Dear Blogger,
Things are getting a little backed up here, and I’ve been getting ready to go out of town for Thanksgiving.
Chicago Lawn is an important place in Chicago history, and also in United States history. I’m doing a directed study on the identities of two groups that appeared in Chicago Lawn: The Civil Rights Movement, specifically the Open-Housing Movement… and the National Socialist Party of America. And I’m also doing a presentation for my seminar class on attempts during the sixties to build a racial border between West Englewood (a black neighborhood) and Chicago Lawn (a then white neighborhood). As both of these topics hold a fairly complex history, and as they're fairly closely related, and I don’t want to give you a lecture, I’m going to give you what I’m studying and learning, piece-by-piece.
On Sunday I went with Ani and our seminar teacher, Leesa, to Chicago Lawn (also known as Marquette Park), and this is when I took my most recent photos. In the early sixties, Chicago Lawn was almost entirely white (99.9%), and was fairly affluent. During this time, West Englewood, a neighborhood just to the east was beginning to integrate, and more specifically, the wealthy white people there were beginning to leave for the suburbs. This, of course, caused the people in Chicago Lawn to panic. When rich people flee, the businesses have no business, causing money to disappear, which then causes jobs to disappear, and then the neighborhood just goes to hell. Of course, hell only stops by when the realtors buy property for cheap, and then sell it for twice the buying price, so no one can actually afford to stay in hell once they buy a house there. So what's going to happen to the people in Chicago Lawn that don't want to leave their homes?
About the time that Chicago Lawn was beginning to actually integrate, a bank owner (whose name I can’t remember) proposed building a wall separating Chicago Lawn and West Englewood essentially enforcing segregation.
Now, the interesting thing about this wall is that it wasn’t intended to be some gigantic, concrete wall separating the neighborhoods, like East and West Germany. It was actually intended to be some kind of neutral zone, like in North and South Korea, the Demilitarized Zone: a place where nothing can economically exist and no one would want to exist. This wall, what they called a “natural barrier”, would keep the neighborhoods successfully segregated. (In the photo album, this place is where there are vacant lots surrounded by fences and barbwire with garbage stuck on it, and some photos of traffic tunnels we walked through.) I’m not sure if everything there was going to be torn down and just left barren, or if it would be toxic place where no one would want to be build anything for fear of being alienated by their neighbors, or how the wall could come to be, at all.
Speaking of existing, this wall doesn’t really have a name. Leesa referred to it as the Western Avenue Wall, due to proximity with Western Avenue. (She was more specific in naming it in the Bell/Oakley/Claremont street area.) So far as a few searches on Google can tell me, this wall has no documented history, it’s something that people alive at the time all knew about. (We talked to a man in a restaurant and he told us that it was an internal boundary. Meaning that no one really drew the boundary. You just knew when you were out of place, and so did everyone else around.) And what’s the point of naming something that doesn’t technically exist? And it won’t technically exist anymore when the people who created it and enforced it are all dead.
But there is nothing really there anymore at the Wall. Just some old abandoned coal building, some cracked parking lots, empty traffic tunnels, and some solar panels that probably aren't powering anything in a vacant lot. (Is nothing there, because the formerly successful businesses all leave or fail when the neighborhood integrated indirectly leaving this spot vacant? Or, did the Wall come into some kind of vague existence with no one saying anything to anyone else outside of Chicago Lawn, making it a purposeless border when the neighborhood eventually integrated?)
Things are getting a little backed up here, and I’ve been getting ready to go out of town for Thanksgiving.
Chicago Lawn is an important place in Chicago history, and also in United States history. I’m doing a directed study on the identities of two groups that appeared in Chicago Lawn: The Civil Rights Movement, specifically the Open-Housing Movement… and the National Socialist Party of America. And I’m also doing a presentation for my seminar class on attempts during the sixties to build a racial border between West Englewood (a black neighborhood) and Chicago Lawn (a then white neighborhood). As both of these topics hold a fairly complex history, and as they're fairly closely related, and I don’t want to give you a lecture, I’m going to give you what I’m studying and learning, piece-by-piece.
On Sunday I went with Ani and our seminar teacher, Leesa, to Chicago Lawn (also known as Marquette Park), and this is when I took my most recent photos. In the early sixties, Chicago Lawn was almost entirely white (99.9%), and was fairly affluent. During this time, West Englewood, a neighborhood just to the east was beginning to integrate, and more specifically, the wealthy white people there were beginning to leave for the suburbs. This, of course, caused the people in Chicago Lawn to panic. When rich people flee, the businesses have no business, causing money to disappear, which then causes jobs to disappear, and then the neighborhood just goes to hell. Of course, hell only stops by when the realtors buy property for cheap, and then sell it for twice the buying price, so no one can actually afford to stay in hell once they buy a house there. So what's going to happen to the people in Chicago Lawn that don't want to leave their homes?
About the time that Chicago Lawn was beginning to actually integrate, a bank owner (whose name I can’t remember) proposed building a wall separating Chicago Lawn and West Englewood essentially enforcing segregation.
Now, the interesting thing about this wall is that it wasn’t intended to be some gigantic, concrete wall separating the neighborhoods, like East and West Germany. It was actually intended to be some kind of neutral zone, like in North and South Korea, the Demilitarized Zone: a place where nothing can economically exist and no one would want to exist. This wall, what they called a “natural barrier”, would keep the neighborhoods successfully segregated. (In the photo album, this place is where there are vacant lots surrounded by fences and barbwire with garbage stuck on it, and some photos of traffic tunnels we walked through.) I’m not sure if everything there was going to be torn down and just left barren, or if it would be toxic place where no one would want to be build anything for fear of being alienated by their neighbors, or how the wall could come to be, at all.
Speaking of existing, this wall doesn’t really have a name. Leesa referred to it as the Western Avenue Wall, due to proximity with Western Avenue. (She was more specific in naming it in the Bell/Oakley/Claremont street area.) So far as a few searches on Google can tell me, this wall has no documented history, it’s something that people alive at the time all knew about. (We talked to a man in a restaurant and he told us that it was an internal boundary. Meaning that no one really drew the boundary. You just knew when you were out of place, and so did everyone else around.) And what’s the point of naming something that doesn’t technically exist? And it won’t technically exist anymore when the people who created it and enforced it are all dead.
But there is nothing really there anymore at the Wall. Just some old abandoned coal building, some cracked parking lots, empty traffic tunnels, and some solar panels that probably aren't powering anything in a vacant lot. (Is nothing there, because the formerly successful businesses all leave or fail when the neighborhood integrated indirectly leaving this spot vacant? Or, did the Wall come into some kind of vague existence with no one saying anything to anyone else outside of Chicago Lawn, making it a purposeless border when the neighborhood eventually integrated?)
It’s some kind of vague, secretive purgatory.
Happy Thanksgiving,
Steve
