Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Red Line
- 2 The Demagogue of Space
- 3 The Demagogue's Mechanism: Groups, Space, and the Mind
- 4 Laboratories: Assigning Space
- 5 Boston: Trains, Immigrants, and the Arizona Question
- 6 Chicago: Projects and a Shock to Social Geography
- 7 Jerusalem: Walls and the Problem of Cooperation
- 8 Crenshaw Boulevard, Los Angeles: Contact and Exit
- 9 Phoenix: The Arc of Intergroup Interactions and the Political Future
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Chicago: Projects and a Shock to Social Geography
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Red Line
- 2 The Demagogue of Space
- 3 The Demagogue's Mechanism: Groups, Space, and the Mind
- 4 Laboratories: Assigning Space
- 5 Boston: Trains, Immigrants, and the Arizona Question
- 6 Chicago: Projects and a Shock to Social Geography
- 7 Jerusalem: Walls and the Problem of Cooperation
- 8 Crenshaw Boulevard, Los Angeles: Contact and Exit
- 9 Phoenix: The Arc of Intergroup Interactions and the Political Future
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Every great city has its bohemias and its hobohemias; its gold coast and little Sicilies; its rooming-house areas and its slums. In Chicago, and on the Lower North Side, they are in close physical proximity to one another. This gives one an interesting illustration of the situation in which the physical distances and the social distances do not coincide; a situation in which people who live side by side are not, and – because of the divergence of their interests and their heritages – cannot, even with the best of good will, become neighbors.
– Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum, 1929When an “L” train on Chicago's Red Line emerges from beneath the Loop heading south, it rumbles above the streets for a distance, then slips between the northbound and southbound lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway, just south and east of the enclave of Chinatown. For the rest of its journey, the passengers have a view of the mighty expanse of South Chicago on both sides of them. Taking this train on my morning journeys to teach, I would read the Chicago Tribune, using the journey to keep up with the news. As we traveled south, around the time we reached US Cellular Field, where the White Sox baseball team plays, I would often put down my paper and marvel at the scenes to the east, across the northbound traffic lanes.Hulking over the expressway were the scarred and burned structures of Stateway Gardens, part of the massive expanse of public housing known as the “State Street Corridor” stretching along State Street from north to south.2 In the collective American imagination, these projects were the epitome of public housing – decrepit, large, dangerous, Black. They stood right along the expressway so that people traveling to the North Side of the city, where most white people were probably going, could not help but see them. The projects had scars of fire coming out some of the windows, like permanent black eyes. The buildings seemed larger than they actually were – perhaps just because they were so ominous – and seemed closer than they actually were, looming over the freeway, probably reflecting the subtle fear they invoked in those passing by.
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- Information
- The Space between UsSocial Geography and Politics, pp. 142 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017