WTF?

You can blame a lot of this on Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Corbu designed “machines for living” and was the main proponent behind the “towers in the park” idea that enthralled architects and public policy makers in the mid-20th century.

Le Corbusier thought everybody should live this way, but it ended up mostly only being applied to poor people because (1) governments kept trying top-down solutions to urban poverty problems with no input from the residents, and (2) nobody who had any input into the process (i.e., people who could choose where they wanted to live) would choose such a thing.

Eventually public policy planners realized the mistake, and nowadays public housing tends to look a lot more like regular neighborhoods. Architects, unfortunately, still revere Le Corbusier; as a city planner myself this seems emblematic of architects’ cult of the genius and their disregard for how people actually interact with their environments. But that’s just cross-disciplinary sniping that probably doesn’t interest most of you.

Sometimes, the shoe fits. The towers of Cabrini Green had open balcony hallways on every floor, even on the north facing sides. In Chicago. Only the very desperate would take an upper floor apartment in CG. Years after leaving Chicago I saw a building in Rotterdam that was a perfect replica of this one. And no doubt it had its share of middle class residents. But that was Rotterdam.

But yes, there were other problems. CG was the closest housing project to a lot of wealthy neighborhoods. That made it prime real estate for the drug trade, so gangs were extra-eager to control it. And controlling it was easy. Station one guy at each stairwell. One guy on a balcony with a gun. Done.

To echo many others, good riddance to that place.

Having been to Dessau and Marseilles, can say that the original designs were top quality and the buildings were built with the best materials. Hence they became havens for all classes of people.

What seems to have happened is the lack of care in design, skimping on materials and racism doomed most new world experiments( and many old world ones as well) to the concentration of the very problems they were supposed to alleviate.

There were (and to some extent still are) plenty of low income neighborhoods around the country where violent crime and general hopelessness wasn’t anywhere near the problem it was in the big housing projects of the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s. You take fifteen thousand people, kick them out of their nice old fashioned mixed-use neighborhoods and warehouse them in an area removed from employment/services, and you’re going to screw shit up.

I lived in the area as the tower’s came down. It was impressive in its methodical slowness. A few rows of housing at a time. Every time you drove by a little more would be gone. The weird bodega and liquor store across the street shuttering up. The stark contrast of the towers with the fancy condos just a couple blocks away on the other side of the tracks (truly an example of the “wrong side of the tracks”).

My only hope is that the idea of more distributed types of subsidized housing prove to be better than the miserable sore that Cabrini Green had become.

Also, I had no idea that we still used wrecking balls to tear down things. Interesting.

(http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/why-did-chicagos-public-housing-fail-too-many-kids-says-d-bradford-hunt-in-blueprint-for-disaster/Content?oid=1200872)

…in which I learned that Chicago officials wanted to build more traditional housing, but couldn’t afford to on the Federal gov’t's $17,000/unit mandate. They went with LeCorbusier-inspired cloud cities not out of love for their aesthetics, but because they couldn’t afford the row homes, walk-ups, or similar that the same money would have purchased in a lower-priced market.

The development of the suburbs sort of made “inner city” such a bad place that somebody thought, with very narrow blinders on, that to put this project on land that is now so incredibly valuable real estate, was a good idea.

To the displaced, sorry. That said, you had some prime real estate and trashed it.

My grandparents died before they could see the HHH demolished in 2005. I am not sure I can convey in a blog comment my mom’s expression when she saw them go on the evening news, or the anger I feel toward the supposedly well-meaning folks who forced them upon these communities in the first place. It boils my fucking blood.

Sudhir Venkatesh has an interesting history of the projects in Chicago (centered around Robert Taylor and Stateway Gardens) in his book American Project.

Looking at Google Street view, you can use the position of the tree and lightpole to roughly estimate where the photographer must have been: in one of the new three-story townhouses across the street. It looks like some of the early photos were taken from the second floor, while the remainder were consistently taken from the third floor.

Up and down, up and down. Make up your mind!

/I keed

Oops! Wrong housing project demolition.

”project?’ that’s just another word for experiment!’ -flava flav, public enemy

…good riddance