned
cloth thrown over torn upholstery, an old calendar left hanging on the wall for its tropical beach scenes-that expressed
the lingering idea of home.
Still, everything about the Gardens seemed in a perpetual state of disrepair. Ceilings crumbled. Pipes burst. Toilets
backed up. Muddy tire tracks branded the small, brown lawns strewn with empty flower planters-broken, tilted, half
buried. The CHA maintenance crews had stopped even pretending that repairs would happen any time soon. So that
most children in Altgeld grew up without ever having seen a garden. Children who could see only that things were used
up, and that there was a certain pleasure in speeding up the decay.
I took the turn into Altgeld at 131st and came to a stop in front of Our Lady of the Gardens Church, a flat brick
building toward the rear of the development. I was there to meet some of our key leaders, to talk about the problems in
our organizing effort, and how we might get things back on track. But as I cut off the engine and started reaching for
my briefcase, something stopped me short. The view, perhaps; the choking gray sky. I closed my eyes and leaned my
head against the car seat, feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship.
Over two months had passed since the botched police meeting, and things had gone badly. There had been no
marches, no sit-ins, no freedom songs. Just a series of miscues and misunderstandings, tedium and stress. Part of the
barré
(Barré)
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