There Are No Children Here (24 page)

Pharoah, because he was so small and nonthreatening, was successful at picking up extra tickets from stadium patrons. “Any extra tickets?” he’d ask, looking longingly at a passerby. How could you turn down that face? It was so sweet and open. Sometimes, Pharoah would hand the tickets over to LaShawn’s boyfriend, Brian, who would then scalp them and give Pharoah a few dollars for his help. Mostly, though, Pharoah and the others would use the tickets to attend a game. They loved to watch Michael Jordan and the Bulls. But there were times when the stadium’s attendants wouldn’t let the children in, even if they had tickets. The children would curse the stadium and the ticket takers. Who were the attendants not to let them in? After all, they lived right next door. Besides, if they wanted, they could make life hell for the stadium’s patrons. Some of the patrons—the stupid ones, they’d say—even parked their cars in Horner. It was almost inviting trouble. Once, a stadium attendant humiliated James by tearing up his ticket as other patrons waited to get in. Another time, when Pharoah handed his standing-room ticket to the attendant, the man firmly told him, “No neighborhood kids allowed.” Pharoah got in through another entrance.

The relationship between the stadium and the neighborhood had long been tense. Built in 1929, the immense concrete monolith has, in addition to serving various sports teams, been host to four Democratic National Conventions, all of them during the Roosevelt and Truman eras. Although they were built nearly thirty years apart, the stadium and Horner mirror each other’s architecture: drab and just plain big.

Over the past twenty years, the Wirtz family, the stadium’s owners, have helped change the character of the neighborhood. The name of Arthur Wirtz, the family’s patriarch, who has since died, is anathema to some residents of this area who believe him to have been a private demolition crew; he bulldozed blocks of homes to make way for his paved parking lots, forty-eight acres in all. But Mr. Wirtz alone did not alter the landscape. The riots following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 turned to rubble the bustling, brightly lit two-mile commercial strip along Madison Street, which runs just two blocks
south of Horner, right past the stadium. Fires set by the rioters destroyed an estimated $10 million worth of property; dozens of other stores shut down, their owners fearing for their safety. It was not a proud moment for the west side—nor for Mayor Richard J. Daley, who ordered the police to shoot to kill. Eleven people died in the rioting, two of them killed by police officers; five hundred were wounded or injured; and three thousand were arrested. Madison Street and the surrounding neighborhood never fully recovered from those two days of rioting. Today, it is lined with liquor stores, currency exchanges, and storefronts overflowing with used refrigerators, stoves, sofas, and other household items.

In the mid-1980s, angry residents feared that the only improvements planned for the area were the construction of two new stadiums, one for the city’s basketball and hockey teams, the other for its football team. When talk of such plans first surfaced, real estate speculators began buying up property in anticipation of rising land values. Some walked the length of Lake Street, under the El tracks, offering to purchase storefronts.

Since the city’s downtown—the Loop—can’t expand to the east because of Lake Michigan, it has crept westward, past the Chicago River and through the city’s once notorious skid row, certain to bump eventually right up against Henry Horner. There are many who believe that with a new stadium the area will become gentrified. The absentee owner of one gutted gray stone building just across the street from Henry Horner was asking $150,000 for the property. And artists and professionals have begun to move into the area just north of Horner, converting aged factories to loft spaces. Some smaller companies have also opened up shop there. The city, for its part, has repaved parts of Lake Street and built a ramp onto the expressway to handle the expected influx of fans. These were, residents point out, the first infrastructure improvements in the area in years.

As this period of real estate speculation began, Henry Horner went into a tailspin, leaving residents, local businessmen, and politicians to whisper of a conspiracy. The thinking went as follows: the housing authority, through neglect and attrition, would empty Horner so that it could be torn down to make way
for yet more parking lots or upscale housing. The housing authority’s lack of money to fix up vacant apartments for new tenants fed the conspiracy theory, particularly as the complex’s number of vacancies soared from 501 to 699 in only a year’s time.

Even passersby who knew of the stadium plans couldn’t help wondering what the city fathers had in store for Horner, which suddenly sat on thirty-four acres of very valuable real estate. Many of the buildings boast more empty units than occupied ones, thin plywood replacing the windows. In some, the black scorching of fires, recent and old, surrounds empty and boarded-up window frames, which look like the blackened eyes of a defeated boxer.

Authorities assured residents that they had no plans to demolish Horner. They cited a 1987 law passed by Congress prohibiting the razing of public housing unless replacement housing is provided. Moreover, the city’s football team, the Bears, chose to continue to play in its stadium by the lake, so only one new arena was planned. Nonetheless, skeptics abounded.

The stadium has caused bad feelings among residents for other reasons as well. On stadium nights, the neighborhood overflows with police. There are so many that two years ago Jimmie Lee, according to the police, had to shut down his drug operations during ball games. Why can’t we get more protection for ourselves? the residents asked. Why does it take all these white people, all these outsiders, to flood the area with police? Why is it that only on stadium nights the area is well lit? The questions, rarely posed directly at the stadium or the city, come up in conversations at Horner. The Interfaith Organizing Project, an organization of local churches, challenged the construction of the two stadiums, but its complaint was merely a whisper compared with loud and well-orchestrated voices heard two decades ago. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, numerous community organizations, most notably the Miles Square Federation, vigorously fought for and won neighborhood improvements, including better schools and health care. Demonstrations were frequent. Today, the tensions simmer below the surface.

Lafeyette, Pharoah, and Porkchop joined some friends as they got to Washington Boulevard, which runs along the southern
edge of the complex. “The police told us to get away, not to watch no cars,” one boy told the others. A disjointed conversation ensued. Should they turn back? There had been nights when the police seemed more intent than at others to keep the boys away from the stadium. Sometimes, the children would heed the cops’ warnings. Other times, they would continue their efforts to watch cars, careful to avoid the police. This night, Pharoah and Porkchop turned back, choosing instead to play basketball on the jungle gym. Porkchop, always filled with mischief, hollered at a teenage sentry for one of the gangs, “Police!” The young gang member jerked his head around. “Where? Where?” Porkchop and Pharoah burst into laughter at their joke. Lafeyette went on to the stadium with his friends.

Lafeyette helped a parking lot attendant wave in cars. The boys could make $5.00 to $10.00 flagging cars into the lots. A policeman approached and told Lafeyette and a few of his friends, who were waiting for cars to pull into the side streets, to go home. Lafeyette may have talked back to him or he may have been slow in moving, but two other boys have separately recounted what happened next. The policeman grabbed Lafeyette by the collar of his jacket and heaved him into a puddle of water. He then kicked Lafeyette in the rear. “What you doing here?” the officer demanded of the boy. “Little punk, you ain’t supposed to be working here. These white people don’t have no money to give no niggers.”

One of Lafeyette’s friends ran to the safety of Horner, where he breathlessly told Pharoah what had happened. Pharoah panicked. He stood by himself in the middle of the playground, shivering more from fear than from the cold. He didn’t want to go to Lafeyette because he was afraid the policeman might kick him, too. He didn’t want to summon their mother because he worried that “she probably would of gotten involved and they would of taken her to jail for keeping her kids out too late.” He was paralyzed with fear.

Meanwhile, two boys had sprinted to get LaJoe, who bolted from her apartment without her coat. By the time she reached Washington Boulevard, Lafeyette was in the back seat of the squad car. She started arguing with the policeman who had thrown Lafeyette to the ground. Two other officers then
showed up. They released Lafeyette. He wasn’t arrested; no charges were filed.

Lafeyette later recalled that one of the policemen had warned him he could get hurt out there at night. “I’ve been living around here all my life and I ain’t got hurt so far,” he told the officer. “Only the police have hurt me.”

No one got the name of the patrolman or his badge number, so there was no way to pursue the case with the police department. Besides, it would be the boys’ word against his. That night ushered in a period of confusion for Lafeyette as he began to question his relationship with the police.

For several weeks, neither Lafeyette nor Pharoah worked the stadium. LaJoe told the two never to go back, but eventually they went. Sometimes LaJoe knew about their forays; sometimes she didn’t. She had trouble saying no to them, as she had had with the older children. Besides, working the stadium was the only way the children could earn spending money.

Pharoah returned to the stadium first. It would be spring before Lafeyette tentatively made his way over there. Pharoah had found a new way to make money. He and his friends performed what was called “the chicken wing” for one of the stadium goers. The man, who was white, would chuckle at the frenzied dance, in which the children mimicked a squawking chicken; he’d give them a few dollars. Pharoah must have realized there was something demeaning about his performance, because when he told the story to others, he would feel embarrassed and would turn his head away, giggling nervously.

For the first time, Pharoah, now ten, began to wonder aloud about being black. “Do all black people live in projects?” he asked his mother. “Do all black people be poor?” He was upset that Michael Dukakis hadn’t chosen Jesse Jackson as his running mate. “He might of won then,” he thought out loud. “Why don’t people elect black people?” The incident at the stadium had unnerved him. He felt that “the police probably don’t like black children or something. The white polices don’t like the black children. That’s what I believe.” It was the first time Pharoah had acknowledged any bitterness toward anybody.

The incident involving Lafeyette and the policeman brought back unsettling memories for LaJoe. Like other long-time
Henry Horner residents, she had mixed feelings about the police—and her ambivalence was passed on to her children.

On the one hand, LaJoe and others had sympathy for the police. What young cop, after all, would want to be stuck alone in a neighborhood like Horner after dark? The residents knew this and understood. It wasn’t safe for them. Why would it be safe for anyone else? In one nearby neighborhood, not too long ago, a youth got down on one knee, put a rifle up to his shoulder, yelled out the name of his gang, and then opened fire on a squad car. Most officers wouldn’t venture into Horner by themselves even during the day. Who could blame them?

But the residents didn’t fully trust the cops. For one thing, residents felt stuck in the middle between the drug gangs and the police. The cops came and went, but the gang members were there twenty-four hours a day, every day. It wasn’t a question of allegiance; it was common sense. Few residents, after all, would call 911 for fear that the gangs would discover that they had snitched.

But much of their wariness was rooted in the past. Memories died slowly. And Horner, like so many other inner-city black communities, had been a victim of the police’s overzealousness or brutality, depending on the way you looked at it. As early as 1968, the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson to explore the problems facing the nation’s inner cities, characterized the relationship between the armed authorities and the black community nationwide as “explosive.” The antipathy of Henry Horner residents toward the police crystallized a year later, in 1969, when four young men were killed by the authorities. Their deaths forever changed the way people at Henry Horner viewed the police.

In the late 1960s, the nation’s black ghettoes were filled with rage and fury, a stark contrast to the resignation and personal excesses of the late 1980s. It was a period when people felt that they could do something, that they could find allies in the “system” to help make it work for them. And when that began to fail them, so did their hope and sense of justice.

First the War on Poverty, despite its grandiose intentions, flickered in its failures, and then the leaders, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., were gunned down. White America seemed intent on ignoring pleas for equality in the schools, in
housing, and in health care. The Kerner Commission, which issued its report only months before Dr. King’s death, presciently warned: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

During those years, the residents of Henry Horner, like many others, organized. They were galvanized by what they considered the neglect and outright exploitation of their community. Pressuring the federal government, they were able to get funds for the founding of a neighborhood health clinic, the Miles Square Health Center. They put pressure on schools, like Crane, to bring in more sympathetic principals. They helped get a swimming pool built at the Boys Club in 1967. And then, in the fall of 1969, residents demanded a traffic light.

Given all the turmoil of those years, it didn’t, at the time, seem an extravagant request. Washington Boulevard had become a virtual expressway for commuters driving from the Loop to the western suburbs, and because there was no traffic light for the one-mile length of Horner, motorists passed it at high speeds. Since the opening of school, two children had been hit by motorists. So it seemed reasonable to the parents in the neighborhood that the city install a traffic light; the city needed to do something to slow down the traffic. But the city refused. It would impede the flow of commuter traffic, officials said.