1

INTRODUCTION

On the twenty-third day of the month of September,

in an early year of a decade not too long before our own,
the human race suddenly encountered a deadly threat to its very existence.
And this terrifying enemy surfaced, as such enemies often do, in the seemingly
most innocent and unlikely of places...

The film version of Little Shop of Horrors (Frank Oz, 1986) begins with these

fateful words. A remake of Robert Croman‘s 1960 original, Oz locates his

interpretation in a downtown skid row of the early 1960s, a location one critic has

called a ―surreal amalgamation of New York and Chicago.‖1 As dramatic notes from

an electronic organ float into the smoggy air and the ominous vocal introduction

subsides, the camera cuts to an aestheticized vision of inner-city blight – a network of

wiry fire escapes frame a dingy palette of overflowing trashcans, broken glass, and

mottled building exteriors. Amidst this grimy canvas we find the film‘s central

protagonist, Seymour Krelborn, a geeky klutz who works as an assistant at a

dilapidated flower shop. Looking out onto this miserable vista through the shop‘s dirty

windows, Seymour is momentarily blinded by a freakish total eclipse of the sun. When

the light returns, Seymour becomes aware of a gigantic, talking Venus fly trap-type

creature sitting behind him on a table. When Krelborn offers fresh soil, water, and

sunlight to the wilting plant, the fickle organism rejects these normal horticultural

foodstuffs, instead choosing to feed off the clumsy shop-worker‘s accidentally

1
James Berardinelli, ―Little Shop of Horrors: A Film Review by James Berardinelli,‖ 1999,
<http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/l/little_shop.html> (accessed December 12, 2008).
 2

bloodied finger. As the plant thrives, business booms at the previously failing flower

store and Krelborn becomes a local celebrity, appearing in newspapers, television

shows and radio programs. Meanwhile, Krelborn‘s co-worker and secret crush Audrey

Fulquard reveals her love for the bumbling florist and her dreams of one day moving

to a tract house complete with plastic-coated furniture and a ―big, enormous‖ twelve-

inch television screen ―somewhere that‘s green.‖ Over the course of the movie, the

carnivorous plant becomes more and more demanding of the simpering shop-worker

and destructive towards his surroundings. Unable to stand the plant‘s increasingly

violent behavior, a fight ensues between the pair, which leaves the shop and the

surrounding neighborhood in rubble and the gigantic plant—unveiled as an alien

during the song ―Mean Green Mother from Outer Space‖--free to ―take over the

world.‖ Together, this series of events link together to form the film‘s subtle and oft-

neglected racial message. With the physical blackness of the eclipse enters not only the

plant, but also a monstrous flesh-eating metaphor for the alien African-American

―other.‖ The creature, you see, is insidiously coded as black – from its big-lipped

caricature of African-American physiology, to its urban black accent and idiomatic

expressions, the plant is a menacing black foil to Seymour‘s innocent, pale, geeky

whiteness. Ostensibly a quirky musical comedy about the aspirations of postwar

working-class whites looking to escape the urban blight city and find a superior life in

the suburbs, with the arrival of the horticultural horror, the film morphs into an

allegory of deep-rooted societal fears over urban American race relations and racial

integration.
 3

This fearful metaphorical representation does not end in the metropolis.

Following Seymour and Audrey‘s eventual escape from skid row and the clutches of

the man-eating plant to the sterile fresh air of suburbia, the closing frame of the film

reveals a small patch of Venus fly-traps growing amid a perfectly manicured

flowerbed. A fearful fantasy of racial conflict and white flight, Little Shop of Horrors

closes with the warning that a ―terrifying enemy‖ might escape the city, eventually

―sprouting up‖ on crabgrass front yards, hell bent on devouring white suburbia.2

Although never ‗directly‘ addressed at any point in the movie, the subtle unspoken

anxiety pulsing beneath the surface of the pixels is clear: immigrants such as African-

Americans threaten here, there and everywhere, and, therefore, must be contained and

controlled.

If there is ever a film that underscored nascent mid twentieth-century fears over

the immanent social collapse posed by housing integration, then this is undoubtedly it.

The invasion and obliteration of the city so graphically represented in The Little Shop

of Horrors corresponds with the very real rejection of urban life by millions of white

Americans during the height of postwar suburbanization. The rise of ―chocolate cities‖

as opposed to ―vanilla suburbs‖ became the spatial and racial paradigm of urban life in

postwar America.3 Yet, it was not until the arrival of urban public housing complexes,

which would soon come to replace the skid row of Seymour‘s Chicago, that federal

2
Robert Beuka briefly refers to Little Shop of Horrors as ―an allegory of postwar ―white flight‖‖ in
Suburbia Nation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004:193-4
3
These terms were introduced by Reynolds Farley, Howard Schuman, Diane Colasanto, and Shirley
Hatchet in ―Chocolate City, Vanilla Suburbs: Will the Trend Towards Racially Separate Communities
Continue?,‖ Social Science Research 7, 1978: 330
 4

policy, local land development strategies and popular desire would collude to solidify

this racial disparity.

The death sentence handed down in Little Shop of Horrors neatly encapsulates

one of the primary challenges of this dissertation: to analyze the progressive

demonization and racialization of Chicago‘s inner-city public housing from 1970-2010

in American visual culture.4 Given that Oz presents the plant as a hostile, foreign entity,

it is noteworthy that he supports his bid for world domination largely through

appearances on mass media network channels. The fame-savvy plant begins his quest to

take over the Earth by appearing as a guest on a local radio broadcast, before moving on

to the bright lights of nationally-syndicated television gardening shows, all the while

driven by a desire for money and mass media exposure.5 This seemingly innocuous

comedy symbolizes the end of Chicago‘s public housing in the American visual

imagination before it had even begun. By the late 1960s, just ten years after the

construction of much of the city‘s public housing, a highly problematic image of

subsidized housing—based largely on race—came to dominate television airwaves,

cinema screens, and mainstream media newspaper headlines. Indeed, much of the period

after 1965 demonstrates the power of visual culture to present its own particular notion

4
It was not only the inner-city but suburbia also that incurred the wrath of leading social critics during
the mid twentieth-century. Lewis Mumford maintained that ―the suburb served as an asylum for the
preservation of illusion.‖ He fumed that suburbia was ―not merely a child-centred environment; it was
based on a childish view of the world.‖ For sociologist Paul Goodman, the suburban landscape led to
adolescents ―growing up absurd,‖ while sociologist William H. Whyte, Jr. believed suburbia speeded
the ascendency of the ―Organization Man‖ and helped to erode time-honored American individualism.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1961: 494; Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd, New York: Vintage, 1962. William H.
Whyte Jr. The Organization Man, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1952
5
Marc Jensen, ―Feed Me!‖: Power Struggles and the Portrayal of Race in Little Shop of Horrors,‖
Cinema Journal, 48, No.1, Fall 2008: 58
 5

of Chicago‘s public housing and its occupants, while ignoring organizations, scholars

and journalists who challenged these narrow illustrations.

Fast forward forty-five years and we find Chicago in the midst of a political bid

to wipe the city‘s subsidized housing from the map and the landscape. This urban

renewal initiative, called the Plan for Transformation,6 began in 2000 under the

leadership of Mayor Richard M. Daley with approval from the U.S. Department of

Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It is the largest, most ambitious

redevelopment effort of public housing in the United States, with the goal of

rehabilitating or redeveloping the entire stock of public housing in Chicago. As the

Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) demolishes the last of the city‘s public housing, my

project addresses the ways in which the projects have been mythologized in late

twentieth-century popular visual culture as sites that deserve to be erased. I argue that

destructive televisual, filmic, and mainstream media journalism narratives have not only

‗constructed‘ the projects as a landscape of hopelessness in the American visual

imagination but have also had the devastating effect of ‗producing‘ and validating the

‗death‘ of public housing in the form of the Plan.

Long a topic for cross-disciplinary investigation in the humanities and social

sciences, scholarship connected to ―the city‖—either as a case study or category of

analysis--has been the focus of a great deal of work by academics interested in

outlining the importance of spatial analysis and spatial representation. Examples of this

scholarship include Kevin Fox Gotham‘s and Stephen Nathan Haymes‘ studies of

racialized inner-city space, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh‘s investigation into the social

6
From here on in I refer to the Plan for Transformation as the Plan.
 6

organization of gang activity in Chicago, and Scott Swearingen‘s and Cecilia Orellana-

Rojas‘ analysis of space and community identity.7 These scholars consider the ways in

which socio-spatial relations and conflicts over land-use can illuminate our

understanding of social change, and criticize attempts to recover the city as a

―readable‖ representational space. Likewise, in their critiques of the readability or

transparency of space, Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja are concerned that visual

imagery or textual interpretations of actual places may attribute an artificial

―epistemological precedence‖ over the social reality of life in that place.8 Lefebvre and

Soja attempt to demythologize common understandings of the city as an artificial

totality by highlighting the spatial formations of urban identity produced across varied

discursive regimes and everyday practices. This scholarship—aided by urban

semiological insights at the end of the twentieth/early twenty-first-century—helped

disseminate burgeoning theoretical interest in urban studies across a diverse spectrum

of interdisciplinary areas. These areas include social science, urban sociology, cultural

studies, and cultural geography, and the neat embrace of the recent ―spatial turn‖ in

aesthetics and cultural critique, the emerging, cross-disciplinary field of Urban Visual

Studies.

7
Kevin Fox Gotham, ―Toward an Understanding of the Spatiality of Urban Poverty: The Urban Poor as
Spatial Actors,‖ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 27, Issue. 3, Sept 2003: 732;
Stephen Nathan Haymes, Race, Culture, and the City: A Pedagogy for Black Urban Struggle, Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 1995; Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, ―The Social Organization of Street Gang Activity in an
Urban Ghetto,‖ The American Journal of Sociology, 103, 1997: 82-111; Scott Swearingen and Cecilia
Orellana-Rojas, "Conflict, space, and identity: Two cases, one process," Research in Urban Sociology,
Issue 5, 1999: 81-109.
8
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992: 144;
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London:
Verso, 1989.
 7

Urban Visual Studies draws on expository practices developed by the disciplines

of art history, architecture, cultural studies, and film and media studies, while situating

analyses within the disciplines of urban-, global-, and migration studies. Urban history

and urban studies traditionally employed quantitative research and survey techniques

to elucidate shifts in demography, economy, and class. The paradigm of Urban Visual

Studies retains these concerns but investigates forms in and of the city such as

buildings, plans, maps, models, mass culture, drawings, art objects, photographs, and

moving images from a visual and cultural perspective.

This approach underpins my dissertation where three broad but overlapping

approaches constitute its methodology. One interprets abstract, dissociated visual

interpretations of Chicago‘s public housing. Moving chronologically from the early

1970s through to the present day, I consider the foremost visual representations of

Chicago‘s public housing, while locating these analyses within contemporary socio-

economic and political structures. I consider the effect of these visualizations on the

construction of social status, stereotypes or what sociologist Rob Shields refers to as

―spatial myths‖9 Another approach investigates the everyday practices, rituals, and

social dynamics of urban vision in public housing. This ethnographic phase of my

research asks: How do prevailing visual representations and socio-political designations

concur or differ from the semiological experiences of ―real‖ residents of public housing?

9
―Spatial Myths‖ refers to space as a social construct; a collective simplification, stereotyping and
labeling of ―place images.‖ Within Shields‘ study ―images and myths were found to have a complex,
historically changing relationship with empirical facts and practices.‖ Rob Shields, Places on the
Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, London: Routledge, 1991: 261
 8

10
Supported by field observations and on-site interviews conducted in Chicago‘s public

housing communities between 2006-2009, as well as research in the recently opened

archives of the Chicago Housing Authority, I investigate individuals‘ and groups‘

efforts to represent their own lives - through activities including the publication of a

resident-run newspaper, some residents‘ tell their own stories. I argue that through this

re-imaging some residents‘ challenge stigmatized identities and negative stereotypes

associated with life in Chicago‘s public housing. My third approach works in the space

in-between, reconciling the image of the city‘s subsidized accommodation with the

reality on the ground. Utilizing the conceptual tools enabled by contemporary spatial

theory, I exploring visual and cultural productions that reflect more accurately the lived

spatial practices of Chicago‘s subsidized housing residents. These counter-examples

resist hegemonic interpretations of tenants by illustrating individuals‘ and groups‘

creation, possession, enhancement or simply ―use‖ of space in the form of everyday

patterns of movement and via grassroots conflicts over the management of their living

environments.

As an organizing principle, my use of the words ―death‖ and ―resurrection‖ is

particularly important. I am not employing these terms in a biblical sense but rather as a

reflection of the magnitude of the task ahead. There are, I would argue, few places more

universally derided as a living environment than Chicago‘s Cabrini-Green or Robert

Taylor Homes, therefore, to offer a counter-interpretation is a challenging undertaking

to say the least. Urban scholar Lawrence Vale recently observed that, ―(no) place in the

10
Jana Carp, ―‖Ground-Truthing‖ Representations of Social Space,‖ Journal of Planning Education and
Research, 28, 2008: 129.
 9

contemporary United States, with the possible exceptions of prisons and certain

hospitals, stigmatizes people in as many debilitating ways as a distressed inner-city

public housing project.‖11 Nonetheless, it is urgent that I offer an alternative narrative—

one that speaks to public housing‘s success in ―life,‖ so to speak-–before the completion

of the Plan in 2015. This is a vital undertaking not only for those still resident in public

housing but also for past tenants, their memories of this place, and for the legacy of the

city‘s subsidized housing. My investigation involves sifting through a socio-

topographical terrain of images to map the ―death‖ and ―resurrection‖ of Chicago‘s

public housing in the American visual imagination.

Death

In order to trace the emergence of how and why negative perceptions of

Chicago‘s public housing came into being, it is necessary to ground my investigation in

a brief historical review of mid twentieth-century American housing politics.

The construction of Chicago‘s public housing began as a result of President

Harry Truman‘s landmark 1949 Housing Act (Wagner-Ellender-Taft Bill) 12, which set

goals to improve postwar housing standards and conditions and to stabilize the

mortgage market.13 Through the implementation of federal initiatives such as the GI

Bill of Rights and guaranteed Veterans Administration low-interest loans, the

11
Lawrence Vale, Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public
Neighborhoods, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002: 13.
12
The 1949 Housing Act, Wagner-Ellender-Taft Bill, was the first comprehensive U.S. housing
legislation. It was a landmark, sweeping expansion of the federal role in mortgage insurance and
issuance and the construction of public housing. It was part of Harry Truman‘s program of domestic
legislation, the Fair Deal.
13
For a more comprehensive history of the 1949 Housing Act that instigated the construction of
additional city-based public housing see Arnold Hirsch‘s Making The Second Ghetto: Race and Housing
in Chicago, 1940-1960, Cambridge, London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
 10

government aimed for ―the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home

and suitable living environment for every American family.‖14 President Truman

staked his claim for ―a decent home and suitable living environment‖ firmly in

suburban soil, however, when he told participants at the 1948 White House Conference

on Family Life, ―children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of this country as is

Wall Street and the railroads.‖ As if in answer to Truman‘s plea, that very same year

housing developer William Levitt opened the doors to Levittown, the country‘s first

mass-produced suburb and an archetype for postwar suburbs throughout the country.

Between 1947 and 1951, Levitt and Sons built 17,450 houses in Levittown, Long

Island, converting a potato field into a community of seventy-five thousand people; by

1950 the company‘s factory was producing one four-bedroom house every sixteen

minutes. Time magazine celebrated the arrival of this unique community with a 1950

cover story on Levitt that featured the slogan, "For sale: a new way of life." One of the

first in line for a slice of this ―new way of life‖ was Hal Lefcourt who marveled at his

new surroundings, ―Bill Levitt didn‘t just build a community here—he built a

world.‖15 While Lefcourt and his fictitious alter ego Seymour Krelborn made

Truman‘s objective a reality by escaping crowded post-war cities in favor of the fresh

air and blue skies of suburbia, the wholesale demolition of urban slums facilitated by

the Housing Act excluded the remaining inner-city populations from the American

Dream.

14
Harry Truman, 1949 State of the Union address. Housing Act of 1949.
15
Jon Blackwell, ―American Dream Houses, All In a Row,‖ The Capital Century, 1951,
<http://www.capitalcentury.com/1951.html> (accessed 26 December 2010).
 11

Those directly affected by the demolition of inner-city tenements included the

residents of the overcrowded, dilapidated, disease-ridden enclave known as ―Little

Hell‖ in the Near North Side of Chicago. Populated by large numbers of Italian and

African-American migrants--the latter, propelled North by socially segregationist Jim

Crow laws and the rise of the mechanical cotton picker during the 1930s--―Little Hell‖

became a last resort for people blocked from entering the surrounding white

communities through racially restrictive covenants. Restrictive covenants were

contractual agreements among property owners that prohibited the purchase, lease, or

occupation of their premises by African-Americans. In 1943 restrictive covenants were

ruled illegal but this decision was largely ignored until the Supreme Court rendered

restrictive covenants illegal in 1948. Recognizing that the private market would never

adequately provide the poorest on the income scale with satisfactory, affordable

housing, following the establishment of the Housing Act of 1949, the Chicago

Housing Authority (CHA) proposed a plan to help low-income families in Chicago

through the construction of low-rise public housing on vacant sites scattered around

the city. Under the leadership of board member, Robert Taylor, and executive

secretary and New Deal Social reformer, Elizabeth Wood, the CHA, initially at least,

had high hopes that public housing projects could help to alleviate postwar

overcrowding in the city and induce racially integrated housing. Established in 1937,

the CHA devoted itself to ―improving people‘s lives by building subsidized housing

for low income urban families unable to obtain ―decent, safe, and sanitary‖ dwelling

units within their income paying ability.‖16 The CHA proposed a progressive plan that

16
Martin Meyerson, & Edward C. Banfield, Politics, Planning, and the Public Interest: The Case of
 12

called for the building of low-rent, low- and mid-rise housing on different vacant sites

near economically well-off, integrated neighborhoods and viewed public housing as an

opportunity for desegregation, and social, economic and political success.17 According

to historian D. Bradford Hunt, ―In 1949, as a first phase, the CHA proposed to build

25,000 apartments on cleared slum land in five years and another 15,000 on vacant

land.‖18 While the first set of public housing buildings constructed on top of ―Little

Hell‖ followed this optimistic line in the form of the racially diverse red-bricked, low-

rise buildings 586-unit Frances Cabrini Homes (1942) on the city‘s Near North Side,

discursive optimism gave way to pessimism as bureaucratic concerns and racism soon

came to plague the CHA‘s planning and maintenance of its developments (Figure 0.1).

In the book American Pharaoh (2000), journalists Adam Cohen and Elizabeth

Taylor describe how city council battles over the site-selection for public housing in

Chicago became a grave racial issue during the mid twentieth-century.19 This was

largely the result of the political corruption, patronage and cronyism that dominated

much of the city‘s twentieth-century governance. Unlike other U.S. cities like New

York City, Chicago never benefited from a reformist Mayor such as Fiorello

LaGuardia. Instead, for the past forty-five years, Chicago has been beholden to the so-

called ―Chicago-style politics‖ of Richard J. Daley and his son Richard M. Daley. This

one-party/one-family made the city vulnerable to corruption: Within three years of

Mayor Daley Sr.‘s election to office in 1955, an FBI investigation charged fourteen

Public Housing in Chicago, Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1955: 45.
17
Meyerson & Banfield, 45.
18
D. Bradford Hunt, ―Understanding Chicago‘s High-Rise Public Housing Disaster,‖ Chicago
Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005: 302
19
Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, American Pharaoh-Mayor Richard J. Daley: His battle for
Chicago and the Nation, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000: 100.
 13

local officials--including a deputy water commissioner, a Cook County clerk, a former

mayoral aide, and four council members—with accepting bribes. A proponent of

segregation, during his twenty-two-year tenure, Daley oversaw much of the planning

for public housing. Cohen and Taylor describe how the Mayor used the developments

to formalize the city‘s existing racial lines, effectively making subsidized housing a

―repository‖ for African-Americans.20 As Arnold Hirsch observes in his definitive

examination of this era in Chicago, Making the Second Ghetto (1983), many white

people accepted uncritically ―the idea that communities deteriorate when Negroes

move in.‖21 Hirsch continues, ―public policy, in short, has played a key role in

fostering, sustaining, and, not infrequently, intensifying the separation of the races

even in the absence of Jim Crow legislation.‖22 If public housing projects were

constructed in white neighborhoods, aldermen fought to keep them racially segregated

(less than ten percent African-American) with the justification that they did not want

them to look like they were going ―downhill.‖23 Vetoing the CHA‘s plans for

construction on their wards, 19th Ward alderman John J. Duffy preferred a plan that

contained the poor and therefore only approved design plans for public housing to be

erected on slum land. The CHA was forced to accept this plan or not build any housing

at all. Indeed, between 1948 and 1951, reactionary whites in the city council repeatedly

clashed with the CHA over sites and integration. After the Mayor succeeded in forcing

out the progressive Elizabeth Wood in 1954, he was able to install executive

20
Cohen and Taylor, 183 and 11.
21
Hirsch, 35.
22
Hirsch, viii.
23
Hirsch, 35.
 14

secretaries that were subservient to the political machine.24 Thirty-two of thirty-three

of the city‘s public housing complexes built between 1950 and 1967 were concentrated

in predominantly African-American neighborhoods. By 1959, seventy-five percent of

the city‘s African-American population lived in exclusively black census tracks

compared to forty-nine point seven percent in 1940.25 The persistent specter of racial

exclusion, in addition to the devastating influence of white flight and the desertion of

the inner-city by working- and middle-class African-Americans, led Hirsch to refer to

the city‘s isolated public housing projects during this time as the ―second ghetto.‖26

The unrelenting struggle between the city council and the CHA over sites

forced the authority to construct public housing on small pockets of land. Given these

site restrictions, the perpetual postwar housing shortage, and the rising cost of urban

land, planners proposed the development of sites at high population densities. The

urgency of slum clearance and the need for large-scale development resulted in the

construction of high-rise accommodations, which greatly restricted design options. The

CHA was also under increasing pressure from the Truman administration and

repeatedly fought with Congress over public housing‘s legitimacy, who feared a public

relations disaster over ―high-cost‖ low-rise subsidized housing. Although policies in

the early CHA administration emphasized the importance of avoiding ―sterile and

stereotyped buildings,‖ by the time the CHA constructed the 1,925-unit Cabrini

Extension North and South (1958) and the adjacent 1,096-unit William Green Homes

(1962), the once modest but pleasant landscape of the Frances Cabrini row-houses

24
Cohen and Taylor, 11.
25
Hirsch, 5.
26
Hirsch, 15.
 15

gave way to the oppressive gray and red overhang of concrete high-rises (Figures 0.2

& 0.3).27 German architectural planner, Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885-1967), influenced

the institutional design of the Cabrini Extension North and South and the William

Green Homes. Hilberseimer lectured at the Bauhaus and came to the U.S. to work for

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the Department of Urban Planning at the Illinois

Institute of Technology College of Architecture in 1938.28 Reflecting the no-frills

aesthetic of the Bauhaus and of his mentor, the design of the Cabrini-Green buildings

was starkly practical with uncompromising rectangular geometry and exposed concrete

frames filled with angular glass and brick. From afar the William Green Homes appear

almost identical to one of Mies van der Rohe most noted buildings, 860-880 Lake

Shore Drive, an apartment complex located in the salubrious Gold Coast neighborhood

just two miles away from the housing project (Figure 0.4).

Dubbed the ―Glass House‖ apartments, the twenty-six-floor, two hundred and

fifty-four foot tall towers on Lake Shore Drive are typical of the Mies‘s severe clarity

and simplicity of design. His buildings made use of materials such as industrial steel

and plate glass to define austere but elegant spaces, a kind of handsome sobriety. The

success of this "skin and bones" architecture depended on the ―extras‖--the expensive

materials, helpful door attendants, janitors to repair the lifts, and babysitters to give

flustered mums some peace and quiet. Nevertheless, while it was one thing to build

apartment towers for the upper-middle-class, as Mies did, it was quite another to adopt

27
Meyerson & Banfield, 95.
28
Witold Rybczynski, ―Bauhaus blunders: Architecture and public housing‖, Public Interest, Issue 113,
Fall 1993: 82-90.
 16

them as solutions for housing the poor, who were provided with none of the expensive

―extras‖ that made this minimalist living strategy livable.

Indeed, despite warnings that the developments would be ―socially

destructive,‖ the city council opted for high density, multistory elevator buildings,

since they were less costly than smaller designs and acted as a well-organized way to

control the city‘s demographic patterns.29 Unfortunately, Daley‘s preference for high-

rises did not account for the social and spatial needs of families, namely the use of

elevator buildings for families with small children. As Hunt observes, ―The problem

with high-rise buildings was not their modernist design, it was their unsuitability for

large numbers of children. The staggering demographic fact of public housing in

Chicago was that, by design, it contained unprecedented numbers of youth compared

to adults.‖30 In the aim of cost effectiveness, the CHA paved over grass with beaten

dirt and asphalt (Figure 0.5). The lack of any indoor or outdoor play spaces forced

children to play either inside their homes or on the tiny encased ―streets in the sky.‖31

Concentrating children at such high densities proved catastrophic as children

overwhelmed branch libraries, the public schools, and the park district, leading to the

vandalism of elevators by children looking for an outlet for their adolescent exploits.32

Furthermore, the construction wiped out many African-American neighborhood

institutions such as community stores and schools, lending the new, high-density

29
Cohen and Taylor, 185.
30
Hunt, 310.
31
Blair Kamin, ―Who Controls the Future of Cabrini Green?,‖ Architectural Record, Vol. 185, Issue 9,
1997: 65.
32
Hunt, 311.
 17

housing a ―sprawling institutional feel.‖33 The ―brick box‖ design of the public

housing buildings concealed and contained residents‘ poverty, rather than facilitating

patterns of activities as the original CHA plans intended. Indeed, the fenced-in exterior

hallways and the psychological distance from the traditional city street grid led one

observer to call the four-mile long procession of high-rises along the State Street

Corridor a ―public-aid penitentiary.‖34 While undeniably progressive in theory and

motivated by a sincere desire to improve the lives of the city‘s low-income families,

internal policy weaknesses, corruption, bureaucratic squabbling and obsession with

cost in the late 1950s and 1960s hindered the CHA‘s ambitions for Chicago's public

housing.

Decline dominated Chicago‘s subsidized housing from the late 1960s onwards,

and Cabrini-Green spiraled ever downward into the city's most visible public shame.

The CHA struggled to manage its sprawling accommodations, as high youth densities,

inadequate services, and mismanagement of the day-to-day operations exacerbated the

buildings‘ existing design flaws, creating a demoralizing environment for tenants and

staff alike. In the late 1960s, Daley withdrew crucial services like police patrols and

routine building maintenance, which resulted in the neglect of elevator repairs, the

vandalism of lobbies and corridors and the use of stairwells as garbage dumps. In

1975, President Nixon placed a moratorium on public housing construction, which

expanded waitlists for tenancy at existing, deteriorating developments. In 1985,

President Reagan reduced federal funding for public housing maintenance,

33
Cohen and Taylor, 186.
34
Cohen and Taylor, 186.
 18

rehabilitation, and construction from $35 billion to $7 billion annually. By 1991, HUD

accused the CHA of mismanagement and poor performance, finding the authority in

substantial breach of its ―Annual Contributions Contract‖ (ACC), a written contract

between HUD and a Public Housing Agency.35 As a result, the City and CHA Board of

Commissioners voluntarily relinquished control to HUD in 1995 with the hope that

direct federal control could help rebuild the housing authority. Once in charge, the

HUD found that corruption was so pervasive in the CHA that improving its financial

management was ―nearly impossible.‖36A report in the Los Angeles Times at the time

described the CHA as a ―downward-spiraling agency that housing experts describe as

the nation's worst, plagued in recent years by a hidebound bureaucracy, poor planning,

occasional corruption and a frayed housing stock depleted by years of waste and

mismanagement.‖37 These political decisions rendered the crumbling exteriors of high-

rise public housing a permanent feature on Chicago‘s urban landscape.

The popular press responded to the mismanagement and physical decline of

Chicago‘s housing during the 1960s with a series of forceful, ravaging articles.38

35
Under the ACC, HUD agrees to make payments to the PHA, over a specified term, for housing
assistance payments to owners and for the PHA administrative fee. The ACC specifies the maximum
payment over the ACC term. The PHA agrees to administer the program in accordance with HUD
regulations and requirements. ―24 C.F.R. Subport D: Annual Contributions Contract and PHA
Administration of Program,‖ Justia: Laws and Regulations, 3 July 1995,
<http://law.justia.com/us/cfr/title24/24-4.0.3.1.22.4.html> (accessed 21 December 2010).
36
Susan J. Popkin, Victoria E. Gwiasda, Lynn M. Olson, Dennis P. Rosenbaum and Harry Buron, The
Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago, New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 2000: 179.
37
Stephen Braun, ―HUD Assumes Control of Chicago Housing Authority Takeover: Inability to
improve management, poor program oversight and fraud are cited. Federal officials face task of
transforming slums,‖ Los Angeles Times, 1 June 1995,
<http://articles.latimes.com/1995-06-01/news/mn-8291_1_housing-authority> (accessed 15 February
2011).
38
In 1958, the conservative American Mercury article, ―Creeping Socialism,‖ called public housing a
―something for nothing‖ program that provided occupants a place to live at the expense of families who
paid ―full realty tax.‖ The biggest perpetrator of this criticism was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy who
 19

Almost without exception, articles focused on the problems of one particular housing

project in particular, Robert Taylor Homes. Located on Chicago‘s State Street, Robert

Taylor Homes opened in 1962 as the largest single high-rise public housing project in

the country, housing twenty-seven thousand people when fully occupied, more than

twenty-thousand of them children, and nearly all of them African-American.39 Media

commentators noted the changing racial demography of public housing, frequently

linking the race and socio-economic status of residents to anti-social behaviors, which

in turn linked to the physical deterioration of the projects. Two articles that appeared in

1965 foreshadowed a visual image of Robert Taylor Homes that would symbolize

Chicago‘s public housing for the next three decades.

Writing in the Washington-based newspaper, The Reporter, Elizabeth Brenner

Drew argued that public housing in Chicago had come to signify ―Negro-occupied

high-rises.‖40 More troubling yet, at least for the author, was that the majority of

Robert Taylor Homes‘ residents were children. This image—no doubt heavily

influenced by the release of politician Daniel P. Moynihan‘s 1965 pathologizing of

inner-city African-American families, the Moynihan Report (which I will discuss in

detail in Chapter 1)—became a dominant motif in the public imagination.41 According

to Drew, ―problem families‖ plagued public housing, and cited a Chicago Daily News

between 1941 and 1955 used the print and television media to campaign against the ―socialist dangers‖
inherent in public housing and disparaged it by branding it "with the stigma of poverty." Joseph Arkin,
―Creeping Socialism,‖ American Mercury, August 1958: 25-29; Helen Baxandall & Elizabeth Ewen,
Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, New York: Basic Books, 2001: 91.
39
Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), Annual Statistical report, 1963. Chicago Public Library,
Municipal Reference Collection.
40
Elizabeth Brenner Drew, ―The Long Trial of Public Housing,‖ The Reporter, June 17, 1965: 15-18.
41
Daniel P. Moynihan, ―The Changing Black Family: The Tangle of Pathology‖, Condensed from The
Negro Family: The Case for National Action, The Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S.
Department of Labor, March 1965:29-44.
 20

claim that ―all‖ the residents of Taylor Homes were ―poor, grappling with violence and

vandalism, fear and suspicion, teen-age terror and adult chaos, rage (and)

resentment.‖42 Whether consciously or not, Drew‘s article linked the behavior of

tenants with the physical condition of public housing, and less explicitly, with the

reason its residents lived there in the first place. What characterized Drew‘s article,

then, was not overt criticism toward public housing, but its use of Robert Taylor

Homes to draw conclusions about public housing generally.

A second article appeared in the Des Moines-based magazine, Look, a few

months later, advancing an even more threatening image of public housing (Figure

0.6).43 The piece entitled, ―Modern Design for a City Ghetto,‖ asserted that ―the 31

identical high-rise slabs,‖ made of ―concrete and steel,‖ created an atmosphere of

―sterile uniformity‖ and ―perpetuated ghetto life.‖44 The article refuted the contention

that Chicago‘s projects were a remedy for inner city blight, but instead equated the

city‘s projects with the slums and ghettos they replaced. The article focused on an

African-American boy, Lonnie, pictured with his back to the camera, staring at a sea of

high-rises through the fence of the balcony (Figure 0.7). A compelling and prescient

image, it foreshadows the use of faceless, usually nameless African-Americans as the

human props in photographs of Chicago‘s massive, deteriorating housing projects.

Moreover, Lonnie‘s fingers, intertwined with the webs of fencing, is strangely

evocative of the way prison inmates grasp the bars of their cells. Castan effectively

criminalizes all those who live in these so-called ―warehouses for the poor,‖

42
Drew, 15-18.
43
Sam Castan, ―Modern Design for a City Ghetto,‖ Look, September 21, 1965: M8-M12.
44
Castan, M8-M12.
 21

condemning and separating their supposed pathological tendencies, from the

metropolitan matrix of Chicago beyond. The overall image of Robert Taylor Homes

becomes one of an African-American ―ghetto‖ in the form of corrupting, impersonal

high-rises populated by welfare recipients, a class of people who represented

unconventional family structures (unwed, divorced women and their children) and

indefinite economic dependence on the state.45 Among academics who have studied

how journalistic visual images function, Stuart Hall concludes that photographs can

serve as ―connotative codes‖ that ―permit a sign to signify…implied messages.‖46

The ―implied messages‖ embedded in public housing photographs had become

patently obvious by the late 1960s; welfare-dependent public housing residents

subverted the objectives of their home, at the same time as advancing stereotypes

about African-Americans. Robert Taylor Homes became a national symbol of the

failure of subsidized housing so much so that the image of barren, crumbling high-rise

accommodations persisted, even after the Housing and Urban Development Act of

1968 prohibited the construction of high-rise public housing except for those intended

―predominantly for the elderly.‖

Henceforth, journalists, politicians, policymakers, and developers frequently

attempt to describe the city‘s public housing using metaphors of disease and decay, and

other adjectives that constructed the community as ―socially isolated.‖47 Article after

45
―Crisis in Public Housing,‖ U.S. News & World Report, November 24, 1969: 66-67; ―A New Battle
for Breakthrough,‖ Business Week, September 9, 1972: 35.
46
Stuart Hall, ―The Determinations of News Photographs.‖ In The Manufacture of News: Social
Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media, ed. Stanley Cohen & Jock Young. London: Constable, 1981:
176.
47
Social science research focused on residents‘ experiences of public housing also tends to be
unfavorable and most often concentrates on big-city high-rise developments. Often cited studies of life
 22

article has lamented the broken windows,‖ ―refuse,‖ ―garbage,‖ and graffiti that had

become the visual shorthand for identifying public housing.48 Coupled with the physical

deterioration of buildings was an emphasis on the ―crime‖ that plagued them. A 1970

Newsweek article, for example, likened Cabrini-Green to a ―maximum security prison‖

with ―dungeon-dim lighting.‖49 Typical articles in the popular press during the 1970s

invoked a narrative of racialized fear about crime using stark visual imagery in the same

vein as the Look article. Photographs of exclusively African-American public housing

residents from Cabrini-Green accompanied the following headlines: ―Suspects Sought

in Cabrini Death‖ (Chicago Defender, 1974), ―Cabrini Green Area Thieves Prey on

Women Drivers in Daylight‖ (Chicago Tribune, 1979), and ―Cabrini Green No Longer

‗Hell on Earth‘‖ (Chicago Sun-Times, 1979). While the popular press stoked the fire

that simmers around visualizations of public housing, late twentieth-century popular

culture exacerbated this nascent visual ideology, cementing suspicions of this place in

the American visual imagination.

From the wailing police sirens in the television show Cops, to the gun-toting

bad boys in MTV hip-hop videos, late twentieth-century urban public housing became

a stage on which to enact terrifying anxieties about the inner-city, cementing an out-of-

in public housing depict residents as on the defensive, attempting to protect themselves from
surrounding and increasingly internal human and physical threats (O. Newman, Defensible Space, New
York: Macmillan, 1972; Popkin, Gwiasda, Olson, Rosenbaum and Buron, 2000; Lee Rainwater, Behind
the Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum, Piscataway, New Jersey: Aldine Transaction,
1970). More generally, social scientists typically characterize low-income people as helpless and
apathetic victims of despair (reviewed in Charles Kieffer, ―Citizen Empowerment: A Developmental
Perspective,‖ In Studies in Empowerment: Steps Towards Understanding and Action, ed. Julian
Rappaport, Carolyn Swift, Robert Hess, London, UK: Routledge). Although scholars, in the main,
refrain from ―blaming the victim,‖ they portray an oppressed, alienated, passive, and powerless resident
population victimized by stigmatization, poverty, and racism.
48
―Crisis in Public Housing,‖ U.S. News & World Report, 24 November 1969: 66-67; ―Public
Housing—Same Old Sad Tale,‖ U.S. News and World Report, October 27, 1980: 89-90.
49
―The Vertical Ghetto,‖ Newsweek, 7 September 1970: 76.
 23

control vision of urban poverty and crime in the collective American mind. In the 1999

film Whiteboyz, for example, a group of impossibly naïve white hip-hop fans from

Iowa come to Cabrini-Green to buy drugs, only to find themselves in the midst of a

violent gang feud that sends them straight back home. A similar storyline underpins

the 1993 movie Judgment Night; premised on a crudely drawn binary opposition

between the safe comforts of suburbia and the mortal dangers of the inner city, the film

tells the tale of a group of suburban men driving to a boxing match who take a wrong

turn into a ―bad neighborhood‖ on Chicago‘s South Side, witness a murder, and spend

the rest of the film running from the drug dealers responsible for the killing. Through

hellish molten cinematography and bounded architectural iconography, director,

Stephen Hopkins, invokes a similar logic to the Look article thirty years before. Shot

from a low angle and illuminated by sultry lighting, red brick public housing buildings

rise up like a volcano ready to erupt. Iron security fences throw jagged slices of

shadow against its side, entombing the high-rise in claw-like silhouettes that, again,

look similar to the dark bars of a prison cell (Figure 0.8). This abstract geometry

magnifies the image of criminality, incubating transgressions within the space of the

building, at the same time as hinting at the perceived destiny of many of the buildings‘

young inhabitants. Throughout the film, hurricane force winds whip through the air,

slapping the building‘s exterior and choking the air with trash, giving visual form to

the suspicion that public housing is a lost cause. As I elaborate in Chapter 3, this place

is not merely struggling, but already in ruins. By invoking the strict urban/suburban

dichotomy laid out in the Little Shop of Horrors thirty years before, and depicting an

inner-city landscape seemingly inimical to human happiness, Whiteboyz and Judgment

 24

Night lead those unfamiliar with life in Chicago‘s projects to ponder why this place

still exists. As if in answer to this question, the city‘s public housing recently entered a

transitional point in its history.

The Plan for Transformation

The CHA is currently in the process of demolishing its high-rise housing projects

and replacing them with glossy mixed-income accommodations (Figure 0.9).

Announced in 2000, the $1.6 billion urban renewal initiative calls for the largest

reconstruction of public housing in the nation‘s history. According to the 2006 book,

Where Are The Poor People To Live?, ―The CHA is forging a template for public

housing redevelopment as it is likely to be pursued in the coming years by municipal

and public housing officials across the country.‖50 The CHA will level all but one of its

fifty-two high-rise buildings, including the concentration of public housing on the

State Street Corridor. The housing authority developed the ten-year Plan to meet three

key objectives: to renew the physical structure of CHA properties, to promote self-

sufficiency for public housing residents, and to reform the administration of the

agency.

The CHA expects to rehab or rebuild twenty-five thousand apartments, with

twenty-one thousand of these units to be demolished by 2009. Approximately six-

thousand new accommodations are planned for mixed-income communities, each

reserving thirty percent for former public housing tenants who will pay no more than

50
Larry Bennett, Janet L. Wright, Patricia A. Smith, Where Are Poor People to Live?: Transforming
Public Housing Communities, Armonk, New York; London, England: M.E. Sharpe, 2006: 4.
 25

one-third of their income, twenty percent ―workforce affordable‖ housing for tenants

who will pay up to one third of their monthly income, and the remaining fifty percent

for people who can buy at the full market rate.51 In order to counteract the projects‘

association with concentrated poverty, organized crime, and welfare dependency, the

second ambition of the Plan is to build ―a sense of self-sufficiency, hope and

opportunity‖ for the residents. The CHA aims to implement these changes via policies

designed to affect the behavior of public housing residents.52 The Plan identifies a

wide range of supportive services to build skills and self-sufficiency. In order to

promote personal responsibility, the Plan advocates stricter occupancy requirements

involving community service, employment and criminal activity background checks.

Lastly, the CHA aims to rebuild confidence in the agency: ―Just as the CHA is asking

for more accountability from its residents, we have also instituted reforms to improve

our own accountability.‖53 Toward this end, in 2001 the CHA privatized the

management of its developments and returned responsibilities such as policing and

social services back to the city of Chicago. Unfortunately, in the ten years since its

inception, three main problems have emerged in the execution of the Plan. General

mistrust of the CHA, coupled with the vulnerability of its low-income residents,

resulted in a heated planning process and confusingly, ambiguous policy objectives.

This contestation stems from many residents‘ opposition to the implementation of the

Plan, namely in the form of rushed relocations, inadequate social support, and the

vocal opposition of some to the demolition of their homes.

51
Bennett, Wright, and Smith, 4.
52
Chicago Housing Authority website, 2006, <www.thecha.org> (accessed 12 December 2009).
53
―Chicago Housing Authority,‖ The CHA‟s Plan for Transformation, 2001,
<http://www.thecha.org/transformplan/plan_summary.html> (accessed 12 December 2009).
 26

The strict adherence to prefixed deadlines resulted in moves for which many

residents are inadequately prepared.54 Despite the ambitions of HOPE VI—a $5 billion

HUD program launched in 1992 to oversee the national implementation of schemes

like the Plan--which stresses the importance for a measured relocation pace, a

provision in the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 allows the

CHA to close a building on short notice if there are threatening health and safety

conditions. In 2002, independent monitor Thomas Sullivan found that demolition rates

were far outpacing the construction of replacement units and that it was common for

residents to move within weeks of demolition. In these situations, the CHA provided

families with ―Housing Choice Vouchers.‖ Created in the 1970s, the Section 8

Housing Voucher program became the dominant form of federal housing assistance for

low-income families seeking to rent in the private market. Unfortunately, many

residents using housing choice vouchers as a result of the Plan did not have the time to

find suitable housing, and consequently, rushed into racially segregated, low-income

areas.55 According to Chicago Housing Authority Choice (CHAC), a group helping

trace relocated families, ninety-three percent of displaced residents‘ have settled in

communities that are majority African-American and seventy-five percent in areas of

high poverty such as Englewood, Roseland and South Shore.56 Similarly, a number of

54
While Cabrini Green once housed 15,000 people, this number is now down to about 5000 (plus an
unknown number of squatters occupying ―vacant‖ apartments that are slated for demolition). Bennett,
Smith, Wright, 4
55
The program is federally funded, but vouchers are distributed by a network of 2,400 local, state, and
regional housing agencies. Since 1995, approximately 3,300 families have relocated using the housing
choice vouchers. Will Fischer, ―Strengths and Weaknesses of the Housing Voucher Program,‖
Metropolitan Housing & Communities Policy Center, The Urban Institute, 2003.
56
William P. Wilen, ―Hearing on HOPE VI and the low income housing crisis,‖ Testimony on behalf of
the National Center on Poverty Law, 10 November 2003,
<http://www.povertylaw.org/advocacy/files/wilen_hopeVI.pdf> (accessed 6 September 2010).
 27

families who opted to move to another public unit ended up in ―decrepit and

substandard‖ housing.57 Lawsuits and other unexpected situations had delayed

confirmations for demolition, and the CHA failed to adjust its time schedule to

accommodate the situation.

To curb residents‘ supposed dependency on government subsidies and to reduce

chronic unemployment, the Plan promotes what it terms, ―self-sufficiency.‖ Residents‘

have access to the city-administered Service Connector program, designed to link

residents to a network of non-profit agencies specializing in childcare and job training,

to provide landlord negotiation seminars, neighborhood tours, security deposit

assistance and life-skills training. Unfortunately, the CHA‘s service programs have

struggled to meet their goal of supporting residents during the upheaval and the

services available to relocating residents are seriously strained. The service provider

for housing voucher participants, for example, has been unable to improve the quality

of the participants‘ destination neighborhoods.58 In addition to the barriers of high

market rents, persistent misconceptions about the Plan and the reluctance of property

owners to rent to those with housing choice vouchers hindered some residents‘ ability

to take full advantage of the voucher program.59 Likewise, the Service Connector has

come under fire for its focus on job-readiness and limited ability to reach displaced

residents. Sullivan considers the emphasis on employment to be an oversimplification

57
Wilen, 2003
58
Paul Fischer, ―Where Are All the Public Housing Families Going? An Update,‖ Lake Forrest College,
3 February 2003, <http://www.povertylaw.org/advocacy/fischer_study.doc> (accessed 6 September
2010).
59
Susan J. Popkin and Mary K. Cunningham, ―CHAC Section 8 Program: Barriers to Successful
Leasing Up,‖ The Urban Institute, April 1999: 29, <http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/chac.pdf>
(accessed 6 September 2010).
 28

of the complex needs of public housing residents, ―[the] lack of jobs was just a part of

larger, deeper problems facing many residents.‖60 The monitor also reported that the

Service Connector was ―grossly‖ underfunded and did not ―even come close to

accomplishing its announced objectives‖ in 2002. With limited funding, the Service

Connector amounted to a phone number residents could call for directions on how to

find supportive services. Similarly, a review by the Metropolitan Planning Council

found the fragmented program design to be ―burdensome‖ to public housing families.61

Lastly, since the Plan requires almost all residents to relocate from their

neighborhoods, and, as a consequence, away from informal support networks and jobs,

many tenants have opposed the demolition since its inception. While many residents

believe in the Plan‘s polemics of mixed-income-social engineering, some other vocal

tenants accuse the CHA, architects, city officials and land developers of a gratuitous

government-funded land grab. Located within close proximity of the affluent Gold

Coast and Lincoln Park, Cabrini-Green represents prime real-estate. As activist Wade

Tillett asks in an article for the online forum, The Friction Institute, ―Is there really

anyone who is going to buy their $500,000.00 townhouse and simultaneously feel that

they are actually fulfilling some sort of moral and social obligation to diversity?‖

Rather, as a resident of Cabrini-Green complains, ―Things we‘ve known for years are

coming true. The CHA knows the developers‘ want the land. Now they‘re trying to sell

60
Thomas Sullivan, Independent Monitor‟s Report No.5, Law Firm of Jenner & Block, 8 January 2003,
<http://www.viewfromtheground.com/special/sullivan/monitoringreport5.html> (accessed 6 September
2010).
61
Kale Williams, Paul Fischer and Mary Ann Russ, ―Temporary Relocations, Permanent Choice:
Serving Families with Rent Vouchers during the Chicago Housing Authority Pal for Transformation,‖
Metropolitan Planning Council, April 2000: 3,
<http://www.metroplanning.org/resources/images/Relocation_1.pdf> (accessed 6 September 2010).
 29

us a plan dressed up in a frilly little dress. Underneath it‘s a land grab and we know

it.‖62 In 2008, the Chicago Tribune ran an exposé on the Plan, accusing land

developers of ―covet(ing) swathes of city real estate for re-development and private

profit,‖ of running at least ten years behind schedule, and of failing to re-house

displaced public housing residents.63 Human rights activist Jamie Kalven invoked a

similar sentiment, using Hirsch‘s terminology concerning mid twentieth-century slum

clearance to accuse the CHA of creating a ―third ghetto.‖ Kalven concludes his 2001

online diatribe against the CHA and private real estate developers, ―A Colossal

Exercise in Moral Deception,‖ by likening the Plan to a ―Greek tragedy.‖64 What

Kalven and many other vocal critics of Chicago‘s urban renewal initiative neglect in

their analyses of the Plan‘s faults, however, is to assign visual representation a role (or

at least accountability) in the implementation and current mismanagement of this

space.

To accuse destructive visual narratives of being the sole perpetrators behind the

realization of the Plan would be inaccurate and is not my intention. Nevertheless,

negative and restrictive representations of subsidized housing undeniably limit not only

what we see of this place, but also how we see it. According to Lefebvre, space is

simultaneously product and process and, accordingly, the representations that undergird

our knowledge and experience of public housing strongly influence the ways in which

62
Matthew Murray, ―Correction at Cabrini-Green: a Sociospatial exercise of power,‖ Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1995: 324.
63
Jason Grotto, Laurie Cohen, Sara Olkon, ―Public housing limbo; Thousands of families displaced.
Hundreds of millions of dollars spent. Years behind schedule. What went wrong with Chicago‘s grand
experiment,‖ Chicago Tribune, July 6, 2008: 1.
64
Wade Tillet, ―A Colossal Exercise in moral deception,‖ The Friction Institute, 5 March 2001: 16,
<http://thefrictioninstitute.org/cha/index.html> (accessed: 28 February 2006).
 30

we think and talk about this space. This way of seeing and relating to Chicago‘s public

housing carries specific political, moral and cultural views and values, and the

spectator‘s relationship with it. Though specific links are difficult to establish, I argue

that the dystopian vision of Chicago‘s public housing in late twentieth- and early

twenty-first century visual culture contributed to its notoriety in the American visual

imagination, and, as a consequence, helped to influence, either ideologically or

psychically, the socio-spatial restructuring of our urban landscape. The inseparability of

spatial representations and social relationships, and the ways in which they reinforce or

challenge social stratification and inequity, are central concerns to this project.

A Question of Representation

To view space and spatial representations as social products is an intellectual

approach taken by Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson,

Rosalyn Deutsch and others.65 While their reconceptualizations of space are vital to

my project, these scholars nevertheless underestimate the role of representation in the

production, maintenance and critique of spatial and social divisions. We need also to

consider the illusory capacity of representation and the dangerous tendency of media

makers to frame the city as a legible space. While the city is indeed intimately tied to

its representations, it is neither identical nor reducible to them either.66 Shields

65
Michel Foucault, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991;
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London:
Verso, 1989: 6; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change, New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991; Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics,
MIT Press, 1998; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham,
North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991.
66
Maria Balshaw & Liam Kennedy, Urban Space and Representation, London: Pluto Press, 1993.
 31

recognizes a key aspect of this complexity. ―The City,‖ he writes, ―is a slippery notion.

It slides back and forth between an abstract idea and concrete material.‖67 Through

these ―slippery‖ representations, the borders between the real and the imagined slowly

dissolve, reducing the public‘s understanding of the inner-city to a confusing

ideological terrain of values, assumptions, exaggerations, and moral panics.

Hollywood blockbusters—perhaps more than any other visual medium--exert a

deep moral, ideological and psychological influence on audiences. This idea is typified

by the former head of Columbia Studios David Puttnam who once candidly admitted

to American Film that, ―Whether we like it or not filmmakers are in the propaganda

business…film sets the social agenda.‖68 Representations never simply reflect –

exactly or even approximately – the curves of reality. Instead, the very concept of

representation implies an active process of selection and construction. When CHA

board chairman Vincent Lane successfully applied for a $50 million HOPE VI grant in

1993 to realize growth machine goals through the demolition of Cabrini-Green he

defined the development as ―distressed,‖ marked by ―hopelessness‖ and a lack of

―opportunity.‖69 Much like the mass media‘s descriptions of Chicago high-rise projects

as ―vertical ghettos,‖ where residents live on ―segregated islands of poverty,‖70 or

―embattled war zones,‖71 Lane‘s word choice translates not as spontaneous or natural

reflections of reality. Rather, it is the cumulative effect of endlessly repeated images

67
Rob Shields, ―A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About it: Alternative Traditions of
Urban Theory.‖ In Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the Twenty First Century
Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996: 235.
68
David Puttnam, ―Puttnam‘s New Mission,‖ American Film, March 1986: 45.
69
Bennett and Reed, 1999, 182.
70
William Moore, Jr., The Vertical Ghetto: Everyday Life in an Urban Project, London: Random
House, 1969.
71
James Garbarino, Nancy Durbrow, Kathleen Kostelny and Caroll Pardo, Children in Danger: Coping
with the Consequences of Community Violence, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992
 32

that link public housing to a kind of apocalyptic horror. As Ed Marciniak, a former

aide to Richard J. Daley, once explained, ―In an unprecedented way, the mass media

has shaped the image of the Cabrini-Green neighborhood as much as the residents

themselves.‖72

In failing to frame the problems in public housing within larger social or

economic contexts of ongoing racial tensions, deindustrialization, or the underlying

causes of drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and violent crime, many late twentieth-

century visual texts serve instead as forums for presenting a public housing

―underclass,‖ a Lumpenproletariat that was neither white nor elderly, but young,

African-American, and socially dysfunctional. By doing so, it transforms a complex

economic issue (the construction of low-cost housing) into a simple moral one

(condemning the behaviors of public housing residents). Within this limited

framework, visual culture reinforces rather that debates or contests the long-standing

division in American welfare policy between the deserving and undeserving poor,

stripping public housing of its human qualities and garnering public support for

demolition.73 Human geographer Tim Cresswell emphasizes that visual representations

have ―consequences ‗on the ground‘ for thousands of people whose lives are deemed

‗out of place.‘‖74 Cresswell writes, ―Metaphorical understandings are as much actions

as the physical actions themselves. Once an inner-city resident is understood to be a

weed, he or she can be treated like one. Weeds, disease, and bodily secretions need to

72
Ed Marciniak, Reclaiming the inner city: Chicago‟s Near North Revitalization Confronts Cabrini-
Green, Washington: National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, 1986: 39.
73
Scott A. Henderson, ―Tarred with the exceptional image: Public housing and popular discourse, 1950-
1990,‖ American Studies, Spring 1995: 32.
74
Tim Cresswell, ―Weeds, Plagues, and Bodily Secretions: A Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors
of Displacement,‖ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87.2, 1997: 339.
 33

be stopped hence society is seen to be justified in taking desperate measures.‖75 My

analysis, therefore, leads me to question: How are power relations, social differences

and cultural stereotypes performed within the geography of these visual

representations of Chicago‘s public housing.76 Whose anxieties do these visions

interpret, and what impact did these fears have on punitive national and urban social

policy?

I address these questions by offering insight into how different spatial

representations constrain particular forms of social action and behavior, and reinforce

social stratification and inequality. In Judgment Night, for example, the space of public

housing is hierarchical, zoned, segregated, gated, and encodes restrictions. Until their

night of judgment, the unfortunate protagonists regard public housing through a prism of

abstractness either through the remote perception of a television set control or the

inference of attention-grabbing headlines. In the absence of direct, first-hand knowledge

of this place, they appreciate public housing only on a superficial, aesthetic level,

uncritically reading what is represented on the immediate surface, coloring in meaning

through distant observation, and consciously neglecting to comprehend that what they

see as rhetorical texts, which carry encoded ideological importance. Viewed from a

reified (distanced, alienated, estranged) distance, this way of seeing Chicago‘s public

housing concurs with Lefebvre‘s conception of ―abstract space.‖77 ―Abstract space‖ is

the space of instrumental rationality, fragmentation, homogenization, and

75
Cresswell, 339.
76
―The power to impose and inculcate a vision of divisions, that is, the power to make visible and
explicit social divisions that are implicit,‖ sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has remarked, ―is political power
par excellence‖ Bourdieu, ―Droit et passé-droit. Le champ des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en oeuvre
des reglements,‖ Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 81/82, 1990: 23.
77
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992: 144.
 34

commodification. It is the use of space by capitalists and state leaders who are involved

in the abstract qualities of space, including fiscal restructuring, disinvestment, and the

city‘s land use. Lifted out of the two-dimensional frame of the television screen, this

projected image of alienated perception underscores political patterns that attempt to

provide, in the words of urban theorist Robert Beauregard, ―a spatial fix‖ for

―generalized insecurities and anxieties‖ about American society, an effect, which, in

turn, provides justification for the implementation of the Plan.78

Tracking examples of this ―production of difference‖ in visual representations of

public housing space helps to reveal deep-seated racist politics and ideologies. Herman

Gray‘s influential study Watching Race (2004) went a long way in demonstrating how

the popular media‘s, and in particular television‘s, fascination with ―blackness‖ helped

consolidate the Republicans‘ coded racist rhetoric (―welfare cheats,‖ ―underclass,‖

―dysfunction,‖ etc) in the 1988 presidential race.79 Racialized spatial constructs

allegorize the discourses of inner-city decline already widespread in U.S. culture during

the late twentieth-century, reproducing what Liam Kennedy terms a ―paranoid

conservative spatial imaginary.‖80 Representations of racialized spatial duality – of

inside and outside, of self and other – all come to play in my discussion of the visual

‗death‘ of public housing.

78
Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993: 6.
79
Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004.
80
Liam Kennedy coined the term ―paranoid spatiality‖ to describe the postmodern representation as the
manifestation of urban experience and culture - white male paranoia (Joel Schumacher's 1993 film
Falling Down) and apocalyptic feelings amidst hi-tech popular culture (Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 film
Strange Days). Liam Kennedy, ―Paranoid Spatiality: Postmodern Urbanism and American Cinema,‖ in
Urban Space and Representation, London: Pluto Press, 2000.
 35

Taking Gray‘s seminal lead in Watching Race, over the past ten years several

scholars have made notable contributions to the study of specific visual representations

of inner-city spaces. These include Steve Macek‘s Urban Nightmares (2006), which

traces the symbolic construction of the city as a site of moral decline in popular

culture. Macek makes the interesting argument that the panic of the cities constructed

by the media (film, television, advertising, news) in the 1980s and 1990s can best be

interpreted as a conservative reaction to the uprisings of the 1960s and polarization of

the U.S. city along lines of race and class. Macek offers a compelling consideration of

the urban landscape through films such as Seven (1996), Falling Down (1993), and

Clockers (1995), all of which he describes as ―demonstrations‖ of the city as ―an

American dystopia.‖81 Maria Balshaw & Liam Kennedy‘s 2000 collection of essays in

Urban Space and Representation provides a similarly interdisciplinary approach to the

study of the illusory power of representation, considering imagining‘s of international

cities including Birmingham and Paris via a broad range of theory including, cultural

geography, film, literary, and television theory and cultural studies. Balshaw and

Kennedy differentiate their book from Macek‘s via their tentative inclusion of some

essays (three out of eleven), which consider an analytical, sociological approach to city

analysis. Film scholar Myrto Konstantarakos‘s perceptive analysis of the cinematic

genre film de banlieue, which maps issues of place, violence, and marginality onto the

topography of contemporary inner-city France, stands out as a convincing attempt to

link sociology to visuality. I intend to build upon and improve upon this start, devoting

81
Macek, 301.
 36

my entire dissertation to interweaving sociological experience through the fabric of my

analysis of prevailing cultural visualities.

An interesting experience during my first research trip to Chicago in 2006

convinced me of the importance of this approach to the validity of my project. During a

tour around Robert Taylor Homes provided by journalist Beauty Turner, she told me

about the time she met Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here (1992), a

bestselling book that would later be adapted into an acclaimed 1993 television series.

The book and television show chronicle the lives of two brothers growing up in a CHA

high-rise project in the mid-1980s and paints Chicago‘s public housing and its

inhabitants as failures. During her encounter with the author, Turner asked Kotlowitz if

he had ever visited any of Chicago‘s public housing projects prior to writing his book.

According to Turner, Kotlowitz became visibly agitated at the question and finally

confessed that ―no‖ he had not but that he‘d spoken to people that had. In place of

firsthand experience, Kotlowitz, like the characters in Judgment Night, encounters

places in the abstract. In lieu of an active and direct engagement with public housing,

the author invented meaning for a space from which he is dissociated.

In contrast, through field observations and on-site interviews, I experienced

firsthand the vital importance of considering visual representations of Chicago‘s public

housing neighbourhoods from a ground-level perspective. While walking through

Cabrini-Green in 2006, I noticed a billboard promoting Old Town Village, a private

housing development, which, due to the city‘s current urban renewal initiative, would

soon take its place. The sign was a glossy montage of photographic imagery: a young

boy blowing on a dried flower, a grandfather with his arm draped around his grandson, a
 37

little girl held aloft by a man‘s arms. All the figures were conveniently racially vague.

Lightly superimposed upon the images were a series of words: ―family, dreams, life,

laughter, happiness, hope, diversity, fun, together, learning, independence, sharing,

success.‖ Four words were in a murkier font than the rest. They occupied the foreground

and formed the phrase: A COMMUNITY COMING SOON. The inescapable subtext of

this advertisement was that those words did not apply to the generations of Cabrini-

Green residents for whom this place was home. The billboard raised the obvious

question: Isn‘t a community already here?

My dissertation attempts to answer this question by arguing that destructive visual

and cultural narratives not only influence support of the present destruction of public

housing but, much like the billboard, also render invisible the positive aspects of its

history, obscuring a full understanding of its multiple forms and meanings, and the

affirmative values for those who lived in the community. By community I refer to

Richard Sennett‘s recent book, Respect in a World of Inequality (2004), in which he

employs the sociological category ‗gemeinschaft‘ in order to characterize ―emotionally

full relations between people‖ who share place as well as shared belief and kinship.82

Drawing on filmic, televisual and artistic representations that offer a positive vision of

―emotionally full relations‖ in public housing and supported by oral testimonies from

residents, I focus on the ways in which visual culture continually contests, renews, and

realigns representations of Chicago‘s public housing. Stuart Hall acknowledges that this

strategy has:

82
Richard Sennett, Respect in a World of Inequality, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004:
191.
 38

the advantage of righting the balance...It is underpinned by an acceptance –

indeed, a celebration – of difference. It tries to construct a positive identification
with what has been abjected. It greatly expands the range of racial representations
and the complexity of what it means to ―be black,‖ thus challenging the
reductionism of earlier stereotypes. 83

Eschewing the unrealistic ambition to overturn negative late twentieth-century

media and popular cultural illustrations of racial difference, instead, this project

compares and contrasts destructive visual representations with positive,

contemporaneous, thematically analogous counter-narratives that more accurately

reflect the lives of people in public housing. The artistic, filmic and televisual

representations I consider function as visual embodiments of the ways in which some

residents, over the years, chose to image themselves positively in their day-to-day

activities. Importantly, these examples resurrect the city‘s subsidized housing, and our

memories of it, from the totalizing generalizations of abstract representations by

demonstrating that other sociospatial process occur beneath, behind and in spite of

dominant visual ideologies.

Resurrection

If the spatial leitmotif of Judgment Night is aggressive and disjointed, then the

television show Good Times (1974-1979) (Chapter 1), the comic book Give Me Liberty

(Chapter 2), the movie Candyman (1992) (Chapter 3), Kerry James Marshall‘s Garden

Project paintings (1994-1995), and Daniel Roth‘s Cabrini Green Forest installation

(2004) (Chapter 4), all provide alternate visions of interlaced sociospatial relations

83
Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, London: SAGE, 1997:
272.
 39

within Chicago‘s public housing. Through a spatial analysis of these visual texts, I

attempt to theorize agency as a spatial phenomenon offering empirical insight into how

different spatial meanings can enable (as opposed to constrain) particular forms of

social action and behavior. Whereas ―abstract space‖ blocks sociospatial movement,

―social space‖ enables movement along what Lefebvre defines as ―routes.‖84 The

counter-examples I consider in this aspect of my project resist dominant visual

ideologies by illustrating the lived spatial practices of some residents who, over the

years, carved out their own ―routes‖ of spatial production through interrelationships,

everyday habits and patterns of movement, and via conflicts and struggles with housing

authority officials over the implementation of the Plan. These key players explore their

space as a site of political struggle, a constitutive component of human agency, and a

facilitator upon action.

I employ sociologists Krista Brumley and Kevin Fox Gotham‘s concept, ―using

space,‖ in order to illustrate this social mobility.85 Based on ethnographic field

observations and interviews with public housing residents in a Southern U.S. city, the

authors offer several strategies by which residents ―use space‖ to provide security and

protection and to challenge or support the redevelopment of subsidized housing.

―Using space‖ highlights the need to move beyond the conceptual limitations of

sociologist William Julius Wilson‘s "neighborhood effects" model in which public

housing residents exist passively, dysfunctionally, and socially isolated from education

84
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1974/1991: 8,
33, 38.
85
Kevin Fox Gotham & Krista Brumley, ―Using Space: Agency and Identity in a Public Housing
Development,‖ City & Community, 1:3 September 2002.
 40

and employment opportunities.86 As I elaborate in Chapter 3, Wilson sees public

housing as a ―container‖ of negative pathologies, a neutral backdrop against which

action unfolds, and within which ―subjects‖ exists as static monuments to missed

opportunities. Applying the concept of ―using space‖ to Chicago‘s public housing

residents, my project contests Wilson‘s ―space-as-container‖ ontology by highlighting

the spatial attributes and spatial influences of human agency, and the attempts of some

residents to contest and resist87 their social, political and economic marginality. 88 I

86
William Julius Wilson, ―The Ghetto Underclass: Social Science Perspectives,‖ The Annals of The
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. 501, January 1989.
87
―Resistance‖ and ―using space‖ are heavily loaded terms, which, in the case of resistance, have been
applied to such widely diverse arenas as French feminist theory and social science studies of specific
―subordinate‖ groups. To avoid getting caught up in this confusing menagerie of applications, I want to
state exactly how and why I use the term, ―resistance.‖ Specifically, I do not intend to read all forms of
resistance in public housing as signs of the resilience and creative mobility of its residents. In order to
avoid this reductionist reading, I differentiate between ―productive‖ and ―unproductive‖ modes of
resistance and ―productive‖ and ―unproductive‖ uses of space. Some ―illegal‖ activities such as selling
lunches from apartments are more ―productive‖ and nourishing in their resistant ―use‖ of space than,
say, selling crack cocaine to one‘s fellow residents. Indeed, it is an unavoidable fact that during the late
twentieth century Chicago‘s public housing was burdened with notoriously high crime rates,
unemployment, gang violence, and soaring numbers of drug users. Without attempting to deny this
history of ―unproductive‖ resistance, the kind of ―resistance‖ I will be referring to is a twofold
confrontation with external forces: First, the act of ―resistance‖ encapsulates the day-to-day struggles of
some public housing residents to make their environment a safe and productive community – i.e.,
coping with poverty, exchanging goods between apartments, and obtaining timely repair and
maintenance. Second, ―resistance‖ describes more acute political battles, such as some residents
attempts save public housing from the threat of demolition through class action lawsuits. By inverting
Michel Foucault‘s assertion that "where there is power, there is resistance" anthropologist, Lila Abu-
Lughod‘s, statement "where there is resistance, there is power" pinpoints the critical heart of my
investigation; I use the term ―resistance‖ to locate struggle within a specific place (Chicago‘s public
housing), and as a means to an end: tenant power. I employ the term ―resistance‖ in a distinctly positive
light to describe the different forms of struggle performed by residents both within the projects (current
residents) and from outside (artists/filmmakers/former residents) to contest their socio-economic
marginality. Julia Kristeva, ―Women‘s Time,‖ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7, 1981:
13-35; Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, London and New York: Methuen, 1986; Paul Willis,
Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1981; Lawrence Levine, Black Culture Black Consciousness: Afro-American Thought
from Slavery to Freedom, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977; Jeffrey Ferguson, ―Race and the
Rhetoric of Resistance,‖ Raritan 28, No. 1, summer 2008:4-32; Michel Foucault, The History of
Sexuality, Vol. 1, 1978: 95-96; Lila Abu-Lughod, ―The Romance of Resistance: Tracing
Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,‖ American Ethnologist 17, No. 1, 1990: 41-55.
88
―Space-as-Container‖ taken from Kevin Fox Gotham. ―Toward an Understanding of the Spatiality of
Urban Poverty: The Urban Poor as Spatial Actors,‖ International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, Vol. 27, Issue. 3, Sept 2003: 724.
 41

outline the ways in which activists manipulate the CHA‘s socio-spatial exercise of

power and, as a result, become what Kevin Fox Gotham defines as ―spatial actors.‖89 I

consider, for example, how some residents waged political battles of resistance for full

recognition of rights in the form of activities including community marches, sit-ins,

and in the preservation of local landmarks, thereby crossing the bridge between the

arena of daily life in public housing and the political sphere of government. Examples

of ―using space‖ may also include the cultivation of spatially defined (i.e. local)

informal social networks, the development of specific styles of interaction and spatial

movement to satisfy material needs, and the provision of security and trust in the

immediate environment. In essence, ―using space‖ describes a kind of mobility of

resistance--the spatial movement of individuals who rely on survival tactics, harvested

from the space and community around them, in order to go about their political and

everyday lives.90

Several methodological approaches frame the organization of my dissertation.

This is, primarily, a cross-disciplinary investigation, not only because of the thematic

intersections that exist in spite of differences in visual medium, but because this

approach highlights the all-encompassing nature of visualizations of this place. Simply

entering ―Cabrini Green‖ into an internet search engine results in a screen full of

images--ominous towering high-rise complexes, vaguely threatening-looking African-

American men loitering in stairwells, and heavy-duty demolition equipment ready to

attack. This straightforward task demonstrates the way in visual culture often reduces
89
Gotham, 2003: 724.
90
According to de Certeau, everyday people who are non-producers are ―tactical‖ as opposed to
institutions which are ―strategic:‖ The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California
Press 1984: 33.
 42

Chicago‘s public housing to a series of one-dimensional flickering images, with little

or no relation to the real place. From television set, to cinema, comic book, art

installation, and computer screen, during the late twentieth and early twenty-first

century, Chicago‘s public housing proved a consistently ripe site for contestation,

debate, and negotiation over questions of representation. In order to chart this

visualization, my investigation moves along a loosely chronological trajectory, starting

with the 1970s--a time most residents agree signaled the death knell for public

housing--and concluding in the present day. This broad historical timescale reveals a

mounting antipathy towards public housing in the American visual imagination, and

the interconnections that exist in the sociopolitical landscape between time periods.

Consequently, each chapter relates to a political public housing cause célèbre of the

time. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with politician and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan

and conservative cultural theorist Charles Murray‘s criticism of the African-American

family structure as it relates to life in 1970s and 1980s public housing in Chicago.

Moynihan‘s The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (1965) argued that a

―tangle of pathologies‖--borne out in factors including child illegitimacy and divorce--

was to blame for the ―deterioration‖ of African-American families in society. Murray‘s

1984 book Losing Ground, meanwhile, argued that liberal welfare programs like Aid

for Dependent Children (AFDC) encouraged the rise of what he calls a ―culture of

poverty,‖ creating disincentives for marriage, and fostering dependency on

government handouts.91 Chapter 3 explores the development of this rhetoric in the

form of William Julius Wilson‘s "neighborhood effects" model, as it existed in 1990s

91
Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, New York: Basic Books, 1984.
 43

America. Chapter 4 takes the form of a review of this late twentieth-century political

climate, considering the current efforts of some tenants to re-evaluate this legacy via

efforts to safeguard community landmarks against the threat of demolition. I consider

these socio-economic and political structures in relation to the foremost visual and

cultural productions of the time.

Chapter 1, ―Let the Battle Begin: Performing Family Unity in CBS‘s Good

Times,‖ for example, links the infamous demonization of African-American family

structure, the ―Moynihan Report,‖ to the representation of nuclear family life in one of

the most watched television shows during the 1970s, Good Times (1974-79). Set in a

deteriorating, gang-occupied, high-rise housing project in 1970s Chicago, Norman

Lear‘s Good Times presented viewers with a situation most closely related to the life

that Moynihan contended was the state of African-American family. Yet, the

patriarchal family structure envisioned in Good Times functioned as a powerful

oppositional strategy to Moynihan‘s pejorative sociological and political discourse.

Indeed, in a television landscape populated almost exclusively by shows in which

African-American families were presented as somehow broken or fractured, the family

in Good Times was unique in that it was headed by a strong black woman and a strong

black man. Supported by James and Florida, the Evans children apply themselves

academically and aspire to make it ―out‖ of the ghetto – a vision in defiance of

Moynihan‘s view that African-American youth were in ―danger‖ of becoming

―trapped‖ in a tangle of negative pathology. Supported by the show‘s producer Allan

Maning‘s archive of viewer letters, this chapter considers Good Times as a stage for

socio-political contestation in black popular culture.

 44

This discussion of late twentieth-century sociological, historical and political

conceptions of black family life segues into Chapter 2. ―From SuperOther to

SuperMother: Liberty for Single Mothers from Public Housing‖ considers Murray‘s

political imagining in relation to the revisionist characterization found in the pages of the

four-issue comic book mini-series, Give Me Liberty: An American Dream (1990).92 Set

in the near future, the epic series follows Martha Washington from her birth to a single

mother in Cabrini-Green in 1995, to her death in 2095 as a lauded war hero.

Washington‘s lifelong struggle for civil, political, and tenants‘ rights not only re-scripts

the familiar trope of the white male superhero, but also offers an alternate model for

understanding the actions of female public housing residents, in a way that affirms and

supports instead of objectifying and humiliating them. I tie the resilience at the heart of

Washington‘s character to the work of the late public housing activist and single mother,

Beauty Turner. Until her death in 2008, Turner worked as a journalist with the public

housing newspapers, Residents Journal and the South Street Journal. In addition to her

journalistic achievements, Turner‘s fame stems from her now infamous so-called

‗Ghetto Bus Tour‘ of Chicago‘s gradually shrinking public housing neighborhoods.

Travelling throughout the city and into the homes of single mothers, the tour aimed to

highlight the political mobilization of those who strive to resist the implementation of

the Plan. Through bodily and perceptive complicity—of working in the space between

see‘er and seen—the ghetto bus tour participant deconstructs fields of objective linearity,

eventually engaging in dialogue with the single mothers of Murray‘s distain. In helping

92
Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, Give Me Liberty: Homes and Gardens, Vol. 1.; Give Me Liberty:
Travel and Entertainment, Vol. 2.; Give Me Liberty: Health and Welfare, Vol. 3.; and Give Me Liberty:
Death and Taxes, Vol. 4.; Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 1990.
 45

to puncture the stereotypes of inferiority and non-productivity regularly attached to

single mother public housing dwellers, Turner emerges as a real life superhero.

In Chapter 3, ―Don‘t Believe the Hype: Smashing through the Looking Glass of

Public Housing,‖ I begin with another example of ‗border crossing‘ into Chicago‘s

public housing by comparing Judgment Night‘s seemingly insurmountable social

barriers with the more democratic vision of spatial justice presented in Bernard Rose‘s

1993 movie, Candyman. The film centers on Helen Lyle, an anthropology graduate

student conducting research into the Cabrini-Green urban folk legend of Candyman, a

murderous ghost who can be summoned by looking into a mirror and chanting his

name five times. In pursuit of academic fame and influenced by sensational newspaper

reports and gossip, Helen, like her male suburban counterparts in Judgment Night,

crosses over to the projects. Unlike the characters in Judgment Night, however, there is

no escape for Helen at the film‘s conclusion; she pays the ultimate price for her

misjudgment of public housing. Through various observational motifs such as aerial

shots, mirrors, holes in walls, Rose critiques the self-righteous polemics of social elites

(academia, CHA) who judge what is ―best‖ for the urban poor. Primarily, I challenge

notions of black sociopathy that render public housing residents ―marginal to,‖ existing

―on the edges of,‖ or ―socially isolated‖ from the wider urban matrix.93 Rather,

supported by research conducted in the offices of Chicago‘s only public housing

93
These are notions expounded by Cornel West and William Julius Wilson. Cornel West: ―The Afro-
American existentialist tradition promotes a self-image of confinement and creativity, restriction and
revolt. It encompasses a highly individualistic rebellion of Afro-Americans who are marginal to, or exist
on the edges of, Afro-American culture and see little use in assimilating into the American mainstream.‖
Taken from Prophecy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, Westminster: John
Knox Press, 2002, 2002 & ―The Ghetto Underclass: Social Science Perspectives,‖ The Annals of The
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. 501, January1989: 202.
 46

newspaper, Residents‟ Journal, I highlight those at the forefront of an effort to re-write

(and re-imagine) Chicago‘s public housing in the American visual imagination. A

story about storytelling, Candyman interrogates the narrative credibility of myth,

warning against naive consumption of second-hand orally circulated and written gossip

centered on African-American males from public housing.

In Chapter 4, ―From Pathways to Portals: Getting to the Root of a Public

Housing Community,‖ I take a retrospective view of the visual landscape described in

the previous chapters, arguing that in spite of years of chronic mismanagement and

ravaging visual treatments, some public housing residents‘ express a keen attachment

to their living environment. To illustrate this place attachment, I apply geographer

Edward Relph‘s concept of ―insideness,‖ a term described as a fundamental dialectic

in human experience, to the uses of organic imagery present in Kerry James Marshall‘s

Garden Project (1993-1997).94 Supported by research conducted in the recently

opened archives of the Chicago Housing Authority, I argue that the organic connective

symbologies at play in the artist‘s repeated use of the pathway motif, replicate a real

infrastructure of collective reciprocity within public housing during its lifetime. From

the 1950s to the late 1980s, for example, flower competitions were fundamental to the

creation of social solidarity, enabling residents to take ownership of their land and to

feel a sense of permanence and responsibility for their living environment. While

Marshall‘s paintings invite the viewer to an interpretive walk along its pathways,

Daniel Roth‘s Cabrini Green Forest (2004) installation beckons her to step off this

horizontal plateau and immerse herself in place. Amongst faux evidence documenting

94
Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 1976: 141.
 47

the existence of a mythic forest underneath Cabrini-Green, Roth‘s installation includes

a fiberglass well, inviting the gallery visitor to cross the threshold to explore the place-

based roots of attachment currently at risk within Chicago‘s Near North Side. Through

an analysis of the social turmoil caused by the impending demolition of two

community landmarks within Cabrini-Green, I argue that public housing should be

recognized as more than simply bricks and mortar. Rather, for some, social clubs,

beauty parlors, ball-courts, and mom-and-pop stores serve as sites of what I call usable

memory: As places where residents reminisce about their deeply rooted past, utilizing

this historical attachment to place to unite against bulldozing property-developers.95

The Garden Project‘s nostalgic pathways and Cabrini Green Forest‘s mythic

underground portal provide interesting models through which to consider not only the

history of socio-spatial interconnections in the projects, but also as vehicles through

which outsiders can appreciate insiders attachment to place.

The issue of dialogical intervention between public housing tenant and non-

public housing tenant leads me into the conclusion of this dissertation. Each of the

following chapters note the ways in which specific visual examples implicitly demand

a certain kind of engagement from the viewer in relation to a new way of seeing. This

concern reaches a culmination in a discussion of the National Public Housing

Museum, which is scheduled to open in Chicago in 2012. Located in the renovated 70-

year-old, three-story former public housing building, Jane Addams Homes on the Near

West Side, the museum will attempt to reinterpret the history of subsidized housing by

95
This term is in many ways derived from ―usable past‖ coined by Van Wyk Brooks. Both terms offer a
way to codify one‘s forbearers and to construct a cultural identity in the face of disruption or chaos. ―On
Creating a Usable Past,‖ Dial 64, 1918: 338.
 48

recreating period living spaces from eight consecutive decades (1938–2002). ―It‘s

more than a museum,‖ says Sunny Fischer, executive director of the Richard H.

Driehaus Foundation, the proposed museum‘s primary backer. ―There is a tremendous

opportunity for discussion and to explain this aspect of the American experience.‖96

The museum poses complex questions about how to preserve the memories of public

housing residents, how to reveal a history often dismissed as an unmitigated failure,

and how to educate people about contemporary issues related to urban communities,

housing research and policy.97

This threefold approach to preserve, reveal, and educate also underpins the

primary ambitions of this dissertation. By examining (and deconstructing) differing

visualizations of Chicago‘s public housing, I consider the power of the visual

representation to produce and maintain - but also dispute and question – common

notions of life in the projects. The need for this re-imaging is no better encapsulated

than by comparing the sentiment expressed in the billboard promoting Old Town

Village with that expounded in the banner which currently decorates the National

Public Housing Museum‘s exterior walls. While the former denies the historical

significance of the city‘s public housing community with the damning indictment, ―A

COMMUNITY COMING SOON,‖ the latter embraces the legacy of the people who

once lived there. Comprised of eight multi-racial faces--a graying Asian matron, a

96
Sheila Elliot, ―Nation‘s first, only public housing museum coming to Taylor Street,‖ Near West
Gazette, 2008.
97
The CHA agreed to turn over the property in 2011 if the museum organizers meet specific criteria;
they had to raise $3.2 million by May 2009, another $1.5 million by December 2010, and the rest by
December 2011, with a proposed opening starting in 2012.
 49

Latino gent sporting a broad-brimmed hat, a brown-skinned girl in cornrows--the

banner's caption reads, "The stories we will tell. . . ." (Figure 0.10).
 50

CHAPTER 1

Let the Battle Begin: Performing Family Unity in CBS‘s Good Times

At 7:00pm on February 1st 1974…

Against a pitch-black screen, a peppy male voice intones the anthemic phrase that

would come to signal two decades of CBS broadcasting, ―From Television City in

Hollywood…‖ Two seconds later, as the camera cuts to a high-angle establishing shot of

two homeless men foraging through dumpsters in a polluted inner city, two dazzling white

words enter the frame identifying the title of the show we are about to see and

problematizing the vision in front of us: Good Times! (Figure 1.1). Before the viewer has a

chance to query this designation, the camera pans across the skyline accompanied by urgent

gospel music sounds that thunder from the screen, assuring the viewer of what the next

thirty minutes will bring: ―Good Times!—Anytime you make a payment—Good Times!--

Temporary lay off—Good Times!—Easy Credit rip offs—Good Times!—Hangin‟ and

jivin‟—Good Times!—Ain‟t we lucky we got „em.‖ The camera then departs its spectral

vantage point, traveling towards the subject of the oxymoronic theme tune: the red brick

high-rise towers of the Cabrini-Green public housing project in Chicago‘s Near North Side.

Like an elevated train hurtling towards its final stop, the camera zooms along traffic-laden

streets, rising again to enter through the window of a fourteenth floor apartment, skirting

over the mottled surface of a dreary magnolia couch, before settling on a painted portrait of

the Evans family – the subject of Good Times (CBS, 1974-79) and of this chapter (Figure
 51

1.2-1.4). Huddled together in an image of familial unity, the painting depicts the occupants

of this space: James Evans (John Amos) and his beloved wife Florida (Esther Rolle), eldest

son, wisecracking ladies man and aspiring artist J.J. (Jimmie Walker), middle-child Thelma

(BernNadette Stanis), and youngest son Michael (Ralph Carter) (Figure 1.5).

The camera‘s roving flight into the Evans residence symbolizes one of U.S.

audiences‘ first exposures to an African-American family on 1970s primetime network

television. Thanks to the efforts of producer‘s Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, and their

film and television production company, Tandem Productions, the 1970s saw the

emergence of a series of shows centered on the everyday lives of African-Americans.

Lear‘s successful staple of mid 1970s sitcoms and spin-offs, which included Sanford

and Son (NBC, 1972-1977), The Jeffersons (CBS, 1975-85), and All in the Family

(CBS, 1971-79), attended directly to racism, public policy, and discrimination, as well

as African-American empowerment.

Before these programs aired, lily-white situation comedies dominated U.S.

screens, centering on suburban domestic issues that rarely seemed to extend beyond

whether Bobby Brady had taken the trash out or what Mom should cook for dinner.

Restricted as much by their racial makeup as they were by their topiary hedges and

white picket fences, Father Knows Best (CBS, 1954-60), I Dream of Jeannie (NBC,

1965-70), and Bewitched (ABC, 1964-72), marked a period in African-American

televisual history defined by Robin R. Means Coleman and Charlton D. McIIwain as

the ―Nonrecognition Era.‖98 When the camera did venture into the realms of urban life,

98
Robin R. Means Coleman and Charlton D. Mcllwain, ―The Hidden Truths in Black Sitcoms.‖ In The
Sitcom Reader: American Viewed and Skewed, ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder, 2005: 82.
 52

it was consigned to plush uptown apartments in The Patty Duke Show (ABC, 1963-66)

and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970-77) – all conspicuously devoid of an

African-American presence.

Between the early 1950s to the early 1970s, African-American representation

in situation comedies was restricted to guest appearances as superfly criminals and

bumbling prisoners-of-war in Car 54, Where are You? (NBC, 1961-63) and Hogan‟s

Heroes (CBS, 1965-71), minstrelsy-tinged sharp-tongued Sapphires in Amos 'n' Andy,

(CBS, 1951-53), or servile characters whose finest hours were those spent serving

Whites in The Trouble with Father (ABC, 1950-55). The air bruised with insults and

stereotypes, African-American television characters mainly portrayed either

accommodating, docile, non-threatening servants on one end of the representational

spectrum or swindlers, incompetents, and buffoons on the other.99 The former

characterization is no better encapsulated than by the subservient heavyset maid in the

series Beulah (ABC, 1950-53). Played originally by acclaimed Broadway actor and

singer Ethel Waters, Beulah served to comfort culturally sanctioned notions of white

superiority and paternalism. While Beulah was self-sacrificing as a nurturer and

manager of her white ―family,‖ as an individual, her own family life was nonexistent.

Amos n Andy‘s Andy was similarly emotionally estranged. Despite a brief and

problematic romance with a Harlem beautician, Andy existed as a singular entity,

whose routines of chicanery and bumbling get-rich-quick schemes served only to

reinforce his second-class citizenship and inability to attain equal status to whites or

99
Coleman and Mcllwain, 128.
 53

the civic responsibilities that come with that equality.100 Framed as divorced, childless,

or widowed singletons, these were characters devoid of the kinship support system,

subjectivity and agency afforded their white televisual counterparts, the Hansen‘s,

Cleaver‘s, Brady‘s and Bundy‘s.

These representations of African-American familial disunity reflect the fragmented

vision of black family life examined and debated within sociological, historical and

political circles during the mid twentieth-century. One of the primary components of

President Lyndon B. Johnson's administrational agenda (1963-69) was to consider the

institution of the family, with a particular focus on structural initiatives and public policy

research to help narrow the persistent yawning economic and educational divide separating

postwar white and African-American families. The most publicized (and controversial)

product of the ―War on Poverty‖ campaign was Daniel Patrick Moynihan‘s The Negro

Family: A Case for National Action (1965).101 The federal government report—commonly

referred to as the Moynihan Report—argued that a ―tangle of pathologies‖ was to blame for

the ―deterioration‖ of African-American families in society. For Moynihan, a policy writer

for the U.S. Department of Labor and future New York State Senator, the family was the

basic social unit of American life and was central in promoting the rapid progress of those

immigrant groups that had been most ―successful‖ in America. Utilizing U.S. census data,

the politician noted several areas in which a delinquent familial structure affected the

progress of African-Americans in society: (1) "nearly a quarter of urban Negro marriages

100
Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
101
Kevin L. Yuill, ―The 1996 White House Conference on Civil Rights,‖ The Historical Journal 41.1,
March 1998: 262.
 54

are dissolved, compared to less than eight percent of urban white marriages"102; (2) "nearly

one quarter of Negro births are now illegitimate"103; (3) ‖as a consequence, almost one

fourth of Negro families are headed by females‖; and (4) "the breakdown of the Negro

family has led to a startling increase in welfare dependency."104 Moynihan argued that the

―roots of the problem lie in slavery‖ and that defects are manifest in ―an unstable family

system,‖ ―a matriarchy,‖ ―low levels of educational attainment,‖ ―high rates of delinquency

and crime,‖ a personal ―withdrawal‖ especially among males, and ―higher rates of drug

addiction.‖ Moynihan concluded his report with this damning designation:

At the center of the tangle of pathology is a weakness of the family structure. Once
or twice removed it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant,
inadequate or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but serves to perpetuate the
cycle of poverty and deprivation.105

By the end of the 1960s, this controversial report came to typify conservative

comprehension of the social and economic disintegration of late twentieth-century

African-American urban life. The ―deficit‖ or ―blaming the victim‖ model alleviated

102
Moynihan compared these figures with that of white women from the years 1950-60 showing a significant
difference between the numbers of divorce between the two groups with whites less inclined to engage in the
practices of divorce and separation. Many African American women who were married are now divorced,
separated or living apart from their husbands, with the highest rates in the North East (twenty six percent of
women). Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy,
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1967: 52-54.
103
Moynihan noted that rates are increasing in both the white and non-white worlds: "Both white and
Negro illegitimacy rates have been increasing, although at dramatically different bases. The white rate
was two percent in 1940; it was three point zero percent in 1963. In that period, the Negro rate went
from sixteen point eight percent to twenty three point six percent." He notes that although some African
American children are technically illegitimate, they are still a product of two people who are unmarried
but in a stable relationship. He also acknowledged that these figures are questionable, dependent on the
limited sources from which he attained them. Rainwater & Yancey, 54-8.
104
At the time of his writing, approximately fourteen percent of black children receive AFDC dollars in
comparison to the two percent of white children. In two-thirds of these cases, Moynihan said that
families cited desertion by the father as the problem. In his mind, there was a correlation with the
growing numbers of family on welfare to the levels of disorganization and disintegration of the African
American family.
105
Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Washington, DC: Office of
Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965.
 55

pressure on policymakers to address a problem that appeared to derive from African-

Americans‘ own cultural and moral lifestyle choices.106 Television scholar Jimmie Reeves

suggests that the report provided the Reagan establishment with ―seemingly ‗objective‘

research that justifies eliminating affirmative action programs, cutting welfare funding,

and prosecuting a brutal war on black youth under the guise of the war on drugs.‖107 As

Mark Anthony Neal proposes in his book Soul Babies, Moynihan‘s report garnered

exposure visibility due to its release shortly before the riots in the Watts housing complex

in 1965. As many journalists grappled for explanations for the explosions of violence in

the Watts public housing project of Los Angeles, the report helped provide the answers.108

By the late 1960s, Chicago‘s Mayor Richard Daley responded with typical vitriol,

withdrawing crucial services like police patrols and routine building maintenance from the

city‘s public housing projects, a move that resulted in the neglect of elevator repairs, the

vandalism of lobbies and corridors, and the use of stairwells as garbage dumps. In 1975,

President Nixon placed a moratorium on the nation‘s public housing construction, which

expanded waitlists for tenancy at existing, deteriorating developments. By the mid 1970s,

Chicago‘s public housing was subject to abandonment and alienation, all under the guise

of residents‘ own social pathologies.

Contemporary situation comedy representations of public housing echoed this

ideological climate, none more so than ABC‘s What‟s Happening! (1976-1979). Centering
106
William Ryan coined the phrase ―blaming the victim‖ – the title of his highly acclaimed book. Ryan
argued that instead of tackling the structural inequalities that disproportionately affect minorities, the majority
blames the victim for acting pathologically. Blaming the Victim, New York: Vintage Books, 1971.
107
Jimmie Reeves, ―Re-covering Racism: Crack Mothers, Reganism, and the Network News.‖ In Living
Color: Race and Television in the United States, ed. Sasha Torres, Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1998:103.
108
Mark Anthony Neal, ―Baby Mama (Drama) and Baby Daddy (Trauma): Post-Soul Gender Politics,‖
Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, New York: Routledge, 2002: 61.
 56

on the lives of the Thomas family living in the Watts public housing project in Los Angeles

during the 1970s, the show complied with all of Moynihan‘s damning designations of

project residents. Satisfying the politician‘s ―matriarchal‖ role, Mabel Thomas is, by her

own admittance, a ―large and in charge‖ single mother and welfare recipient. Excluded at

the end of the last episode of the show‘s first season, her wayward husband was the

family‘s absent, disaffected drug-addicted patriarch. Mabel‘s children, meanwhile, entangle

themselves in a proverbial labyrinth of ―pathology‖: smoking, drinking, robbing and

marooning their way through their academic careers, Roger and Dee seem destined to

follow in their parents‘ example. Played for laughs in ambient sound, destructive racial

stereotypes abound and gunshots drown out any hint of political voice. Most importantly,

the Thomas‘ project a sense of apathy about their situation, and seem listlessly willing to

negate their subjectivity for a welfare check and a cheap laugh. For the viewers‘ of What‟s

Happening!, black urban poverty was not just funny - it was self-inflicted and deserved.

In a ravaging, derisive TV Guide review published on January 12th 1974, Eugenia

Collier argued that African-American representation on primetime sitcoms was a

―travesty.‖109 With almost psychic portend, Collier concludes her diatribe with a plea to

television studios: ―I fervently hope that these programs will be stepping stones to a more

considered portrayal of the black community.‖110 Black political organizations felt likewise.

In 1972, an organization of African-American Democrats in the U.S. Congress called The

Black Caucus organized hearings titled, ―The Mass Media and the Black Community.‖ The

caucus accused white-run media organizations with racist news coverage and hiring

109
Eugenia Collier, ―TV Still Evades the Nitty-Gritty Truth,‖ TV Guide, 12 January 1974: 10.
110
Collier, 10.
 57

practices. Chairman William L. Clay stated: ―The fact that the black community, black

community workers, black organizations and the black movement are variously excluded,

distorted, manhandled, and exploited by the white-controlled mass media (is obvious) to the

most casual observer…(The media) have not communicated to whites a feeling for the

difficulties and frustrations of being a Negro in the United States…(or) indicated the black

perspective in national and local issues.‖111

As if in answer to these criticisms, on Friday, February 1 1974, Good Times entered

U.S. living rooms, providing a nourishing and realistic portrayal of African-American life

lacking in its televisual predecessors. Bolstered by the legacy of the Civil Rights

Movement‘s televised protests for justice, empowerment and political rights, television was

no longer a passive portal for saccharine-sweet sitcom fare or racist, stereotyped

representations of black servility, but a stage upon which to contest ascribed stereotypes

and negotiate a proverbial terrain of dilemmas in dealing with racial politics, African-

American representation and politically engaged subject matter.112 A spin off from the

equally famed and controversial show Maude (CBS, 1972-78), Good Times saw maid

Florida (played by Esther Rolle) graduate from the single life as an in-house maid to the

white Findlay family to the role of fully fledged housewife to her husband James Sr. (John

Amos). In a television landscape populated almost exclusively by shows in which African-

American families were presented as broken or irreparably fractured, the family in Good
111
Edith Efron, ―What‘s Happening to Black‘s in Broadcasting? Excluded, Distorted, Mishandled and
Exploited.‖ In Issues in broadcasting: radio, television, and cable, ed. T. Smythe and G. Mastrioianni,
1975: 151-158.
112
Television news, argues media historian Sasha Torres, came of age and gained credibility in large
part as a result of its coverage of the civil rights movement. Not only did television cameras capture
some of the most inspirational and devastating effects of the era, television reporters brought the
realities of state-sanctioned White supremacy into living rooms across America, implicitly challenging
citizens to rethink the quality of U.S. democracy. Torres, Black, White, and In Color: Television and
Black Civil Rights, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003.
 58

Times was unique in that it was headed by a strong black woman and a strong black man.

Teetering between satire and melancholia, episodes revolve around Florida and James‘

struggle to secure employment and put food on the table. Unlike the carefree shenanigans

depicted in the similarly named series Happy Days (ABC, 1974-84), many of the storylines

involve very difficult times, namely the threat of eviction from the projects, and the

omnipresence of gang crime and poverty. Racial one-line references to political disregard

peppered many of the scripts, a technique designed to jolt the supposedly self-satisfied

audience. To recall the theme tune for the series: ―Roaches roaming the hallways--

Landlord is nobody‟s fool--He lives on the other side of town--Good Times!” Set in a

deteriorating, gang-occupied, high-rise housing project in Chicago, Good Times presented

viewers with a situation most closely aligned with the life that Moynihan argued was the

state of African-American family. Yet, the patriarchal family structure envisioned in Good

Times functioned as a powerful oppositional strategy to Moynihan‘s pejorative sociological

and political discourse. Supported by the figures of James and Florida, the Evans children

apply themselves academically and aspire to make it ―out‖ of the ghetto – a vision in

defiance of Moynihan‘s view that African-American youth were in ―danger‖ of becoming

―trapped‖ in a tangle of negative pathology. No longer objectified as the servants or

burlesque buffoons put forth by previous sitcom representations, the characters in Good

Times provided a vision of Black subjectivity, dealing with and contesting the sociopolitical

landscape of post civil rights era America. Good Times made this patently clear in the

twenty-ninth minute of every episode as the Evans family slumped together in front of the

television - their agency derived from their nuclear make-up (Figure 1.6).
 59

This chapter examines Good Times as an important site of contestation over the

representation of African-American families from Chicago‘s public housing during the

1970s. I consider the often heated and public debates about Good Times as they circulated

in both the mass media press and the African-American press, as well as how the show‘s

actors and the city‘s subsidized housing tenants participated in these debates. How did the

fact that the show‘s main writer, Eric Monte, and three of the show‘s main actors, grew up

in public housing help to authenticate its representations? Most importantly, how does the

image of the perpetually nuclear family life depicted in Good Times differ (or concur) with

the brutal social reality of living in 1970s public housing?

I examine the textual mechanisms employed in Good Times, exploring, in

particular, the show‘s production style, set design and iconographic props to pursue these

questions. Lear‘s conservative production style—what media studies scholar John T.

Caldwell terms ―zero-degree studio style‖--consisted of limited if any ―flourishes‖ or

―videographic ecstasies.‖113 While other contemporary programs of the period such as Hal

Kanter‘s Julia (NBC, 1968-71) relied on television‘s technical and formal excesses, cinéma

vérité techniques, and kitsch and camp to fill the stage, the set designers on Good Times

embraced an austere or ―anti-style‖ approach, depending instead on a limited number of

props loaded with metatextual symbolic meaning. The omnipresence of black and white

photographs of the family, for instance, embodies a familial unity at odds with historical

conceptions of this place. Stripped bare of visual phenomena and over-the-top decoration,

white television audiences were are able to see an African-American family for the first

113
John T. Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authenticity in American Television, New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995: 56.
 60

time. Good Times redefined television as a theater stage - the studio set reconfigured as a

sparse canvas-like space upon which to enact cohesive familial unity and political agency.

Under the glare of the hot lights of television, the apartment became a visible and polemical

site of cultural debate - a metaphorical boxing ring within which to destabilize and

disarticulate Moynihan‘s depressingly fractured reading of African-American family life.

Living together, eating together, arguing, and laughing together, the nuclear familial make-

up portrayed in each episode of Good Times served to systematically undermine and deflate

each of the politician‘s damning critiques. Rife with arguments both on and off set, Good

Times emerged as an example of what Stuart Hall considers, ―a site of strategic

contestation‖ in black popular culture.114 The sanctity of the home as a concealed apolitical

sanctuary from the world outside was discarded as Good Times portrayed the family home

as a political arena.115

Round One: “Nearly a quarter of urban marriages are dissolved”

Writer, Eric Monte, rang the bell for the fight to commence within the first ten

minutes of the Good Times pilot episode, Too Old Blues (February 8, 1974). Centered on

the apartment‘s rickety wood veneer kitchen table at breakfast time, the opening scene

establishes the home as the epicenter--the heart, if you like--of the Evans family. This is the

space within which characters start and conclude their days as well as discuss the pertinent

issues of the day. The first scene covers a terrain of socio-political debate, from Thelma‘s

comments about the family‘s poverty when she states, ―Oh Mama, I can‘t deal with this,

114
Stuart Hall, ―What is this ―black‖ in black popular culture?‖ Social Justice, Vol. 20, 1993.
115
Richard P. Adler, All in the Family: A Critical Appraisal, New York: Praegar, 1979: xxxix.
 61

not oatmeal again, I wish we could have cream of wheat for a change,‖ to references to

black racial politics when Michael responds with, ―At least they‘ve got a black man on the

box.‖ The scene is of most significance, however, in terms of the way it attempts to

negotiate the representation of the African-American father figure, James Evans. Huddled

together around their cramped Formica core, the presence of the mother, father, and three

children, serves as a salient reminder of the family‘s nuclear make-up, the round table

serving as a deadening definitive bullet point in defiance of white hegemonic

representations and readings of African-American familial relations (Figure 1.7). The first

to enter the scene and the last to leave it, the clear orchestrators of this unity are Florida and

James, a vision that casts the first definitive blow to Moynihan‘s critique of urban African-

American marriage. This section considers how the personal lives of the actors influenced

the show‘s depiction of domesticity. Florida and James‘ opening conversation serves to

emphasize the importance of this representation to the show‘s ambitions:

James: ―Hmmm, gorgeous hunk of woman here.‖ (Figures 1.8 and 1.9)
Florida: ―James, I don‘t know about gorgeous but I sure am lot of hunk.‖
James: ―I never worry about the heating crisis - I‘ve got my own heating system here.‖
Florida: ―You‘re not so bad yourself. Good looking man like you could have had any
woman in Chicago.‖
James: ―True, but I married you.‖ Laughter.

Following this exchange, the character‘s turn to face their children who are seated

around the table waiting for their breakfast of oatmeal and milk. For a split second during

this transition, Florida momentarily raises her head, and, with a partly detectable smirk at

the corner of her mouth, winks at the camera. Rolle would later claim in an interview with

Ebony, that this move was in deliberate recognition of her role in bringing a united African-
 62

American marriage to network primetime.116 Florida and James‘s jovial onscreen banter

belies the behind the scenes controversy surrounding this representation, a debate that

caused the first episode to spend two years in development and necessitate over thirty script

revisions.117 During development meetings with Tandem Productions, producers repeatedly

advised the show‘s writers to eliminate the husband character, under the questionable

conjecture that, ―A strong black man is not funny in a sitcom.‖118 Nevertheless, Rolle was

so determined that she should have a husband and a father for her children that she

threatened to leave the show if the producers did not meet her demands.119 Rolle boasts, ―I

introduced the black father to this country…I told (the producers) I couldn‘t compound the

lie that black fathers don‘t care about their children. I was proud of the family life I was

able to introduce to television.‖120 Driving Rolle‘s persistence was her personal experience

of life within a two-parent household. As the actor told a Washington Post reporter the day

before the Good Times pilot aired, ―Our show has the type of black family never portrayed

to America before. It‘s complete, two parents, and with all the love and pride I know to be a

fact.‖121

As one of eighteen children growing up in the crime-ridden and neglected

beachfront city, Pompano Beach, Florida, Rolle experienced extreme poverty. Despite her

family‘s economic disadvantages, Rolle‘s home life was, in the actor‘s words ―stimulating‖

116
Bob Lucas, ―A salt pork and collard greens T.V. show, ‖ Ebony, June 1974: 53.
117
Tom Shales, ―Good Times is Coming and It‘s All in the Family,‖ The Washington Post, 16 February
1974: B1.
118
Eric Monte interview, The Making of Good Times, E! Entertainment, 2000.
119
Christine Acham, ―Respect Yourself! Black Women and Power in Julia and Good Times,‖
Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 2004: 129.
120
Sean Campbell, The Sitcoms of Norman Lear, Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland and
Company, 2006: 122.
121
Jacqueline Trescott, ―Images and Good Times,‖ The Washington Post, 5 April 1975: D1.
 63

– a consequence of the presence of two ambitious parents who cultivated the creative

ambitions of their offspring. Rolle‘s father and mother, Jonathan and Elizabeth Davis Rolle,

persuaded their older children to form a musical-dramatic group called The Family Circle,

initially to entertain family and friends, and later, to perform for local churches and lodges.

Inspired by this formative experience, Rolle would go on to study at the New School for

Social Research and later become one of the original members of the Negro Ensemble

Company in New York, participating in their early landmark productions, ―Day of

Absence‖ and ―The Blacks.‖122 While appearing in Melvin Van Peebles‘s 1972 Broadway

production of ―Don‘t Play Us Cheap,‖ a casting director for Tandem Productions spotted

Rolle‘s talent and invited her to play Florida in the sitcom Maude. Rolle‘s appearance as

the proud and independent day-worker for the liberal Maude Findlay and her family lay to

rest previous portrayals of meek, close-mouthed African-American house cleaners on

television and movie screens. Motivated by this groundbreaking role and driven by a

―cultural need to rewrite the black experience,‖ in 1974 Rolle joined the cast of Good Times

with the intention of ―rewriting‖ the image of the African-American family.123 Describing

the influence her father had on her career success, Rolle says, ―The black husband and

father has been sorely maligned. My father never left us and there were 18 children.

Without him I wouldn‘t be here today…And for every middle-class black family, there are

10 of us, at the bottom of the economic ladder, not on welfare, still struggling and

unsung.‖124 Provided with a network primetime stage, and drawing from her own

122
Lucas, 53.
123
Lucas, 53.
124
Trescott, D1.
 64

experience of African-American family life, Rolle loudly and publicly worked to highlight

this neglected majority.

Rolle‘s knowing wink into the camera lens was not only an acknowledgment of the

agency of those involved in the show‘s production process, but also of her participation in

the public media forum beyond the television studio. In the days leading up to the screening

of the Good Times pilot episode, Rolle provided interviews for the black popular

periodicals, Ebony, Jet, and Freedomways, in order to showcase the series‘ pedagogical

ambitions and to create vocal counter-narratives to African-American representations on

the screen she regarded as destructive.125 In an interview with Freedomways, Rolle

criticized Good Times‟ televisual cousin, What‟s Happening! stating, ―Oh, that show! The

parents in What‟s Happening! despise one another whereas the parents in our show openly

love one another. This is new to television. We‘re pretty much in a fight with everything

that‘s gone before. We‘re trying to create a new language if you like.‖126 Repeatedly

emphasizing the impact on African-American children of stereotyped representations, Rolle

felt that the struggle over images had significant political and social ramifications for the

black community.127 In an interview with Ebony Rolle stated, ―First of all, I have to like

me, and I couldn‘t like me if I depicted crap that made a black child hang its head. I feel an

obligation to do something that will make him stick his little chest out and say, ―Did you

see that!? That‘s why I pushed for the father figure.‖128 According to producer Allan

Manings‘ archive of viewer letters, the show‘s audience recognized and appreciated this

125
Acham, 132.
126
Lucas, 53.
127
Aniko Bodroghkozy, ―Good times in race relations? CBS‘s Good Times and the legacy of civil rights
in 1970s prime-time television,‖ Screen, Winter 2003: 421.
128
Lucas, 53.
 65

educational mandate.129 One African-American educator, a sociologist at New York

University, pointed out the importance of positive images: ―As a teacher of a course called

Black Life Styles…the program does capture an authentic strand of Black Life. For one

thing, it is (the) first program on television that recognizes the Black ‗family‘—with a

mother and a father. It also carries the spirit of Black life style; the desire for education; the

take-off on the White power structure; the dignity; the tolerance; the love, of Black

people.‖130 A letter from a teacher at the William H. Wells High School in Cabrini-Green

celebrated the fact that the show ―open(ed) up a wholesome channel of communication

between my students and I. The students feel part of this representation of their lives, not

excluded like before. Please keep it going.‖131 Rolle‘s struggle to insist upon a husband and

father coupled with the subsequent appreciation by black viewers, served as a counter to

previous interpretations of African-American family life.

Good Times employed magazines as tools for enlightenment, thus making direct

textual reference to the show‘s overall educational agenda. Several episodes open with

Thelma pouring over a copy of Ebony or Michael engrossed in The Chicago Defender,

followed by political debate with family members or lengthy monologue about specific

topical issues, such as health, education, and gang crime (Figures 1.10 & 1.11). In Getting

up the Rent (February 22, 1974), Michael picks up the television guide, and, echoing

Rolle‘s dislike of What‟s Happening! says, ―We‘re not watching that show. If those people

129
―Allan Manings Collection. There are approximately seventy letters dated between February 1974
and February 1975. All the letters have replies signed by Allan Manings. I have supplemented these
with letters published in Ebony. While I do not see these letters as unproblematically representative of
the larger Good Times audience, I do feel these letters provide clues about historical reception practices
and can be valuable in suggesting some of the reception strategies used by viewers.‖ Bodroghkozy, 416.
130
Letter from Ms. Aidena B Runnels, Assistant Professor NYU, Manings Collection. Bodroghkozy,
417.
131
Letter from Diane Bennett, San Francisco, CA, Manings Collection. Bodroghkozy, 416.
 66

have ever been to the projects, then I‘m Will Chamberlin‖ (Figure 1.12). For Michael, and

for the show‘s writer Eric Monte upon whom the young character is based, ―those‖ people

are the white, middle-class producers of What‟s Happening!132 The aspect of the CBS show

that most provoked Monte‘s ire was that creators of What‟s Happening! had no experience

of life in public housing either through having lived there or through ethnographic research.

In contrast, Monte possessed direct knowledge of the life depicted in Good Times having

spent his formative years living in Cabrini-Green. Hence, Good Times became a forum for

Monte to re-educate the public about what it meant to experience a two-parent family

dynamic within public housing. In other words, it provided a stage for Monte to tell his

story.

When Lear told reporters in 1974 that Good Times would become ―the first series

about a real ghetto family,‖ he was referring to Monte‘s influence and experience.133 As

one of three children growing up in Cabrini-Green during the 1960s, Monte‘s family

experienced hardships similar to the Evans‘, namely struggles with money and periodic

unemployment. Yet, while life in Cabrini-Green had not been easy for the aspiring writer,

neither did it match up with the blighted existence described in the Moynihan Report. Like

Rolle, Monte‘s parents encouraged the aspiring writer‘s creativity, enrolling him in free

afterschool reading classes at the Robert R. McCormick Boys and Girls Club during his

teenage years (Figure 1.13). According to their website, the Boys and Girls Club has been

an ―anchor of hope, fun, and stability in the lives of Chicago‘s Uptown community youth

132
The producers of What‟s Happening!! were Bernie Orenstein and Saul Turteltaub.
133
Martin Kasindorf, ―Archie and Maude and Fred and Norman and Alan,‖ The New York Times, 24
June 1973: 226.
 67

since 1958.‖134 During the 1970s, the Club provided its predominantly African-American

students with readings that celebrated the U.S.‘s black cultural heritage. Here, Monte

devoured a swathe of black political writings from Martin Luther King‘s peaceful rhetoric

to Stokely Carmichael‘s (Kwame Ture) Black Power philosophy. Inspired by their calls for

black political agency, at eighteen years of age Monte hitchhiked from Chicago to

Hollywood, motivated by a desire to ―reconstruct the image of African-Americans on

television‖ recognizing the ―the tube was the biggest source of propaganda in the

world.‖135 Within months of arriving in the entertainment capital of the world, Monte,

along with fellow aspiring African-American writer, Mike Evans, pitched the idea for a

sitcom that focused on a black inner-city family to Norman Lear. Desperate to come up

with a suitable starring vehicle for Rolle following her success in Maude, Lear responded

by commissioning a full season. By basing the series on the experiences of his youth—to

the extent that each member of his family inspired each character in Good Times--Monte

re-imagined Chicago‘s public housing family in the American televisual imagination.

At the root of Monte‘s ambition was a desire to create what he called an ―authentic‖

vision of family life in public housing.136 In a 1974 interview for Jet, Monte took a

backhanded swipe at what he regarded as the ―inauthenticity‖ of the creators of What‟s

Happening! stating, ―You know good and well there‘s no way a white cat could survive in

Cabrini-Green.‖137 The African-American press, too, reveled in what they regarded as

Monte‘s street credibility. A Jet magazine article from the 1970s deigned the Good Times

134
The Boys and Girls Club of Chicago, <http://www.bgcc.org/our_clubs/mccormick/Mccormick.asp>
(accessed 20 April 2010).
135
Campbell, 122.
136
Ronald E. Kisner. ―New Comedy Brings Good Times to TV,‖ Jet, 23 May 1974: 59.
137
In addition, says producer Allan Manings, ―CBS sent out a crew to the Cabrini-Green housing project
in Chicago to check on the authenticity of the show.‖‖ Lucas, 51; Kisner, 59.
 68

writer a ―bonified cab driver, dish-washer and tenant of Chicago‘s Cabrini-Green housing

project,‖138 while Ebony referred to the show as a ―slice of ghetto life as thick and juicy as a

slab of salt pork simmering in a pot of collard greens.‖139 Even Freedomways‘s Eugenia

Collier, a fervent critic of previous African-American sitcom representations, applauded the

accuracy of the series writing, “The family in the series is based upon a real family, the

setting is in the housing project so familiar to many urban blacks…There is an authenticity

in the concept of Good Times.‖ 140 The question of ‗authentic‘ or ‗realistic‘ representation

has been a central theme in popular discourse about the portrayal of African-Americans on

U.S. television. According to Hall, ―authentic‖ African-American popular cultural

representations are always shifting and hybridized. In other words, in order for ―good‖

black popular culture to pass the test of authenticity, its representations must

―reference…black experience and black expressivity. These serve as the guarantees in the

determination of which black popular culture is right on, which is ours and which is not.‖
141
In contrast to the questionable heritage of What‟s Happening!, for Monte and for the

African-American public housing residents watching at home, Good Times qualified as an

example of what is ―ours.‖

This representation of family life depended upon the agency of some of the show‘s

actors who fought to correct previous sitcom representations of African-Americans by

employing popular magazines and journals as forums for black social and political

concerns. These outlets, along with battles over the progression of individual characters and

storylines, produced vocal counter-narratives to contest the co-opting of the television

138
Kisner, 58.
139
Lucas, 5.
140
Eugenia Collier, ―Black shows for White Viewers,‖ Freedomways, Third Quarter, 1974: 212.
141
Hall, 1993.
 69

shows by a white-controlled industry. In a sense, Esther Rolle was as much a ―social actor‖

as a stage actor, perceiving her role as a guardian over the show, ensuring that it maintained

an empowering and ‗authentic‘ representation of African-American family life. In his

historical and critical analysis of television programs and commercials, media studies

scholar Jeremy G. Butler considers historian Bill Nichols‘ term, ―social actor,‖ in relation

to non-fiction television and film. For Butler, ―social actors‖ represent themselves to others

in what he regards as a kind of constructed ―performance.‖ Butler elaborates:

The term is also meant to remind us that social actors, people, retain their capacity
to act within the historical arena where they perform…When we see people in
nonfiction television programs, we see them as social beings, as individuals
functioning within a society of other individuals…their appearances on television
are warranted by their social significance, their significance to society.142

In referencing what Butler terms the ―historical world‖, i.e. the reality of living in

Chicago‘s public housing, as well as utilizing ethnographic research and personal

autobiographies of ―social beings,‖ Good Times breached the divide between fiction and

reality, thus becoming a unique form of documentary sitcom. This achievement derived in

large part from the fact that Good Times tackled socially relevant issues from the

perspective of people either currently living or with experience of residing in the projects,

rather than from the viewpoint of those debating and criticizing public housing.

Good Times makes textual references to these claims to authenticity and cultural

―ownership‖ through shots of framed black and white photographs of the Evans‘ family

(Figures 1.14-1.15). Looming in the background of many scenes like trophies are the

smiling two-dimensional faces of Florida, James, Michael, Thelma and J.J. These props
142
Butler continues, ―nonfiction television presents to the viewer the interaction of social actors in the
historical world. In parallel fashion, fiction television presents the interaction of constructed characters,
portrayed by professional actors in a narrative world.‖ Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods
and Applications, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002: 62.
 70

function as narratively imported indexical signs143 designed to certify and enhance the

credibility of the representation of their three-dimensional televisual siblings, an effect that

echoes Rolle‘s claims that ―98 to 99 percent of it (Good Times) is reality.‖144 Scattered

amongst the apartment‘s bricolaged drudge of muddy tasseled cushions and busy floral

drapes, the photographs become crisp physical markers designed to not only to recall Hall‘s

claims for black ―ownership‖ of this space, but also to identify the Evans family‘s histrionic

rootedness within the ―real‖ Cabrini-Green. Ironically, these representations (photographs)

of representations (the Evans‘) identify and locate real places within Cabrini-Green where

family activities took place during the 1970s. Photographs of birthday parties held at the

real life Jane Addams Homes Animal Court Sculpture Park and a graduation ceremony at

the William H. Wells High School line the breezeblock walls and shelves, documenting and

mapping the emotional ties, memories and history of the fictionalized Evans family as well

as the wider public housing community upon which their lives are based. Furthermore, the

fact that the photographs are black and white as opposed to color—an inexpensive medium

in popular use during the early 1970s—is in deliberate recognition of the ―real― public

housing history that the Evans‘ represent. If past events attain meaning by their existence in

history, one can also say conversely that current events are attain significance by their

classification as history. Thus, black and white is influential in creating a sense of archival

historical testimony.145 In the context of the black and white photographs in Good Times,

monochrome becomes an aesthetic of the authentic, and, especially when applied to the

contemporary present in Good Times, functions as an agent of what film historian Paul
143
Roland Barthes, ―The Reality Effect,‖ The Rustle of Language, University of California Press, 1989.
144
Kisner, 60.
145
Paul Grainge, ―TIME‘s Past in the Present: Nostalgia and the Black and White Image,‖ Journal of
American Studies, Vol. 33, No.3, Part 1: Women in America, December 1999: 388.
 71

Grainge defines as ―visual historicism.‖146 Discussing the use of black and white

photography in news journalism and commercial culture, Grainge writes, ―Black and white

helps construct narratives that give issues and events the distance and authority of time; it

has the potential for legitimation, giving archival aura to people and politics, cultures and

corporations.‖147 A brief shot of J.J. standing in front of a black and white family portrait of

the Evans family connects the image‘s ―distance and authority of time‖ to past and present

Cabrini-Green (Figure 1.16). Through the apartment‘s one huge picture window, the

unmistakable red brick exterior of the Cabrini Extension North building lurks ominously in

the distance like a hovering red mountain, guaranteeing the show‘s relationship to a real

place and, thus, its verisimilitude. The photograph‘s three-dimensional actors perform their

agency and unity against this formidable backdrop, reminding for the viewer that a united

African-American family can exist in public housing.

The photograph‘s claim to historical rootedness of families within Chicago‘s public

housing also speaks to the presence of an African-American family on network primetime.

While the pilot episode ostensibly focused on a storyline about James‘ thwarted efforts to

secure employment, it was really a chance for the show‘s actors and writers to stake their

claims in a televisual sitcom landscape dominated by white, middle-class characters.

Although the show clearly distances itself from previous all-white sitcom representations--

during the opening breakfast exchange Florida tells James, ―Let‘s face it James, this ain‘t

Ozzie and Harriet‖—both shows cover universal themes such as love and friendship. This

―same‖ and yet ―different‖ representation of an intact family created an alternate way for

146
Grainge, 385.
147
Grainge, 385.
 72

white viewers to contemplate African-American public housing residents. Situated on the

same sitcom stage battleground, so to speak, white viewers learned that in terms of internal

practices, African-Americans lived lives not dissimilar to their own - rather, it was the

external, structural factors linked to their living environments that were different. A self-

described white schoolteacher asserted that the show was ―absolutely educational. I

recommend it to all my students and their parents. I think we have a lot to learn from the

Evans family and also about the questionable politics of Mayor Daley.‖148 In a national

culture that, during the early 1970s, still revered the representational ideal of the nuclear

family, Good Times‘ dual ownership of the same televisual space as the white sitcom The

Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 1952-66) helped to discard the flawed

representational image of African-Americans as drifting singular entities lacking in agency

or will. Rather, the self-reflexive ―frame‖ within a ―frame‖ (representations of

representations) I have just described served to root the Evans‘ on American soil, one of the

primary ambitions in civil rights era‘s fight for the attainment of full citizenship recognition

for African-Americans.149 Through the efforts of Rolle and Monte, among others, Good

Times carved out a space for the representation of African-American experience of family

148
Letter from Louise D. Kleinsorge, Tiboron, CA, Manings Collection.
149
Like many other sitcoms from the period, Good Times idealized the notion of the two-parent African
American family. According to Robert Bernard Hill and colleagues, ―One-parent families are arbitrarily
assumed to be broken and unstable, while two-parent families are arbitrarily assumed to be intact and stable,
without providing for any independent assessment of the stability or cohesion of each type of family.‖
However, in terms of the show‘s racial, social politics and citizenship recognition it is important that the
Evans‘s represent this ideal. In conforming to white society's view of the family, Good Times helped to show
white Americans that not all African American families were the same, exposing multiple classes. It is for this
reason that I feel able to accept the show‘s reliance on the representational ideal of the patriarchal nuclear
family. Robert Bernard Hill, Andrew Billingsley, William Monroe Trotter Institute, Research in the African-
American Family: A Holistic Perspective, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1993: 98-99.
 73

life in a commercial television network historically dominated by the perceptions of white

producers, writers, and owners.150

The Evans‘ vision of marital unity undermined Moynihan‘s criticisms of the

African-American family. Moynihan regarded the ―breakdown‖ of the structure of the

African-American family as a consequence of the particularity of slavery in the U.S. and

the continuing oppression of black males. Relying on the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier to

support his thesis, the politician argued that emancipation consigned African-American

women to the dominant role in family and marriage relations. The politician explained,

―segregation and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than to

the female personality. Keeping the Negro ‗in his place‘ can be translated as keeping the

Negro male in his place: the female was not a threat to anyone.‖151 An exchange between

Florida and her good friend Willona at the end of the pilot episode contests this reading and

casts the definitive knock-out punch to end this chapter‘s first round. Sitting on the couch,

dissecting the week‘s African-American magazines, Florida prises her head away from

Ebony, turns to Willona and states wryly, ―Don‘t all the politicians say that our women are

supposed to be heads of the house,‖ to which Willona responds, ―They sure do.‖ Mustering

150
By ―others‖ I refer to the African-American choreographer Donald McKayle who directed Good Times in
1974 and Gerren Keith who directed the show between 1976-1979. James Powers, ―Dialogue on Film :
Norman Lear,‖ American Film: Journal of the Film and Television Arts, June 1977, Vol. II, No. 8: 46.
151
Historian‘s Eugene Genovese and Herbert G. Gutman dispute Moynihan‘s argument. In his 1976
work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Genovese acknowledged that slavery exerted
―extraordinary‖ pressures on African American families but nonetheless ―the slaves created impressive
norms of family life, including as much of a nuclear family norm as conditions permitted, and…they
entered the postwar social system with a remarkably stable base.‖ Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll:
The World the Slaves Made, Vintage, 1976. Similarly, Gutman‘s The Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom, relying on census data and historical documents, including letters and diaries, argued that
African-American families were strong and resilient after emancipation. ―In the 50 years after
emancipation,‖ Gutman wrote, ―most African-American families were headed by a husband and wife,
most eventually marry and most children lived with both parents.‖ Herbert G. Gutman, The Black
Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, New York: Pantheon, 1976: 80.
 74

the venom of actor, writer, and character combined, Florida spits, ―Then somebody should

tell my husband.‖ This closing exchange simultaneously deconstructs two of Moynihan‘s

criticisms of urban African-American family life: that "Almost one-fourth of Negro

families are headed by females,‖ and that ―Nearly a quarter of urban marriages are

dissolved.‖ Moynihan‘s angst with the black matriarchal family stemmed from the fact that

it was diametrically opposite to a normative, white middle-class American family ideal. He

writes:

In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure
which, because it is too out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously
retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the
Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.152

By representing a vision of African-American familial unity on a primetime sitcom—the

archetypal home ground of ―whiteness‖--Good Times highlighted the ―unsung‖ three

quarters of black urban marriages that did work.153

In this sense, the show becomes a visual manifestation of sociologist Carol Stack‘s

findings in the anthropological study, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black

Community, which demonstrates the effectiveness of African-American families in

Chicago‘s public housing during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Stack rejects the ―culture

of poverty‖ paradigm associated with Moynihan and anthropologist Oscar Lewis, which

sees a self-perpetuating poverty cycle deriving from a pathological lower-class culture.

152
Moynihan, 1965.
153
This point was also made by the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin who criticized the report for focusing
solely ―upon what is negative in Negro life.‖ James Farmer, the director of the Congress of Racal Equality,
also blamed the report for providing ―a massive academic cop-out for the white conscience.‖ Responding to
the report‘s particular animus against ―matriarchy,‖ Dorothy Height, the President of the National Council of
Negro Women wrote, ―There are strengths in the family that should have been brought out by Moynihan.‖
Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, MIT Press,
1967: 422, 410, 186.
 75

Instead, Stack‘s study reveals a culture based on adaptive strategies that her subjects devise

to cope with the structural conditions that circumscribe their lives. According to Stack, cash

exchanges, flows of goods and services, and information through networks of resilient

social relationships—both kin and non-kin—are essential to the family structure in public

housing. Stack writes:

Highly adaptive structural features of urban black families comprise a resilient

response to the social economic conditions of poverty...(T)he distinctly negative
features attributed to poor families, that they are fatherless, matrifocal, unstable and
disorganized, are not general characteristics of black families living in substantially
below economic subsistence in urban America. The black urban family…proves to
be an organized, tenacious, active, lifelong network.154

The exchange network, the vehicle of introduction to the community, was the feature of

the community that Stack found to be the center of its vitality and the key the survival of

the African-American family. By the mid 1970s, emerging New Left analyses began to

echo the views expressed in Stack‘s study, regarding African-American family structures

like the Evans‘ as functioning, adaptive, resistant and fundamentally strong. At the same

time, since national economic growth declined through the 1970s and the massive

economic and social reforms promised by Lyndon Johnson never materialized, conditions

for Chicago‘s public housing residents progressively deteriorated. The following section

considers how Moynihan conveniently ignored the structural cleavages that devastated

U.S. public housing during the late twentieth-century by focusing his argument around the

stresses in the black family in terms of racial difference and cultural pathology. In the

154
Carol Stack, All our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community, Basic Books, 1997
 76

midst of these difficult conditions, the family home became a ―haven in a heartless

world.‖155

Round Two: "The breakdown of the Negro family has led to a startling increase in welfare
dependency."

Getting up the Rent (22 February, 1974) opens with an exterior shot of the Evans‘

front door from which a freshly assigned ruby red eviction notice ostentatiously dangles

like a ticking time bomb ready to explode. This shot is loaded with psychic portent,

warning of the external, structural political and governmental bureaucracy that threatens to

encroach upon the serenity of the apartment within. Beyond this wooden borderland, the

viewer finds the family customarily seated around the Formica kitchen table at breakfast

time. While Florida, Thelma, Michael and J.J. look on in concern, James sits with his head

in his hands, anguished over the ominous task of finding the month‘s rent money by the end

of the day having just returned from a long night of cleaning dishes. Florida questions her

husband:

Florida: ―You worked all night and all they paid you was six dollars?
James: ―No, they paid me a lot more. But after they got done taking about the federal
withholding, the state withholding, the unemployment compensation, the state disability
insurance, and then a $2 charge for getting my dishwasher uniform cleaned. You know
what? If I‘d worked for them a few more hours, I‘d end up owing them ten bucks.‖

Ever the pragmatist, James throws opens the day‘s newspaper looking for a day job

to add to his existing night employment. After studying the paper for a short period, James

turns to Florida and says sarcastically, ―Well let‘s see what all the equal opportunities

employers have for James Evans this morning?‖ Even without James‘ acerbic tone,

155
Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World, W.W. Norton and Co., 1995
 77

seasoned Good Times viewers already knew the answer to this question: ―nothing.‖ A sixth-

grade dropout, James has bounced from one menial, low-paying car washing, dock-loading

job to another, constantly struggling to provide the basic necessities of food, clothing and

shelter for his family. Better jobs, it seems, are reserved for the well-educated, white

middle-class city dwellers occupying the condominiums in the nearby Gold Coast. James

affirms the educational gulf separating the Evans‘ from a life of monetary comfort when he

responds to his own question with the sardonic, ―Computer designer and college graduate. I

only missed that one by four years of college, four years of high school and two years

public school.‖ James' issue with unemployment and the government‘s involvement in

these obstacles becomes a crucial point of contention during the first season of Good

Times.156 In Too Old Blues (Feb 8, 1974), for example, James attends an interview for the

Union Apprentice Program. To his chagrin, James learns that there has been an

administrative error and that at forty-two years of age he is seven years too old for the

program. After the interviewer tells James, ―This program is government-funded and

government rules can‘t be broken. That‘s the way it is,‖ James responds, ―No, I‘ll tell you

the way it is. I‘ve got a family and they need food on the table and clothes on their back and

I‘ve got to pay rent. I need that job!‖ Like a broken record, the interviewer repeats the

mantra, ―Government rules can‘t be broken.‖ Turning away from this automaton, James

156
Between November 1973 and March 1975, the U.S. experienced an economic recession, which
would have directly affected people in James‘ position. Several factors contributed to the recession.
First, the U.S. went off of the gold standard and printed more money. This created inflation, as too many
dollars chased too few goods. Second, President Nixon instituted wage-price controls. This kept prices
too high, reducing demand. Wage controls made salaries too high, which forced businesses to lay off
workers. Harold G. Vatter & John F. Walker, History of the U.S. Economy Since World War II,
Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996.
 78

faces the front of the live studio stage as if addressing ―fellow‖ Chicago public housing

residents beyond when he responds drolly, ―Unless you‘re running the government.‖

The insensitivity of the public official effectively captures the sense of

abandonment and limitations contained within the Moynihan report, which, in stating that

the African-American family had experienced a ―startling increase in welfare dependency,‖

failed to acknowledge obstacles such as structural unemployment, which left many Chicago

public housing residents with no other choice than to seek government subsidies.157 In a

1965 article for The Nation magazine, William Ryan contended that the Moynihan Report

was ―a new form of subtle racism‖ because ―it seduces the reader into believing that it is

not racism and discrimination but the weakness and defects of the Negro, himself, that

accounts for the present status of unemployment.‖158 Likewise, as social scientist‘s Lee

Rainwater and William L. Yancey point out in their book on the controversy surrounding

the report, Moynihan‘s frequent use of words such as ―failure‖ to describe the unsuccessful

attempts of many poor inner-city dwellers to secure gainful employment connotes

individual responsibility rather than the specter of racial discrimination, limited access to

quality education, and restricted employment prospects that hung over many public housing

residents like a storm cloud.159 James was not a failure – rather, he was failed by an inept

governmental system, headed by a man more interested in international affairs than

domestic duties and the state of his nation‘s economy. As an advisor to Nixon once said,

157
This was also the problem of 19th century racial uplift ideology. In seeking to shift away from
biological determinism of race, black leaders made it a cultural issue, suggesting the problem lay with
the behavior and habits of certain, lower-class blacks.
158
William Ryan, ―Savage Discovery: The Moynihan Report,‖ The Nation 201, 22 November 1965: 380
159
William Julius Wilson, ―The Moynihan Report and Research on the Black Community,‖ The Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 2009: 35
 79

―He (Nixon) knows more about Chile than Chicago.‖160 By the 1970s, unreliable low-wage

service sector and laboring jobs replaced traditional manufacturing and other blue-collar

jobs - once a reliable source of income for those with a limited education. In just twelve

years, between 1970 and 1982, some twenty-four percent of Chicago‘s eight thousand

factories closed or relocated out of the city and hundreds more followed.161 As the Chicago

Tribune and a variety of other sources have documented over the years, the communities

that have been hardest hit by these changes have been African-American.162 As a result,

many of Chicago‘s public housing residents had little choice but to join the end of the

welfare line. For the prideful Evans family, however, this was not an option.

Getting up the Rent makes this resistance to welfare made patently clear when, after

James discards the newspaper in the trash in disgust at the lack of employment

opportunities available to him, Willona suggests that the family consider applying for

emergency welfare funds. Almost choking on a gulp of coffee, James looks Willona in the

eye and says, ―I ain‘t accepting no handouts. I‘ll get a job,‖ before ferociously pulling the

newspaper out of the garbage can. Despite the urban reality of lack of jobs, James regarded

social subsidies as a last resort. In his mind, if he joined the end of the welfare line he

would become the very thing he despised: a clichéd public housing welfare recipient.

During the 1970s many real project residents experienced similar frustrations over

government bureaucracies, the lack of viable employment prospects within Chicago‘s

public housing neighborhoods, and the stigma of being a ―needy‖ welfare recipient. As

160
―The Nation: Nixon turns from Chile to Chicago,‖ Time, 18 January 1971.
161
John L. Rury, ―Race, Space and the Politics of Chicago‘s Public Schools: Benjamin Willis and the
Tragedy of Urban Education,‖ History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 2, Summer 1999: 117-142.
162
―The American Millstone: an Examination of the Nation‘s Permanent underclass,‖ Chicago Tribune,
1986: Ch. 5.
 80

Tony Steele, a lifelong resident of Cabrini-Green states, ―It‘s not that I don‘t want to work.

I do, but for one thing there‘s not enough jobs out there for someone like me. Even if I do

get an interview, as soon as the employer realizes that I‘m coming off welfare and I live in

the projects, they stigmatize me. I never hear from them again and I don‘t get the job.‖163

Like the character of James in Good Times, Steele bears the burden of the welfare

dependency myth. Reinforcing racist attaitudes, late twentieth-century public images and

rhetoric positioned many Chicago public housing residents as victimizers, linked to stories

of ―Welfare Queens,‖ ―unfit parents who view their children as nothing more than increases

in welfare checks.‖164 The greatest propagator of this myth was Ronald Reagan, who used

his 1976 campaign trail to regale salivating Republican crowds with an anecdote about a

woman from Chicago's South Side charged with welfare fraud: "She has 80 names, 30

addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing

deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid,

getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names."165 According

to a report in The New York Times, several newspaper journalists at the time attempted to

search for the "Welfare Queen" in the hopes of interviewing her, discovering along the way

that Reagan‘s story was a ―gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud,‖ and the

woman a figment of the President‘s speechwriter‘s imagination.166 In fact, data suggests

that during the 1970s and early 1980s, less than five percent of all welfare benefits went to

163
J.S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago, Champaign, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2004.
164
Kaaryn Gustafson, The Morality and Rationality of Welfare, University of California, Berkeley,
Unpublished dissertation, 2005.
165
Susan Douglas, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All
Women. Free Press, 2005.
166
Paul Krugman, ―Republicans and Race,‖ The New York Times, 19 November 2007.
 81

people who were not entitled to them, and this figure includes errors committed by the

welfare agency.167 Due to a health care gap, many of those who sought welfare assistance

did so as a result of disability and an inability to work. Scholar and educator Joycelyn K.

Moody recognizes the harm caused by such inaccuracies writing, ―Enduring myths about

welfare are rooted in racist ignorance and sustained by elitist ignorance of every sort: those

myths injure and wound and scar.‖168 The avoidance of such stereotypes was, of course, of

primary importance to the writers of Good Times, thus James persisted in the job market,

striving to undo this falsification. The follow up episode to Getting up the Rent, God‟s

Business is Good Business (March 1, 1974), illustrates this misrepresentation of Chicago‘s

public housing residents.

The episode opens with a lingering frontal shot of the Evans‘ black and white

television set atop a lace doily (Figure 1.17). After the camera cuts to Florida and Michael

sitting on the couch, the teenager asks his mother, ―Are we ever going to get a color TV?,‖

to which Florida responds ―We don‘t need a color TV. We know the sky is blue and the

grass is green.‖ For Florida the monochrome television screen—much like the placement of

the black and white photographs described in the previous section--lends itself to a view of

the world rooted in what Grainge describes as an ―epic factuality – monochrome documents

and chronicles.‖169 In Florida‘s mind, the threat of color television comes to symbolize the

encroachment of colorful temptations, easy fixes and pastiche into the family‘s ―authentic‖

reality. As Grainge elaborates, ―Monochrome provides visual substance, or rather the sense

167
David Zucchino, The Myth of the Welfare Queen: A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist‟s Portrait of
Women on the Line, New York, NY: Scribner, 1999.
168
Joycelyn K. Moody, Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in
America, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
169
Grainge, 386.
 82

(or simulation) of substance, in a postmodern world commonly described as depthless.‖170

The difference between black and white and color in Good Times not only references the

practical limitations of the Evans‘ undisputed poverty and their inability to afford a color

television, but also an ideological battle between good and evil, a stance that corresponds

with the family‘s sharply drawn moralistic take on the world.

After Michael adjusts the aerial to achieve a better picture, an image of an

evangelical preacher flickers onto the screen. Rushing towards the screen to get a closer

look James exclaims, ―It‘s Sam!‖ Sam (played by Roscoe Lee Browne), the viewer learns,

is a long time army friend of James‘ and a former resident of Cabrini-Green. With expert

timing that only thirty-minute sitcoms possess, there is a ring at the doorbell, which turns

out to be Sam. After sashaying into the family‘s living area, the living, breathing

―celebrity‖ proceeds to seat himself on the couch, as the rest of the family stands around

agog. Like a moth to a flame, J.J. is the first to approach the mysterious uninvited guest

telling him, ―I‘ve seen you on the tube man! Them threads, them rocks, those wheels. You

and God must be on a first name basis.‖ Similarly enthralled, Thelma exclaims, ―I just can‘t

believe it! Reverend Sam right off the television is in our own living room. You must know

everyone on TV like the Jackson Five and the Staple Sisters?‖ Turning to address his

congregation, the preacher responds, ―Know them? I saved them!‖ Biding her time like a

lioness inspecting her prey, a perennially guarded Florida cuts to the chase and asks, ―What

are you doing here Sam?‖ The viewer soon learns that Florida was right to be suspicious, as

Sam exposes his true colors. The flashy televangelist has come to the apartment to try to

persuade his old friend to take a well-paid job on his glitzy cross-country ―God Will Save

170
Grainge, 384.
 83

You‖ tour. Unbeknownst to the Evans‘ and the wider Cabrini-Green community, the tour is

a fraud that involves swindling money out of vulnerable poor people. A brief exchange

between Sam and James reveals that Sam has abandoned his wife and four children in the

projects in favor of the good life on the road. ―But what do they do for money?‖ asks James

innocently. ―Ha! Welfare of course!‖ responds Sam.

It is useful to compare the ways the show makes a direct textual comparison

between ‗black and white‘ James and ‗colorful‘ Sam. Sam arrives at the Evans residence

bedecked in the archetypical pimp‘s finery: gargantuan ruby rings, body-hugging polo neck

sweater, garish brocade mauve suit, and an astonishing pair of maroon velvet bellbottoms.

James, on the other hand, greets Sam wearing a plaid shirt, tatty corduroy trousers, and a

stained coat. While Sam‘s vulgar display of wealth reflects his morally ambiguous

psyche—as Florida warns her children, he is a ―wolf in God‘s clothing‖—James‘ puritan

aesthetic mirrors the family‘s pious approach to life.

The camera emphasizes the ideological differences between Sam and James by

pitting them against one another in a series of mirrored confrontation shots (Figures 1.18 &

1.19). This Axial Symmetry composition (also called Bilateral or Mirror Symmetry)

narrates the internal power structure between the two as well as the character‘s individual

internal subjectivities.171 Looking straight into James‘ eyes, Sam sees the man he used to be

before experiencing the corruption of money and fame; James, on the other hand, sees all

the material things he lacks and desires. The fearful symmetry between the pair comes to

171
According to film theorist Louis Thonsgaard, ―Axial symmetry refers to the popular definition of
symmetry as mirroring in respect to an axis…the axial symmetric picture consists of two mirroring parts
which start out by counterbalancing each other compositionally, thus often creating compositions that
are statically in balance.‖ Thonsgaard, ―Symmetry – the Forbidden Fruit of Picture Composition in
Film,‖ P.O.V., No. 15, March 2003, http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_15/POV_15cnt.html (accessed 10
December 2009).
 84

symbolize the dark mirror reflection of temptation within all of us, which draws us to

power, greed and material things. A later scene narrates James partial descent into this

world when the camera captures the pair as if they are one moving, overlapping organism

(Figure 1.20): In the foreground Sam wears an ostentatious cream fur coat, while James, as

if drowning in his friend‘s shadow, stands behind him in a similarly colored but much less

decadent outfit. Caught in this spell, James admires Sam‘s dress exclaiming, ―Last time I

saw you, you were decked out in guardhouse green and look at you now!,‖ to which his old

friend purrs, ―Oh, don‘t let these rocks and rags fool you James.‖ Slapping James back into

reality like a Sergeant Major, Florida enters the frame, looks Sam up and down and snarls,

―Well, they don‘t fool me.‖ Florida‘s body—hand on hips—forces a chasm between the

two characters, generating a moment of clarity that smashes James‘ tempting dream of

wealth to smithereens. The shot dissolves from its symmetrical position to an asymmetric

power imbalance, which places James in the power position (Figure 1.21). Located in the

foreground of the scene, James dwarfs Sam in terms of both stature and moral stance:

Sam‘s clothes seem perverse, while James‘ seem noble. James will later admit to Florida, ―I

don‘t know what happened. The numbers just started dancing in front of my eyes.‖

Although taking the job would have meant a secure financial future, James turns Sam down

knowing that it is the moral thing to do. As Sam leaves to catch his midnight flight to his

next hustle, he shakes James‘ hand and says, ―Honest James.‖

The choreographed bodily tussle between James and Sam symbolizes the writer‘s

pedagogical intent to frame James as the antithesis to Moynihan‘s clichéd welfare cheat. In

abandoning his family and spending government funds unwisely, Sam becomes the

stereotypical fast car driving, big pimpin‘ nightmare of many Republicans. James, in
 85

resisting ―Uncle Sam‘s‖ offer to step onto the dark side, demonstrates that he is not only in

a battle against a corrupt government ‗outside‘ the family home, but also destructive

‗colorful‘ representations that perpetuate the myth that ―welfare dependency‖ is a result of

personal rather than structural failures. For example, the larger-than-life Thomas family in

What‟s Happening! listlessly weave their way through life, taking government handouts

without ever attempting to look for, let alone apply, for jobs. Sam‘s ‗colorfully‘

exaggerated pimp, flash and hustle style of dress hint at his televangical masquerade and

fabricated, superficial persona, forcing the viewer to question the validity of such over-

representations – he is no more real than the pixilated television image seen at the

episode‘s opening. In turn, James‘ under-representation in terms of his austere clothing

equates, not only to the family‘s obvious poverty, but also to their honest approach to their

home life. Slamming the door on the man she calls ‗Scheeming Sam the rip off man‘,

Florida turns to face James and, with a sweep of her hand, which encompasses the whole

apartment, says, ―Honey, this is our strength. It don't matter what some crazy, sick people

say as long as we do the thing that will keep us together.‖ While perilously close to losing

their home on several occasions, the Evans‘ always manage to Get up the Rent, thereby

preserving what ―matters‖—familial solidarity and integrity. Agreeing, James responds to

Florida‘s statement with, ―Baby, you know something Florida, there's a cold world out

there and we can't change it,‖ to which his wife retorts with the episode‘s definitive final

word, ―Well, maybe we can't change it, James, but we sure can't let it change us!‖ In the

course of this episode the viewer came to understand the symbolic nature of the family

home in the formation of the Evans‘ ―us‖ versus ―them‖ attitude. In Good Times, the

―outside‖ is hostile and filled with jeopardy, compounded by a long line of dumb or
 86

insensitive politicians and public officials, while the family exists in a perpetual state of

inward motion, thrown back on itself for survival.172

James‘ simple style of dress—austere not just in comparison to his outlandish friend

but also, importantly, on its own terms--echoes the claustrophobia and stylistic

conservatism of the apartment‘s domestic interior. As with all situation comedies filmed

before a live studio audience, the Evans‘ apartment studio set is spatially constrained. Yet,

while the camera in other 1970s sitcoms like The Bob Newhart Show (CBS, 1972-78) and

Happy Days (ABC, 1974-84) occasionally ventures into the bedroom or bathroom, the

camera in Good Times almost never leaves the living room. This persistent focus on the

Evans‘ living-room-cum-kitchen-cum-hallway-cum-bedroom-cum-artist‘s studio comes to

symbolize not only the spatial restraints and economic realities of living in a two bedroom,

one bathroom public housing unit or even the mass-production needs of primetime

television producers, but the Evans family‘s ideological aspirations. The core of the

home—like the square of a small town where people come and go—brings the outside

inside: a imagined community meeting place within which Florida and James nurture and

navigate their teenage children‘s futures. Hunkering down in the cocoon-like space of the

apartment, Florida and James help their children to carve out future career paths, which use

the ‗outside‘ world wisely. Rather than falling prey to drugs, gang crime and other

pathologies, Thelma practices her plies and daydreams of going to Julliard, while Michael

lounges on the family sofa, pouring over a Black Power pamphlet and instructing the

family that ―one day‖ he will take a seat on the Supreme Court. The living room, although

172
Ella Taylor, Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America, Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 1989: 83.
 87

proudly bedecked with the children‘s school awards, family photographs, and paintings,

contains minimal furniture. This implies that the family are in transit, ready to ‗pack up‘

and ‗move on‘ to the next and better stage at any time. The bounded, deliberately dull, flat

studio lighting and two-dimensional austerity of the set design encourages the viewer to

focus attention on those things inside the Evans‘ residence that are three-dimensional: the

characters and their fluid social interactions.

In many ways the ascetic stage set in Good Times is a throwback to the golden age

of early live omnibus drama, which valued the performer over presentational text.173 As

Caldwell elaborates, rejecting television‘s production capabilities, ―the technical apparatus

was in place only to allow the televised stage play to unfold.‖174 Owing to the factor of

shooting in real time, these comparatively fixed camera positions and a lesser degree of

postproduction editing; the performers had to clarify the comedic relationships

themselves.175 Two- or three-shots dominate the scenes in Good Times, thereby

accentuating conversation, and if the show does employ close-ups, they are typically

reaction shots - a method that underscores the character‘s interior point of view. The Axial

Symmetry composition employed during the confrontation between James and Sam, during

which the camera dances between upper-body shots of the dueling former friends, for

instance, serves to reinforce the show‘s narrative structure as it focuses on the character‘s

endogenous subjectivity. As Caldwell writes, ―Primetime redefined cultural relevance in

the early 1970s as a product of social seriousness and intelligence, rather than lifestyle or

173
Lear frequently referred to his sitcoms as ―theater.‖ In an interview for a 1977 issue of American Film, for
example, Lear stated that he is ―interested in the theater of content.‖ Powers, 46.
174
Caldwell, 56.
175
The television industry rewarded Rolle for her acting ability in 1974 when she was nominated for a
Golden Globe Award in the category of Best TV Actress in a Musical/Comedy.
 88

fashion. The cutting edge was no longer a visual phenomenon…simplicity, consistency,

true characterization, compassion…an approach that simply provided the steak rather than

hype the sizzle.‖176 As with the austerity of James‘ dress, the deliberate removal of visual

clichés from the studio set comes to symbolize a vital dismissal of the political and social

designations routinely ascribed to public housing residents, the most famous of which is, of

course, the myth of welfare dependency.

While, on a simplistic level, James‘ resistance to welfare could easily be read as

another form of ―blaming the victim,‖ the episode‘s very pointed theme of representation—

both over and under—along with its self-awareness of its own fictionality (as a TV show),

lends itself to a more sophisticated reading. God‟s Business Is Good Business becomes a

lesson in dueling fictions – Moynihan‘s, Reagan‘s, Sam‘s, television‘s, and ours tussle

together, thereby highlighting and deconstructing the falsehood of each other along the

way. By invoking this unashamedly biblical, Cain and Abel-derived narrative, the episode

refers to the family‘s ever-present religious beliefs as well as establishing and solidifying

the magnitude of the show‘s prodigious pedagogical ambitions. Thus, Sam‘s metatextual

emergence through the Evans‘ television set is not only a conscious call for a reanalysis of

previous television representations of Chicago‘s public housing residents, but for all

previous representations and interpretations of this place – similar to the ways we must be

wary of Sam, we can‘t trust what they have to offer. A final exchange between Michael and

Thelma identifies the importance of the episode‘s televisual representation for the show‘s

audience. Slumping back into the sofa with a cherryade Thelma declares, ―I want to watch a

real good flick tonight.‖ Flicking through the TV Guide, Michael retorts, ―And I want to

176
Caldwell, 57.
 89

watch an all-black show for a change…Here‘s one. The Los Angeles Lakers versus the

Milwaukee Bulls.‖ With these final words, Michael refers to the limited nature of African-

American contributions to the 1970s televisual landscape. Wriggling free from this

restricted classification, Good Times and the family‘s apartment becomes a ―take off‖

platform of determined attitude, slick with the potential for upward social mobility. The

following section considers the Evans‘ apartment as a space that enables fluid social

interactions and harbors unrelenting ambition.

Round Three: “Most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in a tangle of pathology
that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped

J.J.‘s paintings encapsulate the Evans‘ spatial dynamism. While the rest of the

apartment is a barren landscape of deflated biscuit-colored cushions and cheerless faded

furniture, J.J.‘s artworks gleam with visceral and visual expression, like spotlights on a

Broadway stage. Reverberating with physicality and color, the paintings depict African-

American teenagers with fantastically elongated limbs, choreographed in dance, fingers

pointing at an unknown spot into the distance. Whether reaching for a hoop, potting the

final ball in a game of pool, stretching towards the winning tape, or proudly displaying a

high school diploma, the figures in J.J.‘s works exist in a state of perpetual liberation and

achievement (Figures 1.22 & 1.23). The implied motion in J.J.‘s paintings contradicts

Moynihan‘s assertion that ―Most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in a tangle

of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped.‖ According

to Moynihan, ―pathological‖ tendencies—matriarchal familial patterns, tendencies towards

crime, etc—are formed at a young age due to educational attainment discrepancies between
 90

boys and girls: ―Negro females were better educated than Negro males, and this remains

true today for the Negro population as a whole,‖ writes the politician.177 Moynihan argues

that in later life this difference results in women having more opportunities available for

them in the white collar and professional worlds, while black men remain unemployed and

restricted to menial labor.178 Moynihan concludes this section of his report with the

damning summary, ―This is the failure of youth.‖ In Good Times, however, the Evans

children refused to be ―entrapped‖ by the ascribed political framing. Michael, Thelma and

J.J., like the kinetic figures in J.J.‘s paintings, seem to reach out of the canvas frame

towards upward social mobility and success. In this sense, the paintings are narrative

signs—stage directions, if you like—charting the ―spatial acting‖179 of young residents of

Chicago‘s public housing.180

Specifically, the paintings become leitmotifs echoing the outer frame of the Evans‘

apartment, within which Michael, Thelma and J.J. aspire for the same mobility as their

painted personifications. The main character that the writers of Good Times used to

demonstrate the children‘s educational aspirations was Michael, played by Ralph Carter. In

defiance of Moynihan‘s report, Michael applies himself academically and is devoted

himself to overcoming the obstacles of unemployment, poverty and racism that hinder

many in his position. As a dedicated black nationalist, Michael imagines comprehensive

changes for the betterment of the African-American urban poor. In an interview with the

177
Moynihan, 1965.
178
Moynihan, 1965: 78.
179
Kevin Fox Gotham, ―Toward an Understanding of the Spatiality of Urban Poverty: The Urban Poor as
Spatial Actors,‖ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 27, Issue. 3, Sept 2003: 732.
180
JJ‘s painting are by African-American artist Ernie Barnes (1938-) who painted a series of original
pieces on the show. His painting The Sugar Shack, 1972-1976, featured on the show‘s opening credits
for four years. In 1972 Barnes exhibited ―The Beauty of the Ghetto‖ at the Heritage Gallery in
California.
 91

Christian Science Monitor, Lear told interviewer Arthur Unger, ―There is an attempt to

create a person for whom the audience will be able to foresee a happy future. I want you to

believe the kids are going to make it out of that ghetto.‖181 For Michael and for the real

public housing residents that he represented, the key way to break through the pigeonhole

of pathology was though education.

In an episode entitled Crosstown Busses Run All Day, Doodah, Doohdah (1 October

1974), Good Times deals with the importance of education as a source for uplift and

mobility. The episode begins by emphasizing the structural obstacles that the Evans

children must overcome if they are to achieve educational success. After her youngest child

storms through the front door, Florida asks him, ―Where have you been Michael? I‘ve been

worried about you!‖ Pulling a sign that reads If You Can Read This Sign You Did Not Go

to Harding Elementary School out from behind his back, Michael reveals that he spent the

day picketing the board of education (Figure 1.24). Turning to address his family, the

thirteen year old complains, ―Did you know that this neighborhood has the worst schools in

the whole city?! You know what the hardest math question was this year? How to divide

forty kids into twenty books.‖ Indeed, a 1968 survey by Chicago's Urban League found that

in schools with a large African-American population, the budget for teacher salaries was

only eighty-five percent as high as in white schools, and that operating expenses per pupil

were only sixty-six percent as high.182 Yet, like the figures in J.J.‘s paintings, Michael

refused to be handicapped by ascribed framing devices and governmental obstacles.

181
Arthur Unger, ―Black Family Portrait: ‗Good Times‘ to show ghetto life as it is—almost,‖ Christian
Science Monitor, 7 February 1974: 18.
182
―The Education of Big Ben,‖ Time, August 30, 1968.
 92

In the next second, a prophetic ring at the doorbell signals an opportunity for

Michael to break free from these environmental restrictions. The Evans‘ unexpected visitor

turns out to be Michael‘s principal, Mr. Pearson, who considers Michael a good candidate

to be voluntarily bussed to one of Chicago‘s best schools in an wealthy white area. Mr.

Pierson tells Florida and James, ―We‘ve found students like Michael tend to learn a lot

more when they are surrounded by other students who are also highly motivated to learn.‖

Without seeking his son‘s opinion on the matter, James shakes the principal‘s hand and

says, ―Mr. Pearson, Michael is going to be on this bussing program.‖ After the principal

leaves, Michael asks his parents why they support bussing, a system he regards as a way of

―bussing us off.‖ Possessing a sense of militancy and spouting slogans such as ―Bussing

isn‘t nothing but a bunch of honky four-wheel jive‖ and ―Black isn‘t beautiful on a yellow

school bus,‖ Michael tells his parents, ―If God gave me talent, it was meant to be used in

my own neighborhood with my own people.‖ A sympathetic Florida puts her arm round her

son‘s shoulders and comforts him saying, ―It‘s a step son, bussing is a beginning.‖

Likewise, James replies, ―Aren‘t you always telling me that one day you want to be on the

Supreme Court? Here‘s your big chance. If you get on the Supreme Court you can change

some laws. The Supreme Court doesn‘t hold sessions in the ghetto.‖ According to James, a

move from a predominately-black school to the school in the white neighborhood presented

an opportunity for Michael to acquire the knowledge needed to thrive in a white-dominated

world, and to help change racist laws and practices that effect public housing residents.

Importantly, for Michael, he can move forward (bussed to a future as the Supreme Court

Justice) but he will never forget where he has come from.

 93

James locates the root of his ardent promotion of Michael‘s educational success

after his son asks, ―But you were never bussed, Dad?‖ Looking Michael dead in the eye,

James responds, ―Yes, I was, too. When I was a kid in Mississippi. I was bussed – by foot.

Passed three beautiful white schools to one crummy black one.‖ Beyond reinforcing James‘

oft-referenced rudimentary education, this dialogue is significant in that it indicts and

historicizes white power and privilege by linking his experience of Jim Crow schooling to

Michael‘s current bussing issue. The school district to which Michael will be bussed is

nicknamed the ―detergent district‖ by Florida, who jokes, ―Everything there is whiter than

white.‖ Reacting to his sister Thelma‘s comment that she has never heard of any racial

trouble there, J.J. responds, ―That‘s because there aren‘t any racials there. Only color

problem they have there is matching the carpet to the drapes.‖183 In reply to Florida‘s and

Thelma‘s sudden misgivings about bussing, James explodes: ―I wish you all could hear

yourselves…I‘d be worried about him too, but I worry less about him making his mark in

the world if I knew he got a chance to get a good education. You‘re all talking just like

white people do about bussing. The only reason they talk that way is to cover up for the fact

that they don‘t want to go to school with us.‖ The notion of proving yourself to the white

population is clearly in evidence in this dialogue.184 James alludes to this motivation further

when he baits a still hesitant Michael with the provocation, ―Maybe you‘re just scared to sit

down in the middle of all those white kids and prove to them that you‘re just as smart as

they are? Are you ashamed of being black?‖ For the thirteen-year-old often referred to by

his siblings as the ‗militant midget‘, this is the provocation needed to alter his views. With

183
Bodroghkozy, 408.
184
Acham, 138.
 94

this final jab, Michael picks up his schoolbooks and brown bag lunch, heads out the front

door, past the graffiti on the bare brick walls and towards the bus stop, on a mission to

prove himself to the current white population and defy the historic structural and social

barricades adults set up long before he was born (Figure 1.25). Unlike the lazy, shiftless,

and passive teenagers in What‟s Happening!, Michael typified the point that no matter what

the living situation, education could be a tool for success and would lead some young

public housing residents to opportunities outside of their physical surroundings.

In the following episode, The I.Q. Test (22 October 1974), viewers discover that

Michael‘s decision proves to be a good one. The action shifts four years into the future as

the Evans family prepares a celebration for Michael‘s high graduation. Staring at her

reflection in some shimmering festive baubles purchased for the occasion, Florida tells

James, ―Honey, we are flying and I‘m enjoying the ride. Michael just graduated. Thelma

doing well in high school. Even J.J.‘s getting by.‖ With these words, Florida alludes to the

mobility inherent of the Evans family, as well as her and James‘ involvement in their

children‘s success – an agency and flexibility that effectively disentangles Moynihan‘s

stagnant ―tangle of pathology‖ narrative. Borrowing from Oscar Lewis‘ notion of the

―culture of poverty,‖ Moynihan argued that the inner city African-American community

was comparatively autonomous and resistant to any kind of change. By this, Moynihan

means that low-income families created a culture that became an impediment to social

mobility because it exposed children to a matrilineal form of family life that threatened to
 95

become self-perpetuating.185 In contrast, Florida and James are not only happily married but

also actively engaged in ensuring that their children valued education and hard work.

In his book, Race, Space, and the Politics of Public Schools, U.S. education scholar

John L. Rury describes the actions of some Cabrini-Green parents who harbored similar

educational aspirations to Florida and James. During the 1960s and 1970s, ―Sit-ins and

boycotts, mass marches, and meeting with political leaders were tactics employed in a

struggle to improve conditions in Chicago‘s public schools,‖ writes Rury.186 Indeed, by the

late 1960s, the NAACP, the Chicago Defender, the Urban League, and the Coordinating

Council of Community Organizations joined Chicago‘s concerned parents in their criticism

of the public school system. Beyond calling for improvements in regular educational

programs, these organizations united in their desire to make black history and pride a

central component of future public school curriculums. As historian Anne Meis Knupfer

notes in her chapter ―Schools as Sites of Activism,‖ African-American public housing

residents pioneered curricular change in Chicago public schools to promote pan-Africanist

intellectual principles.187 Kunpfer quotes Anne Riley, a former resident of Cabrini-Green,

who invokes a Black Power stance proclaiming, ―It wasn‘t just about the kids learning

something. It was about them learning the right thing. The right history.‖ 188 Thus, the

struggle for conditions in schools connected with a broader Civil Rights-induced fight for

the recognition of black self-consciousness and cultural identity.

185
Frank F. Furstenberg, ―If Moynihan Had Only Known: Race, Class and Family Change in the Late
Twentieth Century,‖ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 621, 2009:
100.
186
Rury, 117-142.
187
Anne Meis Knupfer. The Chicago Black Renaissance and Women's Activism. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2006.
188
Knupfer, 2006.
 96

Later in The I.Q. Test the viewer discovers that a similar sense of racial pride and an

awareness of black history motivates Michael‘s ambition. After arriving home for his

graduation party, Michael informs his parents that the party is cancelled since he has been

suspended from school. Through a fraught exchange between the sixteen-year-old, Florida

and James, the viewer learns that Michael‘s punishment was the result of his purposely

walking out of a government assigned I.Q. test. Confronting her son, Florida shouts,

―Michael! You might just have mucked up your whole future, flunking that IQ test!‖

Michael identifies the root of his dissent when he responds, ―But Mom! That IQ test was

nothing but a white racist test. This test was given by white people, made up by white

people and even graded by white people. It doesn‘t tell you how smart you are, just how

white you are. That‘s why the average black score is 15 points lower than the average

white.‖ Michael substantiates his argument with an example of the kind of question asked

during the exam: ―A mother and father and two children live in a five bedroom residence.

The mother and father live in one bedroom and each of the children has a room to

themselves. How many guest bedrooms are left? Now how many kids in the ghetto even

know what a guest bedroom is? The black community is different, it has a different

language and culture altogether.‖ Michael‘s objection derives not from the issue of whether

he and fellow Cabrini-Green classmates‘ posses the ability for simple subtraction, but in the

culturally biased and racist nature of the government‘s IQ test. For Michael, who shares the

pullout sofa bed in the living room with his brother, this line of questioning serves to

highlight the ideological chasm separating families like the Evans‘ from the powers that be,

while simultaneously reinforcing the white cultural norms against which the Evans family

struggles.
 97

After finally agreeing with their son, Florida and James decide to go to the Chicago

Test Board offices to dispute the results of Michael's test. After a dowdy secretary escorts

them into a plush uptown office, Michael‘s parents are greeted by a man too busy

crunching numbers to listen to their argument (Figure 1.26). When Florida tells the official

of Michael‘s plans to go to law school, the man--referred to by his secretary as Mr. M--

responds smugly, ―The odds against that are very bad and unrealistic. The lad can‘t

possibly get that far. The percentage of black youths who reach college is 6.3%. Now on to

graduate school is only 4.7.%. And onto law school is 1.6% and passing the bar...‖ When

Florida and James offer to show Mr. M an IQ test written specifically for African-

Americans, the official just shakes his head, refusing to engage with his visitors, the huge

wooden table functioning as a physical and ideological barrier between the characters. With

this unrelenting stream of data and defeatist attitude, Mr. M becomes a televisual

personification of his real life namesake, Mr. Moynihan. In his report, the politician

displays his abstracted and abstruse understanding of black youth:

A prime index of the disadvantage of Negro youth in the United States is their
consistently poor performance on the mental tests that are a standard means of
measuring ability and performance in the present generation…Eighth grade
children…have a median IQ of 87.7, which means that perhaps a third of the
children are scoring at levels perilously near to those of retardation.189

The social scientist‘s strict reliance on 1960's census data, graphs and statistics in his report

was a point of contention for many observers. As Christopher J. P. Sewell writes, ―Like the

WPA narratives collected in the 1930s and 1940s, the people who collected the survey data

were not necessarily pursuing all of the correct information or going to all of the places that

they needed to go. There were often discrepancies due to the fact that many of the

189
Moynihan, 1965.
 98

interviewers were white and did not necessarily get an accurate view of the lives of these

former slaves, due to the ages of the interviewees and their discomfort when speaking with

white interviewers.‖190 Indeed, much like the WPA Slave Narratives—criticized by many

historians including Henry Louis Gates for the over-editing practices of Federal Writers‘

Project workers—Moynihan‘s methodology served to frame participants in a way that

reflected a white, male (governmental) worldview, rather than the whole truth.191 A 1974

New York Times article identified the damaging nature of biased testing on children like

Michael, noting, ―75 percent of the black children in classes for the retarded did not belong

there.‖192 Good Times expands this bounded reading of black educational prospects when,

following Mr. M‘s frenzied number crunching, the computer explodes in a blaze of smoke

and fire (Figure 1.27). Emerging through the mist Florida erupts, ―All people aren‘t

statistics you see. You know something because you come from one culture. I know

something because I come from another culture. How are you going to know where I‘m at

if you haven‘t been where I‘ve been?‖193 To recall Michael‘s earlier critique, ―The black

community is different. It has a different language and culture all together‖ (my emphasis).

For the Evans family, African-Americans should not be judged against a white cultural

190
Also, in several places, Moynihan uses the term non-white, including his many graphs, which could
include other groups that are not African American. While his findings spoke specifically about the
African American population, his terminology leaves room to question if the data only included this
particular subsection of non-white. Christopher J. P. Sewell, Responding to the Moynihan Report, 1965:
Representations of the African American Family on Television in the 1970s and 1980s. Ph.D. Thesis,
Williamstown, Mass: Williams College, 2005: 18.
191
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Charles T. Davis, eds. The Slave's Narrative. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985: 50-51.
192
―California Judge Extends Ruling Against I.Q. Tests,‖ The New York Times, 29 November 1974: 53.
193
Just five weeks after the episode first aired, a Federal judge in San Francisco ruled that standardized IQ
tests were culturally biased and banned their use on African-American students in California public schools
for the purpose of placing them in special education classes. Robert L. Williams, History of the Association of
Black Psychologists: Profiles of Outstanding Black Psychologists, Bloomington, Indiana: Authorhouse, 2008:
211.
 99

norm; rather they should embrace their cultural difference. Hall problematizes the ―eternal

search for either ―authentic‖ media representations of ―blackness‖ or accurate reflections of

African-American social and cultural life,‖ by arguing instead for representations of black

cultural ―difference.‖194 Hall elaborates:

However deformed, incorporated and inauthentic are the forms in which black
people and black communities and traditions appear and are represented in popular
culture, we continue to see, in the figure and the repertoire on which black culture
draws, the experience that stands behind them… black popular culture has enabled
the surfacing, inside the mixed and contradictory modes even of some mainstream
popular culture, of elements of a discourse that is different—other forms of life,
other traditions of representation (my emphasis).195

The concluding scene in The I.Q. Test makes textual reference to this ―difference‖

by returning to Michael‘s graduation party, the centerpiece of which is a painted a portrait

of Michael as the Supreme Court Justice. Resplendent in archetypal scholarly robes and

toting a law book, the ―differentiation‖ occurs in the color of the ceremonial dress; instead

of traditional black, Michael‘s future self wears a vivid purple hue (Figure 1.28).196 On one

level, this is just another in a long line of ways in which Michael uses his dress to

differentiate himself as a model of black culture and pride. Unlike his bomber-jacket

wearing classmates, Michael often wears a fatigue jacket emblazoned with the black, green,

and red Afro-American nationalist flag that flew during the 1960s in revolutionary

opposition to the Stars and Stripes. The ―militant midget‖ wields revolutionary rhetoric and

Black Power sentiments to challenge Florida and James' older ideas of what it means to be

black in a white society, while forcefully celebrating his own African-American heritage.

On another and far more complicated level, Michael‘s purple coloration—framed within
194
Hall, 1993.
195
Hall, 1993.
196
Like the authenticity connoted by the black and white photographs, J.J.s oil paintings carry with them the
weight of history and integrity.
 100

JJ‘s artwork--reflects the broader ideological ambitions of the show and its desire to re-

frame, and make ―different‖ televised representations of African-American life. In

producing a ―discourse that is different‖ within one of television‘s most familiar and

longstanding genres--the sitcom--Good Times becomes a vital example of how black

culture can incorporate a genre at the same time as alter it.197 As discussed earlier, this

‗same‘ and yet ‗different‘ agenda not only speaks to the presence of an African-American

family on the network primetime landscape, but also functions as a fierce critique of those,

like Mr M., who dismiss or underestimate the potential of young, African-American public

housing residents, as well as those who deny black bodies their presence and voice in the

broad schema of world politics.198 In other words, Michael challenges rather than

reproduces white supremacy through his distinctive racial epidermal schema.

This painting as a racialized embodiment of success--housed within the painterly

frame within a frame (of the television set)--acknowledges and re-imagines the real

collective bodies for whom this image (and the show) embodied. In framing the body as a

space, and moving through space and time, J.J.‘s temporal incarnation of future black

success is loaded with the responsibility to remind the other thirteen-year-old males who

comprised U.S. public housing communities that difference and plurality fill their futures,

rather than deficiency. Thus, Good Times becomes one of the shows to which Herman Gray

refers when he writes, ―In shows that engage the cultural politics of difference within the

sign of blackness, black life and culture are constantly made, remade, modified, and

extended. They are made rather than discovered, and they are dynamic rather than

197
Bodroghkozy, 410.
198
As of 2010, only two African-American‘s, Thurgood Marshall (1967-91) and Clarence Thomas
(1991-ongoing), have served as justices on the Supreme Court.
 101

frozen.‖199 Good Times frees black life from Moynihan‘s space of fixity, re-imagining the

dialectic of the body and world for a present and future Cabrini-Green.

This re-imagination depended upon a knowledge of and engagement with the

audience of Good Times. Letters written by audience members during its first and second

season suggest that the show became an important discursive and institutional space since it

served as a vehicle for intertextual and autobiographical dialogue for African-American

public housing residents. In the following section I consider the show‘s discourse with the

audience over the issue of the representation of gang crime. While Season One‘s The

Crosstown Buses Run All Day, Doodah, Doodah and the I.Q. Test focused on issues inside

the home and classroom, the sophomore season built upon the political momentum

generated in these early episodes, breaching the walls of the Evans‘ apartment, emerging

into Cabrini-Green and the real-life concerns of many watching at home. Here, in the city

streets of the Near North Side, Lear et al attempted to discredit Moynihan‘s final, and

perhaps most damning, indictment of African-American life, which links the city‘s

spiraling crime rates to the poverty of many of its black residents.

Round Four: “The combined impact of poverty, failure, and isolation among Negro youth
has had the predictable outcome in a disastrous delinquency and crime rate.”

The special two-part episode, The Gang (12 November 1974) covers the real

problem of local street gangs within Chicago‘s public housing during the 1970s. In contrast

to previous episodes, which, as I have already described, rarely leave the apartment, the

show opens with J.J. and his friend‘s Sylvester and Tyrone emerging from an elevator onto

199
Gray, 90.
 102

the windswept breezeway directly outside the Evan‘s front door. Shot against graffiti and a

panoramic view of the projects beyond, this alternate physical setting marks a significant

entry into an episode that deals with the real dangers lying wait outside the sanctuary of the

Evans‘ apartment (Figures 1.29 & 1.30). Cornering his ‗friend‘ J.J. against a red brick wall,

Sylvester demands that the seventeen-year old take part in a planned fight that evening

between their gang, the Satan‘s Knights, and their archrivals, the South-Side based

Warlords. After a reluctant J.J. makes a feeble excuse about having an emergency dental

appointment, Tyrone spits, ―You cop out tonight, instead of going to the dentist, you‘ll be

able to mail in your teeth. When we get finished wiping out the Warlords, Satan‘s Knights

are going to be the baddest gang in Chicago. They put a hurting‘ on us last time. Fifteen

Satan‘s Knights stretched out and two dead.‖ ―Two dead?‖ responds J.J. holding two

shaking fingers in front of his eyes (Figure 1.31). ―Yeah, two dead. We‘ll see you later,‖

say Sylvester and Tyrone in chorus, before dramatically turning their backs on a petrified

J.J.. Unlike Michael‘s swift and victorious emergence through the Evans‘ front door at the

end Crosstown Busses Run All Day, Doodah, Doohdah, this dramatic four-minute-long

opening scene poses very different questions about how teenage residents use the space of

public housing: Do they head out into the world of educational success like Michael or do

they follow Moynihan‘s depressing reading of ―Negro youth‖ and fulfill the ―predictable

outcome‖ in the form of ―disastrous delinquency and crime‖? Caught off-guard, the live

studio audience—more used to the comfort of witty domestic banters—responds to this

serious dilemma with a subdued ripple of nervous laughter. Their anxious hum not only

hints at the groundbreaking nature of the show to follow, but also implies the possibility
 103

that certain audience members identify with J.J.‘s predicament and the episode‘s subject

matter.

The decision facing J.J. was one that confronted many teenage public housing

during the 1970s. In the same year as The Gang aired, the Los Angeles Times published an

article reporting that, ―juvenile arrests for major offenses—homicide, rape, robbery,

aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and auto theft—have increased 270% in the last 10

years.‖200 A report released by The Washington Post in 1977 corroborated this

investigation, stating, ―Crimes by children – those under 18 – have been growing at a

higher rate than the juvenile population. According to FBI data, arrests for children for

serious crimes – murder, assault, robbery, rape – have jumped about 200 percent in the past

15 years.‖201 Despite there being little evidence to suggest that inner-city African-American

teens were the biggest perpetrator of these crimes, Moynihan makes this claim in his report,

writing: ―Negroes represent a third of all youth in training schools for juvenile delinquents.

It is probable that at present, a majority of the crimes against the person, such as rape,

murder and aggravated assault are committed by Negroes…In Chicago in 1963, three-

quarters of the persons arrested for such crimes were Negro,‖ and so on and so forth.202 The

politician undoes the credibility of this racialized reading of the nation‘s crime by

concluding his tirade with the worrying caveat, ―There is, of course, no absolute evidence

(to support these claims), inference can only be made from arrest and prison population

200
Bill Hazlett, ―Juvenile Gangs: Violence and Fatal Assaults on Increase,‖ The Los Angeles Times, 14
April 1974: A1.
201
Urie Bronfenbrenner, ―The Calamitous Decline of the African American Family,‖ The Washington
Post, 2 January 1977: 65.
202
Moynihan, 1965.
 104

statistics.‖203 Indeed, in their analysis of the links between violent crime and neighborhood

population changes in Chicago between 1970 and 1990, Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Robert J.

Sampson argue that African-Americans were inaccurately associated with neighborhood

homicide rates during this time due to black population gain and white population loss.

Blacks could simply ―not escape from the proximity to homicide, as the highest population

increases were recorded at the periphery of the ghetto where both violent crime and the

proximity to crime increased over time.‖204 In place of context or accuracy, Moynihan

points the finger of blame at his old adversary, the African-American family structure,

arguing that a ―tendency‖ towards crime stemmed from the impact of paternal absenteeism

on black youth, especially males. Family breakdown vis-à-vis paternal absenteeism, argued

the politician, left black males "emasculated under their mother's care. With no strong

father figure to help nurture and develop these young men, they turn towards delinquency

and crime.‖205 Riven with prejudiced conjecture, Moynihan‘s analysis failed to

acknowledge the agency of black youth and the presence of supportive and overseeing

family structures within inner-city African-American families.

Like Michael before him, with the support of his parents, J.J. refuses to succumb to

Moynihan‘s questionable assumptions. Following the opening scene of The Gang, the

camera departs the dreary breezeway, cutting to an interior shot of the apartment‘s window,

through which it travels, eventually arriving on the darkened streets of Chicago‘s Near

North Side (Figure 1.32). Like a breath of fresh air, the camera‘s ‗outside-inside-outside‘

route serves to reinforce the importance of J.J.‘s home life in his decision making process.
203
Moynihan, 1965.
204
Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Robert J. Sampson, ―Violent Crime and the Spatial Dynamics of
Neighborhood Transition: Chicago, 1970-1990,‖ Social Forces, September 1997, 76(1): 31-64.
205
Moynihan, 1965.
 105

‗Outside‘ we find the Evans parents walking home, arm in arm, following a rare trip to the

local movie theater. To their surprise, Florida and James intercept the Satan Knights and a

hesitant J.J. on their way to the gang fight. After persuading J.J. not to participate in the

planned violence, a scuffle ensues between J.J. and the leader of Satan‘s Knight, Mad Dog

(Oscar DeGruy). In the midst of the fracas, a member of the rival gang shoots J.J. in the

shoulder, thus concluding the first of the show‘s two parts. In contrast to Moynihan‘s

assessment, Cabrini-Green did not drag J.J. into a ―tangle of pathology‖ – in his resistance

to violent behavior, he refuses to become a statistic. As this scene demonstrates, this

opposition derived in large part from the presence of a strong father figure and a stable

home life, a situation Moynihan regarded as the exception rather than the rule in urban

African-American families.

Like his televisual alter ego, J.J., the standup comic and actor Jimmy Walker drew

strength from his home life to resist the social ―pathologies‖ present when growing up in

the low-income neighborhood of Morris Heights in the South Bronx. In an interview with

TV Guide in 1974, Walker states, ‖I‘ll tell you about Morris…There were like 20 guys I

hung out with on the street. Five of ‗em were dead before they were old enough to vote.

The rest of ‗em? If they aren‘t in the slam, or ‗away for a rest‘ someplace else, they‘re still

on the street, hustlin‘. And drinkin‘, smokin‘, shootin‘, snortin‘, sniffin‘. Sure, I did all

those things. I went away for a little rest too. How did I make it out of there? I was a punk

kid. A coward. Plus my Dad would have killed me.‖206 With his father‘s encouragement,

Walker resisted a life of crime, opting instead to channel his energy into a career on the

206
Rowland Barber, ―No Time for Jivin‘: Jimmie Walker really goes to work after he stops acting,‖ TV
Guide, 20 December 1974: 30.
 106

stage. Through the federal program Search for Education, Evaluation, and Knowledge

(SEEK), which served as an educational bridge between high schools and colleges, he

entered into the field of show business via stints with a local station, WRBR and a militant

poet troupe, The Last Poets, before joining the cast of Good Times in 1974.207 Walker,

much like fellow cast member Esther Rolle, drew inspiration from his living environment

to foster successful life choices.

Happily ensconced within the safe confines of the apartment is where we find the

Evans‘ at the end of The Gang. As J.J. hobbles in to join his family around the television set

wearing a red jump suit, the studio audience erupts in approval with hoots, claps, cheers

and shouts of ―Right on‖ – a response not only to his ridiculously humorous dress, but also

to his resistance to gang culture. The fact that the program was produced live-on-tape in

front of an audience, along with the lack of a ―fourth wall‖—the imaginary ―wall‖ at the

front of the stage and an aesthetic holdover from the theater--encouraged this kind of

audience participation.208 The audiences encouraging response to Good Times reflected in

its Nielson rating, which was seventh by this point in its second season (1974-1975), with a

twenty-five point eight percent share of the network primetime audience.209 This success

was, in large part, due to the show‘s engagement with its African-American audience. A

spring 1976 survey of fifteen urban areas throughout the U.S. by the audience measurement

firm Arbitron, found that Good Times was the sitcom most favored by African-
207
SEEK is a state-sponsored higher education opportunity program of the City University of New
York. The Program's special admission standards allow access to Lehman College and other CUNY
senior colleges for students who do not meet traditional admission requirements and who fit particular
economic criteria. SEEK students receive academic support including counseling, tutoring, and
specialized academic courses, as well as supplemental need-based financial aid.
<http://www.lehman.edu/students/seek/> (accessed 12 October 2010).
208
Butler, 95.
209
Tim Brooks and Earie Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows 1946-
Present, New York, NY: Ballantine, 1981: 929.
 107

Americans.210 A 1974 article by Eugenia Collier entitled ―Black Shows for White Viewers‖

corroborated these results by compared two of the highly rated television series featuring

African-Americans in prime time. She concluded that NBC‘s Sanford and Son (1972-77)

was appealing because viewers could laugh at weak people in order to feel good about

themselves, whereas viewers of Good Times laughed with strong survivors.211 Thus, the

audiences‘ lavish applause was a vocal acknowledgement that the situation discussed

during the previous episode was one with which a real inner-city black family could relate.

Like the cameras journey through the vaudevillian curtain of the Evans‘ picture window,

the show negotiated the space between the socio-political reality of the time and the

television screen.

The show‘s television set became an important narrative prop in this regard. Placed

firmly at the front of the stage--in the space between the live studio audience and the

―show‖—the television set was a metaphorical portal via which Good Times attempted to

negotiate representations of Chicago‘s public housing residents through dialogue with the

show‘s viewers (Figure 1.33). Not only did Lear actively involve the show‘s African-

American actors in the creative process, he also modified scripts based on feedback from

viewers either in the live shooting or watching on the couch at home.212 In a Washington

Post interview from 1974, Rolle described residents‘ involvement in the making of The

Gang: ―(Lear and the writers) had to work on that one for a year. Lear brought in focus

210
The survey was conducted between April 21 and May 18, 1976. Arbitron compiled market reports
from television diaries kept by selected families across the country. Norman L. Friedman, ―Responses of
Blacks and Other Minorities to Television Shows of the 1970s About Their Groups,‖ Journal of
Popular Film and Television, No. 1, 1978: 88.
211
Collier, 1974: 209.
212
Powers, 36.
 108

groups and people from Cabrini Green to make it realistic.‖213 The positioning of the

television set serves to establish the Evans‘ as the index of viewers identification, situated,

as Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow have argued, as ―a citizen in a world of

communication.‖214 As Thomas Cripps and others have argued, the genre of situation

comedy is significant because its humor relies upon, and is in response to, issues and

problems found within the audiences‘ social, cultural and political reality.215 Hence, as

media scholar Jacqueline Bobo argues in her book chapter ―The Politics of Interpretation,‖

in a medium where African-Americans are often burdened by political and scholarly labels

and assumptions, engagement with one‘s audience reception helps to free up a fluid and

hybrid space of identity and subjectivity, thereby ―giv(ing) voice to members of the

audience who otherwise would not be considered.‖216 Fundamentally, the television in

Good Times serves as a means of establishing the immediacy of the television image—the

Evans‘ watch ―what we watch as we watch the immediacy and democracy of television.‖217

Thus, when Lear killed off the much-loved character of James Evans at the end of

the fourth season following a series of rows over pay and script quality, John Amos, fellow

213
Trescott, D1.
214
Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, ―Television: A World in Action,‖ Screen, Vol. 18, No. 2,
Summer 1977.
215
Thomas Cripps, ―Amos ‗n‘ Andy and the Debate over Racial Integration.‖ In Critiquing the Sitcom:
A Reader, ed. Joanne Morreale. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell, 2003; Melvin Patrick Ely, The
Adventures of Amos „n‟ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon, Charlottesville, VA:
University of Virginia Press, 1992; Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for
Blackness, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995; Leslie B. Inniss & Joe R. Feagin,
"The Cosby Show: The view from the black middle class.‖ Journal of Black Studies, 25 (6), 1995: 692-
711; Linda K. Fuller, The Cosby Show: Audiences, Impact, Implications, Westport, CT, Greenwood
Press, 1992; Justin Lewis & Sut Jhally, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth
of the American Dream, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992.
216
Jacqueline Bobo, ―The Politics of Interpretation: Black Critics, Filmmakers, Audiences,‖ In Black
Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992: 73.
217
Mick Eaton, ―Television Situation Comedy.‖ In Popular Television and Film, ed. Tony Bennett.
London: British Film Institute, 1981: 31.
 109

actors, black organizations, and viewers erupted in blaze of critical antiphony.218 One of the

most vocal critics was Pluria Marshall, then chairperson of the Washington, DC-based

lobbying group, The National Black Media Coalition, and a former resident of Chicago‘s

public housing. Citing a Howard University survey of eighty-four black children in

Washington, D.C., Marshall launched a letter writing campaign to the show‘s producers

urging Norman Lear and CBS to ―restore the father so as not to give ‗new roots‘ on

television to the stereotype of the fatherless black family.‖219 According to Marshall, black

children ―desperately need positive black male images.‖220 In the social imagination of

some members of the Cabrini-Green community, James‘ departure was certainly akin to

bereavement. A viewer, identified as J.F. writes:

I was really sad when they took him off the air. It was interesting how they felt the
need to take the father completely out of the picture…There are black families that
do not have fathers that are there. But they felt the need to take the father out of the
picture completely, make the mother the head of the household. That was a reality
but not my reality.221

The creative personnel who worked on the series felt a similar sense of

disappointment and loss. Judy Ann Mason, one of the show‘s black writers, states, ―I did

218
Norman Lear released John Amos from his contract in September 1976. In a 2004 article in Vibe,
Amos states, ―There‘s a big misconception that I left the show, but actually I was fired. Good Times
creator Norman Lear told me, ―The show has been picked for another season, but you won‘t be with us.‖
He said the production staff regarded me as a disruptive factor. And that came from me fighting for the
script quality. The writers got tired of their lives being threatened and me threatening to bend parts of
them that don‘t bend. So they killed the character off.‖ Indeed, the relationship between Lear and Amos
was, according to the producer, ―quite abrasive.‖ When Amos left the show, a special two-part episode
aired to begin the fall of 1976, the fourth season of Good Times. Several hours before the taping, Lear
received a death threat. If he showed up to the taping, his life would be in jeopardy. An undaunted Lear
went to the taping without bodyguards, and proceeded to warm up the audience as always. Omoronke
Idowu-Reeves, ―Daddy‘s House,‖ Vibe, Vol. 12, Issue 10, Oct 2004: 84; Joan Ryan, ―Amos: Bad
Times,‖ The Washington Post, 4 May 1976, B10; Geoffrey Cowan, See No Evil: The Back-stage Battle
over Sex and Violence in Television, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979: 227.
219
Mark Anthony Neal, ―Baby Mama (Drama) and Baby Daddy (Trauma): Post-Soul Gender Politics,‖
Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, New York: Routledge, 2002: 66.
220
Jacqueline Trescott, ―Good times and hard times,‖ Washington Post, 2 November 1976: C1.
221
Robin R. Means Coleman, African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating
Racial Humor, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000: 170.
 110

what I could (to keep James) but it was too late. They killed the family when they killed

that father. The show died when James Evans died.‖222 The most tragically facet of Amos‘s

exodus from the series was that the first black television family with a strong male head

was now without a father. In an interview with film historian Rick Mitz, Amos reveals the

importance placed on the medium of television and the role of the patriarchal black family

within the notion of positive images:

The only regret I would have about leaving Good Times is that it might mean the
show would revert to the matriarchal thing—the fatherless black family. TV is the
most powerful medium we have, and there are not enough positive black male
images.223

The death of James turned the Evans‘ into that resounding sociological category: the

single parent, female-headed household. Nonetheless, concerned viewers continued to

fight for the re-introduction of a strong father figure, writing letters of protest to the

show‘s producers and the black periodicals. Television became a resource and a culturally

productive space that some viewers appropriated and shaped for their own meanings and

uses; in other words, a vehicle through which public housing residents could represent

themselves.

Sadly, however, letters went unheard and John Amos‘ and Pluria Marshall‘s fears

for the show‘s future proved well founded as just two weeks into the fourth season

Michael became a caricature of Moynihan‘s ire, succumbing to the gang pressure that his

older brother had studiously avoided just two seasons previously. In the episode Michael

the Warlord (13 October 1976), viewers discover a terrified Cabrini-Green community

held to ransom by a rampaging street gang named the Warlords. When Florida discovers

222
Mason quoted in E! True Hollywood Story: Good Times, originally broadcast 2000, E!.
223
Rick Mitz, The Great TV Sitcom Book, R. Marek Publishers, 1980: 318.
 111

Michael‘s Junior Warlords jacket hidden in the stove, she says, ―Oh how I wish James

was here. There would be no way on the world Michael would be in a gang.‖ Rolle felt a

similar sense of disillusionment to her character, ultimately deciding to leave the series in

1977, telling the New York Daily News, ―They‘re not interested in the poor images that are

being put across to the young viewers.‖224 Rolle publicly identified the employment of

white writers, Jack Elinson, Norman Paul and Allan Manings, in place of Eric Monte and

his team of black writers, as the reason behind the show‘s new disempowered depictions.

The new writer‘s eliminated markers of black ‗authenticity‘ and the sociocultural needs of

black public housing residents, moving the buffoonish character of J.J. into the show‘s

lead role. In a 1975 interview with Ebony magazine Rolle stated:

He's eighteen and he doesn't work. He can't read or write. He doesn't think. The
show didn't start out to be that...Little by little—with the help of the artist, I
suppose, because they couldn't do that to me—they have made J.J. more stupid
and enlarged the role. Negative images have been slipped in on us through the
character of the oldest child.225

In James‘ absence, there was no one to temper J.J.‘s simmering idiocy and the show

descended into a representational disaster, with plots revolving around the teenager‘s antics

and schemes. A modern day caricature of Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones replaced the once

relatable seventeen-year-old who resisted the temptation to join a gang due to the influence

of his father.226 Film historian Donald Bogle called J.J.‘s character a ―coon,‖ saying he was

as ―unreal as Sunday morning cartoons,‖ while historian J. Fred MacDonald, in his

historical look at African-Americans in U.S. television, places J.J. firmly within what he

224
George Maksian, ―Esther: Good Times Going Bad,‖ New York Daily News, 25 October 1977: 102.
225
―Bad Times on the Good Times Set,‖ Ebony, September 1975.
226
J Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: Afro-Americans in Television Since 1948, Chicago Il:
Nelson Hall, 1983: 185.
 112

calls ―the age of new minstrelsy‖ of 1970s black comedies.227 Several articles published

during the doomed fourth season of Good Times identify J.J.‘s animalistic sub-human

physical traits: An L.A. Times article characterizes him as ―a kind of black pogo stick with

great rolling eyes and a mouthful of gleaming teeth, described by his little brother as ―an eel

with shark‘s teeth,‖‖228 while a TV Guide review states, ―He has the neck movement of an

automatic sprinkler, and the bulb-eyed glare of an aggravated emu.‖229 His face, with big,

rubbery lips and bulging eyes, was used to comedic effect with repeated use of close-ups to

emphasize his buffoonish mugging.230 In an interview for the Marlon Riggs documentary

Color Adjustment, even Lear confessed that while some of the audience laughed at J.J.‘s

antics, his love of Kool-aid and his repeated cries of his famous catchphrase ―Dy-no-mite!,

the show ―erred by giving them too much and not stopping sooner.‖231 As J.J. clothes got

crazier, the political resonance of the show began to fade away and the show gave way to

racist, repressive representations characteristic of times gone by. Furthermore, without the

careful guidance of his father, J.J. like Michael, resorted to stealing, or, as he jokingly

referred to it, ―finding things,‖ instead of seeking regular employment - a shift in narrative

that effectively sentenced J.J. to the life of ―disastrous delinquency…poverty, failure, and

isolation‖ described in the Moynihan Report.

227
David Bogle, Prime Time Blues: African Americans on Network Television, New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 2001: 201-2.
228
Cecil Smith, ―Florida Moves to Chicago via CBS,‖ The Los Angeles Times, 8 February 1974, E25.
229
Rowland Barber, ―No Time for Jivin‘: Jimmie Walker really goes to work after he stops acting,‖ TV
Guide, 20 December, 1974: 29.
230
Bodroghkozy, 419.
231
Marlon Riggs, Color Adjustment, California Newsreel, 1992.
 113

The End of Good Times

In the following three seasons, Good Times began a gradual critical descent, which

culminated in a disastrous 1978-79 season when it became one of the least watched shows

in the CBS schedule.232 The producers and writers tried to revitalize the show by providing

Florida with a new love interest, but the move was unsuccessful, while the introduction of

new characters failed to enliven the show. Yet, sensing this sheer desperation, viewers

began to turn off in droves. In 1978 Good Times dropped to fifty-eighth in the Nielson

ratings, shedding thirty slots through its shift into a single-parent world, a move that forced

CBS to cancel the show at the end of its sixth year.

Although Good Times left screens in 1979, the show‘s cultural influence is felt in its

influence on sitcoms including The Jefferson‟s (CBS, 1975-85), Different Strokes (NBC,

1978-85), The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984-92), A Different World (NBC, 1987-93), and

Family Matters (ABC, 1989-98), although none were as ground breaking in their depictions

of the African-American way of life as Good Times was in documenting the trials,

tribulations and laughter of the Evans‘. The influence of the show even stretched overseas

in the form of the British TV show The Fosters (ITV, 1976-77), which followed the

exploits of a black family living in a high-rise council housing block in South London. Like

its American counterpart, The Fosters was the first British sitcom on television to feature an

all black cast. The importance of Good Times prevails today – in 2006 cast members Ralph

Carter, BernNadette Stanis, Jimmie Walker, John Amos and Ja‘Net Du bois, accepted the

Impact Award for being ―a show that offered both entertainment and enlightenment, always

striving for both humor and humanity, with comedy that reflected reality‖ at the Fourth

232
Campbell, 129.
 114

Annual TV Land Awards.233 A 2008 article in Jet paid homage to the legacy of Good Times

noting, ―What TV‘s ―Brady Bunch‖ was to White America is what ―Good Times‖ is and

still remains to Black America—family.‖234 Yet, the show‘s legacy is perhaps felt most

strongly by public housing residents themselves, for whom the televised activities of the

Evans‘ came close to encapsulating their reality. In March 2010, BerNadette Stanis

(Thelma Evans), who grew up in the Vandyke public housing project in Brownsville, New

York, became the National Spokesperson for the National Public Housing Museum, (which

I will discuss in detail in the Conclusion). Hosting a fundraiser for the museum titled ―An

Afternoon of Good Times,‖ Stanis told current and past public housing residents, "I want to

show that although you come from poverty you can still have wealth within you, you can

still be the person you want to be and you can still dream the dreams you want to

dream…Good Times told ‗our story‘ – and we are the sum of our stories and we must fight

for this legacy."235 It is the trace evidence of resistance that Good Times leaves behind—the

message that Chicago‘s public housing residents should continue to fight for what is ‗ours‘

and to contest and challenge mainstream media and political imaginings of their home—

that will remain its legacy.

Despite its faults, the history surrounding the making of Good Times reveals that

primetime television could provide a venue for the exploration of previously unrepresented

aspects of African-American family life. In this sense, the battle was, without a doubt, won.

233
Margena A. Christian, ―Where is the Cast of ‗Good Times‘?,‖ Jet, 28 January 2008: 32.
234
Christian, 32.
235
―An Afternoon of Good Times: with BernNadette Stanis aka ―Thelma‖ from Good Times and Tony
Allen of the Boston Celtics,‖ Press Release by the Public Housing Museum, 31 March 2010.
 115

CHAPTER 2

From SuperOther to SuperMother: The Journey towards Liberty

On the evening of February 25 2007, twenty-five year-old Jennifer Hudson

stood on the stage of Hollywood‘s Kodak Theater to accept her Academy Award for

Best Supporting Actress in Dreamgirls and urged people, ―like her,‖ to ―keep the

faith.‖ As back stage interviews would later reveal, Hudson aimed this motivational

call-to-arms at audience members who, ―like her,‖ grew up in public housing. Alluding

to the determination of fellow project residents, the actress told interviewer Ryan

Seacrest, ―We…go through our journeys, trying to hold on to our dreams and achieve

our goals. We have hardships but we prevail at the end.‖ For Hudson, all roads led

back to her mother‘s public housing neighborhood in Chicago. Addressing a television

audience of millions, the actress paid tribute to her mother, Darnell Hudson Donerson,

a single parent from the Southside Englewood project, saying, ―Chicago is my home

and my reality. I come home and I have to stand in line like everybody else. My

mother taught me that.‖1 Talented, confidant, dignified, and not in the least bit

shameful, Hudson‘s public declaration of pride in her mother--voiced on the archetypal

world stage of Oscar night--stands in stark contrast to damning late twentieth-century-

sociological and political imaginings of single mothers from public housing.

While the 1960s and 1970s were marked by Daniel Patrick Moynihan‘s

controversial matriarchy thesis, conservative cultural theorist and political scientist

1
Dave Hoekstra, ―Living the Dream: Jennifer Hudson brings truth and clarity to ‗Dreamgirls‘ role,‖
Chicago Sun-Times, 16 December 2006.
 116

Charles Murray dominated 1980s understandings of African-American women with

his infamous and influential critique of the American welfare system, Losing Ground

(1984). Murray‘s book argued that liberal social welfare programs like Aid for

Dependent Children (AFDC), aimed specifically at inner-city blacks, encouraged the

rise of what he calls a ―culture of poverty.‖2 By making it economically feasible for

single mothers to remain unmarried, he argued, welfare increased the incidence of out-

of-wedlock childbirth, thus hastening the decline of inner-city communities through

unemployment. According to Murray's formulation, welfare did not ameliorate the

devastation of poverty; on the contrary, it encourages it. Instead of empowering

people, it created a dangerous dependency on government aid, a process that drained

their energy and destroyed their initiative, thereby preventing them from acquiring the

productive skills they need to achieve success in America's market economy. "We tried

to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead," Murray lamented.3

Consequently, the sociologist proposed denying unwed mothers child support

payments from nonresident fathers since, in his eyes, solo mothers should be fully

responsible for any children they bear ―in an age where contraceptives and abortion are

freely available.‖4 An unprecedented publicity campaign provided by the conservative

sponsors of Murray‘s research, the Manhattan Institute, ensured that Losing Ground

2
Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, Basic Books, 1984: 60.
3
Murray, 9.
4
Welfare reform proposals, including H.R. 4605, the Work and Responsibility Act of 1994: Hearings
before the Committee on Ways and Means and its Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House of
Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, second session, July 14, 26, 27, 28, 29; Aug. 9 and 16,
1994.
 117

became a cause célèbre for many journalists and politicians alike.5 The book was the

subject of dozens of major editorials and reviews in publications such as Newsweek,

The Dallas Morning News, and The New Republic, culminating with a 1985 New York

Times article, which called it "This year's budget-cutters' bible.‖ In the federal

Executive branch, the newspaper reported, "'Losing Ground' had quickly become holy

writ: In agency after agency, officials cite the Murray book as a philosophical base" for

proposals to slash social expenditure."6

Indeed, Murray‘s policy prescriptions found a rapt audience in the form of the

Reagan Administration‘s conservative government. Reagan‘s oft-repeated 1984

anecdote about a lazy, irresponsible, breeding ―welfare queen‖ who takes public funds

to support a lavish lifestyle, encapsulated the sentiment of the administration, while

Murray‘s graphs and economic data filled in the factual gaps, helping to supply an

evidence base for political and public support for welfare reform.7 Mobilized by

associated appeals to the reputed unfairness of social policies such as quotas,

affirmative action, and special treatment extended to African-Americans and other

communities of color, Murray and Reagan were instrumental in influencing efforts to

5
Before the publicity campaign began, President of the Manhattan Institute and Murray‘s chief patron,
William Hammett, informed his colleagues "any discretionary funds at our disposal for the next few
months will go toward financing Murray's outreach activities." Hammett then mailed out over 700
copies of the book to academics, journalists, and public officials, sent Murray on a national speaking
tour (funded by $15,000 grant from the Liberty Fund) and he raised another $10,000 to "gather twenty
of the nation's leading scholars from both the conservative and liberal camps, along with some of the
best writers on the subject, for a two-day discussion," according to an internal memorandum. Well-
known columnists and other members of the media were paid between $500 and $1,500 a piece to
participate, something that was unheard of at the time, and remains extremely rare.
6
The New York Times editorial page, February 3, 1985.
7
Naming or ―marking‖ became crucial to the racial ―othering‖ of African-American women. Like the
―mammy,‖ the ―matriarch,‖ and the ‖jezebel‖ before her, the ―welfare queen‖ of the 1980s functioned as
racialized moniker of social irresponsibility, deviance, dysfunction and obsolescence.
 118

reform and eventually eradicate the welfare state.8 In 1996, some twelve years after the

release of Losing Ground, the government replaced the AFDC program with

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). TANF distanced itself from its

predecessor through its strict eligibility criteria, and in the fact that families were

restricted to a maximum of five years of support on the program. The rhetoric needed

to influence these changes depended largely on the effectiveness of a shift in the

political language from a focus on the poor recipients of state sponsored support to an

emphasis on taxpayers - the white suburban middle class. Under the Reagan

Administration, the African-American single mother came to represent a moral

abnormality and an economic drain.9

A slew of subsequent sociological and political scholarship continued in this

destructive vein, alternatively identifying solo mothers as ―unwanted by everyone

around them,‖10 a seeping ―contagious‖ infection,11 or as ―cancerous‖ individuals who

―(breed) criminals faster than society can jail them.‖12 Synonymous with deviancy and

sickness, single parents became mythical symbols of a moral failure, dismissed to the

edges of societal acceptance, an ideological ocean far removed from Hudson‘s Oscar

stage. While various academic, political, and journalistic commentators contributed to

8
Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995: 17.
9
Wahneema Lubiano. ―Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by
Narrative Means.‖ In Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas,
and the Social Construction of Reality, ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992: 338.
10
E.B. Kaplan, Not Our Kind of Girl: Unraveling the Myths of Black Teenage Motherhood, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997: 18.
11
Elijah Anderson, ―Neighborhood Effects on Teenage Pregnancy.‖ In The Urban Underclass, ed.
Christopher Jencks & Paul E. Peterson. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1991: 391.
12
Barry Glasner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Basic Books,
2000: 9.
 119

the denunciation of single mothers during the 1980s, however, there was perhaps no

greater critic than popular culture.

Heated and problematic debates over solo mothers found their way into the

American visual imagination through sensationalized network television, daily

newspapers, and weekly magazines reports. Television, in particular, magnified

demonized imaginings of single mothers to ridiculous proportions, none more so than

the Saturday Night Live comic character, Cabrini-Green Harlem-Watts-Jackson (played

by Danitra Vance), who appeared in the show‘s 1985-1986 season. As the sole African-

American female performer on the show at the time, Vance‘s character encompassed a

hyper-caricatured cross-section of urban single motherhood. On her NBC televisual

debut, the oft-pregnant seventeen-year-old relayed the fateful moment she told her

mother she was expecting another baby:

So, I'll never forget this one day - I was at home, my momma was fixing some
corn bread, black-eyed peas, candied yam with neck bones and some Kraft
Macaroni & Cheese. I said, "Hi, Momma, you wanna hear a joke? I'm pregnant."
She said, "How did that happen?" I said, "How am I supposed to know how that
happened? You never told me nothing about things like that, the school don't
teach us about things like that, you're asking me how that happened? How'd that
happen? How'd that happen?... Er, Momma, can I have a smoke?‖

As a foul-mouthed, disrespectful, smoking, welfare-dependent singleton, Cabrini-

Green-Harlem Watts-Jackson parodied the conservative voting public‘s worst

nightmare.

Despite the character‘s obvious comicality--born out in the chorus of howls that

greeted this disenchanted monologue—beneath the whimsy, there exists an

uncomfortable undercurrent of prejudiced realism. In Jokes and their Relation to the

Unconscious, Freud emphasized that a joke is a projected form of social

 120

communication. He suggested that jokes provide socially acceptable means of

permitting social taboos, and, hence, their enjoyment derives from the expression of

desires that are normally inhibited. In finding the Cabrini-Green-Harlem-Watts-Jackson

character ‗funny,‘ the audience implicitly accepts certain unambiguous, stereotyped

assumptions about welfare-dependent single mothers generally. Comforted by the socio-

political ‗cleverness‘ of the joke (or what Freud called the ―joke-work‖), the Saturday

Night Live studio set provided a safe, bounded space in which one could be elevated free

from demands of pity or empathy, instead replacing this emotion with spiteful mockery.

Freud suggested that this ―economy of pity‖ can be ―one of the most frequent sources of

humorous pleasure.‖13 More worryingly, this expression suggests that audience

members might make the same assessments during election season, within the similarly

darkened realms of the ballot box. Vance, an acclaimed stage actress, recognized the

uncomfortable fact that sometimes a joke isn‘t ‗just a joke.‘ After a season of playing a

single mother welfare recipient, a drug addict, an alcoholic, and a maid, Vance chose to

leave the show, expressing great frustration at the limited range and vision of the roles

she was offered. Saturday Night Live‘s presentation of quasi-tempered racist humor—or

its meta-language—encapsulates a complex and dissembling rhetoric, which feeds into

late twentieth-century public fears surrounding the urban pathologies of single mothers.

Furthermore, Vance‘s imperial-sounding name, Cabrini-Green-Harlem-Watts-

Jackson, encapsulates the fears of many conservative-voting audience members. Taken

separately, Cabrini-Green (Chicago), Harlem (New York), Watts (Los Angeles), and

Jackson (Mississippi), geographically locates each U.S. city‘s most notorious public

13
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991: 295.
 121

housing projects. Famous for high rates of unemployment, drug dealing, endemic

crime, welfare dependency, and single parent households, these high-rise subsidized

housing projects amount to the roll call of what The New York Times mockingly called,

―America‘s Least Wanted‖ housing projects.14 Taken together, within the context of

Vance‘s quad-barreled character name, they encapsulate a wider and far more

worrying threat--the pervasive national spread of the single mother ―infection‖; a

countrywide geography of abnormality, where, as historians Peter Stallybrass and

Allon White note in their analysis of urban representations, ―the axis of the body is

transcoded through the axis of the city.‖15 In other words, not only is Cabrini-Green-

Harlem-Watts-Jackson a resident of public housing, but she is also a single mother, a

dynamic that works to conflate environmental notoriety and solo motherhood into a

single dystopian mantra. The companion image to this rhetoric is Murray‘s ―culture of

poverty‖ thesis, which focuses on women‘s living and reproductive practices as the

transmission belt that drives the cycle of inner-city pathology. Subject to this

ideological mystification, the character‘s existence came to symbolize a kind of

―multiple jeopardy.‖16 Sociologist Deborah King first conceived of this term as a way

to articulate the multiplicity of gender, sexual and racial repressions that can hinder an

individual‘s life. In the case of Vance‘s Saturday Night Live character, this barrage of

oppression is, again, firmly rooted in her name, Cabrini-Green-Harlem-Watts-Jackson:

effectively, the single mother is public housing. In her racial, educational, marriage,

14
―America‘s Least Wanted,‖ The New York Times, August 14, 1989: B2.
15
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1986: 145.
16
Deborah K. King, ―Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist
Ideology.‖ In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist thought, ed. Beverly Guy-
Sheftall. New York: New Press, 1995: 297.
 122

and environmental deficiency, Saturday Night Live‘s dangerously ‗humorous‘

characterization of a slothful ‗baby-factor‘ mother came to represent the ultimate

―(m)other.‖

While many 1980s television programs promoted such destructive

representations of single mothers, a revisionist characterization found its way into the

pages of the four-issue comic book mini-series, Give Me Liberty: An American Dream

(1990).17 Produced by the American comic book creator and Sin City (2005) director,

Frank Miller, and the British comic book artist, Dave Gibbons, Give Me Liberty

chronicles the lifelong adventures of Martha Washington, a Cabrini-Green resident and

child of a single mother. Despite never directly acknowledging their name choice in

any interviews or publications, Miller‘s and Gibbons‘ decision to christen Washington

after Martha Dandridge Curtis Washington, the wife of the first president of the United

States, George Washington, serves as a vital component in her characterization. Even

those of us with only the most remedial understanding of colonial America, understand

Martha Washington as an honored, even revered character, well-known for devotedly

supporting her husband during revolutionary campaigns for U.S. freedom. Less well

know, and therefore far more intriguing, are Washington‘s views on slavery. Martha

and her husband owned and managed at least one hundred and fifty black slaves during

their marriage. Despite the relative leniency of the then national capital, Philadelphia‘s,

attitude towards the freeing of slaves during the late seventeenth-century, Martha

17
Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, Give Me Liberty: Homes and Gardens, Vol. 1.; Give Me Liberty:
Travel and Entertainment, Vol. 2.; Give Me Liberty: Health and Welfare, Vol. 3.; and Give Me Liberty:
Death and Taxes, Vol. 4.; Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 1990.
 123

adamantly refused to free her personal slaves during her lifetime.18 This alternative

biography lends the title of the series, Give Me Liberty, a certain ironic significance.

Historians attribute ―Give Me Liberty‖ to a speech given by Patrick Henry at Virginia

Convention on March 23, 1775, the beginning of the American Revolution.19 After

urging his fellow Virginians to arm in self-defense, at the same time as shirking their

own dependence on black slaves—a practice he considered to be a ―lamentable evil‖—

Henry closed his appeal with the immortal words: ―I know not what course other may

take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.‖ In answer to Henry‘s stirring

rhetoric, Give Me Liberty re-imagines the young, African-American Martha

Washington of Cabrini-Green as an empowered individual capable of deciding her

own future—she becomes a First Lady for the twenty-first-century.

Set in the near future, the epic series of stories follow Martha from her birth in

1995 in a decrepit inner-city hospital, to her death in 2095 as a lauded war hero. The

turning point of Washington‘s heroic tale occurs on the eve of her seventeenth birthday.

Disgusted by the hideous poverty she, her mother, and two brothers are forced to endure

in Cabrini-Green due to the corrupt and inept economic policies of President Erwin

Rexall, the teenage Washington decides to join a fictitious military group called the PAX

Peace Force, a reinvented U.S. army. Here, Washington attempts to thwart the

President‘s megalomaniacal control in a series of bloody, hard-fought adventures.

Overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, she defeats Rexall, emerging as a

notorious and highly respected superhero. Through the historico-political association of

18
Patricia Brady, Martha Washington: An American Life. New York: Viking, 2005.
19
Charles Cohen, "The ‗Liberty or Death‘ Speech: A Note on Religion and Revolutionary Rhetoric,"
The William and Mary Quarterly, 1981, 38 (4): 702–717.
 124

her name, Martha Washington‘s success speaks to contemporary real-world political

claims-to-agency for young black women. Indeed, as a young African-American female,

Washington not only re-scripts the familiar trope of the white male superhero, but also

offers an alternate vision of the children of urban single mothers. Washington excels in

physical strength, leadership skills, and intelligence, endowments which contest political

scientist James Q. Wilson‘s assertion that, ―The children of single moms are more likely

than those of two-parent families to be abused, to drop out of or be expelled from school,

to become juvenile delinquents, to take drugs, and to commit adult crimes.‖20

Washington‘s struggle for civil, legal, political, and tenants‘ rights offers an alternate

model for understanding the actions of poor female public housing residents, in a way

that affirms and supports single mothers instead of objectifying and humiliating them.

This chapter examines the resilience at the heart of Washington‘s character as a

way to highlight the determination and political motivations of a ―real life‖ Chicago

public housing ―superhero,‖ community activist, journalist, and single mother, Beauty

Turner. Like her fictive alter ego, Turner experienced extreme poverty and violence at

a young age. Rather than destroying the teenage project resident, however, these

hardships provided her with strength and a desire to resist injustice towards her fellow

Robert Taylor Homes residents. The self-appointed ―writer and a fighter‖ found her

weapon not in a gun, like Washington, but in a typewriter. Until her premature death in

December 2008, Turner worked as a journalist with the Chicago public housing

newspaper, Residents‟ Journal, and later as assistant editor of another project-based

20
James Q. Wilson, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture has Weakened Families, New York, NY:
Harpercollins, 2003: 8.
 125

newspaper, South Street Journal. In addition to her journalistic achievements, Turner‘s

fame stems from her now infamous thirteen-year old ―Ghetto Bus Tour‖ of the city‘s

gradually shrinking public housing neighborhoods.21

The Ghetto Bus Tours began in 1995 as casual and informal trips into

Chicago‘s public housing developments in order to give those unfamiliar with the

projects a taste of what life in the developments was like. Once the CHA began to

demolish public housing high-rises in the late 1990s, however, the tours gained

additional social and political significance. Driven by a desire to educate as many

people about life in subsidized housing and the controversial social effects of the Plan

before it was too late, Turner intensified her advertising campaign for the tour by

appearing on local radio stations and setting up a website, as well as increasing the

frequency of the tour schedule. To the chagrin of many local politicians who would

rather the buildings were razed and forgotten than explored and commemorated, the

tour attracted a wide audience, curious to see a place they‘d hereto only encountered

via attention-grabbing newspaper headlines or cinema screens. Initially drawn in by

Turner‘s poetry-slam style of address and eccentric personal style (she nurtured a

much-publicized penchant for animal-print clothing and bright red lipstick), the five-

hour-tour exposed visitors to the uncomfortable reality of the Plan—mismanaged

relocations and rushed demolitions, for example—as well as an enduring tight-knit

community structure, at odds with the preconceptions of many on the tour.

21
The tour costs $20. The money goes to We the People Media, Residents‟ Journal‘s non-profit
publisher.
 126

I joined Turner, her sister Maple Hardy, and Ron Carter, the editor of the South

Street Journal, on the Ghetto Bus Tour during the summer of 2008. We travelled

throughout the city‘s South Side, from churches, to abandoned mom and pop grocery

stores, past Quincy Jones‘ alma mater DuSable High School, and into the homes of

single mothers who raised their children in the projects. The Ghetto Bus Tour aims to

highlight the day-to-day maneuvers and political mobilization of single mothers who,

in their activism, strive to resist the implementation of the Plan. In her lifelong

struggle to puncture the stereotypes of inferiority and non-productivity regularly

attached to single mother public housing dwellers and welfare recipients, Turner

emerges as a real life ―supermother.‖

In order to chart both Turner‘s and Washington‘s individual journeys towards

―superness,‖ this chapter follows a chronological trajectory. Beginning with

Washington‘s birth and early struggles in Chicago‘s Cabrini-Green housing project,

the comic charts her subsequent experiences in life, culminating in her eventual death.

Frank Miller characterizes the sequential nature of Washington‘s story in the following

terms, ―She journeyed from housing-project prisoner to drugged-out victim of an

insanity ward, from soldier to explorer to savior of the world, to mother of a new

generation worthy of your name.‖22 Gibbons exploits the inherently dialectical nature

of Give Me Liberty by inserting dates between panels—2002, 2003, and 2007—a

technique intended to chart a movement in time and focus (Figure 2.1). The inclusion

of dates also has implications for the believability of the narrative. As comic book

22
Frank Miller, ―Introduction.‖ In The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First
Century, ed. Diana Schutz. Milwaukee, Oregon: Dark Horse Books, 2009.
 127

aficionado Will Eisner notes, ―A comic becomes ―real‖ when time and timing is

factored into the creation. In music or other forms of auditory communication where

rhythm or ―beat‖ is achieved, this is done with actual lengths of time. In graphics the

experience is conveyed by the use of illusions and symbols and their arrangement.‖23

Turner, meanwhile, approached the Ghetto Bus Tour from a noticeably

autobiographical perspective, relating the sequence of stops on the tour to a variety of

life experiences. Turner describes her journey in life in similar terms to Miller‘s

assessment of Washington, stating, ―I moved from being a victim of abuse, to

homelessness, to community organizer, and journalist for the Residents‟ Journal and

South Street Journal.‖ The historical linearity of Turner‘s tour locations enforces the

temporal movement of her life trajectory, as well as the characteristics of endurance

and survival common to many Chicago‘s public housing residents. Taking this

narrative cause and effect arc as my guiding philosophy, this chapter documents the

chain of events that led Washington and Turner to achieve their Liberty.

Martha Washington

Martha Washington‘s challenging start to life is made unmistakably clear in

the opening few pages of the first installment of the Give Me Liberty series, Homes

and Gardens (1991). Dominated by frenetic scenes of domestic, gang and police

brutality, the comic locates Cabrini-Green as a stage for oppressive environmental

obstacles. Black smoke billows from broken windows, canary yellow graffiti tags
23
Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art, Taramac, FL: Poorhouse, 1985: 138; Scott McCloud,
Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form, New York:
Harper, 2001: 24.
 128

stating simply ―NO‖ puncture exterior walls, and street signs bearing the projects

instantly recognizable name appear to crack under the weight of a mysterious pressure

(Figure 2.2). To reinforce the familiar trope of inner-city pathology, Gibbons and

Miller cast Washington as the child of a single mother. A blood-splattered sequence of

five small panels documents her father‘s death at the hands of violent armed police

while protesting poor living conditions in Cabrini-Green, just one year after her birth.

Over a series of three lower-tier panels, Washington‘s narrative voice explains:

DAD DIED IN A PROTEST AGAINST THE GREEN. DAD SAID THE

GREEN‘S A PRISON FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVEN‘T DONE ANYTHING
WRONG. THEY CALL IT SOCIAL WELFARE BUT DAD CALLS IT A
PRISON. IT‘S GOT BARBED WIRE LIKE A PRISON. AND THEY
SHOOT YOU IF YOU TRY AND GET OUT. NOBODY EVER GETS OUT.
NOT EVEN WHEN THEY‘RE DEAD.

Washington‘s abrupt emphasis on certain words (protest, green, prison, wrong, social

welfare, barbed wire, shoot, out) functions as a kind of staccato heartbeat. This

breathless, almost strangulated indictment of her home—compounded by the inclusion

of a tombstone in the final panel of the page—effectively sentences Washington to a

life of pain in the ―prison‖ of Cabrini-Green.

This opening theme of environmental trauma reaches a crescendo in the next

few pages as a now seven-year-old Washington must run for her life, pursued by a

crazed pedophile, through muddy labyrinthine alleyways, past syringes, crowds of

drug-addled homeless people, and puddles of lime green vomit (Figure 2.3).

Alternating between tiny close-up fragments of Washington‘s wide-eyed face and

narrow elongated panels showing the attacker closing in on our terrified hero,

Gibbons‘ compressed ―breakdowns‖—defined as the blocking out of the visual

 129

perspective and time of action for each panel--enhances the rising tempo of panic and

evokes the feeling of mental and physical confinement (Figure 2.4).24 This is an out of

kilter city space, full of secret hiding places, characterized by a netherworld of jaunty

perspectives, skulking shadows, and monstrous inhabitants of the night. When

Washington manages to hide from her enemy in a disused locker-room, Gibbons‘ gilds

the scene in a sickly seafoam green, petrifying public housing with the omniscient

specter of death (Figure 2.5). The green color bleeds into her body like an infection, an

artistic strategy that implies that her living environment has consumed her - she is

Cabrini Green. This frenetic opening section serves to establish the environmental

obstacles that Washington and real public housing residents like Turner must contend

on a daily basis.

In its almost celebratory emphasis on nihilistic despair, the comic also

illustrates the vice-like dystopian hold of late twentieth-century mass-media

representations of single mothers from public housing. Projected into our living rooms

every evening, televisual manifestations of single motherhood came to define, clarify,

and solidify a social boundary--who belongs and who does not. A useful example of

this border control can be found in the form of CBS‘s 1986 documentary, The

Vanishing Family – Crisis in Black America.25 Presented by media analyst Bill

Moyers, the show reports on the social changes caused by the disappearance of two-

parent black families in Newark, New Jersey‘s inner city public housing

neighborhoods. Following a muted introductory sequence featuring the crumbling

24
Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman and
Harvey Pekar, Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1989: 22.
25
Bill Moyers, The Vanishing Family – Crisis in Black America, Columbia Broadcasting System
Special Report, 1986.
 130

exteriors of project buildings, the camera cuts to an ominous statement, which asks the

viewer, "What happens to families when mothers are children, fathers don‘t count, and

the street is the strongest school?" As the text fades out, we find Moyer seated opposite

seventeen-year-old public housing resident and welfare recipient, Clarinda Henderson,

a solo mother for two years, who justifies her single status with the defiant, ―I

wouldn‘t want no man holding me down.‖ A stony-faced Moyer then turns to ask the

father of the child, Darren Lyell, aged eighteen and no longer a presence in the child‘s

life, what he does with his days: ―Making babies and stuff. Making babies,‖ responds

the sullen teenager. With these fateful final words, the credits role against a darkened

lingering image of a smirking Henderson, a visual effect that effectively situates the

emotionally charged figure of the black female body as the central protagonist in this

drama.

In his seminal investigation of black televisual representation in the 1980s,

Watching Race, Herman Gray argues that such racialized imagery was central to ―the

consolidation of a conservative cultural and political hegemonic block.‖26 Network

television positioned Reagan‘s discourse at the forefront of national political and

public debate, ―staging‖ a version of ―blackness‖ that maintained, promoted, and

circulated conservative agendas. Gray describes this era in television in the following

terms:

Race and visual representations were at the very core of the new right‘s largely
successful efforts to establish a rightward shift in the political, cultural and social
discourse. This discourse established the foundation for matters ranging from the
economy to morality (Edsall and Edsall, 1991; Hacker 1992; Johnson 1991; Katz
1989). The ―sign of blackness,‖ its discursive production, contestation, and

26
Gray, 14.
 131

mobilization, was an essential element of the political and cultural realignments

that helped to stage and install the neoconservative hegemony referred to as
Reaganism (Edsall and Edsall 1991). 27

One of the primary agendas of Reagan‘s rhetoric--and the television shows

that propagated his idiom—was to focus debates on individual character and personal

responsibility. In stigmatizing the single mother as the cause of her own poverty and

that of African-American communities, television shows like The Vanishing Family

helped to shift the angle of vision away from structural sources of poverty by blaming

the victims themselves. Thus, Henderson‘s televisual image of single motherhood

provided ideological justification for Charles Murray‘s interest in limiting the fertility

of African-American mothers who are seen as irresponsibly producing economically

unproductive children, and eradicating the welfare system. In 1991, some seven years

after the release of Losing Ground, Murray expressed this extreme solution to the

―problem‖ of single mothers while appearing as a guest on ABC's This Week: "If all

else fails...if they fail to take responsibility in the form of…abortion, contraception…I

say resort to orphanages. That would be my solution, if all else fails.‖28 Murray‘s

suggestion that the government should control the reproduction of low-income women

condemns single mothers as the moral property of the State, as people who need to be

sanctioned and punished for the crime of poverty. In threatening to remove women‘s

reproductive autonomy, the image becomes one of the public sphere invading that

which is private—of the state scrutinizing and interfering with a women‘s ultimate

right to control her own body. The argument that welfare is an incentive to illegitimacy

27
Gray, 14.
28
ABC News, This Week, 28 November 1993.
 132

links children to potential ‗vices‘ of their parents, thereby subjecting blameless infants

to the moral and emotional impoverishment of life in care.29 In Murray‘s mind, single

mother‘s irresponsibility rendered them the responsibility of the government. Despite

mounting endemic, structural inequality, institutional racism, and economic

restructuring, in Murray‘s simple ―pull yourself up by the bootstraps‖ morality play,

the eradication of social welfare programs that fed children and housed working

families, as well as extreme reproduction control measures, would ultimately benefit

single mothers.

Later in the same interview, Murray invokes another conservative talking

point by suggesting that single mother‘s unthinkingly ―waste‖ public money on

frivolous expenses and that the only fair solution ―for us‖ would be to ―get rid of the

whole welfare system, period, lock, stock and barrel.‖30 Notwithstanding the ludicrous

suggestion that one could be frivolous when considering that in 1991 welfare for single

mothers amounted to less than one would earn on the federal poverty level, Murray‘s

text is significant for the way it frames single mothers as modern-day social pariahs

threatening to deplete white bank balances with their high-taxation welfare needs. On

average, in the post-World War II political economy, one of every three African-

American families qualified as officially poor. With such high-levels of black poverty,

welfare state policies supporting poor African-American mothers and their children

have become increasingly and undeniably expensive. Thus, as Gray argues, Murray‘s

references to ―waste‖ and to ―you‖ play against historic and racialized discourses about

29
Matthew A. Crenson, Building the Invisible Orphanage: A Prehistory of the American Welfare
System, Harvard University Press, 2001: 327-8.
30
Murray, 1993.
 133

welfare at the same time they join law-abiding taxpayers to an unmarked but

normative, idealized racial, and class subject — hardworking whites.31 By

emphasizing the public costs attached to single motherhood, Murray, again, helped

justify the eradication of the liberal welfare establishment. This representation amounts

to what sociologist Patricia Hill-Collins terms ―controlling images‖ of African-

American womanhood, designed to ―reflect the dominant group‘s interest in

maintaining Black woman‘s subordination.‖32 Furthermore, in asserting that such cuts

are the only ―fair‖ solution ―for us‖—This Week‟s white interviewer and the white

middle-class viewers sitting at home—Murray defines the racial and class fault lines

that run through his rhetoric: Just as the single mother threatens to drain the public‘s

purse by siphoning off valuable resources from the state, she also simultaneously

ensures its moral and social survival because, as Hill-Collins notes, ―those individuals

who stand at the margins of society clarify its boundaries. African-American women,

by not belonging, emphasize the significance of belonging.‖33

In other words, by positioning and constructing African-American single

mothers as irresponsible economic drains, Murray and Reagan‘s discourse labored to

highlight the ‗superior‘ values of the white, middle-class, and, in particular, their

accepted ‗norms‘ of monolithic family life. The ―family,‖ as I discuss in greater length

in the previous chapter, is an intrinsically ideological category. The rhetoric of

―disorganization,‖ ―disintegration,‖ ―deterioration‖ serves to reify one type of living

31
Gray, 17.
32
Patricia Hill Collins, ―Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images,‖ Black Feminist
Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, London, UK: Routledge, 2000:
70.
33
Collins, 70.
 134

arrangement—the ideal type of bourgeois nuclear family—as outside history, as if

decreed by a natural law.34 Typically portrayed as single, the welfare mother defies the

primary tenet of white male-dominated ideology: She is a solo woman with no male

authority figure to assist her. As a result, her handling reinforces the dominant gender

ideology positing that a woman‘s true value and financial security should occur

through heterosexual marriage. This moralistic ―them‖ and ―us‖ rhetoric is illustrated

in Moyers‘ documentary by the presenter‘s repeated assertion that, ―there‘s been a

startling change in values‖ in the Newark neighborhood that was the focus of the

documentary, a variation that has produced ―a world turned inside out.‖35 As

sociologist Sharon Elise identifies, ―Teenaged mothers are those mothers who are too

young, too poor, not educated, not married, and not employed. Thus teenage mothers

are defined from a deficit perspective by their distance from the normal or ideal mother

who is the right age, the right class, and is mothering under the right circumstances,

which includes heterosexual marriage.‖36 More distressing—at least for the white

middle-class conservative voter--was the possibility that African-American single

mothers might infiltrate and influence their nuclear white homes with their pathology.

This much is made patently clear in Murray‘s 1993 Wall Street Journal article, ―The

Coming White Underclass,‖ which warns white Americans that ―their‖ (African-

American‘s) rising illegitimacy rate threatened to spread to white neighborhoods the

same crime, drugs, and ―drop out from the labor force‖ that ―infected‖ urban black

34
Adolph Reed, Jr., ―The Underclass as Myth and Symbol: The poverty of discourse about poverty,‖
Radical American, Vol. 24, January 1992: 33.
35
Moyers, 1986.
36
Sharon Elise, ―Teenaged Mothers; A Sense of Self.‖ In African American Single Mothers:
Understanding Their Lives and Families, ed. Bette J. Dickerson. Sage Series on Race and Ethnic
Relations, Volume 10, Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995: 56.
 135

communities.37 When coupled with intense televisual scrutiny and constant media

bombardment, this ―epidemic model‖38 of inner-city pathology helped to solidify a

Reaganite agenda during the 1980s, ensured that, in their educational, moral, and

cultural deviation from accepted societal norms; African-American single mothers

became the ultimate ―super-other.‖

Give Me Liberty manipulates the reader‘s view of public housing in order to

define the societal parameters solidified by these late twentieth-century media outlets.

Gibbons achieves this via shifts in the reader‘s physical vantage point, a technique

Eisner terms ―aspect-to-aspect‖ transition.39 Following the documentation of

Washington‘s father‘s death, several panels chart the movement of a police helicopter

approaching a building clearly recognizable as the massive high-rise Cabrini-Green

Extension North (Figure 2.6). The comic book equivalent of a filmic zoom, the shifting

viewpoints of the panels resemble camera cuts in cinema and television. The reader

views the helicopter and the public housing building to which it is headed, from below,

then from above, and then again from below (Figures 2.7 & 2.8). Moving at a frantic

pace, these quick disconcerting jumps in point of view serve partly to heighten concern

about public housing as a scene of crime surveillance, but perhaps more importantly,

37
Charles Murray, ―The Coming White Underclass,‖ Wall Street Journal, October 29 1993.
38
Sociologists Christopher Jenks and Susan Mayer conceived of the ―epidemic model‖ to demonstrate
the social dynamics that occur within neighborhoods. They argue that when a child‘s neighborhood
peers engage in a certain type of behavior, the child will be socialized into engaging in such behavior:
―Socialization mechanisms tend to conceive of individuals as (relatively passive) recipients of powerful
socializing forces, suggesting that neighborhoods mold those who grow up in them into certain
behavioral patterns.‖ Christopher Jencks and Susan Mayer, ―The Social Consequences of Growing Up
in a Poor Neighborhood.‖ In Inner-City Poverty in the United States, ed. Laurence Lynn Jr. and Michael
McGeary. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1990.
39
―Aspect-to-aspect‖ is the term coined by Scott McCloud to describe a kind of transition in panels that
―sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a place, idea or mood.‖ Scott McCloud, Understanding
Comics: The Invisible Art, Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993: 72.
 136

to place the reader at an impersonal distance; we see buildings not as the residents see

their homes (from the inside) but from a peripheral, intermediate, and neutral bird‘s-

eye-view. As Eisner acknowledges, ―Looking at a scene from above it, the viewer has

a sense of detachment—he is an observer rather than participant. However, when the

reader views a scene from below it, then his position evokes a sense of smallness,

which stimulates a sense of fear.‖40 Spiraling between detachment and fear, these

‗above‘ and ‗below‘ shots recapitulate and reinforce the distanced way that television

shows such as The Vanishing Family (and other mass-circulation newspaper,

magazines and popular television shows) tend to view public housing and residents‘

including single mothers – from a distance and rarely in dialogue. The reader‘s

elevated vantage point serves to maintain our distance above, beyond, and superior to

public housing residents, a position that promotes the agency of the onlooker over the

looked-at. Compounding this visual attack, Gibbons avoids dialogue balloons

altogether in favor of a sound effect drawn directly inside the panels amongst shrapnel-

like falling snow. The pervasive ―WHUP, WHUP, WHUP‖ of the helicopters blades

pulse in the background like blood through an eardrum, an effect that deigns the

helicopter, and, as a consequence, those positioned outside, the only valid speakers in

this narrative. Accompanying the helicopter across several panels as it encircles

Cabrini-Green, the onomatopoetic refrain performs a linguistic and ideological

function common to outside designations of public housing – it is content to attack (or

―WHUP‖) from a distance.

40
Eisner, 92.
 137

While most interpretations of Chicago‘s public housing view and criticize the

site from the outside, in the next sequence Gibbons and Miller take the narrative one

step further by shifting the reader‘s perspective inside Cabrini-Green Extension North,

thereby provoking a dialogue with the object of intense political scrutiny and constant

media bombardment. The shots of the police helicopter give way to a view of one of

the building‘s windows, which, in turn, becomes an interior shot of Washington

attempting to sleep in a claustrophobic dorm-style bedroom. This final page of the

Homes and Gardens story shows Washington facing the reader at an intimate eye-level

perspective, looking out defiantly. At this climactic moment, the narrative refuses to

accuse the public housing resident by persisting with the arousal of our unease about

this location. In what amounts to perhaps the most poignant image of the entire Give

Me Liberty series, this symbolic final page of the first installment of Washington‘s life

history indicates a vital power shift to a personal point of view for the remainder of the

saga. Other narrative strategies serve to heighten this impending vacillation. In contrast

to earlier references to Washington, which Miller forms in a distanced, detached

second- and third-person singular form, a strategy in-keeping with her objectified

positioning within the panel frame--―She‘s black. Grew up poor. Would‘ve ended up a

junkie or a hooker…you‘ll never make the history books. You won‘t even score a

footnote‖—the writer litters this panel with the repeated use of first-person pronouns.

Along with the character‘s eye-level perspective, this technique helps to focus the

verbal text on Washington and her control (―mine,‖ ―my‖) rather than on the outside

designations. Here too, Washington has shed the green epidermis of earlier panels and

has regained her natural skin color skin. Moving from the surreptitious magic of the
 138

urban night, through the window, and into the interior of public housing, the visual

strategies in Give Me Liberty combine to signal a narrative bridge from a peripheral to

a personal point of view for remaining three issues of Washington‘s life story.

Washington‘s eye-level perspective and ―I‖ voice during the finale of the Home

and Gardens issue is of iconographic importance in that it not only indicates an

alternative narrative logic to the early distanced birds-eye-view, but it also implicates

the audience in an important paradigm shift (Figure 2.9). For cinema scholar Angela

Ndalianis, ―The notion of the ―passive spectator‖ as voyeur collapses when media

experiences immerse the viewer in spectacles that are aimed at perceptually removing

the presence of the frame.‖41 By looking us directly in the eye, Washington‘s intimate

reader-character identification reminds us that we are not just bystanders in this story -

this superhero is part of our world. This begs the obvious question: if Washington

looks at ―us,‖ then who are ―we‖? For many years, comic books were considered

simple power fantasies for powerless adolescents, seeking an easy escape on a lazy

Saturday afternoon.42 As Steve Neale argues in ‖Masculinity as Spectacle,‖ the near-

omnipotent abilities of the heroes allow narcissistic identification to take place for the

audience.43 Traditionally filled with juvenile humor, cosmic japeries and big-breasted

babes, the adventures of Superman, Batman et al allowed one to escape into a fictional

world characterized by colorful costumes, secret identities, and spectacular battles

41
Angela Ndalianis, ―Architecture of the Senses: Neo-Baroque Entertainment Spectacles.‖ In
Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 358-9.
42
Danny Finegroth, Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and
Our Society, New York: Continuum, 2004: 19.
43
Steve Neale, ―Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on men and mainstream cinema.‖ In Screening
the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Cohen and Ina Rae Hark,
London: Routledge, 1993: 11.
 139

between good and evil. Overall, unsophisticated tales in terms of subject matter, they

relied instead on visual excess. More recently, however, several comic book series‘

have sought to amalgamate this absurdist legacy with a political edge, combining

historical and fictional narrative. In the first full-length discussion of the unique

aesthetics of comic books as a means of creative expression and art and literary form,

Comic Books as History, Joseph Witek writes:

A growing number of contemporary American comic books are being written

as literature aimed at a general readership of adults and concerned, not with the
traditionally escapist themes of comics, but with issues such as the clash of
cultures in American history, the burdens of guilt and suffering passed on
within families, and the trials and small triumphs of the daily workload.44

One need only look to Art Spiegelman‘s Maus: A Survivor‟s Tale for prime example

of this critical conflation of real world political subject matter and the graphic

medium.45 Maus is a biography of the author‘s father Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew

and Holocaust survivor. The story alternates between descriptions of Vladek‘s life in

Poland before and during the Second World War and Vladek‘s later life in the Rego

Park neighborhoods of New York City. Spiegelman distinguishes Maus from a

traditional biography by employing various animals to represent different nationalities

and races: Jewish people are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, the British as fish and

so on. As Witek notes in his description of the work, anthropomorphized talking

animals, of course, commonly populate comics, and the Nazis have been stock villains

in comics since before World War II, but Maus combines the two elements in a

historio-political work that is as bold and shocking in visual form as it is insightful and
44
Witek, 3.
45
Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor‟s Tale, Pantheon Books, 1991. Since its two-volume release in
1986 and 1991, Maus has won the National Critics Circle Book Award (1986) and the Pulitzer Special
Award (1992).
 140

poignant in historical reference.46 This duel approach helped to attract a wide media

attention and a discerning, critical readership, one who would be willing to upgrade

from newsstand haunts and their traditionally cheap and flimsy reproduction of

commercial comic books to the realms of the bookshop and their hardback comic

books. Comic book art is, thus, a literary medium in transition from mass popularity to

a new level of respectability as a means of expression and communication for serious

stories involving real people with real-world problems.

Give Me Liberty harbors similarly politically complex ambitions for its

readership. More than a faint whiff of ludicrousness clings to this Martha‘s life story,

an effect manifest through Gibbons‘ gigantic fortresses, dazzling satellites, mile-long

spaceships, flying motorbikes, and colorist Angus McKie‘s dazzling, effects-laden

color palette, and yet, there is a contemporary political reality that underscores

Washington‘s tale. This verisimilitude becomes evident in both the comic‘s

architecture and characterization. For example, while the fictional names of

Superman‘s Metropolis and Batman‘s Gotham City help to disembody and thus temper

the violence staged within their skyscraper canyons and dank back streets, Give Me

Liberty‘s frequent inclusion of ―Cabrini Green‖ signs serves to equate the

environmental turbulence within its opening pages to a real-world location. Moreover,

while Superman copes with Metropolis‘s bank and mail-truck robbers, Washington, as

we soon find in the remainder of her adventures, operates on a sophisticated level of

political consciousness, dealing with unglamorous real-world issues like poverty,

46
Witek, 4.
 141

social repression, and government corruption. This claim to literal truth is evident first

in the attitudes of the creators themselves:

When we started with Martha, we were actually much more kind of serious, we
wanted to do something grim and gritty, and grim and political, but we actually
both realized that we were more interested in doing something that had a bit of
satirical edge to it and something that was, in many ways, absurd, because that
can be more effective in skewering things than, you know, being dead on and
very serious about it…I think that many of the concerns that we had and that
we extrapolated in 'Martha' have actually come to pass. Again, because it's
comics and because it's a work of fiction, it's kind of heightened, but I'm really
pleased that we ended up with a real resonance between Martha's fictional
world and our real world.47

As the opening issue of the Give Me Liberty saga makes clear, there were few places

and fewer people more politically resonant then the residents of Cabrini-Green during

the 1980s. Regarding the current turn towards ideological significance in comic book

narratives, cultural theorist Scott Bukatman states that, ―The traumatic body of the

superhero now signifies a traumatized reality.‖48 Thus, when Washington looks into

our eyes, she is not just asking us to look beyond our, ―but it‘s just a comic,‖

prejudice; she also asks that we look past one-note, hysterical late twentieth-century

televisual representations of the lives of single mothers--to step inside her world to see

an alternate version of this reality in the remaining three issues of the saga.

Miller throws the reader straight into the heart of this ―traumatic reality‖ at the

beginning of the second issue of the Give Me Liberty series, Martha Washington goes

to War (1994). Here, the reader discovers a now fifteen-year-old Washington as she

struggles to survive a series of horrific encounters including the brutal murder of her

47
Shaun Manning, ―Gibbons Discusses ―Martha Washington,‖‖ Comic Book Resources, 23 March
2010. <http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=25341> (accessed 10 November 2010).
48
Scott Bukatman, ―The Boys in the Hoods: A song of the Urban Superhero,‖ Matters of Gravity:
Special Effects and Superman in the Twentieth Century, Duke University Press, 2003: 125.
 142

favorite schoolteacher. The stress and horror of witnessing this event leaves her

temporarily mentally unstable and the authorities send Washington to a mental

institution. During her three-month residency in the home, the existing President Erwin

Rexall dies in a firebomb attack on the White House and the former agriculture

minister President Howard Johnson Nissen--modeled on a bizarre combination of

Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan--assumes leadership. Under Nissen‘s helm, the

government extrapolates Cabrini-Green into a roofed-in facility where nobody goes in

or out, while budget cuts force authorities to shut down prisons and mental institutions,

bringing hideous poverty and violence to city streets. These problems seem of little

concern to the alcoholic Nissen, who, driven by madness and an insatiable desire for

power, makes it his sole purpose to instigate the second American civil war. Nissen

masterminds riots, battles, and fights in every U.S. state in order to detract attention

away from his own corrupt affiliation with the outlaw Fat Boy Burger Corporation,

from whom he embezzles large amounts of money to bolster his personal fortune. In

Washington‘s absence, Chicago becomes a city riven by internal divisions, headed to

corrupt politicians who abandon its public housing residents in a fortress-type facility

devoid of building maintenance or financial support.

Accusations of madness, alcoholism and bizarre corporate alliances aside, there

exists a certain parallel between Nissen‘s political rejection of his city‘s subsidized

housing and that of Reagan‘s time in office during the 1980s. When Nissen‘s alter-ego

Reagan came into office in 1981, he did so with a with a mandate to reduce federal

assistance to local governments by sixty percent, an ambition which would benefit

those already well-off in society and hinder the working class and poor. After just one
 143

term in office, he slashed funding for domestic programs that assisted the working

class (especially the poor), declined the wages for the average worker, and caused the

homeownership rate to fall. These changes directly affected those in public housing in

1985 when Reagan reduced federal funding for subsidized property maintenance,

rehabilitation, and construction from $35 billion to $7 billion annually. Along with

Reagan‘s funding cuts to social welfare programs, Chicago‘s public housing residents‘

were also forced to cope with internal corruption. Scandals surrounding the nation‘s

public housing owe much to the mismanagement of Samuel Pierce, Reagan's only

HUD secretary. A major 1988 review undertaken by Pierce's successor as secretary,

Jack Kemp, uncovered "significant problems" of fraud, theft, mismanagement, and

influence-peddling in ninety-four percent of HUD's budget.49 Estimated losses from

this abuse ranged from $2 billion to $6 billion, the victims of which were residents of

subsidized housing.50 Internal allegations of corruption also haunted the CHA at this

time, forcing federal officials to seize control of the authority in 1985. By the late

1980s, mismanagement and underfunding of the CHA was at such a dire level that the

authority was unable to conduct simple tasks such as collecting rent and counting the

number of occupied units.51 These economic decisions combined to render the

crumbling exteriors of Washington‘s home, Cabrini-Green, and the poverty of its

residents‘, a permanent feature of the urban landscape.

49
"Still Rising: the HUD Bill, and Smell," The New York Times, July 13, 1989: A22.
50
"Still Rising: the HUD Bill, and Smell," A22.
51
Susan J. Popkin, Victoria E. Gwiasda, Lynn M. Olson, Dennis P. Rosenbaum, & Larry Buron, The
Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago, Piscataway, New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press 2000: 179.
 144

It is into this ―traumatized reality‖ of megalomaniacal corruption that Martha

emerges when budget cuts force the closure of the mental institution, thereby releasing

her onto the streets without warning. The experience of roaming the streets she once

knew leaves Washington with a mix of horror and confusion. Her extremely emotional

response to the violence and extreme poverty in front of her throws Nissen and

Washington‘s differing character traits into plain relief--while she is honest, he is

corrupt; while he is a sleazy alcoholic, she is clean-cut; while she thinks of others, he

only consider himself. Driven by a desire to thwart Nissen‘s tyrannical control, she

spots a sign for and subsequently signs up for the fictitious military group, the PAX

Peace Force. The organization described by comic book reviewer Penny Kaganoff as a

―combination of the Marines and the Foreign Legion,‖ offers the teenage Washington

a place to fight to defend the rights of her fellow public housing residents, and to

rescue the U.S. from the brink of destruction.52

Gibbons employs various visual strategies throughout the Give Me Liberty

series to illustrate the power imbalances present in Washington‘s late twentieth-

century Chicago. A borderless panel placed soon after Washington joins PAX

illustrates the gaping ideological abyss separating public housing residents from the

government that seeks to control it (Figure 2.10). While the upper-tier panel features a

distanced blacked-out (and therefore faceless) frontal image of Washington and her

family at a decrepit make-do graveyard, the lower-tier consists of an image of the

newly elected President Nissen parading through the streets of Chicago, flanked by

military guards and festive bunting. Although compositionally similar—both face the

52
Penny Kaganoff, ―Trade Comics: Give Me Liberty,‖ Publishers Weekly, December 13, 1991: 52.
 145

viewer in a central pose—the vastly different subject matter and spatial detachment of

the borderless panel highlights Nissen‘s, and by narrative association, Reagan‘s,

involvement in the creation and maintenance of gaping social chasms during the

1980s.

While acknowledging this societal imbalance in the form of detached panels,

Gibbons carefully aligns the reader‘s sympathy for these discrepancies firmly in

Washington‘s hands. For example, Gibbons punctures Give Me Liberty with several

―splash pages,‖53 featuring pseudo-Time and –Newsweek stories which report Nissen‘s

supposed presidential success and love of the ―people‖ (Figure 2.11). Inserted at

random between panels documenting unnecessary political wars, incidences of

governmental corruption, cynical corporatism, and horrific inner-city poverty, these

glossy inclusions illustrate the controlling authority of the State, which at any point

feels able to interject and exert its megalomaniacal control. Moreover, these rose-tinted

quasi-photographic style additions function as blatant, self-aware illustrations of

―display,‖ masquerades designed to obscure the intrigues and scandals present in

Washington‘s quasi-fictional Chicago. Following a particularly sickly Era: Man of the

Year portrait of the President, Gibbons captures a powerful close-up eye-level shot of

Washington wiping tears from her eyes, soon after she joins PAX (Figure 2.12). While

compositionally similar to the faux-photographic portrait of Nissen, Washington‘s

image is a bona fide, shamelessly authentic exercise in comic book characterization. In

other words, Nissen‘s overblown faux-realism operates paradoxically to devalue his

credibility, and thus ―distance‖ or ―otherness‖ from the reader—an effect comic book

53
A splash page or sometimes referred to simply as a "splash," is a full page drawing in a comic book.
 146

scholar Scott McCloud refers to as the ―objectifying power of realistic arts.‖ In

contrast, Washington‘s simple pencil and ink characterization enhances and assists

reader-identification.54

The different types of typography that accompany each character reinforce

this sense of empathetic engagement. While the dialogue boxes and caption balloons in

which Washington plays a part are hand-lettered, computer-generated typography, or

what Eisner calls ―cold type,‖ accompanies the images of the President.55 The freehand

lettering attached to Washington‘s appearances in the story betrays the calligrapher‘s

hand and more closely approximate the idiosyncratic nuances of the human voice than

mechanically produced type, a technique that, again, helps to align her with the

reader.56 As Eisner recognizes, ―Personal calligraphy assures that no two letters will be

exactly alike and thus adds a recognizable ―human‖ quality to graphic stories.‖57 On a

similar note, while the magisterial Nissen remains mute and avoids eye contact,

Washington speaks directly at the reader; her three speech balloons repeat the defiant

mantra: ―This won‘t kill me. I won‘t die here. This won‘t kill me.‖ This syntactic,

repetitive, verbal address toward the reader drowns out Nissen‘s uncommunicative

tone, thereby engaging the audience in a dialogue regarding the government‘s

involvement in the maintenance of social injustice.

Frozen at the moment of intense anger and sadness, Washington‘s face captures

her emotional state, but her words deny stasis and continue to move forward in time and

space. Indeed, this moment of determination serves as the catalyst for Washington‘s
54
McCloud, 1993: 54.
55
Will Eisner, Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative, Taramac, FL: Poorhouse, 1996: 27.
56
Witek, 23.
57
Eisner, 1996: 26.
 147

metamorphosis into the ultimate comic book soldier, a journey that begins, not on the

streets of Chicago, but in the wilds of the Amazon rain forest. After arriving in the

Amazon on an assignment to prevent the Burger Boy Corporation from burning down

the forest to make way for a large-scale food production plant, Washington is disgusted

to learn that the aim of the mission is in fact to enable the deforestation. While her army

colleagues unquestioningly accept these orders, Washington resists the corruption that

bleeds though the PAX organization, citing parallels between the abandonment of

Cabrini-Green and the planned deforestation of the Amazon. Indeed, although never

directly addressed within the narrative, the forest provides a useful metaphor for

Cabrini-Green, an association that explains Washington‘s decision to risk her life by

defying her white male colleagues at PAX to protect the forest.

Gibbons documents Washington‘s defense of the forest in the form of a physical

fight with her commanding officer and Nissen‘s henchman, Lieutenant Moretti, across a

double-page spread of blood-curdling, graphically violent panels in the climax of

Martha Washington Goes to War (Figure 2.13). The large number of frames (twelve),

their close proximity to one another, and their shifting visual perspective, seem designed

to compress time—like a slow-motion action replay—ensuring that the viewer witnesses

the full extent of what will become a memorable victory for Washington. To heighten

the magnitude of the event, Gibbons delays Washington‘s physical domination of

Moretti until final frame of the spread. After wrenching a knife out of her opponent‘s

hand and breaking his wrist in the process, Washington straddles Moretti, who lays

crying and screaming on the forest floor. Save for the ―KRAKK‖ of the lieutenant‘s

injury, Gibbons strips the panel of all accessories, a technique designed to focus
 148

attention on the narrative importance of her triumph. Indeed, this final panel is notable

for its lack of framing border. While a requisite rectangular black line filled with

visceral, close-up action shots confine all of the previous fight sequences, the last frame

floats in the blank pure white space between borders. McCloud refers to this white space

as the ―gutter‖ and identifies it as one of the most important narrative tools in comic

architecture. The use of the gutter in this instance holds importance for the broader

ideological aims of the Give Me Liberty series and this chapter as a whole. Trapped

within the darkened pixels of The Vanishing Family documentary, television portrayed

Clarinda Henderson in a way that presented her as the cause of her own situation.

Through selected questioning, editing choices, even down to the sultry, moody lighting,

The Vanishing Family cast Henderson as a shifty, apathetic foil to Moyers‘ white male

authority figure. By emerging into the pure white space of the gutter and revealing the

questionable morals of her white male colleagues along the way, however, Washington

re-scripts such narrow framing devices, breaking out of the shackles of pathology

regularly attached to single mother families from Cabrini-Green.

When coupled with Washington‘s defeat of her main adversary--the titanic and

altogether more overpowering figure of Moretti--the absence of a frame (and the

related narrative quantum leap towards ‗openness‘)--suggest a new way of seeing and

appreciating female comic book characters. Washington quite literally wrestles the

elder statesman‘s stronghold on the heroic out of his hands – not before she takes the

chance to kick him in the balls, however! Refusing to wait in subordination for the

help of Clark Kent or Peter Parker‘s alter egos, Washington subverts and challenges

comic book gender role norms and the typical boy-rescues-girl adventure story. Nor
 149

does she assume the vapid, tousled-haired role of recent female ‗superheroes‘ like

Catwoman (Halle Berry) or Barb Wire (Pamela Anderson). Replete with a shaved

head, the costume- and make-up-free Washington adopts behaviors and a physical

appearance traditionally ascribed to men in comic books, so much so that she is often

mistaken for a man and called ―sir.‖ As Gibbons acknowledges, ―Martha is an

alternate-world version of the traditional patriarchal comic book hero, of whom the

undisputed daddy is Captain America, created in 1941 by Joe Salmon and Jack

Kirby.‖58 This statement serves as a vital acknowledgement of the high stakes at which

Martha is playing. Just as Washington shirks the traditional appearance of a female

comic character, in her journey into the pure (and symbolically white) space of the

gutter, Washington attains the kind of unrestricted mobility that Gary Engle in his

analysis of Superman‘s flying abilities, terms ―part of America‘s dreamwork.‖59 While

Superman slinks through the air, Washington now too floats into the airy space of the

gutter once reserved for only brawny, white male all-American superheroes. By

comparing Martha to Captain America—like Superman, a nationalistic and patriotic

superhero--Gibbons defines Washington‘s American citizenship. She is not longer

situated as a homogenous ―super-other,‖ on the edges of societal acceptance as she was

in the first of the Give Me Liberty series. Now she assumes a multidimensional

existence that allows her to maintain a position within a long line of respected U.S.

superheroes and remain a resident of Chicago‘s public housing.

58
Dave Gibbons, ―Chapter Commentaries.‖ In The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-
First Century, ed. Diana Schutz, Milwaukee. Oregon: Dark Horse Books, 2009: 234.
59
Gary Engle, ―What makes Superman so darned American?‖ In Popular Culture: An Introductory
Text, ed. Jack Nachbar and Kevin Lause. Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992:
337.
 150

In one of the series‘ later adventures entitled Insubordination (1995), Gibbons

pays homage to (and subverts) this comic book legacy, pitting Washington and the

archetypal red, white and blue ―superman‖ and ―super-soldier‖ Captain Kurtz in a fight

against Aryan Thrust, a terrorist group intent on destroying Philadelphia (Figure

2.14).60 Following a bloody fight with their adversaries, the comic artist pictures a

battered and listless Captain Kurtz clutching the city‘s Liberty Bell with Washington,

bruised but undaunted, to his rear. The iconographic implications embedded in this

image are clear – the patriarchal comic book hero must relinquish the super-soldier

mantle and the responsibility to defend the nation‘s liberty to a new wave of hero: a

female public housing resident. In dodging bullets, evading flaming mortar shells

firing, or taking on army tanks by herself, the aggressive, physically potent, and

intelligent Washington eliminates the cultural divisiveness present in television shows

like The Vanishing Family, showing how women can be as tough if not tougher than

their white, male opponents.

In her metamorphoses into the ultimate comic book hero, Washington not only

re-scripts stereotypes about female superheroes, but also what it means to be a resident

of the real Cabrini-Green. Over the years, many female public housing residents

traversed traditional power dynamics, refusing to remain within the restricted frame of

societal definitions of who they are, emerging victors in protests against their own

Lieutenant Moretti or Captain Kurtz. During the 1980s, inept management, inefficient

and inadequate maintenance and services, forced many public housing tenants to build

60
Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, Insubordination in Happy Birthday, Martha Washington (A Three
Part Series), Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 1995.
 151

their own political structure by becoming community leaders. Female public housing

residents worked collectively toward altering living conditions that threaten their

public housing development‘s viability. Commonly referred to amongst the

community as ―Queen Bees,‖ many female public housing residents commanded

resident management corporations, which serviced facilities such as Laundromats,

security, and day-care centers. Women‘s political struggles over the material and

spatial resources controlled by the city and the local housing authority expanded the

definition of public housing residents beyond the requisite single mother

characterization. In their research on community activism, Sara Evans and Harry

Boyte offer historical evidence that public housing ―can serve as the arenas where

people can distinguish themselves from elite (societal) definitions of who they are,

(and) gain the skills and mutual regard necessary to act as a force for change.‖61 Public

housing resident and single mother Martha Smith, who lived in the Wentworth

Gardens housing project during the 1980s, concurs with this statement, saying,

―Becoming a member of the LAC Community Development Corporation allowed me

to show what I‘m worth. We did a much better job than our male predecessors! I got

respect there. It allowed me to prove that I‘m just not holed up in my apartment all day

watching Days of Our Lives. I do things. I make things happen. We‘re not all like

we‘re portrayed on T.V.--as timewasters and drifters.‖62 A telecourse aired by PBS

Adult Learning Services between 1994 and 2000 entitled ―Low Income Women‘s

Resistance‖ sought to combating the denigrating rhetoric to which Smith refers. Part of

61
Sarah Evans and Harry Boyte, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
62
Collins, 75.
 152

a ―Women and Social Action‖ season and directed by sociologist Martha Thompson,

the documentary focuses on the organizing successes and challenges in Chicago‘s

Wentworth Gardens housing project. The accompanying study guide describes the

documentary in the following terms, ―Women and Social Action goes beyond social

theories and popular politics, offering a first-hand look into how women are

influencing society on a grassroots level. Personal stories from over seventy women

and men reveal the complexities of our lives and highlight the commitment, vision,

humor, and compassion that result in effective social action.‖63 Along with Smith‘s

valuable civic duty, this documentary inverts, contradicts, abrogates, and in some

fashion presents an alternative to commonly held homogenous ways of seeing female

public housing residents.

While many female public housing residents attempt to counter restrictive

televisual representations of social isolation and marginalization in the ―real‖ world,

Washington, makes a similar claim in Give Me Liberty, breaching the edges of panels,

elongating their clear boundaries with her fists, energy blasts, and chants. A useful

example of this desire for spatial possession occurs in a double-page spread placed

immediately after Washington‘s historic fight with Moretti. In a section of Miller‘s

story titled, Martha Washington Saves the World (1997), Gibbons features an

undeniably phallic-looking rocket blasting off into outer space leaving a broad patina

of white crayon in its wake. The effect illustrates--in the bluntest terms--the comic

equivalent of a ‗cum‘ shot and the ultimate theatricalized catharsis of victory (Figure

63
Martha E. Thompson, Women and Social Action: Teleclass Study Guide, Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt
Publishing Company, 1997.
 153

2.15). Compositionally positioned across two upwardly vectored tiers, the act of the

moving rocket not only becomes a visual quip on patriarchic limitations, but also

mirrors Washington‘s unique journey in life. Offered in ‗chunks‘ through the medium

of comic panel, Give Me Liberty links individual points on a timeline into what comic

book scholar Thomas A. Bredehoft calls an ―architecture of narration‖ – a cohesive

lesson in ‗cause‘ and ‗effect.‘64 The panel‘s accompanying text confirms this reading:

Cabrini Green and all the blood and tears and death and wars over all the years
– they‘re what I am. Everything I‘ve lived through – all the crying and fighting
and killing I‘ve done – it all adds up to something. I have to make things better.
In my own world.65

Indeed, Washington‘s physical ascension into space symbolizes her lifelong

desire to escape a series of ground-level restrictions. From the ‗prison‘ of Cabrini-

Green, to the cocoon of a school locker room, to incarceration in a mental facility, and

even the clutches of arch enemy Moretti himself, until the point where she jets off in a

space ship in Saves the World, Washington‘s life comprises of one big Venus fly trap.

As Gibbons acknowledges in his introduction to the most visually grandiose of the

Give Me Liberty series, ―It always seemed to me that one of the themes of our saga

was alternating containment and escape. Indeed, the title of the first arc itself, Give Me

Liberty, clearly stated as much.‖66 Snaking from the early life netherworld of tiny,

claustrophobic panels, to her eventual dizzyingly spiraling destiny in double-page

spreads of cosmic scenery, Washington‘s bodily movement in life and space becomes

a poetic negation of all spatial constraints. Elevated above all else, Washington exists

64
Thomas A. Bredehoft, ―Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time: Chris Ware‘s Jimmy
Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,‖ Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, Winter 2006: 870.
65
Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, Crossover, Milwaukee, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, 1995.
66
Gibbons, 432.
 154

in a ―place of weightlessness, a site that exists, at least in part, in playful defiance of

the spirit of gravity.‖67 Looking down at her adversaries with a panoramic and

panoptic gaze provides Washington with a powerful liberation from her ‗captors‘.

Michel de Certeau wrote that riding to the top of a New York skyscraper ―lifted‖ the

traveler ―out of the city‟s grasp. One‘s body is no longer clasped by the streets that

turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as

player or played, by the rumble of so many differences (my emphasis).‖68

Washington‘s rocket-like propulsion, power, and movement through and above city

space is an act of exploration, self-possession, and a freedom and liberation from the

constraints of patriarchal dictators who attempt to constrain her movement.

Kineticism has always been a key feature of the comic book genre – after all,

it is the very nature of the superhero and her ‗superness‘ to animate the spaces they

inhabit – however, Washington‘s elastic movement through space in Saves the World

is particularly unique. In addition to repeating the firing rocket motif, Gibbons

employs a number of compositional techniques and symbols in support of

Washington‘s physical and mental ascension from powerlessness to power. One such

approach is the use of motions lines or as many comic book aficionados term them,

―zip ribbons,‖ which imply the high-speed environmental effects on Martha‘s body

(Figure 2.16), or, alternatively, her bodily effect on her surrounding environment

(Figures 2.17 & 2.18).69 In this case, both the latter images place the machine-gun

toting Washington in a dominant power position. While her victims—propelled

67
Bukatman, 188.
68
Michel de Certeau, ―Walking in the City,‖ The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, California:
University of California Press 2002.
69
McCloud, 1993: 111.
 155

backwards and upwards by her sheer strength—fly out of the panel foreground of the

panel with their backs to the reader, Washington frontal stance and accompanying

bold, blurred streaks of color convey a sense of spatial ownership and virtuosic

perspectival limitlessness. The zip-ribbons, which emanate from her gun, cloaking the

scene in pulsating tones like a extraordinary kaleidoscopic entities, therefore become

rainbow-like ―declarations of intent,‖ implying the gestural arc of Washington‘s bodily

performance and ambitions: she is here, but she also effects there, and thus she is pure

energy.70

Gibbons emphasizes the extent of Washington‘s omni-power during the

remaining pages of the Saves the World issue through a proliferation of vocal

projections and sound effects. Modestly sized speech balloons give way to uproarious,

exclamation-mark laden grunts, screams and bellowed declarations of intent: ―NO

LOSER TALK! WE‘LL GET OUT OF THIS! WE‘LL FIND A WAY! THERE‘S

ALWAYS A WAY!‖ As Washington‘s anger about the injustice around her grows, so

does the intensity of her voice and the scale of her vocal typography: ―COME TO

MAMA. COME TO MAMA ‗CAUSE MAMA‘S GONNA BLOW YOUR SORRY

BUTT TO HELL!‖ To demonstrate the heroine‘s determination and speed, Gibbons

spreads her dialogue thinly in order to show how quickly Washington‘s soaring

acrobatics cover distance throughout the panel.71 Meanwhile, the letters of the sound

effects, ―PFOOM,‖ ―BOOM,‖ and ―BRAKABRAKABRAK!,‖ execute similar visual

70
Dick Arnall, ―Taking a Line for a Walk: The Animated Itinerary of Jonathan Hodgson,‖ Animate!
2000, <http://www.animateonline.org/editorial/2002/08/taking-a-line-for-a-walk.html> (accessed 3 July
2010).
71
Martyn Pedler, ―The Fastest Man Alive: Stasis and speed in contemporary superhero comics,‖
Animation, 2009: 255.
 156

and oral spatio-temporal leaps across panel breaks (Figure 2.19). By entering and

crossing the gutter, Gibbons‘ sound effects exploit the translatory capabilities of sound

projections and illustrate the percussive nature of the ensuing detonations. These

zapping and whooshing audio projections create a onomatopoeia spelling out their

authority, which, much like the zip-ribbons, perform Washington‘s influence on the

dense landscape surrounding her.72 Like diacritical marks (a comma, emoticon or a

period), these techniques operate in a third dimension, negotiating the internal

subjectivity of Washington‘s motion and agency.

Washington‘s stretched body resonates with the energy of implied movement,

linking the spaces of the panels, the city, and beyond, and dissolving boundaries along

the way. As Bukatman observes, ―The superhero city is founded on the relationship

between grids and grace. The city becomes a place of grace by licensing the multitude

of fantasies that thrived against the ―constraining‖ ground of the grid.‖73 Despite her

flights of spatiotemporal grandeur, Washington always, (excuse the cliché), keeps her

feet on the ground, frequently returning to Cabrini-Green to break up gang fights and

defend the rights of fellow residents. The full scope of Washington‘s new found omni-

power becomes clear in later frames when the faces of her enemies start to break

down, falling apart on the page, shattering like planes of glass on the panel floor.

Washington emerges triumphant from this rubble to commandeer the entire frame with

her imposing and heroic presence (Figures 2.20 & 2.21). Washington‘s poetic

72
As Vivian Sobchack acknowledges in her study of animation, motion lines, vocal projections, and
sound effects are ―meta-objects,‖ which can be conceived, drawn, and rendered but do not substantially
exist ‗as such.‘ Vivian Sobchack, ―The Line and the Animorph or ‗Travel Is More than Just A to B‘,‖
Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journey, 2008: 253.
73
Bukatman, 188.
 157

transcendence of the geometric grid reflects, again, her determination to thrive against

popular cultural containment fields.

Seeing Washington explode from one jagged panel to the next, trailing

lightning bolts through the limbo of the gutter that separates them, it is occasionally

easy to forget that she is but a mere mortal. Gibbons and Miller remind the reader of

her vulnerability in the final installment of the Give Me Liberty saga, Martha

Washington Dies (2007). In this brief seventeen-page coda, we find a now one

hundred-year-old Washington in her final moments of life, amongst the aged rubble of

what used to be her Cabrini-Green home, surrounded by her children and friends. As if

to imply her impending death, a new third person-narrative voice appears atop the

scene to reiterate Washington‘s life journey, ―Martha Washington has done many

things in her century. She‘s been many things. A soldier, a warrior, an explorer of the

wildest depths of the universe, a wife and mother and a leader and a teacher.‖ Devoid

of a final drawn-out bloody battle or false sentimentality, Dies amounts to an

enigmatic and moving farewell complete with the only last words she could possibly

have uttered: ―Give Me Liberty‖ (Figure 2.22). Washington‘s children feel a sense of

responsibility to preserve their mother‘s legacy. After she draws her final breath, they

take up their guns, heading out of the frame as a narrative voice explains, ―Ganne has

gone back to the source of all things. But the war goes on. And we are ready. The end‖

(Figure 2.23). Washington‘s presence in the weightless space of the gutter provides the

comic‘s most important symbol of hope for future generations of Cabrini-Green

residents. As McCloud writes: ―Most of us are so used to the standard rectangular

format that a borderless panel…can take on a timeless quality. Because of its

 158

unresolved nature, such a panel may linger in the reader‘s mind. And its presence may

be felt in the panels which follow it.‖74 Like an open door, the borderless panel

functions as a symbolic site of narrative development between two panels, signaling us

to expect a shift in tone for the remainder of Washington‘s adventures. Breaking free

of the concrete visual frame around her, Washington‘s presence in the liminal gutter

space between ‗now‘ and the ‗future,‘ along with the implied presence of a ―diegetic

horizon‖ beyond (or outside) of the comic frame, pulls the image forward in time and

space, hinting at the broader implication of her current fight for future generations.75

The familiar icon of the immobile, closed panel no longer contains time, but instead

hemorrhages and escapes into the surrounding atmosphere like an echo as if to imply,

the fight will go on!76 Washington‘s death, then, signals not the end, but merely a stage

in a broader political and social fight for female residents from public housing.

In late 2009, Dark Horse Comics released their own tribute to Washington

and the mentors she inspired in the form of a one hundred dollar, six hundred page,

oversized, hardcover volume containing her complete life story. The Life and Times of

Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century stands as an epic tribute or as Michael

Silverblatt calls it, ―testamentary,‖ to Washington‘s life and work, and the strength of

residents from Chicago‘s public housing.77 This tribute was primarily at the request of

Gibbons, who, as his sentimental conclusion to the Life and Times tome reveals,

developed a unique attachment to the comic character over her lifetime:

74
McCloud, 1993: 102.
75
Roland Barthes, ―The Third Meaning,‖ Image-Music-Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977: 65.
76
McCloud, 1993: 103.
77
Michael Silverblatt, ―The Cultural Relief of Art Spiegelman: A conversation with Michael
Silverblatt.‖ In Art Spiegelman: Conversations, ed. Joseph Witek. University Press of Mississippi, 2007:
135.
 159

I feel I should offer some words of farewell to Martha, imaginary though she is,
although it doesn‘t feel that way. She‘s been part of my life for almost twenty
years, through good times and bad. It‘s as if she were an old friend whom I
would meet from time to time, the years dissolving when I did, always
optimistic, always brave, always decent and honorable. In fact, over the years,
Martha has attained a kind of reality for me. Not all fictional characters you
deal with do, but I think I speak for myself and Frank when I say that we really
do have a sense of knowing Martha as a real person. I‘ll miss her.78

In a recent online interview for ComicBookMovie, Gibbons revealed that he and Miller

plan to explore the character on the big screen with Sin City (2005) star Rosario

Dawson in the role of Washington. "Frank and I have been in love with Martha since

we first created her and I'd like to think that maybe movie-goers would be as well," he

said.79

By acknowledging that Washington is ―imaginary‖ at the same time as she is a

―real person‖ Miller and Gibbons embrace the contemporary trend for ―real-world‖

superheroes in the Hollywood box office cinema. Representations of a new wave of

―real‖ caped crusader have dominated the last ten years. Ordinary New York high

school student Dave Lizewski entered the superhero fold in director Matthew

Vaughn‘s wannabe-superhero film Kick-Ass (2010), based on the comic of the same

name. Sporting unforgiving spandex and with an axe to grind against local petty

criminals, Lizewski, aka Kick-Ass, stages criminal interventions to enliven his dreary

existence. As he tells a friend, "Is everyday life really so exciting? Are schools and

offices so thrilling that I'm the only one who ever fantasized about this? Come on – be

honest with yourself. At some point in our lives, we all wanted to be a superhero."

According to a recent article in Britain‘s The Independent, real life would-be heroes
78
Gibbons, ―Chapter Commentaries,‖ 2009: 540.
79
‗Rormachine‘, ―Miller Wants Rosario Dawson for ―Martha Washington,‖ ComicBookMovie, 2010,
http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/notyetamovie/news/?a=8893 (accessed 12 December 2010).
 160

feel similarly galvanized into action, choosing to adopt a superhero persona in their

everyday lives: ―There are, according to the recently launched World Superhero

Registry, more than 200 men and a few women who dress up as comic-book heroes to

patrol their city streets in search of... if not supervillains, then petty criminals and those

in need of their help.‖80 In New York, for example, ―a woman named Terrifica patrols

bars and parties in a gold mask, Valkyrie bra, red boots and cape, in an effort to protect

inebriated women from men looking to take advantage of them. In her utility belt, she

carries pepper spray, a camera to photograph would-be predators, a journal, and

Smarties for energy. In Mexico City, meanwhile, Superbarrio dons red tights and a

red-and-yellow wrestling mask, using his eye-catching image to organize labor rallies

and protests, and file petitions.‖81 Uniting Terrifica, Superbarrio and their filmic

inspiration Kick-Ass, is their common embrace of manageable real–world tasks. Kick-

Ass is, after all, not a Man of Steel from the planet Krypton. He isn‘t a biology whizz

lent superhuman powers by the bite of a radioactive spider, and he certainly doesn‘t

live in a Batcave - he is just an regular person trying to make a difference.

Likewise, Washington separates herself from most traditional crime-fighting

action heroes such as Batman, Catwoman, or Wonder Woman, in that she exists

devoid of candy-colored costume extravagance, bulletproof skin, pumped-up pectoral

muscles, or the ability, like Superman, to ―leap tall buildings in a single bound.‖

Stripped bare of armor, ornamentation or super-human invincibility, she becomes a

normal person who cries when her friends and comrades die and on several occasions

80
Johnny Davis, ―Holy Masked Avengers: Meet the Real-Life Superheroes,‖ The Independent, 4 April
2010.
81
Davis, 2010.
 161

is seriously hurt enough to require a trip to the hospital. In place of unrealistic

superpowers, she possesses natural super-endowments such as astuteness, swiftness,

fighting ability, and the logical faculties to which we can all aspire. In other words,

there are no concealed secrets to Washington‘s power – she is an everyday Super

Woman. Such a character takes on what Umberto Eco, in his analysis of the role of the

reader in the comic book genre, calls ―aesthetic universality‖--a capacity to serve as a

reference point for behaviors and feelings that befall all of us.82 Thus, in the absence of

the requisite superhero adornment--the mask--Washington comes to personify every

public housing resident in every American city who secretly feeds the hope that one

day, from the inner depths of their personality, there can spring forth a superhero

capable of making the same life altering decisions as the superhero from Cabrini-

Green. This process of real world self-identification is central to Miller and Gibbons‘

ambitions for the Give Me Liberty series. As Gibbons describes in the conclusion of

The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century:

I think Martha's legacy is that she's been an inspiration to the people in the
story, that she's always been straightforward and honorable, and brave, and a
hero in the true sense. She's just a decent, decent person, someone who I'd love
to have as a friend, who I'd probably follow anywhere, and I think throughout
her life she had an integrity that would be an example to anybody.83

As if in answer to this plea, Beauty Turner enters the frame, lifted out of the pages of

the comic book and into the ‗real world‘, driven by an ambition to overcome the social

divisiveness generated by the CHA‘s urban renewal initiative.

82
Umberto Eco, ―The Myth of Superman,‖ The Role of the Reader: Explorations of the Semiotics of
Texts, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984, 109.
83
Manning, 23 March 2010.
 162

Beauty Turner

Like Washington, Turner experienced an unusually traumatic start in life.

The youngest of sixteen siblings, Turner and her twin, Daisy, were born in Chicago‘s

Cook County Hospital to Willie and Hattie Hardy in 1957. Following the riots

triggered by the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, eleven-year-old

Turner and her family left their West Side neighborhood and moved to the safer

Stateway Gardens public housing project on the city‘s South Side.84 At the age of just

fifteen, Turner married a local boy and, at first, life was perfect. "I thought he was the

perfect man," Turner told the Chicago Tribune the year before her death, ―I was

wrong.‖85 About a month into their marriage, her husband physically assaulted her for

the first time thus instigating a cycle of abuse that would last for the next twenty years.

After divorcing her husband after seventeen years, Turner became involved with a new

man, who, she tells me, abused her repeatedly, dismissed her burgeoning interest in

writing, and padlocked her inside their apartment whenever he went out to work.

Turner then went on to date a politician and notorious Chicago drug dealer

simultaneously – the latter, upon discovering the existence of his rival, set fire to

Turner‘s home, destroying all of her worldly possessions.86 Living off welfare and

fearing for the lives of both herself and her three children, the now thirty-nine-year-old

Turner seemed destined to become the real life personification of Cabrini-Green-

Harlem-Watts-Jackson – Saturday Night Live‘s clichéd, objectified, single mother

from public housing.

84
Mary Schmich, ―Letter writer‘s opinions earn her a column,‖ Chicago Tribune, 6 August 2004: 1.
85
Don Terry, ―The Beauty Treatment,‖ Chicago Tribune, January 7 2007: 12.
86
Schmich, 1.
 163

Keen to escape this string of failed and abusive relationships, Turner moved

herself and her children into Robert Taylor Homes in 1986. Public housing allowed

her, as she once explained, "to live my life without some man telling me what to do.

Or beating me."87 Indeed, Chicago‘s subsidized accommodation proved to be an

alternative housing solution for many low-income women during the late twentieth-

century. Federal welfare regulations coupled with changes in public housing rental

guidelines penalized intact families. As urban planner Daphne Spain notes,

increasingly in the U.S. public housing became a ―distinctly gendered urban

location.‖88 Although the first public housing leaseholders were overwhelmingly male-

headed families, by 1991 (the year Turner moved into Robert Taylor) eighty-five

percent of the families in Chicago‘s subsidized housing listed a woman as the primary

leaseholder.89 By 1997, the percentage had increased to ninety-four percent, with

female-headed households earning less than $5,000 per year. In fact, as sociologist

Diana Pearce observes, the feminization of poverty was first identified in public

housing.90 Since Turner qualified for the lowest-income category, she found an

immediate, affordable housing solution as well as salvation away from her abusive

partner, in Robert Taylor Homes.

While the project provided the desperate family with a much-needed refuge, it

also served as a vantage point from which to observe the community‘s poverty,

87
Sara Olkon, ―Housing Activist Beauty Turner dies,‖ Chicago Breaking News, 18 December 2008,
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2008/12/beauty-turner-housing-activist-dies-cha-chicago.html
(accessed 10 December 2009).
88
Daphne Spain, ―Direct and default policies in the transformation of public housing,‖ Journal of Urban
Affairs, 17.4, 1995.
89
Chicago Housing Authority, Department of Research and Program Development, 1991.
90
Diana Pearce, ―The Feminization of Ghetto Poverty,‖ Transaction: Social Science and modern
society, 21.1, 1983.
 164

unemployment, building mismanagement, gang violence, and police brutality. During

the late twentieth-century, Robert Taylor Homes housed six of the poorest U.S. census

areas with populations above 2,500. Ninety-five percent of the housing development's

20,000 residents were unemployed and listed public assistance as their only income

source. Meanwhile, rates of violent crime and gang activity were among the highest in

Chicago. The Black Kings and the Sharks (affiliates of major Chicago gang families)

and the Black Disciples, Vicelords, Black P. Stone Nation, and Mickey Cobras all

called the Robert Taylor high-rises their home. The CHA estimated that $45,000 in

drug deals took place daily.91 The twenty-four, sixteen-story neglected, concrete high-

rises that comprise Robert Taylor, many blackened with the scars of arson fire,

accommodated a queer mix of single mothers and their children seeking refuge as well

as a threatening, criminal element.

Disgusted by what she considered an apathetic response by CHA officials to

the rampant poverty, unemployment, building mismanagement, and gang violence in

her new neighborhood, and concerned for the safety of her children, Turner started to

attend community and crime-prevention meetings, as well as serving on the Steering

committee of the October 22 Coalition, a campaign against police brutality. Through

her active participation in the care of her community, Turner became known as a vocal

representative and advocate for tenant‘s rights. Acting as an ad-hoc social worker, the

energetic and stubborn problem-solver employed a unique poetry-slam style of address

91
I experienced the persistent severity of the drugs war in Chicago‘s public housing firsthand during the
Ghetto Bus Tour. Driving by Robert Taylor, a couple of shots rang out, causing all tour participants to
look out the window uneasily to see where the shots were coming from. Sensing our discomfort, Turner
comforted us that the sound could not be gunshots as no-one was running. ―Must be fire crackers,‖ she
reassured me. It was only when we concluded the tour at a Bronzeville coffee shop located at 528 East
43rd street, that Turner would confess that, ―yes, they probably were gang gunshots.‖
 165

to air her neighbor‘s misgivings to the Mayor, the governor, Chicago newspapers, and

popular magazines. During the course of the Ghetto Bus Tour, Turner employed a mix

of language to describe the luxury condos springing up in public housing

neighborhoods "like Jiffy popcorn in the microwave," of affordable housing drying up

"like a raisin in the sun," and of public housing residents "standing on a peg leg trying

to balance a low budget with one hand and a baby in the other." Turner‘s distinctive

approach attracted criticism in some quarters including the CHA who, as Philip

Jackson, a former CHA official notes, ―were turned off by her style and the sting of her

words."92 One of the first to recognize her tenacious attitude and her lyrical ability was

journalist Ethan Michaeli, then copy editor for the Chicago Defender. The two met in

1999, when they both attended a meeting where CHA officials were trying to reassure

residents that the Plan would make their lives easier. That is when, Michaeli says,

Turner stood up and said, "Isn't this bogus? Isn't this just a land grab? This doesn't

smell right." Despite harboring some concerns regarding Turner‘s no-holds-barred

approach, when Michaeli left the Chicago Defender to become the publisher of the

Chicago public housing newspaper Residents‟ Journal in 1999, he offered Turner a job

as an investigative reporter: "I knew it was a bit of a risk to have such an active voice

on the paper, but I also knew that she could write about the community and that she

had great access to people."93 Indeed, despite her undeniably subjective, partisan

approach to working on Residents‟ Journal—not a trait typically respected in a

journalist—Turner‘s presence provided a uniquely personal inside experience of life in

92
Schmich, 1.
93
Schmich, 1.
 166

subsidized housing, a line of attack unavailable to Michaeli and the rest of his non-

resident writing team at the time. During her time at the newspaper, Turner drew from

her first-hand experience of life in the projects to help co-direct the Advocacy and

Outreach Initiative, a project designed to educate people about the effects of the Plan

on Chicago‘s public housing community. Despite its undeniable shortcomings, Robert

Taylor Homes proved to be the launching pad for Turner‘s journalistic career, the

primary purpose of which was to provide a perspective of life in public housing from a

resident‘s point of view.

After seven years at Residents‟ Journal, in 1997 Turner left to concentrate her

energies into establishing the Ghetto Bus Tour. The tour extended and built upon of

the communicative ambitions Turner fostered at the newspaper, by offering outsiders

an insider‘s take on life in public housing. As Turner states in the introduction to her

Ghetto Bus Tour blog, ―Much too often you hear from Professors, Sociologists,

Academics, city officials, politicians and never hear from the ones that it (the Plan) is

affecting the most which is the residents from public housing. The only valid voices in

the plan!‖94 Turner then elaborates on the educational aims for the tour, invoking its

national as well as international significance:

The city is moving ten of thousands of low income people out of public
housings, all throughout the city into the so-called mixed income housings-
come out and learn for yourself about the criterias (sic) that keeps many of
them from returning back once the places are redevelope (sic) 25,000
apartments in public housings being demolished-25,000 units due to come
back, but guess what, not all will be public housings. Learn from the voice of
the voiceless where they are going. Many of the people that came on the tours,
also got to see with their own eyes what is (really) taking place here in our city
with the poor. They witness, the good, the bad and the ugly as well as the

94
Ghetto Bus Tour interview. August 2008.
 167

Beauty of what is happening here on a global scale. What happens here in

Chicago will happen all the way around the world! We are the expriemental
(sic) city!!!!!

The Ghetto Bus Tour blog, which is still active some twenty months after

Turner‘s death, illustrates Turner‘s global ambitions for the tour. Amongst

photographs from the tour and personal anecdotes, the blog includes Turner‘s 2008

tour schedule, which lists the professions and home cities of tour participants. Starting

on January 9th and culminating on December 10th 2008 (the day before her death),

Turner‘s numerous tour participants included U.S-based journalists such as reporters

from the Washington Post and National Geographic, as well as reporters from

France‘s Paris Match and Le Figaro, Frank Dosoer from CBS International Radio in

Quebec, Canada, and television and news crews from as far afield as Germany, Turkey

and Russia. The tour also attracted a considerable number of student attendees,

including groups from Chicago‘s Highland Park High School, Chicago Center for

Urban Life and Cultures, Young Women‘s Leadership Charter School, and Harvard

School of Excellence. The remaining tour participants integrated a varied cross-section

of society: a group of nurses from Chicago‘s Stronger Hospital, tourists seeking an

alternative vacation experience, Attorney Tamara Holder, award-winning

photographer Jon Lowenstein, and Ambassador to South African, Pearl Nomvume

Magaqa. This diversity serves as a tribute to Turner‘s desire to re-educate as many

people unfamiliar with life in the projects as possible, and to present this re-education

from a residents‘ point of view.

That this tour experience is rooted in a historical re-education of Chicago‘s

public housing history becomes clear during the tour‘s first few minutes. After
 168

traversing a four-mile stretch through the heart of Downtown Chicago, Turner‘s beat-

up yellow school bus passes through an area commonly known as Bronzeville or, as

my tour guide preferred to call it, the ―Harlem of Chicago‖ (Figure 2.24). On passing

the austere-looking DuSable High School, my fellow tour participant, Ron Carter,

exclaimed, "That's my high school. You've heard of Quincy Jones? He went to this

high school. You've heard of Nat King Cole? He went to this high school." Cradling a

microphone in her hand, Turner went on to list the names of other singers and

musicians including public housing resident‘s Lou Rawls, Cleotha and Pervis Staples

of the Staple Sisters, and Jennifer Hudson. We then drove past Oak Woods Cemetery

where Carter reeled off the famous names on some of the graves, including Olympic

star Jesse Owens and onetime Chicago Mayor, Harold Washington.95 Along a one and

a half mile patch of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Turner directed my attention toward

an array of plaques and monuments to the neighborhood‘s culture and history,

including artist Alison Saar‘s statue, Monument to the Great Northern Migration

(2006). The fifteen-foot cast bronze statue depicts an optimistic male traveler facing

north toward the Chicago Loop with one hand raised, carrying a suitcase bound with

rope in the other. A diamond-shaped plaque just north of the statue reads:

This bronze monument depicts a man wearing a suit of shoe soles rising from a
mound of soles. The soles, worn and full of holes, symbolize the often-difficult
journey from the south to the north. It commemorates all the African American
men and women [souls] who migrated to Chicago after the Civil War.

Oriented north towards the Near North Side, the statue stands as a testament to the

thousands of African-American migrants from the South who would eventually come

95
Phuong Ly, ―I want you to see what I see,‖ The Washington Post, March 9, 2008.
 169

to reside in Chicago‘s public housing during the mid twentieth-century, seeking to

escape segregation and in hope of economic freedom and opportunity. The

accommodation of this influx of people was, of course, one of the primary ambitions

of President Harry Truman‘s landmark 1949 Housing Act (Wagner-Ellender-Taft

Bill).96 Under the helm of the CHA, the city devoted itself to ―improving peoples‘ lives

by building subsidized housing for low income urban families unable to obtain

―decent, safe, and sanitary‖ dwelling units within their income paying ability.‖ Fast

forward to today, however, and we find a negation of these ambitions in the form of

the wholesale removal of public housing from Chicago‘s landscape. Hence, Saar‘s

piece becomes less a statue and more of a permanent monument to urban renewal. The

director of Chicago‘s Public Art Program, Mike Lash, suggests that the figure‘s hand

gesture should be interpreted as ―stop,‖ a symbolic gesture to keep out unwanted

developers and gentrifiers, rather than as a welcome sign. This example of what

sociologist Diane Grams terms a ―territorial marker‖ designed to codify the function of

public art in local communities, exists at the nexus of struggles over cultural meanings

and the social and economic future of this local area.97

As if to emphasize the tragic erasure of this history caused by the

implementation of the Plan, the tour made its first scheduled stop at the recently

opened, mixed-income development, Oakwood Shores. On the way, Ron Carter

directed my attention toward an approaching billboard for Oakwood Shores at the

96
For a more comprehensive history of the 1949 Housing Act that instigated the construction of
additional city-based public housing see Arnold Hirsch‘s Making The Second Ghetto: Race and Housing
in Chicago, 1940-1960, Cambridge, London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
97
Diane Grams, ―Territorial Markers: A Case Study of the Public Art of Bronzeville,‖ The Journal of
Arts Management, Law, and Society, Vol. 36, No. 3, September 2006: 225-240.
 170

corner of 39th and Cottage Grove. The image featured a sylvan, blue-skied vision of

inner-city existence: Couples stroll with their dogs through wide tree-lined streets

filled with imposing redbrick mid-rise apartment blocks. Beneath this idealized

picture, a gold-colored sub-heading stating, ―Close to the Lake. Close to the Loop.

Close to Perfection,‖ hung like a nimbus over a textual verification of this image:

If you‘re looking for a perfect apartment, your best housing choice for
Chicago‘s near south side is Oakwood Shores. Oakwood Shores is the ―new
wave‖ of city living, offering brand new one, two and three bedroom
apartments with all the conveniences to compliments your busy lifestyle
(Figure 2.25).

Upon the tour‘s arrival at Oakwood Shores, however, a very different picture

greeted me. After disembarking the ageing bus, Turner took me into the home of single

mother Keira Wallis who lives in the new mixed-income development with her two

grown sons and daughter-in-law as well as her ninety-three-year-old mother. One of

the few former Robert Taylor Homes residents to qualify for residency in the new

development, Wallis was initially delighted with her new apartment: ―I felt so lucky to

have a home. Things were great. At first.‖ Soon after their 2007 move in date,

however, the glossy veneer of Wallis‘ ―perfect‖ apartment began, quite literally, to

crack: the once imposing flooring began to break apart under foot, the dishwasher

repeatedly broke down, and the water supply throughout the apartment ran a murky

brown color. When Wallis complained to the CHA about these problems, they

responded by issuing her with a bill for the repairs, ―They said I‘d broken the rules of

my residency by breaking the floor. How do you break a floor!?‖ Specifically,

however, Wallis directs her anger at her market-rate Oakwood Shores neighbors who
 171

sidestep the responsibility of stringent behavioral residency criteria tests imposed on

public housing tenants. She explains:

It‘s them against us. I had to get job training, a drugs test, and prove my
financial literacy before moving in here. I then had to pass a test on how to
clean my house, how to take the garbage out. I have unexpected visits from an
inspector to check that I do all this. Do the market rate people have to do all
this?

To qualify to live in these new mixed-income communities, public housing

residents are required to meet CHA leasing compliancy as well as additional

requirements made by the private developers of each respective mixed-income site.

Such criteria, as listed in the CHA‘s Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy,

include rules governing good credit, criminal records and full-time employment. For

instance, applicants between the ages of eighteen and sixty-one have to be employed a

minimum of fifteen hours per week at admission and twenty hours a week after two

years of residency. If applicants are accepted into new accommodations, management

and security guards police public housing residents for small infractions like

congregating on stairwells or holding large outdoor barbeques. In 2010, a Chicago

Public Radio investigation into the residency criteria at Oakwood Shores revealed the

absurd case of a public-housing resident served an eviction notice for what an

inspector considered a ―cluttered closet.‖98 The same investigation also highlighted the

predicament of former Robert Taylor Homes resident, Henry Jackson, who was

reported and nearly evicted from his home for ―loitering‖ in an Oakwood Shores lobby

while waiting for a bus in midwinter. In her analysis of the implementation of public

98
―Public Housing Residents Learn the Rules for Mixed Income,‖ Chicago Public Radio, 6 March
2008, <http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=24770> (accessed 15 April 2009).
 172

housing redevelopment in Chicago, sociologist Deidre Pfeiffer notes that a number of

the white, middle-class occupants support these criteria. Quoting from a resident

named identified only as Alex, Pfeiffer writes:

I like the idea that its diverse and the whole culture that comes with it. I don‘t
mind the music or the way people outfit their cars. I think it‘s fascinating. And
I‘d love to get to know them, experience a different culture other than my
own…But then again, there are things here that we don‘t like, like the trash.
You see young mothers, not married, walking around the street. And I don‘t
approve of the way they raise their kids, hitting them on the streets.99

Thus, the strict residency criteria imposed on public housing residents serves to

―quarantine‖ their supposedly ―pathological‖ social behaviors from upper-income

white owners like Alex.

A growing body of literature critiques this approach to the problems of the

urban poor.100 Historian Devereaux Bowley, for example, criticizes the ―paternalistic

philosophy‖ of both social reformers and public officials toward the poor, in particular

those living in public housing, noting: ―the residents were treated like children, and the

tragedy is that for some it was the self-fulfilling prophecy—they acted like children

and were satisfied to have public housing and welfare policies control their lives.

Public housing thus tended to perpetuate a permanent class of dependent people,

99
Deidre Pfeiffer, ―Displacement Through Discourse: Implementing and Contesting Redevelopment in
Cabrini Green,‖ Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic
Development, Spring 2006.
100
See, for example, James C. Fraser and Edward L. Kick, ―The role of public, private, non-profit and
community sectors in shaping mixed-income housing outcomes in the US,‖ Urban Studies, 44.12, 2007:
2357-2377; John L. Smith and David Stovall, ―Coming Home to new homes and new schools: Critical
Race theory and the new politics of containment,‖ Journal of Education Policy, 23.2, 2008: 135-152.
Quoted in Mark Joseph and Robert Chaskin, ―Living in a mixed-income development: Resident
perceptions of the benefits and disadvantages of two developments in Chicago,‖ Urban Studies, Vol.47,
No. 11, October 2010: 3.
 173

unable to fend for themselves.‖101 In early 2010, Chicago Public Radio questioned the

main proponent of the urban renewal initiative, Mayor Daley, about the low number of

public housing residents eligible for residency in mixed-income accommodations, to

which the defensive and prickly politician invoked a paternalistic stance by provided

the confusing comeback, ―I said we‘re going to rebuild their souls. Not give them an

apartment, not give them a home, but you rebuild their souls.‖102 Patronizing aims to

―rebuild their souls‖ and middle-class aims to dictate new norms to which public

housing residents are expected to conform amount to what sociologist Mary Pattillo

refers to as the ―tyranny of the middle class.‖103 In discussing single mothers in the

same breath as matters regarding trash collection, Alex, like Daley, assumes a moral

stance, which like the sanitization of behaviors required of the resident criteria itself,

effectively validates one set of social practices over another, thereby effectively

eliminating Oakwood Shores as a housing option for those who fall outside of middle

class behavioral norms.

Furthermore, even though city officials and some private developers market the

redevelopment of Chicago‘s public housing as way to ―unite different economic

classes of people,‖ in many ways the ―mixed-income‖ designation is inaccurate. The

imposed income floor stipulated by residency criteria means that eighty-nine percent,

of public housing residents are denied units in the new mixed-income accommodations

101
Devereaux Bowley, The poorhouse: subsidized housing in Chicago, 1895-1976, Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1978.
102
―Public Housing Residents Learn the Rules for Mixed Income,‖ Chicago Public Radio, 2008,
<http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=24770> (accessed 6 March 2008).
103
Mary Pattillo, ―Investigating in poor black neighborhoods ‗as is‘.‖ In Public housing and the legacy
of segregation, ed. Margery Austin Turner, Susan J. Popkin and Lynette Rawlings. Washington, DC:
The Urban Institute Press, 2009.
 174

and are instead provided with housing choice vouchers to find market-rate

apartments.104 While the North Town Village complex represents the highest income

mix, accommodating thirty percent public housing units, most of the other so-called

mixed-income developments accommodate fewer than ten percent subsidized housing

tenants. In buildings with fewer than fifty units, this often translates into one or two

token low-income tenants. As Pfeiffer notes, although many of the upper-income

owners describe themselves as ―progressive‖ for moving into a community

characterized by its ―diversity,‖ when probed, others desire an area composed of racial,

rather than economic variety.105 Alex concluded his interview with Pfeiffer by saying

that, ―I don‘t want to see minorities go. I want to see it get more diverse, but instead

have professionals or even working-class.‖ By fostering an environment that excludes

low-income minorities based on their behavioral as well as economic situation, the

Plan fails in its aims for socio-economic diversity.

Amongst those who oppose the rigorous residency criteria exist a cynical

element who regard it as a strategy designed to encourage the removal of former

project residents from mixed-income accommodation entirely. In other words, by

constructing an environment comprised of racial, rather than class multiplicity, private

developers and city officials make the area ―safe‖ for economic investment in the

future. Harold L. Lucas, longtime Bronzeville resident and founder of the Black

Metropolis Convention and Tourism Council, agrees with this assessment, arguing that

104
A recent report by the New York Times reporting that almost half of the market rate Oakwood shores
residents have college degrees and half have incomes over seventy thousand dollars. Among the public
housing residents, meanwhile, all of whom are African-American, none have completed college and
three-fourths earned less than twenty thousand dollars. Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, ―A Wish for More
Community in Mixed-Income Units,‖ The New York Times, 20 May 2010.
105
Pfeiffer, 2006.
 175

stringent residency criteria are in place to prepare public housing residents for further

displacement in the event of future upscale gentrification. Located within close

proximity of the affluent Gold Coast and Lincoln Park, Cabrini-Green, for example,

represents prime real-estate land. As Lucas states in an interview for Medill Reports,

―Daley‘s plan isn‘t about mixing in, but out.‖106 After listening to Wallis and Smith

tell their stories, Turner handed both women flyers for a rally demonstration at the city

town hall the next day, telling them, ―Don‘t worry, I‘ll make sure your voice is heard.

We‘ll tell the truth.‖ As we clambered onto the bus for the next stage of the tour,

Turner reiterated this stance, stating, "I've been on both sides of the fence. I've been

where it's fancy and rich, I‘ve been in the bowels of the ghetto, and I‘m determined to

fight to break the divide between the two. This is truth hour."107 The ―truth‖ as she

sees it is that most of the people leaving will not come back to their old neighborhoods

and many won‘t be better off in the new ones.

Residents like Turner and Wallis have not passively acquiesced to the

implantation of the Plan. Their contemporary activist efforts continue the work of

women who, starting in the 1960s, persistently engaged in sustained grassroots efforts

to stem the deterioration of their buildings, grounds, services, and programs. For over

four decades, activists worked tirelessly to resist the political, economic, social, and

physical realities that shaped subsidized housing‘s deteriorating conditions. Today,

confronted by the destruction of their homes, Turner and Wallis share a collective

106
Marisol Rodriguez, ―CHA Plan for Transformation poses challenges for Bronzeville,‖ Medill
Reports, 20 March 2008, http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=84621&print=1
(accessed 29 November 2010).
107
Kate N. Grossman, ―‘Ghetto tours‘: Students, journalists, others get up-close view of CHA‘s ‗good,
bad, ugly,‖ The Chicago Sun-Times, 19 July 2007: 6.
 176

vision to reveal the macro political-economic processes that underpin this

contemporary threat to their living environment.

Individual residents‘ apartments come to function as components in this

collective vision, as base camps where protestors plot their missions to overcome the

enemy and to protect their homes. As Roberta M. Feldman and Susan Stall argue in

The Dignity of Resistance, ―grassroots activism is implicitly place-bound. That is, the

networks of relationships and the activism that they support are located in, organized

in, and may involve conflict over places.‖108 Hence, it comes as no surprise that the

second stop of Turner‘s tour takes the tour-go‘er into the nerve center for Wallis and

Turner‘s collective political fight. After driving north to 29th and State, the tour group

hiked into the eight hundred-unit cinder block and concrete high-rise, Dearborn

Homes, one of a few public housing buildings in the city yet to be demolished or

selected for renovation. The unmistakable stench of urine filled the air as we climbed

three flights of graffiti-scrawled, dirt-filled stairs. As if sensing my unease, Turner

smiled and told me, ―I let the people on the tour feel everything we feel, love.‖ When

exposed to such conditions, some tour participants, including Washington Post

journalist Phuong Ly, accuse Turner of contributing to ―poorism‖ or poverty

tourism.109 Relating the experience to the tours of New Orleans highlighting the

wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina, Ly recalls feeling ―uncomfortable‖ during the

Chicago excursion, arguing that the Ghetto Bus Tour effectively treats ―other people‘s

misery‖ like a ―museum attraction.‖ ―These were drug ridden, violent neighborhoods,‖

108
Roberta Feldman and Susan Stall, The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents Activism in
Chicago‟s Public Housing, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
109
Phuong Ly, ―I want you to see what I see,‖ The Washington Post, 9 March 2008.
 177

stated an elderly gentleman on the tour as we drove up to Dearborn. That this

statement is undeniably true, at least for the latter stage of public housing‘s existence,

reveals Turner‘s undoubtedly partisan approach; the journalist painted a nostalgic

picture of her early years in the projects, recalling a ―time when the projects shined

every bit as much as the buildings going up in their place.‖ Meanwhile, the bus drove

past two new mixed-income communities without comment, apart from mentioning

that a ―few‖ families will get a chance to move in. When asked about families

relocated to apartments with housing choice vouchers, Turner focused solely on one

forced to move fourteen times, mentioning nothing about the families who may thrive

once removed from public housing. As Kate N. Grossman of The Chicago Sun-Times

observes, ―While the CHA is well known for masking bad news, the opposite might be

said of Turner.‖110

Yet, one could perhaps forgive the tour‘s circuitous route and undoubted

voyeurism, and the guide‘s inherently subjective approach. This was, after all, the

journalist‘s last gasp in her crusade to tell an alternative version of public housing

history before it is too late. By starting the tour in Bronzeville, with a positive and

pivotal reflection of Chicago and America‘s history, Turner highlights a much-

neglected time in mainstream mass-media coverage. As she tells the Chicago

Tribune‘s Mary Schmich, most narratives surrounding Chicago‘s public housing only

tell part of the story, ―she thinks her ghetto tours fill in some gaps.‖111 Turner reiterates

this stance during the tour, telling me, ―This was a community where people like me

110
Kate N. Grossman, ―Ghetto Tours‖: Students, Journalists, Others get a Close-Up View of CHA‘s
‗Good, Bad, Ugly,‖ The Chicago Sun-Times, July 19, 2007: Final Edition.
111
Mary Schmich, ―Ghetto Tour is journey into city‘s heart,‖ Chicago Tribune, August 12, 2007: 1.
 178

lived, played, stayed and died -- just like your community. All the horror stories you

hear in the newspapers -- it's not like that at all.‖112 Nor does Turner completely

sidestep the ―bad‖ stuff, however. While some accuse the tour of ―poverty tourism,‖

others recognize contact with the unceremonious side of Chicago‘s public housing as a

crucial component of Turner‘s quest to reveal the conditions and injustices that

residents fought against during its lifetime. Following his personal experience of the

journey, for example, social scientist D. Bradford Hunt states, "This is the anti-tour, in

a way. It fills a void for people who don't necessarily trust the standard line that

everything is fine."113 Turner‘s decision to christen the tour with the controversial title,

―ghetto,‖ is a direct acknowledgement of these challenging material conditions.

Indeed, Turner‘s desire to avoid the sugar-coating of Chicago‘s public housing history

is evident in the brutally honest way she advertises the tour on her website: ―Imagine

being able to take a tour through the ghetto? You get to see where people actually sold

crack on the corner and park benches where whinos slept. You can visit the old run

down urine-smelled buildings and where someone was brutally murdered over a gang

fight. These are probably the things you would expect to see on a tour of the ghetto,

but in reality this was once a home to Beauty.‖114 Nonetheless, Turner transcends the

offensive colloquial signification and derogatory implications through wordplay,

challenging people‘s preconceived ideas of the ―ghetto‖ and all it stands for, by

reassembling the word as an acronym for ―Greatest History Ever Told to Our People‖

112
Ghetto Bus Tour interview, August 2008.
113
Grossman, 6.
114
―Ms. Beauty Turner‘s Greatest History Ever Told to Our People TOURS‖ leaflet, Summer 2008.
 179

(Figure 2.26).115 Through this acronymic re-classification and via participant‘s direct

exposure to everything residents ―feel,‖ Turner re-imagines the ghetto as a site of

resistance.

After navigating a labyrinthine trail of endless corridors, Turner and I arrived at

a primary meeting place for grassroots organization and the hub for many Dearborn

residents‘ struggle, the home of long-term tenant and community activist, sixty-three-

year-old Carol Wallace (Figure 2.27). Welcoming us into her apartment, Wallace

proceeded to show me her collection of photographs of living and deceased public

housing activists as well as newspaper clippings documenting what she referred to as

their ―battles.‖ Standing at a window with a spectacular view of the downtown skyline,

Wallace pointed an angry finger at a far off point in the distance, telling me, "That's

probably what the rich man hates. Poor people had a good view." Wallace then called

my attention to an article published by Turner in the South Street Journal in 2006

about the object of her disdain, entitled ―Residents Protest HUD Office.‖116 In 2006,

Turner and Wallace, along with Deidre Brewster, an organizer from the Coalition to

Protect Public housing, and Ebonee Stevenson, a member of (STOP) Students Tenants

Organizing Project‘s, helped to organize different tenant groups from around the city

in a protest against the forced displacement of public housing residents from their

homes. Angry groups including the Grove Park Tenants Association, Kimbark Tenants

Association, Washington Scene Tenants Association, and the Cabrini-Green Tenants

115
Originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jewish people were compelled to live, during
the late twentieth-century, the word ‗ghetto‘ was employed for several other uses. While predominantly
employed to describe an overcrowded, primarily African-American inner-city location, it has also been
used as a derogatory adjective to refer to a ―ghetto‖ appearance or lifestyle.
116
Beauty Turner, ―Residents Protest HUD Office,‖ South Street Journal, Vol. 13, No. 9, 14 December
2006: 1.
 180

Association, congregated outside city hall to demand a meeting with Joseph Galvin,

HUD‘s Midwest Director. According to Turner‘s article, five of the female protestors

representing different groups went up on the elevator to the HUD director‘s office and

provided his secretary with personal testimonies from angry displaced residents.

Turner‘s impassioned text accompanies a photograph of project resident‘s with arms

held aloft, microphones in hand, and faces contorted in anger (Figure 2.28):

Chants rang out like a sonic boom in downtown Chicago from hundreds of
low-income Housing renters and Chicago Housing Authority tenants as well as
homeowners from all around the Chicago land area. They marched in front of
and inside the foyer of the 77 West Jackson HUD building. The chanters were
so loud they were heard blocks away. As their feet trampled in the wet
pavement they chanted in harmony ―Housing is a human right, to save our
homes we must fight!‖ ―Hey HUD what do you say, we want changes made
today!‖ along with signs that read: ―Stop the war on the poor!‖ and ―Stop the
Land Grab!‖117

In conjunction with this organized protest march and South Street Journal

article, in 2005 Turner published a series of articles in the Chicago Reporter and the

Residents‟ Journal. This series exposed the problem of relocating public housing

residents with Housing Choice vouchers from their inner-city neighborhoods to

suburban housing in areas such as South Shore, Englewood and Roseland on the South

and West sides of the city. Entitled, ―Deadly Moves: Moving at their Own Risk,‖ the

series revealed that moving to these areas not only reinforced traditional patterns of

racial composition, but also led to increased levels of violent crime.118 The series begins

with the case of Nicole Wright, a single mother to a sixteen-year old son, who moved

117
Turner, 2006: 1.
118
South Shore, Englewood and Roseland each have an African-American population approaching or
exceeding ninety percent. Larry Bennett and Adolph Reed Jr., ―The New Face of Urban Renewal: The
Near North Redevelopment Initiative and the Cabrini Green Neighborhood.‖ In Without Justice for All:
The New Liberalism and our retreat from Racial Inequality, ed. Adolph Reed Jr. Boulder: Westview
Press, 2001: 208.
 181

from the Robert Taylor Homes to a new apartment in the gang and drug-plagued

Englewood neighborhood. Not long after their arrival in the new area, Wright‘s son was

shot in the back and killed while playing basketball in a nearby field. At first, Wright

believed that his death was the result of a random shooting but, over time, she and her

family became convinced that he died due to his lack of familiarity with local gang

members and their rivalries. "My child was more protected in the projects. There's too

much freedom out here,‖ Wright said.119

As Turner‘s investigation reveals, the relocation process often stirs territorial

disputes in neighborhoods like Englewood, pitting young men with established gang and

drug connections against residents from public housing, where different networks

controlled the illegal drug market. While citywide homicides fell by fifteen percent

between 1998 and 2003, in Englewood, Roseland and South Shore, they increased by

thirty six percent.120 "It's like they took all the gangs and mixed them up. Every project

they shut down, they don't check where they put you. They just put you," commented

Wright's younger brother, Sammy. Sammy continues, the gangs are "automatically

bumping heads [and the CHA's attitude is] whatever happens happens, but we got them

out of our hair."121

CHA officials declined to answer numerous verbal and written requests from

Turner regarding her findings, choosing instead to issue an official statement that read,

in part, "We are working to create environments where hard-working, law-abiding

residents can live in safety and peace." Once the Chicago Reporter series hit the
119
Brian J. Rogal and Beauty Turner, ―Moving at their own Risk,‖ The Chicago Reporter, July/August
2004.
120
Rogal and Turner, 2004.
121
Rogal and Turner, 2004.
 182

newsstands and local and national radio stations also started to cover the story,

however, the CHA jumped into action, holding a press conference, which addressed

the issue of gang violence in the neighborhoods mentioned in the articles. The

publication of Turner‘s exposé also prompted city officials to assign more police to

some of the dangerous locations highlighted by the article.122 Talking to Chicago Sun

Times about Turner‘s achievement, reporter Curtis Lawrence says, "She did that. She

held people accountable. That would not have happened without her."123 Turner‘s

―Deadly Moves‖ series earned her numerous prestigious awards, including the first

annual New America Award from the National Society of Professional Journalists,

Chicago Association for Black Journalists, Courageous Voice, Black Pearl, and

Women of the Century Awards. Just one year before her death, Turner featured in a

four thousand-word Wall Street Journal cover story, which celebrated her life as a

writer and activist, her advocacy on behalf of fellow public housing residents, and her

fearless ability to confront the authorities (Figure 2.29). In the article, journalist

Jonathan Eig quotes several residents who praise Turner‘s work including Laverne

Williamson, a former resident of Robert Taylor Homes, who states, ―'Everybody

knows Beauty. She's knocking on doors, teaching people to come out to meetings. If

you need help with an apartment or the CHA is trying to B.S. you, everybody knows to

call Beauty.''124 Turner‘s position on the customary white, male, middle-class stage of

122
Jonathan Eig, ―Tough Beat: In Chicago, Demise of housing Projects is Hard on a Paper; As
Residents Scatter, Tabloid Vows to Keep on Slugging; Crime and Corruption; ‗Everybody Knows
Beauty,‖ Wall Street Journal, 26 January 2006: A1.
123
Mary Mitchell, ―These Two old acquaintances won‘t be forgot: Chicago lost caring journalists
Beauty Turner, Morgan Carter,‖ The Chicago Sun Times, 30 December 2008: 12.
124
Jonathan Eig, ―CHA housing tabloid writes for disappearing readership: Opponent of high-rise
demolitions contends they disperse poor,‖ Chicago Sun-Times, 29 January 2006: 13.
 183

the Wall Street Journal cover represents a vital step towards traversing traditional

power dynamics, or, as Turner defines her quest, ―breaking the divide‖—between

female public housing residents and the wider metropolitan matrix of Chicago.

Moving from the base camp of Dearborn Homes, out into the political public

sphere of the town hall, Turner‘s socio-political mobility encompasses a kind of public

spatial ownership. The importance of women‘s social reproduction work inside the

home has been empirically documented and argued to be ―a source of struggle and

social change.‖125 bell hooks, for example, contends that African-Americans‘ historic

struggle to create and sustain a safe and nurturing ―homeplace‖ does more than

provide the necessities of everyday survival: It is a source of resistance to challenge

the societal obstacles of racism, classism, and sexism that impact their daily lives.

hooks writes, ―Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could

strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts

despite poverty, hardships, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the

dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.‖126 More recently, however,

scholars have come to recognize the work of female public housing residents, like

Turner, who extend their efforts into ―transgressive politics‖ in the public sphere.127 As

activist Terry Haywoode notes, through their grassroots organizing they extend ―the

boundaries of the household to include the neighborhood,‖ ultimately to ―dissolve the

125
Marjorie L. DeVault, Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gender Work,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Meg Luxton, More than a labor of love: Three
Generations of women‟s work in the home, Toronto: Women‘s Press, 1980; H.L. Hartmann, ―The family
as a locus of gender, class, and political struggle: The example of housework,‖ Journal of Women in
Culture and Society, 6.3, 1981: 366-394.
126
bell hooks, Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics, Boston: South End Books, 1990: 42.
127
Roberta Feldman and Susan Stall, The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents Activism in
Chicago‟s Public Housing, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004: 11.
 184

boundaries between public and private life, between household and civil society.‖128

To confront the increased scale of the problems facing public housing residents and the

increasing political and economic power of the actors with whom she engages, Turner

extends her resistance beyond the boundaries of her home neighborhood and into the

public sphere. Turner engages in confrontational, transgressive resistance by

instigating organized efforts such as organized marches, rallies, radio show interviews,

and newspaper articles to defend her community and homeplace against threats to its

survival, and to assert her rights and protections as an equal citizen in the polity. In

resisting the destruction of her homeplace and community, and in carving out space for

herself on the national stage independently of the CHA, Turner contests the dominant

ideologies of her identity as a poor African-American woman and defies the

boundaries that separate her from the white, male-dominated public sphere.

These examples of what social scientist‘s Sylvia Fuller, Paul Kershaw, and

Jane Pulkingham term ‗active citizenship‘ stand in explicit contrast to the conservative

rhetoric of isolation and dependency usually attached to African-American single

mothers from public housing.129 As Feldman and Stall note, ―Conventional wisdom

presumes that residents living in the nation‘s most troubled public housing

developments are trapped by poverty, dislike their developments, and would move

immediately if given the opportunity.‖ 130 To appreciate the full extent of this

hyperbole, you need only turn to the titles of various psychology books on the lives of

128
Terry Haywoode, ―Working-class Feminism: Creating a Politics of Community, Connection, and
Concern,‖ Ph. D. Dissertation, The City University of New York, 1991: 175.
129
Sylvia Fuller, Paul Kershaw and Jane Pulkingham, ―Constructing ‗active citizenship‘: single
mothers, welfare, and the logics of voluntarism,‖ Citizenship Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, April 2008, 157–
176.
130
Feldman & Stall, 60.
 185

single mothers, including Virginia E. Schein‘s Working from the Margins, and Valerie

Polakow‘s series, The Erosion of Childhood, Shut Out, and Life on the Edge.131 Thanks

to traditional conceptions of citizens as active participants in the public realm of the

workforce, single mothers who depend upon social assistance to survive become social

exiles, relegated to the margins of society as diminished citizens. President Bush

senior, for example, theorized that improved social and economic conditions would

arise only through participation in the private market, rather than welfare programs. He

redirected state resources to job-training and private social services and required poor

people receiving even the most meager subsidies to engage in community service or

employment. As political theorist Carole Pateman observes:

In the patriarchal welfare state ‗women‘ have been opposed to the ‗worker‘ and
the ‗citizen.‘ Single mothers thrown into poverty lack both the means for self-
respect and the means to be recognized by fellow citizens as of equal worth to
themselves, recognition basic to democracy.132

Thus, employment is more than just a way to make a living; it is a form of moral

behavior. Free market commitment becomes synonymous with patriotism; those who

rely on government social support, such as public housing residents, hinder the

country‘s ―competitiveness‖ and are ―undeserving‖ of the rights of citizenship.133

Neoliberal ideology that constructs a person‘s dwelling not as a right of every

citizen, but rather as a commodity to be earned through personal initiative, also

131
Virginia E. Schein, Working from the Margins: Voices of Mothers in Poverty, Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1995; Valerie Pokalow, The Erosion of Childhood, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1992; Lives on the Edge: single Mothers and their children in the Other America,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994; Shut Out: Low Income Mothers and Higher Education
in Post-Welfare America, Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2004.
132
Carole Pateman, The Patriarchal State In Feminism, the Public and the Private, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998, 242.
133
Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the war on Poverty to the war on Welfare, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1989.
 186

contributed to the marginalization of single mothers from subsidized housing. The Plan

feeds into this ideology by employing ―free market empowerment‖ discourse. For

example, in late September 2004, Terry Peterson, CEO of the CHA, gave a talk titled

―The Social Cost of Inaction‖ at his alma mater, Roosevelt University. While promoting

the Plan, he said, ―We‘re turning communities without hope into ones with a bright

future.‖134 He added that ―just as there was a cost to society when whole neighborhoods

are written off and ignored,‖ so is there a ―cost to maintain communities that don‘t give

back in the form of taxes and jobs.‖ ―I want to be honest with folks,‖ he said, ―I tell

them that they have responsibility for their actions as well.‖ By equating American

citizenship with participation in the free market, Peterson constructs public housing

residents who embrace public services as non-citizens, a ―blame the victim‖ ideology

that justifies shutting them out of the redevelopment planning process. In contrast,

recent scholarly debates increasingly emphasize the importance of interrogating

citizenship not as a static and abstract construct but as lived political experience.

Recently released oral histories such as Rhonda Y. Williams‘ The Politics of Public

Housing (2005) and Frederick Wiseman‘s documentary Public Housing (1997) all

highlight the resourcefulness of grassroots tenants as political citizens, capable of

altering the current course of public housing redevelopment in low-income communities

across the country.135 Williams, for example, traces the evolution of public housing-

134
Pfeiffer, 22.
135
Feldman and Stall, 2004; Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women‟s
Struggles Against Urban Inequality, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005; Frederick Wiseman,
Public Housing, Chicago, IL: Housing films, 1997. Other important contributions include Daiva
Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan, ―Negotiating citizenship: the case of foreign domestic workers in
Canada,‖ Feminist Review, 57, 1997: 112–139; Engin Isin and Brian Stanley Turner, ―Citizenship
studies: an introduction.‖ In Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. Engin Isin and Brian Stanley Turner.
 187

based political protests through the stories of three generations of female residents‘ in

Baltimore, Maryland. The author describes how they fought to improve deteriorating

building conditions, to replace unresponsive government and housing officials, and to

reverse accelerating social and economic insecurity in public housing. Turner echoes the

sentiment expressed in Williams‘ tale, refusing Peterson‘s ideological framing by

strengthening the confidence, skills, and claims to citizenship of single mothers,

enabling them to fulfill valuable civil roles through public sphere-based activism.

Turner‘s transgressive resistance reveals the complex and diverse means female public

housing residents‘ employ to mediate and respond to what cultural critic Henry Giroux,

in his theory of resistance, defines as ―the interface between their own lived experiences

and structures of domination and constraint.‖136 Indeed, in their decisive blaze across the

city‘s public sphere, from the domestic space of Wallace‘s Dearborn Homes apartment,

out onto the exterior realms of the HUD foyer, to the national stage of a Wall Street

Journal cover, to meeting the future president of the United States as Turner did in

2006, single mothers acquire the kind of unrestricted individual mobility so integral to

American ideals of ‗active citizenship‘.

In her relentless and tireless quest to advocate on behalf of her fellow public

housing residents, Turner exuded a kind of immortality. Therefore, when she died

suddenly from a stroke at the age of fifty-one on December 18, 2008, four months to

the day of my Ghetto Bus Tour experience, the Chicago public housing community

London: Sage, 2002; Luke Desforges, Rhys Jones and Mike Woods, ―New geographies of citizenship,‖
Citizenship Studies, 9 (5), 2005: 439 – 451; Ruth Lister, ―Inclusive citizenship: realizing the potential,‖
Citizenship Studies, 11 (1), 2007: 49–61.
136
Henry Giroux, Theory of Resistance in Education, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983:
108.
 188

was left reeling. ―Beauty was a special person who cared deeply for her community

and for anyone who needed help. She was truly a ‗voice for the voiceless‘ as well as ‗a

writer and a fighter,‖ wrote Residents‟ Journal editor Ethan Michaeli in an e-mail alert

to followers of the newspaper.137 A Chicago Breaking News article about the activist‘s

death prompted a series of emotional condolence comments, including one from Mark

S. Allen, Associate Editor on the South Street Journal, who writes:

Beauty of course leaves a tremendous legacy as a friend, activist, and

colleague. In addition to remembering the legacy of people like the late
Artensia Randolph, legendary Chicago Public Housing leader, and activists like
the late Marion Stamps, that true public housing activists like Beauty Turner
should also be remembered as one who was a true champion for the poor. Her
last effort, The Ghetto Tours was indeed a reflection of Beauty's legacy
building on behalf of Chicago's poor constituency. 138

In positioning Turner within the legacy of Randolphe and Stamps, Allen invokes a

historical linearity to the cause of activist ―truth telling.‖ Curtis Lawrence, a former

reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, echoes Allen‘s stance, referring to Turner as ―the

real deal,‖ and compared her to Ida B. Wells, the crusading Chicago-based journalist

who exposed the lies used to justify lynching in the South.139 While the CHA attempts

to sugarcoat the Plan in many respects—attested in part by CHA official‘s initially

stilted response to the ―Deadly Moves‖ investigation--Turner, like the women who

came before her, endeavored to unveil this deception, campaigning for the rights of

public housing residents.

137
Ethan Michaeli, Personal email received on 10 December 2008.
138
Sara Olkon, ―Housing Activist Beauty Turner dies,‖ Chicago Breaking News, 18 December 2008,
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2008/12/beauty-turner-housing-activist-dies-cha-chicago.html
(accessed 25 August 2009).
139
Mary Mitchell, ―These Two Old Acquaintances Won‘t be Forgot: Chicago lost Caring journalists
Beauty Tuner, Morgan Carter,‖ The Chicago Sun Times, 30 December 2008: 12.
 189

Heeding calls to maintain and preserve this legacy before the CHA wipes away

the last traces of the city‘s public housing, Turner‘s daughter Latanya Turner, a fellow

journalist, recently agreed to resurrect the Ghetto Bus Tour initiative when she

completes her college degree in 2011. Describing her mother‘s influence, she writes,

―Mom never stopped working on her dreams, and she never stop encouraging me to

follow my dreams.‖140 Since her mother‘s death, Latanya has also helped to preserve a

downtown exhibition space, known as the Ghetto Gallery. As the final stop on the

Ghetto Bus Tour, the gallery functions as a lasting visual legacy to the activism of

single mothers from Chicago‘s public housing. Immune from the fate of the wrecking

ball, the gallery also exists as a call-to-arms for future generations. Located in a tiny

storefront on South Evans Street, the Ghetto Gallery comprises three large walls in a

building otherwise leased as a recording studio for a company named Demo Kings.

The owner of the company, an old acquaintance of Turner‘s, allowed the journalist to

use the space for a minimal charge, an financial outlay support by charitable donations

made by tour participants as well as from We the People Media, a not for profit charity

organization situated in Chicago. Black and white photographs of a protest-banner-

wielding Turner at a demonstration in the early 1990s line the walls of the gallery, next

to framed newspaper articles, artwork with African-American and revolutionary

themes, and color photographs of celebrity tour visitors like Jesse Jackson and the

current Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George (Figure 2.30). A notice board

140
Steve Rhodes, ―Writer, Fighter Beauty Turner Dies,‖ NBC Chicago, 19 December 2008,
<http://www.nbcchicago.com/around-town/archive/Beautys-World.html#ixzz0oYNzVDgC> (accessed
1 April 2009).
 190

placed next to these artifacts, informs visitors about upcoming public demonstrations

and activist meetings in the gallery.

The gallery‘s montage of images, times, memories, and people is a neat,

condensed ―micro-geography‖ of the Ghetto Bus Tour experience. Much like the

experience of the Ghetto Bus Tour, the Ghetto Gallery highlights, not only the

sensation of viewing, but also, the viewers responsibility in the construction of this

vision. In other words, the Ghetto Gallery‘s ―montage-effect‖ functions as a discursive

plea to visitors to engage directly with a visual mosaic of Chicago‘s public housing

history. Like the tour as a whole, the gallery‘s plurivectorial narration and historical

simultaneity invite viewers to imagine the time and space of Chicago‘s public housing

in a unique and dialogical way. By instigating this conversation, the Ghetto Gallery

makes a similar plea for communication and interaction as the Ghetto Bus Tour

manages to achieve through its fusion of stops and various points of interface (Figure

2.31). That this conversation is the aim of the entire experience became clear when,

upon leaving the Ghetto Gallery, Turner attracts random cries of ―Hey Beauty!,‖

―Good work Beauty,‖ ―Call me Beauty,‖ leading tour-goers into discussion with

current and past public housing residents. Through bodily and perceptive complicity—

of working in the space between see‘er and seen—the ghetto bus tour participant

deconstructs fields of objective linearity, eventually engaging in dialogue with the

―infectious‖ single mothers of Charles Murray‘s disdain.

 191

Conclusion

The formal voyeurism provided by the various stops on the Ghetto Bus Tour

relates to the way Give Me Liberty‘s comic book panel sequences offer a new ―way of

seeing‖ Chicago‘s public housing residents. The comic panel and the bus window

frame function as comparable spatial fields in this regard as that they both provide a

pathway to a variegated way of interrogating Chicago‘s single mothers from public

housing. As comic book scholar Joseph Witek observes, ―Reading a comic book

always entails a degree of Peeping Tomism, as we peer through the ―windows‖ of the

panel borders at a world beyond our own.‖141 While the passenger must break through

the screen (window) of visual representation by disembarking the bus and interacting

with the subject of their observation, so the comic reader too encounters an analogous

point of interface. The ―gutter‖—the blank white space between comic book panels—

functions as an essential component in this participation. Here, in the indeterminate

state of the gutter, the viewer becomes what McCloud calls a ―silent accomplice‖ in

deciphering and linking the singular moments described in the panels into a series of

topological links, and, eventually, a continuous amalgamated entirety (Figure 2.32).142

The gutter opens up an arena of subjective universality, asking the reading to ―join in a

silent dance of the seen and the unseen, the visible and the invisible.‖ McCloud

explains:

Several times on every page the reader is released—like a trapeze artist—into

the open air of imagination. Then caught by the outstretched arms of the ever-
present next panel. Caught quickly so as not to let the reader fall into confusion

141
Witek, 1989: 72.
142
McCloud, 1993: 68.
 192

and boredom. But is it possible that closure143 can be so managed in some

cases—that the reader might learn to fly?144

Likewise, the objective of the borderless frame is not to provide a stage but

rather to heighten the reader‘s involvement with the narrative, ―much like a play in

which actors interact with the audience, rather than merely performing in front of

it.‖145 Eisner elaborates, ―Whereas the conventional container-frame keeps the reader

at bay—or out of the picture, so to speak—the frame…invites the reader into the

action or allows the action to ―explode‖ toward the reader.‖146 Dave Gibbons‘

intensely subjective color palette, ambiguous locations and realities, peculiar temporal

jumps, and absurd perspectives also require that the reader occupy a key role as

animator of the piece, actively stitching together the narrative frames via the topology

of images, absences, and excess.147 ―To be a superhero, you‘ve got to be able to

move,‖ writes Bukatman in his analysis of the Superman genre.148 This concept of

reader motion calls to mind the scholarship of cultural geographer D. N. Livingstone

who argues in the context of ‗travelling theory‘ in order to define the encounter

between reader and comic page.149 The variegated visual and verbal tracks (or portals)

between the two ―disturb any assumption that a clear boundary line can be charted

143
Scott McCloud uses the term closure to describe the synthesis of panels with respect to both
movement and narrative and hence the use of expressions such as ‗action-to-action, ‗subject-to-subject‘
and ‗scene-to-scene‘. McCloud, 1993: 75.
144
McCloud, 1993: 90.
145
Eisner, 1985: 45.
146
Eisner, 1985: 46.
147
Jason Dittmer, ―Comic Book Visualities: A Methodological Manifesto on geography, montage and
narration,‖ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 35, Issue 2, March 2010: 230.
148
Bukatman, 2003: 189.
149
Dittmer, 224.
 193

between acts of production and consumption.‖150 The reader travels back and forth,

back and forth between the meta-planar surface of the comic page and their own

imaginations, animating a three-dimensional space of inquiry and the possibility of

one, two, or even multiple, simultaneous narrative approaches. Gibbons‘ spatially

invasive scopic realms appeal to a broad, variegated way of seeing and appreciating

solo mothers from public housing. Give Me Liberty holds out the possibility of

introducing what geographer Jason Dittmer calls a new ―‘optical unconscious,‖ ―one

that holds open opportunities for more plural, flexible narratives connected with public

housing residents‘ to emerge from a singular montage.‖151

Lifted out of the pages of the comic book and into the ‗real world‘, the Ghetto

Bus Tour provided a useful jumpstart for dialogical intervention between single

mothers from public housing and those unfamiliar with their lives. In the wake of

Turner‘s death, however, concerted efforts need to be made, both citywide and

nationally, to maintain this educational exchange. At Oakwood Shores, for example,

property managers need to ensure that they treat public housing residents and mixed-

rate tenants with the same levels of respect – i.e. residency criteria should be applied to

all incoming residents, no matter their income, as it is in many of Chicago‘s other new

mixed-income neighborhoods. The current tenant policies exclude a number of current

residents, which calls into question the CHA‘s mission for the Plan. As social

scientist, Mark L. Joseph states, ―For mixed income to truly be a success, property

managers will have to work harder at engineering a social transformation, too. New

150
David N. Livingstone, ―Science, Text, and Space: Thoughts on the Geography of Reading,‖
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, 2005: 395.
151
Dittmer, 223.
 194

buildings will not erase the stigma of failed public housing, which follows former

residents. The challenge of mixed income remains making sure all people in mixed

income are treated equally.‖152 Susan Popkin, Mary Cunningham and William

Woodley also suggest that CHA should review its one-strike policies, perhaps

allowing ex-offenders back onto leases on a case-by-case basis.153 On a broader

national and international scale, educators in the fields of history, social sciences,

political science, and cultural studies should ensure that they assign a number of oral

testimonies from female public housing residents to their college syllabi. As I have

already mentioned in this chapter, recently released oral histories such as Rhonda Y.

Williams‘ The Politics of Public Housing (2005), Roberta Feldman and Susan Stall‘s

The Dignity of Resistance (2004), and Frederick Wiseman‘s documentary Public

Housing (1997) all highlight the resourcefulness of grassroots tenants as political

citizens, capable of altering the current course of public housing redevelopment in

low-income communities across the country.154 As historian Annelise Oleck observes,

"seeing and hearing from welfare mothers in all their complex, contradictory humanity

can cut the distance between them and us—a necessary first step toward envisioning a

more humane way of providing aid to poor families."155 Eschewing the standard

vantage point of architects, government officials, reformers and sociologists by

enabling the players in their important histories to narrate their own tales, these

152
Natalie Moore, ―Some Public Housing Residents Try a New Life in Mixed Income,‖ Chicago Public
Radio, 2 June 2008, http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=24623 (accessed 24
March 2010).
153
Susan Popkin, Mary Cunningham, and William Woodley, ―Residents at Risk: A Profile of Ida. B.
Wells and Madden Park,‖ The Urban Institute, Washington DC: The Urban Institute, 2003: 30-31.
154
Feldman and Stall, 2004; Williams, 2005; Wiseman, 1997.
155
Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar‟s Palace: How Black Mother‟s Fought their Own War on Poverty,
Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2006: 2.
 195

examples put faces on countless unsung heroes, who, in their activism, challenge

misconception after misconception about African-American, female public housing

dwellers and welfare recipients.

While Turner‘s Ghetto Bus Tour stood at the forefront of efforts to rebuild

destructive readings of late twentieth-century inner-city African-American single

mothers via direct engagement between tour go‘er and public housing resident,

Gibbons and Miller ask comic readers to participate in a similarly intimate act of

reconstruction. Tour-goers and readers‘ alike experience Washington and Turner‘s

rocket-like propulsion, thrust, and movement through and above city space as an act of

exploration, self-possession, and a freedom and liberation from the constraints of those

who attempt to constrict their agency. Their individual journey‘s towards political

awakening, earned respectability and personal empowerment re-animates single

mothers in the American visual imagination, placing the reader firmly in the driving

seat on this narrative pathway to a new way of seeing: like Washington, we must all

become explorers (Figure 2.33).

 196

CHAPTER 3

Don‘t Believe the Hype: Smashing through the Looking Glass of Public Housing

In 1993 and 1994, NBC‘s Nightly News aired a series of forty-five stories on

ghetto violence and street gangs provocatively titled ―Society under Siege.‖ One story in

the series opens with black and white hand-held camera footage of a ―forced entry‖ raid

into a gang lair in an unnamed inner-city high-rise. Simultaneously, the righteous voice

of news anchor Tom Brokaw crackles over the raucous scene informing the viewer that

the ―epidemic‖ of gang warfare in Chicago is so severe ―children are planning their own

funerals.‖391 Two scenes later we are propelled to a high-angle aerial view of the scene

of this human misery: the Cabrini-Green housing project on Chicago‘s Near North Side.

As Brokaw‘s monologue fades out with the parting line, ―home is a war zone, life is

under siege,‖ and an instrumental version of Ice Cube‘s ―Ghetto Bird‖ crescendos, the

project becomes a container of aggressive pathology. By opening the news report in this

almost ethnographic way, with an enveloping camera looking down on and

documenting the neighborhood below, this sequence signifies how negative

representations of Chicago‘s public housing projects were mapped onto and into the

vocabulary of the American popular imagination during the 1990s.

Nightly News‟ highly edited and decidedly dramatized visual illustration of the

panic over public housing allegorized the conservative myth-making strategies and

ideologically over-determined images so central to the late twentieth-century discourse

on the ―urban crisis.‖ Blaming the urban minority poor for the poverty and social

391
―Society Under Siege,‖ Nightly News, NBC, 1 November 1993.
 197

isolation they faced and exaggerating the threat they posed to the rest of society, shows

like ―Society Under Siege‖ helped to establish crime as one of the nation‘s most

significant problems. A 1993 article from the Chicago-based newspaper, the Times

Mirror, located the source of this panic by asking the public where they obtained their

information about crime. Sixty-five percent responded that they learned about it via the

news media.392 Such fears helped to justify social policies such as the 1994 Violent

Crime Control Law Enforcement Act, which subjected public housing communities to

increased policing as well as cuts in income support and social services. Yet the ―terror‖

of the inner-city was greatly exaggerated; as a report by the national media watch group

FAIR reveals, the national rate of violent inner-city crime actually declined slightly

between 1973 and 1994.393 In other words, the danger posed by the urban ―underclass‖

was disproportional to the toxic discourse that surrounded it. The mainstream news

media were not alone in their relentless inflation of the menace of the inner-city. Rather,

the real ideological damage was committed on the big screen.

Today, as the Plan implodes the last of Chicago‘s public housing buildings, this

chapter considers two distinctly different ―ghetto-based‖ dramas that emerged during

the early 1990s; one which parallels the conservative political climate of the time in

mythologizing public housing as a violent site that deserves to be razed and the other

which argues for the permanence of public housing by offering visual modes of tactical

resistance to these myths. Specifically, when analyzing both films I focus attention on

how public housing space is performed in terms of the represented residents‘ spatial

392
Janine Jackson and Jim Naureckas, ―Crime Contradictions: U.S. News Illustrates Flaws in Crime
Coverage,‖ Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Extra! May/June 1994: 10.
393
Jackson & Naureckas, 10.
 198

mobility and access to the social institutions, resources, and spaces that make up the

metropolitan matrix of Chicago. My first film, Stephen Hopkins‘ Judgment Night

(1993), constructs public housing as a site of subjugation and social isolation through

textual references to its cartography: space is hierarchical – zoned, segregated, gated –

and encodes boundaries. Chronicling the exploits of four white middle-class

suburbanites who after taking a wrong turn on the highway find themselves in the

projects, Judgment Night depicts Chicago‘s public housing as a truly nightmarish urban

landscape of mindless violence and despair. Incarcerated by iron gates, walls, street

signs and lights (―Do Not Enter,‖ ―One Way,‖ and red ―Stop‖ signs appear throughout

the film), the group spends the duration of the film struggling to get ‗out‘ of public

housing.394 In this sense, Judgment Night allegorizes the discourses of politicians,

policymakers, and developers during the 1980s and 1990s who frequently attempted to

describe Chicago‘s public housing using metaphors of disease and decay, and other

adjectives that constructed the community as ―socially isolated.‖ The biggest perpetrator

of the social isolation argument is sociologist William Julius Wilson who sees public

housing as a ―container‖ of negative pathologies, an environment within which residents

fester passively and dysfunctionally ―separate‖ from education and employment

opportunities.395 Frank, John, Ray and Mike‘s spatial transgressions between

centeredness and marginality correspond with Wilson‘s attempt to provide, in the words

of urban theorist Robert Beauregard, ―a spatial fix‖ for ―generalized insecurities and

394
Paula J. Massood and Manthia Diawara make similar arguments within the context of South Central
Los Angeles in the article‘s ―Mapping the Hood: The Genealogy of City Space in Boyz N the Hood and
Menace II Society,‖ Cinema Journal 35, No. 2, Winter 1996:90 and ―Black American Cinema: The New
Realism,‖ in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara, New York: Routledge, 1993:11.
395
William Julius Wilson, ―The Ghetto Underclass: Social Science Perspectives,‖ The Annals of The
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. 501, January 1989.
 199

anxieties‖ about American society.396 In framing the projects as the moral inverse of the

suburbs - as a deviant urban core populated by a hopelessly pathological ―other‖ - public

housing is sentenced to death in the viewer‘s imagination.

Released just one year before Judgment Night, Bernard Rose‘s horror film

Candyman (1992) offers a more democratic vision of spatial justice. Based on Clive

Barker‘s short story, ―The Forbidden‖ (1986), Candyman features a black ghost who

haunts anyone who dares to say his name five times into a mirror.397 Rose alters the

narrative from a white, lower-class British inner-city to Chicago‘s Cabrini-Green, a

housing project identifiable with urban desolation since the 1960s.398 Smashing

through the socio-spatial barriers portrayed in Judgment Night, the characters in

Candyman re-conceptualize public housing as a site of spatial negotiation and

opportunity. For most of the film, white anthropology graduate student Helen Lyle

(Virginia Madsen), like her male suburban counterparts in Judgment Night, assumes

the role of privileged ―investigator‖ of the projects.399 The scholar of urban legends is

delighted when, through intermittent library visits, news reports, and gossip provided

by her fellow academics, she learns of the Cabrini-Green folk legend of Candyman. In

pursuit of Candyman, she too crosses over to the projects and yet, unlike the characters

396
Robert Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993: 6.
397
Clive Barker, ―The Forbidden,‖ Books of Blood, Vol.5, New York City, NY: Time Warner
Paperbacks, 1988.
398
This shift may have been motivated by Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne‘s highly publicized stay in
Cabrini-Green. In the mid 1980s, the Mayor decided to spend the night in a typical housing project
apartment; she and her family left early, and drew attention to the deplorable conditions in Cabrini-
Green and (to white Chicagoans, anyway) its menacing ―otherness,‖ rather than, as had been hoped, to
the fact that its inhabitants were friendly and responsible – albeit poor and black – American citizens.
Laura Wyrick, ―Summoning Candyman: The Cultural Production of History,‖ Arizona Quarterly, Vol.
54, No. 3, Autumn 1998: 114.
399
In Barker‘s tale, Helen is working on a thesis: "Graffiti: The Semiotics of Urban Despair," and finds
a rich source of mythological material in the fictive Specter Street Estate which Rose later converts into
the real life Cabrini-Green in Candyman.
 200

in Judgment Night, there is no escape at the film‘s conclusion. With her death Helen

she pays the ultimate price for her misjudgment of public housing. Through various

observational motifs such as aerial shots, mirrors, and holes in walls, Rose offers a

new way of seeing public housing and critiques the self-righteous polemics of social

elites (CHA, academias) who judge what is ―best‖ for the urban poor. Employing

Candyman‘s central theme of epistemological and mythological resurrection as an

interpretative framework, this chapter warns against conservative notions of black

sociopathy that render public housing residents ―marginal to,‖ existing ―on the edges

of,‖ or ―socially isolated‖ from the wider urban matrix.400

The spatial negotiations in Candyman are key to understanding the socio-

spatial mobilization of ―real‖ residents of Chicago‘s public housing. By linking Pierre

Bourdieu‘s place-based concept habitus and sociologists Krista Brumley and Kevin

Fox Gotham‘s conceptual tool ―using space‖ to the lived experiences of public housing

dwellers, I draw attention to the attempts of some residents to contest their perceived

marginality.401 Bourdieu has described habitus as a ―sense of one's place...a sense of

the other's place‖ in the world of one‘s lived environment and is concerned with how

these ―senses‖ affect our ability to negotiate within different fields and with places and

400
These are notions expounded by Cornel West and William Julius Wilson. Cornel West: ―The Afro-
American existentialist tradition promotes a self-image of both confinement and creativity, restriction and
revolt. It encompasses a highly individualistic rebellion of Afro-Americans who are marginal to, or exist
on the edges of, Afro-American culture and see little use in assimilating into the American mainstream.‖
Taken from Prophecy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, Westminster: John
Knox Press, 2002 and ―The Ghetto Underclass: Social Science Perspectives‖, The Annals of The American
Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. 501, January1989: 202.
401
Kevin Fox Gotham & Krista Brumley. ―Using Space: Agency and Identity in a Public Housing
Development,‖ City & Community, 1:3 September 2002.
 201

people.402 ―Using space‖ builds on the ―navigative‖ possibilities inherent in Bourdieu‘s

concept by focusing specifically on the transitional link between institutional

constraints and survival tactics employed by tenants in order to go about their daily

lives. The device underscores the need to move beyond the static conceptual

limitations of Wilson‘s "neighborhood effects" model, in which public housing

residents exist passively, dysfunctionally, and socially isolated from education and

employment opportunities.403 I apply Brumley and Gotham‘s tool to the work of

Chicago‘s only public housing newspaper, Residents‟ Journal.404 This bi-monthly

newspaper is written, produced, and distributed entirely by Chicago public housing

residents and is free to all of the city‘s remaining public housing households, health

care facilities, community centers, and religious institutions. It is also available at a

subscription rate to others outside of public housing. Residents‟ Journal was

introduced in 1996, a year and a half after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban

Development (HUD) provisionally took control of the CHA, as a response to executive

director Vincent Lane‘s failure to address infamous housing conditions at the

developments – rodent broken elevators, high crime rates, a corrupt and inefficient

bureaucracy, and a hostile relationship with other city agencies. As part of HUD‘s

efforts to improve the housing agency, to forge relationships with resident leaders, and

to change the public perception of residents, Assistant Secretary Joseph Shuldiner

announced plans to initiate a resident-written newspaper. Shuldiner employed a young,

402
Pierre Bourdieu, ―Droit et passé-droit. Le champ des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en oeuvre des
reglements,‖ Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 81/82, 1990: 53.
403
Wilson, 1989.
404
Interestingly, Residents‟ Journal already have a connection to Candyman; for the 2004 re-released
special edition of the movie, the distributors involved Residents‟ Journal employees in the production of
a commentary ‗featurette‘ highlighting ―real‖ life in Cabrini-Green.
 202

enthusiastic reporter named Ethan Michaeli, who was working on the Chicago

Defender at the time, to be Residents‟ Journal‟s first editor.405 Despite his editorial

inexperience Micheali stipulated early on that Residents‟ Journal was going to be

exactly as its name suggests: a journal for public housing residents and not a political

forum for the CHA. Michaeli recalls:

I was immediately intrigued by the idea (of Residents Journal), having heard
often from residents that the mainstream media misrepresented them and failed
to provide them with useful information…Before accepting the position, I
asked the CHA for a written guarantee they would not censor or otherwise
shape the editorial content of the publication. I felt that editorial independence
would be a critical component of the publication‘s ability to attract and retain
residents to its ranks.406

Since then, Michaeli and the journal have held true to these early ambitions.

For the past thirteen years, Residents‟ Journal has been at the forefront of an effort to

re-write (and re-imagine) Chicago‘s public housing in the American imagination.

Responding to residents‘ frustrations regarding their misrepresentation in the

mainstream news media, Residents‟ Journal strives to provide a public forum for

tenants to air their views about the day-to-day reality of living in public housing. In

recent years, Residents‟ Journal has reported the experiences of the 60,000 public

housing residents ordered to pack up and leave behind not only their homes but also

lifelong friends and support networks, due to the implementation of the Plan. Of late,

the journal has investigated conditions in yet-to-be-demolished public housing

405
In 1999, after Richard M. Daley replaced Shuldiner, Residents‟ Journal cut their ties with the CHA.
As Michaeli describes in an article for Chicago magazine, he was ―given an ultimatum: Become part of
the CHA‘s public relations strategy or lose its funding within 30 days.‖ Michaeli convened a board of
directors, created a nonprofit organization (We the People Media), applied for a few grants, and made
the journal truly independent. Steve Rhodes, ―New From Home,‖ Chicago, June 2003.
406
Sudhir Venkatesh, ―Residents‘ Journal: By and For Public Housing Residents: An Interview with
Ethan Michaeli,‖ Souls 4, 2002: 90-93.
 203

buildings, such as whether residents are being relocated with promised social services,

and if the City of Chicago is fulfilling its promise to let residents return to new mixed-

income neighborhoods. In this sense, Residents‟ Journal provides an interesting model

through which to apply the conceptual tool ―using space‖ as well as a vital contrast to

one-dimensional mainstream media representations of the lives of Chicago‘s public

housing residents. Residents‟ Journal illustrates the ways in which inhabitants

represent their own lives, thereby the challenging stigmatized identities and negative

stereotypes associated with public housing.407

In depicting Chicago‘s public housing as a psychotopographical landscape

where socio-spatial divides can be conquered, Candyman and Residents‟ Journal

demythologize the one-dimensional terrain of stereotypes, assumptions and moral

panics presented in Judgment Night.

Judgment Night

Director Mario Van Peebles fired the starting gun for the filmic ―death‖ of

public housing with the violent project-based film New Jack City (1991), which

centers on the violent escapades of a drug gang at the height of New York City‘s crack

cocaine epidemic. Since then, dramatic scenes from the ‗‗hood‘ have become a

commonplace feature on American screens. In representing public housing as a

divided urban space - zoned according to incidents of alcoholism, domestic violence,

street crime, and drug addiction - films such as Menace II Society (1993, directed by

Albert and Allen Hughes) set in the Jordan Downs project in Los Angeles and

407
Brumley & Gotham, 2002.
 204

Clockers (1995, directed by Spike Lee) situated in the Gowanus projects in Brooklyn,

were joined by a lesser known, less academically dissected and, to be fair, less

critically successful drama Judgment Night, set in the Robert Taylor Homes in

Chicago. Where Stephen Hopkins‘ Judgment Night differs from its contemporaries,

however, is in its harshly drawn distinction between the utopian suburban home of the

middle-class central characters, and the nightmarish dystopian inner-city they

unwillingly venture into en route to a boxing match. The film‘s topographical binary

opposition invokes and justifies the moral panic over the inner-city during the 1990s,

helping to seal the fate of public housing in the American visual imagination.

This social polarization is established in the film‘s first few minutes when we

find our suburban heroes -- level-headed Frank (Emilio Estevez); John (Stephen

Dorff), Frank‘s troubled younger brother; Ray (Jeremy Piven), an obnoxious car sales

clerk; and Mike (Cuba Gooding, Jr), an African-American womanizer -- in an idyllic

autumnal landscape of middle-class familiarity (Figure 3.1).408 Scenes of kids riding

bicycles and a man with a briefcase coming home from work are accompanied by a

blatantly symbolic hip-hop soundtrack which pulses in the background like a mounting

heartbeat, hinting at the urban fate that awaits them. After hugging his wife on the

stoop of their home and leaving her with the famous last words, "It's just a bunch of

guys going to a boxing match. That's it," Frank and his buoyant friends take to the road

408
Barry Keith Grant acknowledges the tokenistic inclusion of an African-American character by
noting, ―in yuppie ideology, race is subsumed by economic difference.‖ Indeed, clothed in the same
sport-casual attire of his white friends, Judgment Night suppresses Mike‘s blackness, instead coding him
as just ―one of the guys.‖ Grant, cited in Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right, And
The Moral Panic Over the City, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006: 212.
 205

in a luxurious RV, a miniature suburbia-on-wheels that Ray has secured on loan for the

night (Figure 3.2).409

Tipsy on bottles of Budweiser salvaged from the RV‘s mini-refrigerator, the

group stumbles around the vehicle, whooping and cheering at the pre-boxing match

festivities beamed from a television screen (Figure 3.3). Salivating one minute, then

recoiling in horror the next, the group are transfixed by the reified vision of young,

glossy, pumping, preening black men beating one another to a bloody pulp. This

spectacle provides more than a backdrop for the action of the narrative; instead, it

becomes a useful tool to relay the dynamics of my project. Their ravenous

consumption demonstrates the way in which some middle-class white people

comprehend inner-city black people more through long-distanced but familiar media

images than through personal everyday interaction. The television screen, in this sense,

detaches the viewer from the subjects viewed, colonizing and exoticizing the inner-city

as a violent black space of otherness.410 Through the simulated screen of a pay-per-

view boxing show, the inner-city is sold as a signifier of danger and the unknown that

at the same time instills both fear and desire in the suburbanites.411 Like a department

store display case, the television screen becomes a portal through which the group see

the ‗goods‘ – the urban space that so fascinates them – but don‘t have to touch or

409
Macek: 214.
410
Cameron McCarthy, Alicia P. Rodriguez, Ed Buendia, Shuaib Meacham, Stephen David,
Heriberto Godina, K. E. Supriya, Carrie Wilson-Brown, ―Danger in the safety zone: Notes on race,
resentment, and the discourse of crime, violence and suburban security,‖ Cultural Studies, Volume 11,
Issue 2 May 1997: 281.
411
McCarthy, Rodriguez, Buendia, Meacham, David, Godina, Supriya, Wilson-Brown, 281.
 206

comprehend in any real sense.412 The group drools over this slick, beatified

representation of inner-city blackness, unaware that the scenes of violence are a mere

commercial trailer for the real life bloody exploits that await them. This reality comes

sooner than they expect when vodka-swilling Ray loses his patience with a traffic jam,

shouting at no one in particular, ―I‘m not going to miss this fight. I hate being late!,‖

forcing the group to make a detour into an area of Chicago recognizable as the

concrete towers of the Robert Taylor Homes.

The Crossover

As the RV careens off the Dan Ryan Expressway and into a dimly lit tunnel

exit, the camera cuts to a high-angle crane shot that highlights the dystopian gravity of

this spatial decision. In stark topographical contrast to the raised street and florescent

lights of the freeway, the dark, decayed, burrowed tunnel leaves the viewer in no doubt

that the suburbanites‘ have made a wrong turn (Figures 3.4 & 3.5). Nevertheless, the

group, like modern day colonial explorers, cross this geographical boundary,

ploughing forth into foreign territory confident in the knowledge that their ownership

extends to ownership of the Dark Continent beyond.413

While Hopkins frames the suburban scenes through a short focal distance in

order to integrate the characters into their surroundings, after the crossover, long focal
412
To recall: In 1993 a Times Mirror asked the public where they got their information about crime;
65% of the American public responded to a Times Mirror poll that they learned about crime from the
media. Jackson and Naureckas, 10.
413
I will not be pursuing this avenue further in this chapter but it should be acknowledged that the Plan
– a reversal of white flight – could be seen as a form of modern day colonialism. As David Theo
Goldberg observes, ‖Outside colonizes inside; unable to afford spiraling rents, the inner city are turned
out, homeless, on to the street…As the social margins are (re)colonized or cut loose, the peripheral is
symbolically wiped away.‖ David Theo Goldberg, ―Polluting the Body Politic.‖ In Racism: The City
and the State, ed. Malcolm Cross & Michael Keith. London & New York: Routledge, 1993: 47.
 207

distance serves to detach the subjects from the background, thus underscoring the

ideological distance separating the two spaces. Additionally, while the suburban scenes

are shot against the luminous buttery sunlight of an autumnal afternoon, after the

protagonists enter the inner-city, the screen is shrouded in shadow, a technique that

recalls the oppressively sinister cinematography of film noir. As a result, as soon as the

group turns away from suburbia they are immediately consumed by a dark sense of

dread. While suburbia is tantamount to intimacy, home, interiority, a space where the

suburbanites feel integrated and have an affinity with their surroundings, the city, on

the other hand, becomes a site of exclusion, a netherworld, a space of flight, fear, and

of confrontation with alterity.414

Emerging from the tunnel on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, the group

enters into a truly nightmarish urban landscape of dimly lit streets, litter-filled vacant

lots, weathered, crumbling buildings and omnipresent graffiti. Stunned by the vision in

front of him, John shouts ―Where‘s the damn Expressway, Ray!?‖ Against a

colophony of similar complaints, Ray brings the RV to a grinding halt in front of a

group of homeless men loitering around a burning canister in the middle of the street

(Figure 3.6). Seizing a chance to, first, make fun of his white friends‘ fears of poor

414
According to Harvey Warren Zorbaugh (1896-1965), an exponent of the Chicago School of
Sociology, this sharp edged spatial dichotomy is a historical continuation as Chicago has always been
―An area of high light and shadow, of vivid contrasts - contrasts not only between the old and the new,
between the native and the foreign, but between wealth and poverty, vice and respectability, the
conventional and the bohemian.‖ The Chicago School of Sociology was a group based at the University
of Chicago who pioneered research on urban studies, poverty, the family, the workplace and race
relations. They contributed a major body of works during the 1920s and 1930s specializing in urban
sociology and research into the urban environment by combining theory and ethnographic fieldwork in
Chicago. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago‟s Near North Side,
Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1929: 4.
 208

black people and, second, humiliate the homeless men from the raised safety zone of

the RV Mike exclaims:

Mike: Oh look, it‘s the Brothers Johnson (pointing at the homeless men). Hey look, if
you‘re lost you ask for directions, so let‘s ask those guys. They look like they know
their way around!
Ray: Oh sure, we‘ll tell them we‘re the welcome wagon and have some baked goods
for them!
Mike: (grabbing the RV‘s loud speaker) Excuse me gentlemen. We‘re the welcome
wagon; can you come here for a minute please? (Pointing at Ray, laughing) Mr.
Welcome would like to ask you something!
Ray: (grabs the microphone) That‘s not funny!

Mike‘s provocation has the desired effect as two of the homeless men slowly make

their way over to the vehicle. Excited beyond belief, Mike exclaims, ―Here they come!

There‘s a party in here, baby!‖ Under the high beam of the RV‘s headlights, a

homeless man stumbles into the frame and mumbles the partly discernable line, ―Let

them have it, Earl.‖ Cue dramatic music as Earl slowly reaches into his pocket,

rummaging for the ultimate come back to Mike‘s provocation: a gun. As the horrified

suburbanites dive to the floor of the RV and a shaken Ray attempts to retrieve his own

handgun from the glove pocket, the camera reveals that the ‗weapon‘ is just a harmless

brown-bagged bottle of booze. With his pride thoroughly dented Ray steps on the gas,

ordering his friends to lock the doors and reassuring them that if anything like that

happens again, ―We‘ll just blow them away.‖

From the overflowing trash, to crude stereotypes of drunken homeless people,

the scene reverberates with clichés about collective ―underclass‖ existence. Long shots

show the homeless men gathered in a group thereby intensifying the impression that

they are involved in clandestine activities, while the use of dramatic backlighting and

swirling mist frame the dispossessed men as mysterious and threatening. Specifically,
 209

Judgment Night‘s representation of urban existence satisfies the image of ―underclass‖

life postulated by William Julius Wilson in the study The Truly Disadvantaged (1990).

Wilson contends that although the lack of jobs and poverty was the ultimate cause

behind Chicago‘s inner-city destitution, behavioral deficiencies amongst

predominantly black communities created a ―tangle of pathology,‖ a term borrowed

from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to describe the social traits that perpetuate the

conditions of the poor. Wilson argues that since the 1970s, structural changes in the

economy––such as the shift from manufacturing to service industries and the departure

of low skilled jobs from urban centers––rendered the remaining unemployed inner-city

families socially isolated from role models and job networks, and mired in

concentrated poverty, crime, single motherhood, and welfare dependency. These

conditions left them mired in concentrated poverty, crime, single motherhood and

welfare dependency.415 Wilson argues that without the presence of role models there is

nothing "to keep alive the perception that education is meaningful, that steady

employment is a viable alternative to welfare, and that family stability is the norm, not

the exception." With this social transformation of the ghetto, "joblessness as a way of

life takes on a different social meaning...a vicious cycle is perpetuated.‖ 416 This

‗culture of poverty‘ explanation of urban poverty overemphasizes the cultural values

of the inner-city poor and blames the institutional faults of the CHA and racial

inequality on the victims themselves.

415
Wilson, 1989: 300.
416
William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy,
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987: 57.
 210

The director‘s camera articulates Wilson‘s critical stance by framing the Robert

Taylor Homes as the social equivalent of a black hole. Through textual references to

its cartography, the film frames public housing as a site of repression and social

isolation. Judgment Night‘s tagline warns ―Don't Move, Don't Whisper, Don't Even

Breathe,‖ while in the main body of the film ―One Way,‖ ―Do Not Enter,‖ and red

―Stop‖ signs appear frequently, signifying the various pathologies that Wilson argues

separates housing project residents from the wider metropolitan matrix. Within this

filmic road to perdition, Chicago‘s public housing residents‘ are helplessly trapped in a

―vicious cycle‖ that offers them one choice: kill or be killed (Figure 3.7). The film‘s

constrictive signs, therefore, become allegorical symbols for the spatial metaphors and

geographical units - ‗concentration effects‘, ‗spatial isolation‘, ‗ghettoized poor‘,

‗super poverty areas‘ - routinely attached to the causes and consequences of urban

poverty.417 Moreover, Judgment Night‟s numerous signage leitmotifs articulate how

stock representations of delinquent and aberrant behavior – endless chains of one-note

recyclable signifiers – come to entangle and unfairly signify all members of the

underclass. As sociologist Rob Shields argues:

Representations are…metonymic in their tendency to displace the city

completely so that one ends by not dealing with the physical level of direct
social exchange and brute arrangements of objects but with a surrogate level of
signs (my emphasis). This arrangement of signs is a simulacrum which
presents itself as ‗reality.‘418

417
―Concentration effects‖ is taken from Wilson, 57; ―Spatial isolation‖ is taken from Katherine M.
O‘Regan and John M. Quigley‘s ―Teenage Employment and the Spatial Isolation of Minority Poverty
Households,‖ The Journal of Human Resources 31, 1991: 692-702; ―Ghettoized poor‖ is taken from
Mark Gottdiener‘s ―The Ghettoized Poor.‖ In The New Urban Sociology, ed. Mark Gottdiener and Ray
Hutchinson. McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 1991: 161.
418
Rob Shields, ―A Guide to Urban Representation and What to Do About It: Alternative Traditions of
Urban Theory.‖ In Re-Presenting the City Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century
Metropolis, ed. Anthony D. King. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996: 229.
 211

In other words, this scene highlights how representations of public housing never

simply reflect reality; instead, the very concept of representation implies an active

process of selection and construction. As I discuss in the Introduction, the perception

that Chicago high-rise project were ―vertical ghettos,‖ where residents lived on

―segregated islands of poverty,‖419 or ―embattled war zones,‖ 420 for example, was not a

natural reflection of reality; it was the effect of continually recycled images that linked

public housing to apocalyptic horror. The copious diffusion of discourse on the

savagery of public housing and its residents produced a ―paranoid spatial imaginary,‖

which manifests itself in film‘s plethora of ―stop‖ signs and in the suburbanites‘

insistence that they are trapped in a dysfunctional environment.421

The groups repeated cries of ―We have never been here,‖ ―We have no clue

where we‘re going,‖ ―I don‘t see a sign or anything here,‖ ―Where the hell are we!?‖

upon their entry into the projects, add weight to the sense that public housing is a

socio-spatial dead end. By ensuring that citizenship exists solely within the mobile

territory of the RV, the vehicle comes to symbolize America‘s investment in

individualist home ownership as a marker of national belonging.422 The film‘s stark

419
William Moore, Jr, The Vertical Ghetto: Everyday Life in an Urban Project, London: Random
House, 1969.
420
James Garbarino, Nancy Durbrow, Kathleen Kostelny and Caroll Pardo, Children in Danger: Coping
with the Consequences of Community Violence. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
421
Liam Kennedy coined the term ―paranoid spatiality‖ to describe the postmodern representation as the
manifestation of urban experience and culture - white male paranoia (Joel Schumacher's 1993 film
Falling Down) and apocalyptic feelings amidst hi-tech popular culture (Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 film
Strange Days). Liam Kennedy, Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture, Edinburgh,
Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
422
Government post-war federal policy towards investment in mass suburbanization helped to solidify
American bias towards the citizenship of suburbanites. The building of an efficient network of roads,
highways and superhighways, and the underwriting of mortgages for suburban one-family homes, had
an enormous influence on the pace of suburbanization in the U.S. In effect, the government was
 212

comparison between the ―respectability, diligence, and moral superiority of (white)

homeowners‖ and the ―disreputableness, slothfulness, and property endangering‖ black

project tenants renders citizenship an ideological construction and a type of control.423

In the words of philosopher Seyla Benhabib:

Citizenship and practices of political membership are the rituals through which
the nation is reproduced spatially. The control of territorial boundaries, which
is coeval with the sovereignty of the modern nation state, seeks to ensure the
purity of the nation in time through the policing of its contacts and its
interactions in space. The history of citizenship reveals that these nationalist
aspirations are ideologies; they attempt to mold a complex, unruly, unwieldy
reality according to some simple governing principle of reduction, such as
national membership. Every nation has its others, within and without.424

In this sense, the vehicle‘s windshield becomes a literal and metaphorical frontier that

demarcates a definitional boundary between those in the modern spaces of order (those

―within‖) and those outside (those ―without‖) (Figure 3.8). Rendering the ―underclass‖

―socially isolated‖ from the safe, comfortable lifestyle coded within the bourgeois

interior of the RV, the windshield confines modernity, power, light, money, and luxury

within the closed limits of middle-class white suburbia; locked away – quite literally -

from the savage, dimly lit, graffitied streets outside. In his work, sociologist Georg

Simmel analyzed various spatial forms of social distance, all involving forms of social,

physical and psychological differentiation.425 Simmel believed that space could be

subdivided for social purposes and framed in by boundaries. In contrast to natural

encouraging the transfer of the middle-class population out of the inner cities and into the suburbs,
sometimes with devastating effects on the viability of city centers like Chicago. Robert A. Beauregard,
When America Became Suburban, New York: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
423
Goldberg, 55.
424
Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens, Cambridge & New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004: 18.
425
Georg Simmel, Soziologie [Sociology: Investigations on the Forms of Sociation], Leipzig: Duncker
& Humblot, 1908.
 213

boundaries, the social boundary is "not a spatial fact with sociological consequences,

but a sociological fact that is formed spatially," meaning boundaries provide special

configurations for experience and interaction.426 As Dave Frisby observes in his

analysis of Simmel‘s chapter ‗The Social Boundary‘:

Space possesses the characteristic that it may be broken into pieces and
subdivided for our purposes. In other words, it can be framed in by boundaries.
Here Simmel specifically draws upon the analogy with the picture frame in so
far as framing has a similar significance for social groups as for works of
art…he (Simmel) does indicate that a society, and forms of socioation, possess
a sharply demarcated existential space in which the extensiveness of space
coincides with the intensity of social relationships.427

The planar frame of the windshield, then, constitutes a ―demarcation‖ between

two intensely different social relationships (formed in suburbia and the city) that can

never be breached. This representation of the underclass as a distinctly separate group

reinforces the discourses of urban decline widespread in American culture during the

late twentieth-century. During the 1980s and 1990s numerous articles, speeches, policy

papers, bestselling books, social scientists, politicians, and policy analysts repeatedly

traced the troubles of U.S. cities to the growth of an alien and dysfunctional urban

core.428 Such analyses framed poor inner-city residents as suffering from not only

economic but also social deficiencies. ―The underclass operates outside the generally

accepted boundaries of society,‖ wrote Ken Auletta in his eponymously titled 1982

426
Simmel, 1908.
427
Dave Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel‟s Social Theory, New York, NY:
Routledge, 1992: 105.
428
Bruce C. Conn, The Horror of Cabrini Green, L.A., California: Holloway House Publishing Company,
1975; Don Terry, ―Even a Grade School Is No Refuge from Gunfire,‖ The New York Times, 17 October
1992; Bradford Hunt, ―What Went Wrong With Public Housing in Chicago?‖ Journal of the Illinois State
Historical Society, Spring 2001; Leon Dash, When Children Want Children: the Urban Crisis of Teenage
Parenting, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1989; Valerie Polakow, Lives on the Edge:
Single Mothers and their Children in the Other America, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press,
1993.
 214

book on the subject. ―They are often set apart by their deviant or antisocial behavior

(and) by their bad habits.‖429 A Time magazine cover story from August 1977 stated,

―Behind (the ghetto‘s) crumbling walls lives a large group of people who are more

intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined.

They are the unreachables: the American underclass.‖430 This statement isolates the

―underclass‖ as a disconnected group implicitly responsible for its members‘

immiseration and ―unreachability.‖ As Steve Macek notes in his book Urban

Nightmares, ―With such an ‗Other,‘ no commonality, no communication, no shared

experience is desirable or even possible; the only possible relation decent (white,

suburban) people can have to such Others is to exclude, control, and confine them.‖431

These fears all figure prominently in the conservative discourse of Judgment Night, a

film that repeatedly invokes and justifies the late twentieth-century moral panic over

the inner-city.

Reared on this conservative ideology, when the suburbanites in Judgment Night

look down at the ghetto poor though the picture frame of the windshield, they are

certain that mockery and objectification is all that the poor deserve. Thus, when the RV

pulls away from the groups encounter with the homeless men and Ray reassures his

friends, ―Look, don‘t worry, when the guys built the expressway they did it logically.

When we hit the next intersection, we‘ll cut over,‖ he is convinced that ―the guys‖

(Aldermen Richard Daley and John J. Duffy) had it right: logic will prevail and the

paranoid late twentieth-century political establishment that constructed the expressway

429
Ken Auletta, The Underclass, New York: Random House, 1982: 27-28.
430
Kennedy, 91.
431
Macek, 133.
 215

barrier will protect him and his friends from the illogical savage urban ―other.‖ In

other words, the underclass became the ―other‖ by which the logical, rational,

suburban citizen is constituted against. Ray underlines this sense of intractable

difference and distance between himself and urban dweller when he expects the

homeless man to be armed. To trigger-happy Ray, because of where he is, the man

must be a criminal, a social and spatial pariah who exists outside of, or, in the case of

the screen metaphor, the other side of the public sphere. Through this representation of

spatial duality – of inside and outside, of self and ―other‖ - the film portrays social

barriers, or in the words of social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark ―invisible walls‖ that

―confine those who have no power, and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The dark

ghettos are social, political, educational and – above all- economic colonies.‖432 One of

the unique aspects of cities, however, is that despite everyone‘s seeming alienation and

isolation it is possible, at any given moment, that spatial and individual barriers can be

broken down. This moment arrives in Judgment Night when, after driving away from

their encounter with the homeless men, someone dashes into the path of the RV; after

stopping the vehicle, the group finds an injured man on the road and, when they take

him on board, discovers that he has been shot. Shortly thereafter, the drug dealers who

shot him, led by a sneering villain named Fallon (Denis Leary), crash their car into the

RV, kill the injured man, and then decide to eliminate the witnesses as well. A frenzied

pursuit by Fallon and his cronies forces the friends to flee the mobile home, thereby

432
Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1965:
11.
 216

breaching Clark‘s ―invisible wall‖ and setting off a chase of cat and mouse that takes

up the remainder of the film.

Venturing into the world ―outside,‖ the group find themselves in an anarchic

environment (Figure 3.9). As gunshots ring out in their wake, the friends scale a wire

fence and a winded Ray cries, ―Where‘s the cops, man? Someone must have heard the

blast?‖ to which Mike responds, ―We could dynamite the whole city block and no one

would come.‖ ―That‘s criminal‖ decides John. In the next moment, John stumbles

across a payphone, finding unsurprisingly, that it‘s vandalized and of no use. In the

few seconds between John uttering ―It‘s criminal‖ and picking up the abused phone - a

democratic feature of American urban civilization - the film spatially designates public

housing as a ―criminogenic‖ environment.433 John‘s damning critique refers not only to

police negligence but also, through the scene‘s spatio-temporal association, links

public housing residents with the decrepitude of their living environment.434 This scene

conveniently blames local residents for the despicable conditions they are forced to

endure on a daily basis. The housing project in Judgment Night becomes a vast refuse

site for people who are undeserved of the normal services, amenities, and police

433
In their book Body Count, William J. Bennett, John DiJulio, Jr. and John P. Walters contend that
moral poverty has transformed many low-income urban neighborhoods into ―criminogenic‖
environments, ―places where the social forces that create predatory criminals are far more numerous and
stronger than the social forces that create decent, law abiding citizens. Bennett, DiJulio & Walters, Body
Count: Moral Poverty…And How to Win America‟s War Against Crime & Drugs, London & Glasgow:
Simon & Schuster, 1996. Cited in Macek: 106.
434
John‘s ―criminogenic‖ association aligns with the argument posed by political scientist James Wilson
and criminologist George Kelling in their famous 1982 article ―Broken Windows,‖ in which they used
the image of broken windows to explain how neighborhoods might decay into disorder and crime if no
one attends to their maintenance: a broken factory window suggests to passers-by that no one is in
charge or cares; in time a few more windows are broken by rock-throwing youths; passers-by begin to
think that no one cares about the whole street; soon, only the young and criminals are prepared to use
the street; which then attracts prostitution, drug-dealing, and such like; until, in due course, someone is
murdered. In this way, small disorders lead to larger disorders, and eventually to serious crimes. James
Wilson and George Kelling, ―Broken Windows,‖ Atlantic Monthly, March 1982.
 217

protection we all take for granted. The sense that life in public housing is a self-made

misery extends to the film‘s close attention to the bounded iconography of its

architecture and its hellish molten cinematography.

Lured by the deceptively welcoming sight of twinkling Christmas lights in a

window, the suburbanites scale yet another wire fence, finally arriving at the front door

of the foreboding Robert Taylor Homes. Shot from a low angle and illuminated by

sultry lighting, the red brick buildings rise up ignobly like a volcano ready to erupt.

Iron security fences throw jagged slices of shadow against its side, entombing the

high-rise in claw-like silhouettes that look eerily similar to the dark bars of a prison

cell (Figure 3.10). This abstract geometry magnifies the image of criminality,

incubating and localizing transgressions within the space of the building, at the same

time hinting at the perceived destiny of many of its young inhabitants. In this sense,

this scene articulates the various mechanisms of control exerted on residents living in

Chicago‘s public housing buildings during the late twentieth-century. In 1992, for

example, just six days after seven-year-old public housing resident Dantrell Davis died

in the crossfire of a gang fight while walking to Jenner Elementary School with his

mother in Cabrini-Green, then CHA chairman Vincent Lane held a press conference in

Mayor Richard Daley Jr.‘s city hall office ordering a massive sweep of the project

declaring, ―We have seen a complete breakdown of society.‖ 435 In less time than the

time it took to pull the trigger that killed Davis, Lane implemented a plan entitled

“Operation Clean Sweep.‖ The CHA installed metal detectors at the entrance to some

of Chicago‘s high-rise projects and blocked off the side entrances to buildings, while

435
Newsweek, ―Chicago Housecleaning,‖ 08/19/91: 58-59.
 218

enforced curfews and unannounced ―sweeps‖ of individual apartments became routine

procedure.436 These security measures worked to spatially compartmentalize tenants of

subsidized housing; in a Foucaultian sense to classify them and train their bodies in

time and space as ―objects of information, never…subject(s) in communication.‖437

Indeed, many CHA residents describe the living conditions they endured during this

time as a form of ―state-sanctioned imprisonment.‖438 Writing in Residents‟ Journal,

Latoya Wolfe who grew up in the projects of Chicago recalls:

I‘ve toured concentration camps in Prague, and visited cousins in jail, and these
places remind me of my childhood home. You feel like someone is trying to
detain you. Someone wants you to see the bars when you open your front door
and remember that you are indeed a prisoner.439

Judgment Night‘s representation of this socio-spatial control precipitates the

way in which scholars often refer to public housing as ―islands‖ of poverty, a ―city-

within-a-city,‖440 a ―quasi-independent city,―441 or a ―fortress city.‖442A Chicago

Tribune series from 1986, for example, called its public housing, ―The Chicago

Wall…a physical barrier of brick and steel and concrete that separates black from

white and, rich from poor, hope from despair.‖443 An exchange between Frank and Ray

articulates this sense of social separation:

436
Newsweek, 1991.
437
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York City, NY: Vintage,
1995, 200.
438
―Voices from the occupied territory of Cabrini Green,‖ Revolutionary Worker, 8 November 1992: 6.
439
Latoya Wolfe, ―Home for the Holidays,‖ Residents‟ Journal, February-March 2006: 10.
440
Charles Scruggs, Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel, Baltimore, Maryland:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
441
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of the Modern Ghetto, Cambridge,
Mass; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2000: 8.
442
Mike Davis, ―Fortress L.A.,‖ The City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los-Angeles, London:
Vintage, 1990.
443
J.S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago, Chicago, Illinois:
University of Illinois Press. 2004: 11.
 219

Frank: We‘ve got to make one of these people let us use their phone.
Ray: Do you really think one of these freaks is going to let us use their phone?!
Frank: These freaks are our neighbors Ray!
Ray: They‘re not my neighbors.
Frank: Oh yeah? I bet we haven‘t been further than ten miles from your front door this
whole night.

Ray‘s dogged disavowal of his ―neighbors‖ is interesting for two reasons. First,

despite his protestations, Ray is more like a ‗stereotypical‘ public housing resident

than any of his other friends: he drives an uninsured vehicle, drives drunk, and owns

an unlicensed firearm; he is, in effect, a suburban gangster. What Ray sees through the

literal and metaphorical barrier of the windshield, then, is not only a vision of the

public housing ―other,‖ but a Lacanian mirror inverse of himself. Jarred out of his

complacent fantasy bourgeois life by this night of judgment, Ray is forced to confront

not only the savage urban ―other‖ but also the fragility of the suburban experience. In

bursting the superficial bubble of the RV, the film encourages Ray to meet his own

economic vulnerability as a used car sales clerk head-on; he, like the residents in

public housing, is only a few checks away from destitution. Second, Ray‘s statement

draws attention to how social distance and difference are all the more evident when we

exist in close proximity to one another.444 Today, as the Plan calls for half million-

dollar condominiums to be constructed adjacent to yet-to-be-demolished public

housing high-rises, observers are asking: ―how the twain will meet‖ (Figure 3.11).445

Doug Van Dyke, a white townhouse owner who lives in Orchard Park, one of

Chicago‘s mixed-income developments admits, ―People on both sides have looked at

444
Frisby, 105.
445
Brian Smith, ―The Store in the Middle,‖ Chicago, February 2004: 75.
 220

each other with more than a little suspicion.‖446 Ray‘s sneering dismissal of public

housing, then, parallels Van Dyke‘s thinly veiled racist anxiety about living next door

to ex-public housing residents. This film‘s dominant motif of spatial dread continues

unabated when the pursuing felons force Frank, John, Ray and Mike to enter Robert

Taylor Homes in search of a telephone.

To the sound of pulsing rap music, the group roams through filthy

claustrophobic corridors screaming for help. After encountering a pregnant woman

brandishing a baseball bat, even the previously optimistic Frank is forced to admit

―Nobody‘s gonna help us.‖ Nevertheless, the three other friends continue to bang on

randomly chosen doors demanding help, only to be confronted by enfeebled residents

who mutely peek past tangles of locks and ominous-looking security bars. These

fenced-, wired-, and bricked-off spatial representations not only reflect the

stereotypical mass media depiction of public housing as an object of fear for those

outside but also emphasize feelings of fear and insecurity within the ghetto (Figures

3.12 & 3.13).447 The fortification of public housing defends the group from those

inside at the same time as hermetically sealing the poor within a contained

architectural space. As David Theo Goldberg observes, ―The living space of poverty is

best described in terms of confinement: cramped bedrooms sleeping several people,

sleeping space serving as daytime living rooms, kitchens doubling as bathrooms and

oftentimes as bedrooms.‖448 In both film and real life, the spatial constraints of

subsidized housing not only promotes feelings of fear, but also become practical

446
Smith, 75.
447
Kennedy, 2000: 110.
448
Goldberg, 51-52.
 221

limitations on the people living in that space. Overwhelmed by the cramped maze-like

interior of the housing project building, and pursued by the drug dealers who want to

kill them, the group is chased on to the roof for a final showdown. Here, Frank, John,

Ray and Mike negotiate what Ray refers to as their only way ―out,‖ a rickety ladder

that connects two tenement buildings (Figures 3.14 & 3.15).

Shot from above, the next sequence frames Robert Taylor Homes as a

predatory Venus Flytrap threatening to engulf the suburbanites at every turn. Other

elements of the mise-en-scene, such as ominous silhouettes and shadows, reinforce the

overriding impression that subsidized housing is a hazardous place to visit, or worse

still, to live. This disconcerting topography reflects aspects of Ray‘s troubled

subjectivity. Thus, when the suburbanite declares, ―Nothing about tonight makes much

sense,‖ he is at once disconnected in the space of public housing yet comfortable in his

own understanding of it—―They‘re not my neighbors, man.‖ For Ray, the projects will

always be viewed through a social barrier, whether it is a windshield or the green veil

of the overused hundred dollar bills with which he unsuccessfully tries to buy his life.

His viewpoint is geographically and culturally unyielding. Unimpressed with the car

dealer‘s sweet talking ways, the gang leader punishes Ray for his unsympathetic, one-

dimensional view of public housing by tossing him off of the roof and into the misty

orange underworld below, dismissing his offer of money with the line: ―You and your

friends are the kind of spoon-fed fucking fruit bait that I fucking HATE! You think

you can buy me off? Jerks like you sail through life, reading about people like me in

the newspaper. HEY! You're in a different place now, motherfucker! $100,000 might
 222

buy you out of North Shore. Here, that means shit. This is my fucking world‖ (Figure

3.16).

The film‘s climactic final scene takes place in a South Side grocery store where

Hopkins leaves the family man Frank to fight it out with the gang leader alone. After

Fallon threatens to hurt the suburbanite‘s wife and child (having stolen Frank‘s I.D.

from the RV), a hand-to-hand battle ensues and ―normal‖ middle-class Frank summons

the strength to outwit the deviant public housing resident (Figure 3.17). As a squad car

and ambulance arrive to remove Fallon‘s bloodied body (having been alerted by the

stores security system) and the final credits roll against an absurdly peppy soundtrack,

the final verdict of Judgment Night is in. By framing the projects as a deviant, wild

urban core populated by a hopelessly pathological ―other‖—the moral inverse of the

noble, victorious suburbs—public housing is sentenced to death in the viewer‘s

imagination. If we are not already convinced that public housing is, in Ray‘s words,

―hell,‖ then the visual and sonic ferocity of the film‘s final minutes leaves us in no

doubt. Hurricane force winds whip through the air, slapping the building‘s exterior and

choking the air with trash, giving visual form to the notion that public housing is a lost

cause. The portrayal of public housing as a descending spiral of physical disintegration

and mental immiseration, from which there is absolutely no hope of recovery, reflects

the hegemonic mythology surrounding the implementation of the Plan.

A 1995 report from mixed-income property developers, The North Town

Community Partnership, which states that, ―seen from 40 floors up in a luxury tower

across town, Cabrini-Green‘s apartment slabs brood like tombstones on quarantined

 223

turf,‖ effectively articulates the Plan‘s myth-making tactics.449 The report continues

with metaphors of disease and decay that characterize public housing as ―warehouses

of terminal poverty, crime plagued, prowled by dope gangs,‖ its residents ―unsure of

today, desperately unsure of tomorrow.‖450 By employing language that establishes

public housing as a lifeless contrast to the ―norm,‖ this report, like the visual

propaganda on offer in the film, conveniently ignores the middlespace of historical

fact. By failing to articulate the government‘s culpability in the establishment of urban

problems—the denial of social services, persistent specter of unemployment, the

failing public school system, and sweeping disinvestment—the ninety-minute cultural

narrative distorts the meaning of Chicago‘s inner-city and narrows the complexity of

project life. Instead, subsidized housing exists as a problem in itself, and a burden to

the world. By presenting inner-city Chicago as a degenerate space rife with poverty,

lack of policing, dead ends, social barriers, and cultural aliens, Judgment Night

supports the government‘s implosion of public housing and conveniently ignores the

generations of law-abiding residents who, against the odds, made this place their

home. Indeed, in spite of their difficult living conditions, many public housing

449
Larry Bennett and Adolph Reed, ―The New Face of Urban Renewal: The Near North Redevelopment
Initiative and the Cabrini Green Neighborhood.‖ In Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and our
retreat from Racial Inequality, ed. Adolph Reed Jr. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001: 183.
450
This is, of course, the same rhetoric used to describe the tenements during Chicago‘s ―slum
clearance‖ in the early twentieth-century century. As historian Gwendolyn Wright observes, ―The
impetus for slum clearance derived, in part, from picture of deplorable conditions and human despair in
the tenements…most sentimental and incensed were the photographs of Jacob Riis…In How the Other
Half Lives (1890), The Children of the Poor (1892), A Ten Year War (1900), The Battle With the Slum
(1902), and Children of the Tenements (1903), Riis attacked the tenements as the source of all social
pathology in the slum. He provided images rather than social theory to make his point. In the eyes of
most middle-class Americans, these journalistic photographs showed the squalor and depravity of
tenement existence.‖ Gwendolyn Wright, Building the American Dream: A Social History of Housing in
America, New York: Pantheon, 1983: 131.
 224

residents have spent years trying to improve their built environment, and as a result

create a nurturing place of upward social mobility and hope.

In the following section I offer a reading of real-life community mobility,

Residents Journal, via the spatial re-conceptualizations offered in Candyman. Building

on geographer Anne Buttimer‘s assertion that ―The observer who explores place

speaks of housing, whereas the resident of that place lives the process of dwelling,‖ I

contrast the differing socio-spatial landscapes presented in Judgment Night and

Candyman as a way to highlight the fundamental difference between an outsider‟s way

of describing public housing and an insider‟s way of experiencing of dwelling. 451 The

―outsider‘s trap,‖ continues Buttimer, ―is that one looks at places, as it were, from an

abstract sky.‖452

Candyman

The perfect geometry of the Spector Street Estate was only visible from the air.453

Candyman‘s credit sequence opens with overhead shots of Chicago‘s traffic-

laden expressways, which lace through the city streets like overly clogged bodily

arteries (Figure 3.18). Accompanied by the dramatic tones of a Philip Glass

soundtrack, the camera weaves through every inch of this heaving city mass, taking us

on a journey from the Kennedy Expressway, to the ―Red‖ and ―White‖ buildings of the

Cabrini-Green housing project in the city‘s Near North Side, and onwards to the

451
Anne Buttimer, ―Home, Reach, And the Sense of Place.‖ In The Human Experience of Space and
Place, ed. David Seamon and Anne Buttimer. Oxford: Taylor and Francis, 1980: 171.
452
Buttimer, 171.
453
Clive Barker‘s first sentence from ―The Forbidden,‖ Books of Blood Omnibus Vol. 5, London: Time
Warner Paperbacks, 1988.
 225

exclusive high-rise condominiums of the glittering Gold Coast. We, the viewer, hover

above this sea of concrete pathways, witnessing the ―invisible walls‖ of race and class

divisions with which the story is engaged, prophesying the boundary crossings that the

protagonist, Helen, will later make.454 By opening Candyman in this almost

ethnographic way, with an insidious camera looking down on and recording the

environs below, director Bernard Rose not only maps the projects onto the landscape

for the sake of the events to follow but also, like the Nightly News report introduced at

the start of this chapter, signifies how the projects and the history of the projects have

been mapped onto and into the vocabulary of the American popular imagination:

Public housing becomes a container of destructive pathology within a city that has

been repeatedly mythologized as dystopic. As the camera pans across this divided

landscape, an austere and analytic black voice that the audience later learns is

Candyman‘s, clearly articulates this real-life extradiagetic infamy:

They will say that I have shed innocent blood.

What's blood for, if not for shedding?
With my hook for a hand I'll split you from your groin to your gullet.
I came for you. (My emphasis)

Presented in tandem with the opening panning sequence, Candyman‘s threat to

the collective ―you‖ is, in effect, addressed to the collective ―us‖ - the people who live

in the condominiums and work out at the gyms below – the white middle-class movie-

go‘er. Filmed in 1992 when Cabrini-Green was reeling from the violent gang wars of

the late 1980s, Candyman emerged during the height of white middle-class urban

454
Kirsten Moana Thompson, ―Strange Fruit: Candyman and Supernatual Dread,‖ Apocalyptic Dread:
American Film at the turn of the Century, Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2007: 61.
 226

anxiety about the threat of housing project crime spilling into their communities.455

Seventeen years later, as half million-dollar condominiums stand adjacent to public

housing high-rises, the film articulates the pervasive paranoia of property purchasers in

Chicago‘s new mixed-income property developments; to recall Doug Van Dyke‘s

anxiety: ―People on both sides have looked at each other with more than a little

suspicion.‖456 Indeed, while the central focus of Clive Barker‘s original story of

atmospheric decrepitude and urban malaise are the Thatcherite induced class conflicts

that seeped through British culture during the late twentieth-century, Rose‘s film, in

contrast, is a critique of historically deep-rooted, American white middle-class anxiety

about the threat of Chicago‘s racial integration. In this sense, Candyman joins

Judgment Night in its theme of socio-spatial dread and the fear of the eradication of

social barriers. Yet, while Judgment Night presents the city‘s borders through a strict

suburban/utopia vs. urban/dystopia binary, Candyman offers a more nuanced social

analysis of these divisions.

Rose begins his critique of Chicago‘s border-filled city space in the film‘s

opening sequence. Maps show a comprehensive overview of the city, yet, though

abstraction and one-dimensionality they also erase qualities of urban experience and

street life. As Michel de Certeau has argued, the planner‘s bird‘s-eye viewpoint, while

providing a comprehensive overview of the city, fails to map the point of view of

personal itineraries in space by which pedestrians actualize sites through their

455
Candyman premiered in the same year as seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was killed in the crossfire of
a gang fight while walking to Jenner Elementary School with his mother in Cabrini-Green. His death
sparked a citywide awakening to the violence happening in inner-city projects. For a more detailed
description of this crime see The New York Times article, ―Even a Grade School Is No Refuge from
Gunfire,‖ by Don Terry, 17 October 1992.
456
Smith: 2004.
 227

―narrative footsteps.‖457 Maps, therefore, like the one-dimensional visual stereotypes

of project life presented in Judgment Night, only offer a reductive version of inner-city

existence. However, by choosing to linger over Chicago‘s inner-city space for a full

six minutes, Rose‘s opening camera sequence signals a call to arms – a rallying cry for

a reanalysis of this space. This protracted title scene forces the viewer to look past the

―grid‖ of the map, to the spaces in-between the buildings, at the ―narrative footsteps‖

on the sidewalks where the potential for new thoughts and realities emerge. Rose‘s

opening sequence, then, while acknowledging the limits of filmic representation, also

emphasizes the power of film to resist symbolization and to redraw the city‘s

topography, thereby undermining the official distribution of space.

In this half of my chapter, I consider this ―street level‖ resistance to one-

dimensional interpretations of city life through Rose‘s dominant visual motif of liminal

representational spaces – mirrors, photographs, slide projections, and graffiti on

windows – which invite the viewer to reconsider the ways they see public housing. I

argue that these emblematic surfaces generate progressive ―open‖ spaces, where all

boundaries become porous and subject, in the words of film critic Fred Botting, to a

―strange destabilizing ―in-betweenness.‖458 By reversing oppositions, for allowing

white middle-class central characters like Judgment Night‘s Ray to fail, Candyman

contests the strict binary of poverty and affluence presented in the later film. Working

―in between‖ these two extremes, Rose establishes a liminal space where a white

middle-class academic meets and ultimately recognizes African-American public

457
Michel de Certeau, ―Walking in the City,‖ The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1984.
458
Fred Botting, ―Candygothic,‖ The Gothic: Essays and Studies, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001: 144.
 228

housing residents. This permeability of boundaries, the breaking down of distance and

objectivity, ―resurrects‖ Chicago‘s public housing in the American visual imagination.

Through my reading of Candyman I argue that the people who live in Chicago‘s

projects led (and continue to lead) lives far richer, more complex, and spatially

dynamic than is suggested by the popular image in Judgment Night. Their stories,

obscured by the dystopian clichés in Judgment Night, are unveiled in Candyman. This

spatial mobility begins when Rose‘s camera departs its spectral vantage point,

swooping down to street level amongst the ―narrative footsteps‖ of Chicago.

Here, on the ground, we find Helen interviewing an unseen teenager who has

heard about Candyman from a ―friend of a friend who knew someone.‖ This,

importantly, is first of three different back-to-back versions of the legend the film will

offer (Figure 3.19). As the brash female voice-over tells us that the story we are about

to hear is ― the scariest story I ever heard, and it‘s totally true,‖ we learn that

Candyman is a monster who can be invoked by the ritual of saying his names five

times in front of a mirror. As the retelling goes, in a white picket-fenced suburban

house in the middle of nowhere in particular, Clara, a baby-sitter, dares her amorous

boyfriend Billy to perform the ritual. Too cowardly to complete the mantra in full, the

boyfriend pronounces the name four times before retreating downstairs. Alone, the

baby-sitter stares at her reflection in the mirror and, in a demonstration of supernatural

curiosity, utters the final ―Candyman‖ before shutting off the light. With this last word,

Candyman‘s figure (Tony Todd) momentarily flashes behind her, followed by a shot

of the living-room ceiling from the boyfriend‘s viewpoint, punctured by a hook and

seeping with blood. Leaning into the Dictaphone with which Helen records her
 229

account, the teenager concludes, ―(He) killed her, split her open with his hook, and

then killed the baby, too. And Billy got away, but soon after he went crazy.‖ Later in

the film, Helen and Bernadette jokingly replay the teenager‘s version of the story by

beginning the incantation, which, importantly, only Helen completes.

The second version of the Candyman legend emerges when, seeking further

verification of the legend, Helen consults with her academic rival, paternal British

professor Philip Purcell (Michael Culkin), who provides a historicized version of the

Candyman story (Figure 3.20). Walsh recounts the following family romance:

Candyman was the son of a slave. His father had amassed a considerable
fortune from designing a device for the mass-production of shoes after the Civil
War. Candyman had been sent to all the best schools and had grown up in
polite society where he was a prodigious talent as an artist. He was much
sought after when it came to documenting ones wealth and position in society
in a portrait and it was in this latter capacity that he was commissioned by a
wealthy landowner to capture his daughter‘s virginal beauty. Poor Candyman!
When a relationship developed between the young man and woman, the father
executed a terrible revenge. He paid a pack of brutal hooligans to chase
Candyman through the town to Cabrini Green, where they sawed off his right
hand with a rusty blade. They proceeded to smash nearby beehives and smear
his body with honey, causing him to be stung to death, and nobody came to his
aid. They burnt his body on a giant pyre and scattered his ashes over Cabrini
Green. As a result, Candyman is said to haunt Cabrini Green.459

Following this professorial interpretation, the film shifts to the academic interior of a

classroom at the University of Illinois. Here, Helen replays a Dictaphone recording of

the teenager‘s interview, which invites the interest of nearby African-American

janitors, Henrietta and Kitty. Intrigued by their knowledge of the Candyman tale,

Helen asks the women to give her their version of a recent murder at the projects

linked to the legend (Figure 3.21):

459
Due to the limited scope of this chapter I will not be considering the theme of miscegenation
although such a consideration would be interesting in future scholarship.
 230

Kitty: Well all I know is that there was some lady in her tub and…and she heard a
noise.
Helen: Do you remember her name?
Kitty: I think her name was Ruthie-Jean…And she heard this banging and smashing
like someone was trying to make a hole in the wall - so Ruthie called 911 and she said
somebody coming through the walls. And they didn‘t believe her.
Henrietta: They thought the lady was crazy. Right?
Kitty: Mm-hmm. So she called 911 again and they still didn‘t believe her. But when
they finally got there she was dead.
Helen: Was she shot?
Kitty: No. Umm, she was killed with a hook. Sch‘tz (slicing movement with her hand)
Yeah.
Henrietta: It‘s true. Yeah, it is. I read it in the papers. Candyman killed her.
Kitty: Yeah, but….ah….I (wink at Helen) don‘t know anything about that (dirty look
to Henrietta).

Taken together, the three accounts of the legend can be read as a paradigm of the

film‘s thematic concerns, since they establish the interrogation of the narrative

credibility of myth. First, from the teenager‘s tale of white suburban horror, to

Purcell‘s academic account, to Henrietta and Kitty‘s urban reality, Candyman offers

three contradictory versions of the legend that cross class, race, and educational

boundaries. Through its socio-cultural plurality, Candyman deconstructs the one-

dimensional white, male, middle-class interpretation of urban life offered in Judgment

Night. This narrative diversity highlights the futility of Helen‘s quest for a singular

definition of the legend, and, in a broader sense, public housing as a whole.

Moreover, this sequence draws attention to the fact that Candyman is a story

about storytelling. This self-reflexive technique underscores the film‘s examination of

representational modes of truth as well as our spectatorial role in the consumption of

myths related to life in public housing. Exemplified by the suburbanites‘ ravenous

consumption of the inner-city through the portal of the television screen in Judgment

Night, our heady pop-cultural diet of visceral, terrifying dystopianism effectively

 231

dissolves the borders between the real and the imagined, thereby reducing the public‘s

understanding of the inner-city to a confusing ideological terrain of values,

assumptions, exaggerations, and moral panics. Therefore, through its metatextual

investigation into the spectatorial pleasures of listening to, telling and watching these

tales of inner-city horror, Candyman exposes not only how representations traffic

between the screen and the viewer but also lays bare the manipulative power inbuilt in

all representations.460 As film scholar Mikel Koven observes in his analysis of

Candyman‘s metanarrative thematic, ―What begins as representation, the telling of

‖the scariest story I‘ve ever heard,‖ becomes a presentation of the narrative itself.‖461

The self-consciously mannered nature of this ―presentation‖ is apparent when we

consider the way in which Rose frames Helen as the conduit for the film‘s narrative.

As the teenager regales Helen with her version of the legend, the academic looks

imploringly out of the screen as if directly into the eyes of the viewer. Centrally

locating her in the frame, Helen‘s only prop is a cigarette, which sends curlicues of

smoke about her head, framing her in the gauzy ochre tones of a 1940s Hollywood

heroine (Figure 3.22). This aestheticized close-up effectively foregrounds the

following sequences investigations into voyeuristic fascination, placing Helen and,

through its spectatorial identifications, the viewer, as central figures within this

examination. This theatrical close-up, like the other non-linguistic instruments of

―documentation‖ that appear throughout the film - note-pad, pen, camera, tape-

recorder, computer, and slide projections – effectively detach the viewer from the

460
Botting: 146.
461
Mikel J. Koven, ―Candyman Can: Film and Ostension,‖ Contemporary Legends, 1999: 168.
 232

subject viewed, underscoring how we exoticize and abstract the inner-city as space of

―otherness‖ and pathologize it as a subject for academic study (Figure 3.23).462

Rose critically evaluates the subjective potential inherent in all representations

through the absence of the film‘s central object: the figure of Candyman. While he

enters our mental consciousness from the beginning of the film through childish

gossip, academic scholarship, and newspaper headlines, it is not until over halfway

through the movie that the objective figure of Tony Todd enters the physical action.

As Candyman himself admits, he exists only through ―the writing on the wall,‖ ―the

whisper in the classroom,‖ and ―the rumor on the street corner.‖ Moreover, as trailers

for the film plead, ―What‘s behind the mirror?‖ and maintain that, ―You don‘t have to

believe just beware,‖ the question must be asked: beware of what exactly? If the

teenager, the academic, and the cleaners are to be believed, what we need to be fearful

of is Candyman and what he most powerfully signifies, of course, is the archetypical

figure of the ―underclass‖: the angry black man.463 Candyman‘s exclusion from the

physical action for all but a couple of final scenes critiques the way in which Judgment

Night profiles public housing residents‘ as a vaguely threatening, but nonetheless

nameless group of ―others.‖ Through Candyman‘s corporal absence, the film

deconstructs our naive but willing consumption of second-hand orally circulated and

written gossip centered on black males in Chicago‘s public housing. This naiveté is

apparent when Henrietta and Kitty reassure Helen about the reliability of their version

462
McCarthy, Rodriguez, Buendia, Meacham, David, Godina, Supriya, Wilson-Brown, 1997.
463
Kim D. Hester-Williams, ―Neo-Slaves: Slavery, Freedom, and the African-American Apotheosis in
Candyman, The Matrix, and The Green Mile,‖ Genders, Issue 40, 2004
http://www.genders.org/g40/g40_williams.html (accessed 12 April 2008).
 233

of events, not through the accuracy garnered of personal experience, but with the

guarantee ―It‘s true. Yeah, it is. I read it in the papers.‖

Long tainted with the dubious honor of being dubbed ―America‘s most

notorious housing development,‖ over the years Cabrini-Green has been subject to

damning headlines.464 The film acknowledges this extradiagetic infamy when, in an

early sequence, Helen browses through newspaper microfiche of coverage of the death

of Ruthie Jean only to discover the derogatory headline, ―What killed Ruthie-Jean?:

Life in the Projects‖ (Figure 3.24). By asking ―what‖ and not ―who‖ killed the public

housing resident, the film suggests that some news media, far from being passive,

heuristic devices of verifiable truths, are in fact destructive forces willing to construct

fear and pathology around the material conditions of urban communities. In this sense,

fear coalescences, not only in the invisible figure of Candyman, but in form of public

housing as a whole. Therefore, when Candyman admits, ―I am Rumor. It is a blessed

condition to live in other people‘s dreams, but not have to be,‖ he acknowledges the

phantasmatic significance attached not only to his existence, but also to the fictive

nature of some news stories centered in Cabrini-Green. Indeed, CHA figures during

the late 1990s indicate that Cabrini-Green is not an especially violence-prone public

housing area, and, even before the implementation of the Plan, there is some evidence

of a decrease in local criminal activity. As sociologist Larry Bennett and political

scientist Adolph Reed Jr. write, ―Between 1992 and 1993 (the years of Judgment Night

and Candyman‟s releases), Cabrini-Green‘s incidence of crime (that is, annual

homicides, criminal sexual assaults, serious assaults, robberies, burglaries, thefts, and

464
John McCormick, ―Can Chicago Beat the Odds,‖ Newsweek, 2 January 1989: 25.
 234

vehicle thefts per one hundred residents) fell from 10.3 to 8.2.‖465 The film‘s opening

theme of narrative interrogation emphasizes that, unlike Judgment Night, Candyman

does not simply endorse media-based ―truths‖ but rather, as these figures suggest,

presents them as misleading representations generating fear and maintaining social

tensions.

Through its critical examination of the reception and transmission of stories

centered in public housing, Candyman engages in some of the same contests over

narrative at the heart of Residents‟ Journal. The journal, as described in the

introduction to this chapter, is a bi-monthly newspaper that is written, produced and

distributed entirely by Chicago public housing residents. Offering a combination of

investigative reports, community news, and social commentary, Residents‟ Journal

offers an ―insiders‖ take on life in the city‘s projects. Of the residents‘ who work on

the paper, Kathryn Greenberg, the CHA‘s managing director of communications

writes, ―Because they‘re so familiar with the experience of life in the developments,

they have a kind of knowledge about the details of public housing that other reporters

don‘t. They really get into the in-depth reporting and provide information that isn‘t

being provided by the rest of the media.‖466 For example, the newspaper recently

criticized a story promoted in the mainstream media that linked increased violence in

the city to CHA leaseholders. In fact, based on an analysis of Chicago Police

Department data, Residents‟ Journal reports that despite "false public assertions that

neighborhoods are being overrun by CHA relocates‖ there are no concrete links

465
Bennett & Reed, 202.
466
Rhodes, 98.
 235

between the Plan‘s demolition of high-rise public housing buildings and the perceived

increase in crime.467 In this sense, Residents‟ Journal acts as a countervailing force to

mainstream media representations of project life, an oppositional discourse that

conjoins practice (life in the projects) with (re)presentation. Resisting the dystopic and

sometimes inaccurate reporting offered by the Chicago-Sun Times and the Chicago

Tribune, the journal‘s editorial independence allows public housing residents to tell

their own stories and, importantly, image themselves.

In order to tackle what editor‘s Ethan Micheali and Mary C. Johns call the

―falsification‖ of public housing in the television news media, since 2000 Residents‟

Journal has transmitted a weekly live call-in television show on the Cable Access

Network (Figure 3.25).468 With a potential audience of millions, RJ TV highlights

several positive examples of community action in the city‘s public housing, such as the

journal‘s Urban Youth International Journalism Program, an initiative that aims to

―broaden the intellectual, educational and career horizons of youths who live in public

housing and other low-income neighborhoods by training them to communicate their

perspectives and priorities in print news and feature articles and other positive

examples of community action in the city‘s public housing.‖469 Through this self-

reflexive re-imaging some residents challenge stigmatized identities and negative

stereotypes associated with life in Chicago‘s public housing. Likewise, through its

self-conscious examination of stories centered in public housing, Candyman engages

467
Mary C. Johns, ―U.S. Reps Call for Moratorium on Public Housing Demolitions,‖ Residents‟
Journal, Fall 2008.
468
Informal interview conducted with Ethan Michaeli and Mary C. Johns on 25 August 2008 at the
Residents‟ Journal offices in Chicago.
469
―Urban Youth International Journalism Program,‖ Residents‟ Journal: We the People Media, 2009
<http://www.wethepeoplemedia.org/Home/UYIJP/About.htm> (accessed 14 February 2009).
 236

in a similar critique of visual proof and resistance of social designations - a reality that

cannot be ―truthfully‖ represented by an ―outsider‖ - as Residents‟ Journal. This

appellation is on offer for all to see as we return to the exploits of Helen Lyle, our

filmic ―outsider,‖ as she dines with her academic partner Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons)

and Helen‘s husband Trevor (Xander Berkeley), the night before her fateful crossover

into Cabrini-Green in search of the site of Ruthie-Jean‘s murder.

The Crossover

Cut to an expensive smoke-filled restaurant where Bernadette, in fearful

anticipation of her first trip to Cabrini-Green, warns, ―I won‘t even drive past there. I

heard a kid got shot there the other day.‖ ―Everyday‖ replies Helen knowingly, rolling

her eyes at Bernadette and sipping a glass of Merlot. Despite the fact that Helen has

never previously set foot in public housing, she infers that she understands the social

reality of public housing better than the residents themselves. Helen‘s egotism is

confirmed when, on their way to the projects, she condescendingly reprimands her

academic partner for her reluctance to use Cabrini-Green as a case study: ―We've got a

real shot here…An entire community starts attributing daily horrors to a mythical

figure‖ she tells Bernadette. Helen‘s simplistic and patronizing explanation of the

Candyman myth establishes her problematic and abstracted understanding of the lives

of public housing residents; for Helen, the residents are naively confusing reality with

fiction. As film scholars Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai observe in their analysis of

the movie, ―what Helen fails to consider in making this assumption is the possibility

that in order to position herself as an educator, she may actually need to believe that
 237

they believe in the legend.‖470 For the residents of Cabrini-Green, the stories they tell

about Candyman function as a myth which brings them together and which offers a

chance of meaningfulness and romantic transcendence that is separate from the

material constraints upon their lives. The efforts of a white middle-class academic to

dispel the myth of Candyman through a process of rationalization, becomes an attempt

to deaden the imaginative dream states of some for whom dreams, or even nightmares,

are preferable to reality.

Rose underscores Helen‘s abstracted understanding of her research subject by

employing dramatic high-angle camerawork to shoot her journey on the Kennedy

Expressway into Cabrini-Green (Figure 3.26). This technique, like the crane shot used

to frame the RV‘s crossover into the Robert Taylor Homes in Judgment Night,

detaches Bernadette and Helen from the space of public housing. This approach

highlights the ideological abyss separating the City of Chicago from the dark space of

public housing roaring within it, as well as foregrounding the dystopian gravity

implied by the crossing of geographical boundaries. Where Helen‘s crossover differs

from her suburban compatriots, however, is that the academic undertakes this

transition willingly. Helen‘s desire to see public housing for herself as opposed to

reading about the housing project in a sensationalist media report marks the film‘s first

symbolic stage towards recognizing the ―other.‖

Having parked their car at what Helen refers to as a ―safe‖ distance, the

academics make their way towards the looming red brick public housing buildings.

470
Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai, ――How much did you pay for this place?‖: Fear, Entitlement, and
Urban Space in Bernard Rose‘s Candyman.‖ In Horror Film Reader, ed. Alain Silver & James Ursini.
New York: Limelight Editions, 2000: 302.
 238

While the nervous Bernadette brandishes an arsenal of a rape alarm and pepper spray,

Helen is similarly equipped with her camera. Reared on the same dystopian newspaper

headlines as Ray in Judgment Night, the academics fully expect public housing

residents to be armed. As the scholars climb the dilapidated stairwell of the building,

the director‘s camera reveals filthy walls, graffiti-stained with Candyman‘s name.471

Perched atop Helen‘s shoulder, the camera quickly pans left and right frantically

consuming this frightening ―writing on the wall‖ and mimicking Helen‘s desire for

knowledge of the Candyman myth (Figure 3.27). Rather than being confused or

horrified at what she finds, however, the blonde academic is delighted; ―This is great!‖

Helen tells a skeptical Bernadette. Arriving at the front door of Ruthie-Jean‘s vacant

apartment, Bernadette pleads with her impulsive friend, ―What if someone‘s packing

drugs in there? Are you just going to apologize and give them your card?‖

Unstoppable and with a complete lack of compassion, Helen proceeds to violate

several unspoken boundaries in the space of a few short minutes. After climbing over

yellow crime scene tape Helen enters the dank, maze-like space of Ruthie-Jean‘s

apartment; here, she proceeds to enter the murdered woman‘s dilapidated bathroom

(the reported ―scene of the crime‖), only to discover hole in the wall where a mirrored

medicine cabinet used to be, which marks an entryway into the next apartment.

471
Due to the limited scope of this chapter, I will not be expanding here on the role of graffiti in urban
communities. However, it should be noted that Helen‘s photography and her attempt to ―read‖ the
writing on the wall in the Cabrini-Green building reflects the oversimplification that is regularly
afforded to countercultural graffiti by housing authorities and other public space officials. As urban
sociologist Elijah Anderson notes in Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the
Inner City, graffiti is a ―sign(s) written for and by the eyes on the streets.‖ New York, NY: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2000.
 239

Despite Bernadette‘s continued suspicions, Helen continues to cross the mirrored

border to see what lies on the ―other side‖ (Figure 3.28).

As Helen scrambles through the hole in the wall, the camera is, again,

positioned by her head thereby forcing the viewer to assume the same investigative

role. Our direct and very pointed identification with the scholar as boundary-breaking

―investigator‖ places the anxious white middle-class movie-go‘er within an analogous

field of mediation. As spectators we also look into the mirror and consequently we too

are susceptible to the discoveries that lie on the other side.472 The viewer, now

positioned on the opposite side of the wall to Helen, sees that she is entering through a

huge graffitied image of a black face (Candyman‘s), whose gaping mouth is the hole

through which the academic is climbing (Figure 3.29). Before Helen has a chance to

appreciate fully the sight in front of her, she raises her camera and proceeds to take

numerous photographs of the graffiti on the walls. As the academic reaches the end of

the camera film, the scene is suddenly plunged into darkness; in the few seconds it

takes for her eyes to readjust to the varied light conditions and for the soundtrack to

build to a deafening climax, a graffitied black scream fills the cinema screen

referencing the ―writing on the wall‖ that sustains Candyman‘s notoriety (Figure 3.30).

This sequence marks an important filmic shift in terms of how we – Helen and the

viewer – ―see‖ public housing.473 First, in their simplest and most literal form, mirrors

act as tools with which to reflect objective truth. Therefore, by looking into and

through the mirror, the film asks us to take responsibility for the act of seeing. Thus

472
Thompson: 63.
473
Antonis Balasopoulos, ―The Demon of (Racial) History: Reading Candyman,‖ Gramma: Journal of
Theory and Criticism 5, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 1997: 38.
 240

far, Candyman has provided dubious vehicles for ―truth‖ – newspapers, oral interviews

– but a mirror, as we all know, never lies. Stripped bare of hysteria and academic

competition, the mirror comes to symbolize a collective plea to reassess the way we

view public housing. Second, the absence of her photographic shield forces the

academic to confront the subject of her study. As we will soon find, however, just as

the scholar has consumed Candyman‘s myth with her academic endeavors, he will

ultimately consume her.

Promising to return to Cabrini-Green with extra film for her camera, Helen and

the relieved Bernadette leave Ruthie-Jean‘s apartment only to be greeted with a young

housing tenant. ―You don‘t belong here, lady, going through people‘s apartments and

things,‖ Ann-Marie McCoy (Vanessa Williams) tells Helen (Figure 3.31). Ignoring

McCoy‘s chastisement, Helen becomes excited by the prospect of interviewing the

murdered woman‘s neighbor, and, after handing the woman a business card, wrangles

herself an invitation into her home. Slightly peeved by Helen‘s snooping, the public

housing resident compares the academics to prior visitors – ―newspapers, cops,

caseworkers, they all want to know‖ - and boldly confronts her inquisitors: ―So you say

that you doing a study? What are you going to say? That we rob, we steal, that we

gang bang: we‘re all on drugs right? We‘re not all like those downstairs. I just want to

raise my son good.‖ Taken aback by McCoy‘s list of racist stereotypes, Helen is

further mystified by an apartment that is warm, comfortable and far removed from the

apocalyptic domestic interior that confronted the suburbanites in Judgment Night

(Figure 3.32). Entering a clean and tidy space filled with numerous photographs of

birthdays, high school graduation ceremonies, and summer parties, forces Helen to
 241

meet her academic preconceptions about what the home of single mother from public

housing should look like head-on. Raised in an era of public demonizations of inner-

city single motherhood, exemplified by Charles Murray‘s Losing Ground (1984),

which attacked liberal welfare programs like Aid For Dependent Children (AFDC) for

―demoralizing‖ the urban poor, promoting immorality and self-destructive behavior,

creating disincentives for marriage, and fostering dependency on government

handouts, Helen had expected McCoy to be an unmitigated failure.474 Thus far, in her

unrelenting quest to frame Cabrini-Green in a way that supports her thesis – as a

disturbed community living in fear of an equally disturbing phantom – Helen has

failed to stop to reflect upon the everyday lives of those who don‘t fit into this

condescendingly narrow idea of project life. By daring to crossover into the private

domestic space of public housing as opposed to just reading about Cabrini-Green in an

academic study, however, Candyman exposes the misunderstanding upon which

Helen‘s builds her thesis. In this sense, both McCoy and Helen ―perform‖ Brumley

and Gotham‘s conceptual tool ―using space.‖ To explain: the public housing resident

―uses space‖ to resist her marginal economic position and Helen ―uses space‖ by

―witnessing‖ McCoy‘s struggle and to begin her journey towards recognizing the

―other.‖ McCoy‘s and Helen‘s mobility defies the static interpretation of project life

offered in Judgment Night and unmoors Wilson‘s ―neighborhood effect‖ significations

- ―One Way,‖ ―Do Not Enter,‖ ―Stop‖ - which firmly situate social pathologies on the

back stoops of public housing apartments. Furthermore, in defiance of Murray‘s

474
For a discussion of this issue, see Chapter 2. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social
Policy, 1950-1980, New York, NY: Basic Books, 1984.
 242

report, McCoy is an employed single mother – cleverly revealed through her

supermarket worker‘s uniform – who only wants the best for her young son. In this

sense, Candyman frames McCoy as a ―spatial actor‖ who engages in negotiations and

renegotiations with the space around her, enabling her to become an agent of rather

than subject to her own destiny.475

Regarding this need to re-conceptualize single mothers from public housing,

Ethan Michaeli, editor of the Residents‟ Journal, writes:

Once I started covering public housing, I started to see that people were really
different from how I had been led to believe. They were not lazy at all. They
were incredibly hardworking, for the most part. Really, really diligent in
making sure that their kids were dressed and fed and went to school, and that
their apartments were clean.476
Written by and for public housing residents, Residents‟ Journal presents a ―mobile‖ take

on life in the projects thereby challenging academic and mainstream-media ascribed

degradations which, if they acknowledge residents‘ at all, frame them as lethargic and

ambivalent about their situation. Michaeli stresses the important role of the mass media

in this re-imagining:

Residents‟ Journal‘s very presence among other media contradicts recurring

images of public housing tenets as lazy, illiterate, and unconnected to broader
communities…Mainstream media are sometimes frustratingly reluctant to
include the perspectives of public housing tenants in articles and discussions
about the future of public housing communities. Media organizations tend to
accept assumptions about the behavior of public housing tenants, the need for
mixed-income communities, and the effect of certain types of architecture on
the lifestyles of public housing residents. Mainstream media simultaneously
tend to ignore and accept the second-rate services provided to public housing

475
Kevin Fox Gotham, ―Toward an Understanding of the Spatiality of Urban Poverty: The Urban Poor as
Spatial Actors,‖ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 27, Issue. 3, September
2003: 724.
476
Rhodes, 99.
 243

residents. I believe this skewed coverage is a direct result of our failure as a

society to address issues of race, gender, and poverty. 477

The power of the mainstream media to circumvent public housing residents is

an issue Candyman addresses later in the film when Helen triumphantly returns to the

comfort of her Lincoln Park apartment with the photographic slides of her visit to

Cabrini-Green (Figure 3.33). Pulling shut the drapes in her living room, she slumps on

her cream couch with a glass of red wine and settles back to project the stills onto her

velvet curtains. In the background looms the silhouette of the Cabrini-Green housing

project. It then dawns on the academic that the structure of the building that she had

―investigated‖ that afternoon is not unlike the layout of her own condominium: In fact,

it‘s exactly the same. Mid-century housing developers originally intended Helen‘s

building to be used as public housing, but later transformed it into expensive

apartments in the 1960s due to the lack of structural wall separating it from the Gold

Coast. Over yet another bottle of the omnipresent Merlot, Helen reveals this fact to a

shocked Bernadette:

Helen: My apartment was built as a housing project.

Bernadette: No.
Helen: Yeah. Now take a look at this. (Walks over to the window and draws the
curtains.) Once it was finished, the city soon realized there was no barrier between
here and the Gold Coast.
Bernadette: Unlike over there where you‘ve got the highway and the E1 train to keep
the ghetto cut off.
Helen: Exactly. So they made some minor alterations. They covered the cinder blocks
in plaster, and they sold them off as condos.
Bernadette: How much did you pay for this place?
Helen: Don‘t ask (Shaking her head). (Walking to the bathroom.) Now, wait till you
see this; here‘s the proof. (Detaching the bathroom mirror.) The killer, or killers, they

477
Sudhir Venkatesh, ―Residents‟ Journal: By and For Public Housing Residents: An Interview with
Editor Ethan Michaeli,‖ Souls, 4(1): 91, 2002.
 244

don‘t know which, smashed their way through the back of the cabinet. See, there‘s no
wall there. There‘s only a medicine chest separating us from the other apartment.

By emphasizing that a lack of ―barrier‖ between the mid twentieth-century

planned public housing and the Gold Coast is problematic, Helen unwittingly confirms

that racial and social contagion is still a real issue for many people. Just as Rose‘s

filmic story-within-a-story exposes the limits of mental subjective representation, so

Helen‘s discovery of a house within her house exposes the physical traces of her

buildings link to past and present oppression and denial. Indeed, while the academic is

correct in assuming that her building is an architectural template of Ruthie-Jean‘s, she

disregards the historical and economic factors differentiating these structures; while

one reflects the comfort of gentrification the other embodies decay. Recalling Kenneth

B. Clark‘s discussion of the formation of ―invisible walls,‖ the ―invisible walls‖ in

Helen‘s apartment suggest her alienation from the bureaucratic structures that

constructed the projects, and yet her, and our own, implication in its history and

present situation.478 Just as the windshield in Judgment Night became a literal and

metaphorical frontier demarcating a definitional boundary between those in the

modern spaces of order and those outside, so the plaster walls in Helen‘s apartment

constitute a planar frame that confine power, money and luxury within the closed

limits of white middle-class existence. As Helen peers through the looking glass of her

penthouse widow onto the public housing complex beyond, she performs the same

action we all do when we turn on the news at night to consume images of the inner-

city. This spectacle, experienced from a spectral point-of-view of distance and power,

478
Clark, 11.
 245

can be turned on and off at will. This skewed, flexible framing allows us, as Michaeli

points out, to ―accept the second-rate services provided to public housing residents‖

and to protect oneself from the ghostly presence of the ―other‖.

It is only when Helen removes the mirrored disguise in Ruthie-Jean‘s

apartment and in her own that she exposes herself to a reality that had otherwise been,

quite literally, covered up. By collapsing this spatial boundary, Helen undermines the

social and ideological differences separating the ghetto from the rest of the city, fear

from normalcy, and academic detachment from one‘s object of study from terrifying

involvement in it. While Ray breaches the ―invisible wall‖ of the RV‘s windshield

thereby confronting the world outside, so Helen violates the liminal space of the mirror

consequently facing alterity for the first time. However, while Ray resists this

confrontation –―They‘re not my neighbours‘ man‖ – Helen, as we will soon discover,

not only sees the ―other‖ but will become possessed by it and part of it. The mirror

reflections and border-crossings in Candyman invite our heroine to a critical reversal,

to break socio-spatial boundaries, to realize the limits that delineate bourgeois

subjectivity, to experience, what film scholar Laura Wyrick terms a revelatory

―aporia.‖479

The high-speed, violence-ridden climax of Candyman begins when Helen

encounters the fantastical Candyman in an empty parking garage where he tells her, ―I

came for you.‖ Overcome, the academic loses consciousness and wakes up to find

herself in McCoy‘s apartment, holding a meat clever and completely drenched in

blood (Figure 3.34). The blood belongs to Anne-Marie‘s dog, which lies decapitated

479
Wyrick, 99.
 246

on the floor – and the single mother‘s baby, Anthony, is missing. Following this

bizarre turn of events, the police arrest Helen for the abduction and assumed murder of

McCoy‘s baby. Henceforth, Helen also becomes the prime suspect for the grisly

murders of Bernadette and a psychiatrist at the hospital where she is committed.

Paradoxically, Helen finally gains the fame she covets, not by publishing her research

on Candyman, but through an unexpected kind of infamy. The ―recording‖ materials

that the researcher used to decipher the projects are now turned on her; as she is taken

away for questioning (by two African-American police officers), the police car‘s

headlights project onto her tiny frame like a Broadway stage-light, while the buzzing

flashlights from journalists‘ cameras snare like a drum roll announcing the academic‘s

entry onto a stage of notoriety reserved for the inner-city public housing resident

(Figures 3.35 & 3.36).

After escaping from the asylum by jumping through the window of her

psychiatrist‘s office, Helen returns to Cabrini-Green where she discovers Candyman

asleep in an underground den hidden within its architecture. When he awakes

Candyman states, ―you came for me… Our names will be written on a thousand walls,

our crimes told and retold by our faithful followers. Surrender to me now and he will

be unharmed. We‘ll be infamous.‖ Helen, hypnotized by Candyman‘s offer of

immortality, falls into his arms, effectively sacrificing herself for the sake of the

missing baby. As she wanders through Cabrini-Green in the next scene, Helen hears a

faint cry and realizes that Candyman has placed Anthony in a woodpile, which the

residents have prepared for a bonfire the next day. After rescuing the baby from the

burning pyre, the scholar both supersedes and becomes Candyman, or as film scholar
 247

Kirsten Moana Thompson has suggested ―Candywoman‖: the white female academic

and the African-American legend forever tied in a coalition of myth.480 ―You‘re mine

now,‖ Candyman whispers into Helen‘s ear, referring not only to his physical

overpowerment but also to Helen‘s assimilation into the world of notoriety that he

symbolizes. No longer able to detach herself from the ―other‖ through her academic

research, Dictaphone, newspaper headlines, the ―display case‖ of the television screen,

or the plaster walls of her apartment, Helen becomes part of Candyman‘s

―congregation, the community of believers.‖

In the penultimate scene, McCoy leads a silent procession of Cabrini-Green

residents into the cemetery where Helen‘s funeral takes place. A high-angle overhead

shot shows this cavalcade maneuvering through the graveyard to her burial site where

Helen‘s husband Trevor and his new girlfriend Stacey, stand mournfully (Figure 3.37).

The camera quickly shifts to a low-angle close-up shot of Helen‘s ghostly white face

looking out though the shallow depths of her closed casket (Figure 3.38). Through this

point-of-view shot, the scholar both sees and is seen, by the two communities she

sought to conquer: the Cabrini-Green population and middle-class academia. While

Helen once positioned herself at a spectral distance from the projects as a rationalist

academic ―investigator,‖ now, quite literally rooted in Cabrini soil, she is aware of her

positionality in relation to public housing residents and the reality she tried to

mythologize.

During her ideological switch from cynic to believer, Helen experiences the

failure of all the apparatuses of social structure and instruction she had hereto believed

480
Thompson, 80.
 248

in: universities, hospitals, psychiatric wards, and the marital home itself. Judiciously

dismissed as a hysterical community-driven fallacy, the suspicions of the Cabrini-

Green community are corroborated and rendered truthful, thereby undermining the

authority assumed by academic, class, and race hierarchies.481 The film suggests that

the fears, desires and fantasies of the housing project community are beyond academic

recovery, and, in fact, may have great power in the patterns of everyday life. This

critique substantiates, furthermore, that there is no single homogenous framework for

understanding the lives of public housing residents.

By crossing the ―border‖ into the housing project, Helen exposes herself to a

world that she had hereto only been shown in dystopian filmic representations. In

framing the project as a quiet, contemplative void, Rose disputes the stereotypical

representation of the ‗hood in films released around the same time as Candyman such

as John Singleton‘s Boyz N the Hood (1991) and Albert Hughes‘s Menace II Society

(1993), both of which place a characteristic emphasis on overpopulation and violence.

Along with this pared down landscape, Philip Glass‘s fantastic score with its repeated

chanting, pipe organs and unnerving choruses helps to set the deeply chilling,

mythological tone that reverberates through the entire film, an effect that stands in

explicit contrast to Judgment Night‘s pulsating hip-hop score. The amalgamation of the

Gothic and the present day is reinforced by Anthony B. Richmond‘s brooding

cinematography, which incorporates ―stained glass‖ in the form of graffiti written over

windows. Furthermore, svelte, handsome and eloquent, the romanticist dialect of

Candyman contests the clichéd street language of the formulaic filmic black man.

481
Botting, 142.
 249

Brandishing a hook rather than a gun, Candyman resists the gangster labels that

oppress him and which Helen, through her academic research, strives to rationalize.

This counter-framing has the effect of conveying a classical gravity quite unlike the

fleeting images of public housing we receive from the jumpy cinematography in

Judgment Night.

In the film‘s final sequence, the camera returns to Candyman‘s dilapidated

residence and hovers over a new graffiti image on the wall. Here, Helen has been

immortalized as the reincarnation of Caroline, Robitaille‘s original lover, pictured in

white surrounded by flames with the words, ―IT WAS ALWAYS YOU HELEN‖

scrawled on the wall (Figure 3.39). Helen‘s death marks a shift in her narrative

function: she is now ―the writing on the wall,‖ the demonized spirit once embodied in

the singular figure of the black man. In finding herself in the same helpless position as

the nineteenth-century Candyman, modern-day Helen is held accountable for the errors

perpetrated by her white ancestors against the ―other.‖ By setting Helen on fire (albeit

inadvertently) in a pyre at the same place where the white people had burned

Candyman one-hundred years before, an understated exchange of imperialist violence

occurs - the discriminated dwellers of Cabrini-Green become the vigilantes.482

Through this spatio-temporal link, Candyman highlights the way in which space bears

the memorial scars of historical traumas rooted in America‘s history of violence

against African-Americans. Moreover, the film reminds the viewer that Cabrini-Green

482
Balasopoulos, 39.
 250

is a ―memory palace,‖ a space loaded with representational surfaces like streets and

buildings which function as visual cues, reminding the residents of their past.483

Through her recognition of the lives of public housing residents‘, Helen

establishes a framework within which we can contemplate the work of the Residents‟

Journal. If Candyman tells the story of a ―myth that is demythologized,‖ then

Residents‟ Journal subverts the conventional paradigm of Chicago‘s public housing

space, and re-imagines its space.484 This subversion surfaces in the pages of the

Residents‟ Journal through tenants‘ opposition to the implementation of the Plan.

We can interpret the opposition of Residents‟ Journal to public housing

demolition as a form of ―institutional distanciation‖485 whereby residents attempt to

distance themselves from the contemptuous journalistic perceptions of project life by

cultivating an attachment to place that allows them to salvage a measure of dignity and

personal autonomy.486 Thus, resistance to public housing demolition is not an

incidental mechanism of defense against a threat to living space but is an essential

constituent of place-based identity.487 On the one hand, some residents welcome the

redevelopment as an opportunity to leave public housing and reject the ‗project

identity.‘ On the other hand, the tenants‘ who work on the Residents‟ Journal use their

‗project identity‘ to express their meaningful attachment to place, and to challenge

displacement and the resulting disruption of friendship ties and social networks. For
483
In 1596 Matteo Ricci devised the technique of the ―memory palace.‖ It is a mnemonic link system
based on places and the architecture in places that allows a person the means of committing large
quantities of information to memory. Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1966.
484
Botting, 147.
485
David A. Snow and Leon Anderson, ―Identity Work among the Homeless: The Verbal Construction
and Avowal of Personal Identities,‖ American Journal of Sociology 92, 1987: 1336-71.
486
Gotham, 2003, 731.
487
Gotham, 2003, 731
 251

example, in a recent article titled ―Who could Miss the Hole?‖ Michaeli describes how

the residents of Robert Taylor Homes construct their ―place identity‖ through ―Old

School‖ parties:

On a warm Saturday this August, hundreds of former Robert Taylor residents

set up tents and booths and gathered in an empty field where the Hole once
stood. Giant speakers belted out dusties, hip hop, R &B and jazz music. Food
and drink were plentiful and mostly free. At a few tents, people sold t-shirts
emblazoned with photographs of the high rises and the addresses of the now-
demolished buildings. Many people wore home-made T-shirts commemorating
friends who had died too young. In one spot, old friends posed for photographs
in front of a colorful mural of the buildings.488

Contrary to its oppressive nickname and its harsh representation in Judgment

Night, Robert Taylor Homes was not a dead-end space that residents‘ struggled to get

―out‖ of but rather, according to Residents‟ Journal, a place to which some tenants

make a concerted effort to stay connected. According to a study by sociologists Sudhir

Venkatesh and Isil Celimli, displaced residents remain associated with their old

neighborhoods by returning every year for these specially organized ―birthday‖ parties

that celebrate the construction date of their old public housing buildings.489 Former

public housing tenant, Ray Ward, describes his attachment to Robert Taylor Homes in

the newspaper: "When I left, the buildings were still standing…When I drove by now,

I almost cried. There was so much memory here. It's a whole life you can't get back. 490

While nostalgia may be a component of this attachment to public housing, the social

supports residents such as Ward spent years, if not decades, building up are not easy to

cast aside. As a former resident, Ward understands public housing as a site of spatial

488
Ethan Michaeli, ―Who Could Miss the Hole?‖ Residents‟ Journal, Winter 2008, No. 44
489
Jennifer Sushinsky, ―The Neighborhood Project: A Cabrini Green Youth Perspective in Photographs
and Words,‖< http://www.neighborhoodproject.org/web_pages/about_us.html> (accessed 9 April
2006).
490
Michaeli, 2008.
 252

contiguity, interdependence and entailment, and place-based identity. This vision

concurs with ethnologist Marc Auge‘s view that place engenders identity: ―it is the

spatial arrangements that express the group‘s identity (its actual origins are often

diverse, but the group is established, assembled and united by the identity of the

place).‖491 In the next chapter I consider the historical formation of place-based

identity in Chicago‘s public housing in greater depth. For the time being, however, it is

useful to theorize Ward‘s experience in public housing and the activities of the

Residents‟ Journal by calling upon Pierre Bourdieu‘s place-based concept, habitus.

Bourdieu has described habitus as a ―sense of one's place...a sense of the

other's place‖ in the world of one‘s lived environment and is concerned with how these

―senses‖ affect our actions and interactions with places and people.492 Habitus is a

―system of durable, transposable disposition, structured structures predisposed to

function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize

practices and representations.‖493 In other words, habitus provides the practical skills

and dispositions necessary to navigate within different environments – in Ward‘s case,

public housing - and guides the choices of the individual. At the same time, habitus is

constantly remade by these navigations and choices, including the success or failure of

previous events. The concept of habitus articulates not only Ward‘s inherent bond with

his community (the ―structured structures‖), but also the improvised ―navigations‖ and

adaptations of residents to explicit, contingent circumstances.

491
Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, New York: Verso,
1995: 34.
492
Pierre Bourdieu, ―Droit et passé-droit. Le champ des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en oeuvre des
reglements,‖ Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 81/82, 1990: 53.
493
Bourdieu, 53.
 253

A prime example of such an adaptation arose in 2003 when, as reported in a

joint investigation by Residents‟ Journal and The Chicago Reporter, some residents

filed a class-action lawsuit against the CHA alleging that the housing authority

violated the Federal Fair Housing Act as well as contractual obligations to tenants

when it moved 78% of all involuntarily displaced families to census tracts that were

more than 95% African-American and with more than sixteen point six percent of the

population living in poverty.494 In early 2005, the lawsuit was settled and the CHA

agreed to modify its relocation procedures for families yet to be moved, and to

―retrofit‖ relocation for families already moved by offering them better mobility

counseling.495 The judge also required that the CHA preserve two buildings slated for

demolition for subsidized housing residents who wanted to stay in the community

during the redevelopment. According to urban scholar David Fleming, ―The act of

filing suit imbued residents with both material and discursive power.‖496 Through these

habitus-derived acts of resistance—navigating bureaucracies, reading legalese, and

otherwise partaking in the municipal sphere of state government (contingent

circumstances)--some residents asserted that they are not only citizens, but politically

mobile agents, capable of altering the current course of public housing redevelopment

in Chicago. As Greg Jackson, who now owns a pizza parlor just blocks away from

where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood tells Residents‟ Journal, "We come from

the gutter. We have no choice but to be strong. We make the best come out of the bad.

494
Venkatesh, Celimli, Miller, Murphy, Turner, 2004.
495
Alexander Polikoff, Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing and the Black Ghetto,
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006.
496
David Fleming, City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Urban America, Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 2008.
 254

That's what makes a leader."497 By reporting these habitus-derived acts, Residents‟

Journal becomes the ―point of resistance‖ to which Michel Foucault refers to when he

acknowledges the power of discourse to ―be both an instrument and an effect of power,

but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an

opposing strategy.‖498 Charting a decisive blaze across the city‘s public sphere, the

residents‘ socio-spatial exercises of power concurs with Brumley and Gotham‘s

concept of ―using space.‖

Moving beyond the conceptual limitations of Wilson‘s "neighborhood effects"

model, Residents‟ Journal highlights the spatial attributes and spatial influences of

human agency, and the attempts of some residents to contest their social, political and

economic marginality. As I have discussed at other points in this chapter, ―using

space‖ may involve several different social activities, from the creation of informal

social networks, to class action lawsuits. The ―performance‖ of these activities creates

a counter-knowledge network, which operates in contrast to the discourses that the

mainstream print, television and film media use to construct their reality.499

Reinforcing virulent racism, classism, and sexism on the one hand, Judgment Night

exemplifies the public imagery and late twentieth-century conservative rhetoric of

some architects, government officials, and sociologists which positioned poor black

public housing residents as pathological, static, a-historical, hopeless casualties of

poverty. Indeed, the dominant paradigm for comprehending the position of public

497
Michaeli, 2008.
498
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, translated by R Hurley, New York, NY:
Vintage Books, 1990: 101.
499
Matthew Murray, ―Correction at Cabrini –Green: A Socio-spatial Exercise of power,‖ Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 1995, Vol. 13: 323.
 255

housing residents in recent urban life has been from a deficit perspective; too often

tenants are seen as subject to, rather than agents of, their own destiny. By depicting the

―spatial acting‖ of housing project residents within their locale, however, Candyman

frees the space of public housing from points of fixity by emphasizing the spatiality of

poor people‘s agency.500 A story about storytelling, Candyman interrogates the

narrative credibility of myth, warning against naive consumption of second-hand

orally circulated and written gossip centered on African-American males from public

housing.

Residents‟ Journal, like Rose‘s filmic critique of outsider‘s social designations,

illustrates the ways in which inhabitants represent their own lives and, importantly,

image themselves. In doing so, Residents‟ Journal puts faces on countless unsung

heroes who in their day-to-day lives puncture misconception after misconception about

the habitus of public housing dwellers. Recasting the prevailing view that public

housing was an unmitigated failure, Residents‟ Journal reminds us that while public

housing may have failed, that does not always mean that those who lived there were

failures. Both films and journal offer important lessons when I, a white graduate

student, follow Helen‘s path into Cabrini-Green: Listen, never pre-judge, and most

importantly of course, don‘t believe the hype.

500
Gotham, 2003: 724.
 256

CHAPTER 4

From Pathways to Portals: Getting to the Root of a Public Housing Community

I am a resident of Cabrini Green and I want to continue to live here forever. We

care about Cabrini Green because it is a part of us. That‘s why I say that
Cabrini is just like one big family. Just like any other family, we‘ve had our
disagreements, but we‘ve been through everything together. To break up our
family is just wrong, and I can‘t let that happen…I have always had a dream
that I would be able to raise two children of my own in 1230 N. Larrabee St.,
teaching them just as my father has taught me…I know that justice will prevail
-- which is why we will never give up. We will come together and fight to get
our buildings back. We‘ve lost three of them, and don‘t plan on losing any
more.501

In this impassioned plea, made in the wake of the implementation of the Plan,

Chicago public housing resident Maurice T. Edwards Jr. succinctly pinpoints the heart

of the relationship between self and place within the city‘s public housing

neighborhoods: Not simply a space to sleep, play, and dwell, Cabrini-Green is

something more, ―it is a part of us.‖ Taking Edwards‘ statement as a guiding

philosophy, this chapter will explore the socio-spatial interconnections that exist and

that have always existed between the members of Chicago‘s public housing community

and their lived environment. This focus stems from the essential phenomenological

opinion that people and place are synergistically intertwined. As philosophers Edward

Casey, Jeff Robert Mugerauer, Jeffrey Malpas, and Ingrid Stefanovic have all argued,

even in spite of our mobile, continually changing modern era, being ―rooted‖ or ―in-

place‖ remains a non-contingent necessity for people.502 As Casey states in the Preface

501
Maurice T. Edwards, ―Letters to the Editor,‖ The Chicago Reporter, March 2006.
502
Edward S. Casey, Getting back into Place: Towards a renewed understanding of the Place-World,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993: 403; Jeff Robert Mugerauer, Interpretations on Behalf of
Place, Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1994; Jeffrey Malpas, Place and Experience: A
 257

to his ubiquitous book on the subject, The Fate of Place, ―To be at all—to exist in any

way—is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place.‖503 In

other words, people do not exist separately from the world they live in - on the contrary,

they are ―immersed‖ in it. This existential feeling of environmental immersion - or what

Martin Heidegger terms ―being-in-the-world‖ - is the basis of place experience.504

Today, in Chicago‘s public housing neighborhoods, the intimate relationship between

people and place is changing.

Upon completion of the city‘s current urban renewal initiative, the fifty-three

high-rise buildings that once marked a grey and red slash across Chicago‘s inner-city

skyline will be a distant memory.505 Ordered to pack up and leave not only their homes

but also lifelong friends and support networks, many residents have, quite literally, had

their roots yanked from beneath their feet. While there are many meanings ascribed to

place - symbolic, political, topological, and imaginary to name but a few - social

associations are perhaps the strongest. This is particularly true for residents of public

housing for whom depending on neighbors to mind their children when they go to the

store because they cannot afford childcare, or borrowing food from friends when they

don‘t have the funds to buy their own, proves fundamental to the formation of place-

based collective bonds. This dependence has been confirmed by sociologists Sudhir

Philosophical Topography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Ingrid Stefanovic,

Safeguarding Our Common Future, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. As David
Harvey suggests, paradoxically, ―the elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather than
less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication.‖
David Harvey, ―From Space to Place And Back Again,‖ Justice, Nature and the Geography of
Difference, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996: 299.
503
Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, California: Centennial, 1997: xi.
504
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, New York: Harper and Row, 1962; Identity and Difference, New
York: Harper and Row, 1969.
505
Ron Feemster, ―The Problem with Public Housing: Is Chicago Solving It?,‖ Ford Foundation
Report, Vol. 34, No. 2, Spring 2003.
 258

Venkatesh and Isil Celimli who claim that seventy-six percent of all Chicago public

housing tenants‘ social networks are comprised of other project inhabitants. If they

could, roughly seventy-five percent of all displaced CHA families would return to their

old neighborhood.506

Through iconographic and polemical uses of natural imagery, painter, Kerry

James Marshall, and installation artist, Daniel Roth, critically respond to this social

displacement. Marshall and Roth‘s central motifs of flower-laden ‗pathways‘ and

watery garden ‗wells‘ not only map the literal physical configurations of streets and

busy thoroughfares that existed within Chicago‘s public housing neighborhoods, but

also illustrate the deep-rooted, rhizomatic social interconnections ―inside‖ these places.

Geographer Edward Relph in his book Place and Placelessness (1976) first conceived

the use of ―insideness‖ as a conceptual means to describe place experience. More

recently, the concept has been applied by scholars including cultural geographer‘s

Anne Buttimer, Denis Cosgrove, Graham D. Rowles, and environment-behavior

researcher David Seamon to subjects as diverse as representations of platial

attachments in contemporary film to the study of the geography of aging in rural

Appalachia.507 The existential crux of place experience, argue all these scholars, is to

506
Sudhir Venkatesh & Isil Celimli, ―Tearing Down the Community,‖ Shelterforce Online, Issue: 138,
November/December 2004.
507
Anne Buttimer, ―Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld,‖ Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 66, 1976: 277-92; Graham D. Rowles, Home and Identity In Late Life: International
Perspectives, New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company, 2005: 82; Stephen Daniels and Denis
Cosgrove, "Introduction: Iconography and Landscape." In The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on
the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen
Daniels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988: 1; David Seamon, ―Interconnections,
Relationships, and Environmental Wholes: A Phenomenological Ecology of Natural and Built Worlds."
In To Renew the Face of the Earth: Phenomenology and Ecology, ed. Daniel Martino, Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2007: 53-86; Seamon, ―The Life of the Place: A Phenomenological
 259

be ―inside‖ place; in other words, they define insideness by the degree to which a

person or group belongs to and identifies with place. Relph argues that the existential

relationship between ―insideness‖ and its experiential opposite ―outsideness‖ is a

fundamental dialectic in human experience. Framed by the path and portal spatial

motifs, I utilize Relph‘s concept of ―insideness‖ as a way to allegorize the deep-rooted,

place-based networks of social attachment present within Chicago‘s public housing

neighborhoods. Divided into two sections, this chapter employs the work of Marshall

and Roth to, first, chart and explore the attachment of public housing dwellers to their

living environment and the threat that the Plan poses to this relationship and, second,

to consider the current desire of some residents to safeguard community landmarks

against the threat of demolition.

The first series of artworks I consider, Marshall‘s Garden Project (1993-1997),

presents a historicized vision of the interlaced social relationships that existed within

Chicago‘s Stateway Gardens, Rockwell Gardens, Altgeld Gardens, and Wentworth

Gardens housing projects during the mid twentieth-century. The multi-layered spaces

(both literally and symbolically) of the paintings portray public housing as an Edenic

paradise. Golden rays from a lemon-yellow sun lick the sky, plastic-wrapped Easter

baskets speckle the well-tended lawns, and storybook bluebirds bearing festive scrolls

fly this way and that, toting messages from 1950s- and 1960s-style ads such as

―There‘s More of Everything,‖ and ―Bless Our Happy Homes‖ (Figure 4.1). Often

dismissed as ironic, mock-naive evocations of everything the high-rise projects are not

Commentary on Bill Hillier‘s Theory of Space Syntax,‖ Nordisk Arkitekturforskning (Nordic Journal of
Architectural Research), 7, 1, 1994: 35-48.
 260

- beautiful gardens - Marshall‘s dreamy, nostalgic vistas are more complex than this

paradoxical assessment permits.508 The organic connective symbologies at play in the

artist‘s pastoral artworks replicate a very real history of collective practices within

public housing. The pathway motif, present in nearly all the Garden Project paintings,

comes to symbolize the socio-spatial infrastructure of reciprocity and interdependence

so prevalent within Chicago‘s public housing neighborhoods during their lifetime.

While Marshall‘s paintings invite the viewer to an interpretive walk along its

pathways, Daniel Roth‘s Cabrini Green Forest (2004) installation beckons her to step

off this horizontal plateau and immerse herself in place. Roth‘s exhibition, installed at

the Donald Young Gallery in Chicago in 2004, includes faux documentary evidence of a

mythic forest that exists within a secret underground pathway connecting the

Metropolitan Correctional Facility in the city's Loop with the Cabrini-Green housing

project. The central motif in Roth‘s installation is a fiberglass well or, as the artist refers

to it, Portal (Figure 4.2). This reflective ―ink floor piece‖ invites the gallery visitor to

cross the threshold to the subterranean world and explore the unseen catacombs

below.509 Like a modern day Jules Verne, Roth accepts the Portal‟s invitation, returning

from his mission with a selection of hand-written texts, graphite wall drawings,

sculptural forms, and architectural maps. Through these minutely detailed artistic

testimonies, we learn that the land beneath Cabrini-Green is a labyrinthine terrain of

508
See Garrett Holg, ―Realism Today: ‗Stuff Your Eyes with Wonder,‖ Artnews 97, No. 3, March 1998:
154-56; Calvin Reid, ―Kerry James Marshall.‖ Bomb, No. 62, Winter 1998: 40-47; Terrie Sultan, Kerry
James Marshall: Telling Stories, Selected Paintings, Ohio: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art,
1994 .
509
Roth coined this definition in an interview with artist Otto Berchem in the article ―Underground
Connections,‖ Metropolis Magazine, No.3, June/July, 2008
<http://www.metropolism.com/magazine/2008-no3/daniel-roth-interview/ > (accessed 9 February
2011).
 261

twisted roots and thorns. Drawings depict sinewy organic vestiges springing forth from

beneath the high-rise concrete frames above, while ominous, root-like sculptures of bark

and leave sprout like daggers from the gallery‘s whitewashed walls, seemingly resistant

to Roth‘s quest to take the underground forest overground. While Marshall portrays mid

twentieth-century public housing as a dreamy, Norman Rockwellian paradise, in

contrast, Roth‘s installation jolts us awake and directly into the present day with an

artistic interpretation of the socio-ecological trauma of urban renewal. Via the

exploratory Portal, viewers find themselves in a position to recognize not only the deep-

rooted organic social interconnections that exist within Chicago‘s public housing, but

also to appreciate the actions of some determined tenants striving to preserve

community landmarks against the threat of urban renewal.

Placed in the position of temporary ―insideness,‖ the viewer comprehends the

intricate networks of social interaction and affiliation currently at risk within

Chicago‘s Near North Side. Through an analysis of the social turmoil caused by the

impending demolition of two community landmarks within Cabrini-Green, I argue that

public housing should be recognized as more than simply bricks and mortar. Rather,

for some, social clubs, beauty parlors, ball-courts, and mom-and-pop stores serve as

sites of what I call usable memory: As places where residents reminisce about their

deeply rooted past, utilizing this historical attachment to place to unite and prevent the

uprooting of community landmarks in the future.510 In other words, certain community

510
This term is in many ways derived from ―usable past,‖ coined by critic and historian Van Wyck
Brooks in 1918. The concept was used by Brooks to define those aspects of American history and
literature that could be used to interpret and understand the present. Brooks declared,‖ the past is an
inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideas. It yields up, now this treasure, now that, to
anyone who comes at it armed with the capacity for personal choices.‖ This ―past‖ was Ralph Waldo
 262

landmarks function as places of historical contiguity where the past that can be used to

interpret and understand the present events. Many current public housing residents are

aware that they are heirs to a legacy deemed worthy of respect and emulation, and

fight to maintain their cultural identity through their opposition to the implementation

of the Plan. Today, from the quiet protests of independent shop owners who refuse to

sell up to the bulldozing moneymen, to the fight of the tenant activists and community

protesters, this community is rising up to defend their turf.

Taken together, the Garden Project‘s nostalgic pathways and Cabrini Green

Forest‘s mythic underground portal provide interesting models through which to

consider not only the history of socio-spatial interconnections in the projects, but also

as vehicles through which outsiders can appreciate insiders‘ attachment to place.

Pathways

Kerry James Marshall‘s journey began the day he was born in a public housing

project in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955. By the end of the 1960s, Marshall moved

with his family to the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, Los Angeles, and

attended a Junior High School just two blocks from the headquarters of the Black

Panthers. It was against this backdrop that Marshall spent his formative years as a

witness to some of the Civil Rights era‘s most pivotal moments. Inspired by these

events as well as the experiential lessons of his own life, Marshall enrolled at the Otis

Emerson‘s humanistic New England, which Brooks considered to be the model on which present U.S.
and its literature would be built. His call for a return to the positive values of Emerson opposed the
pessimistic vision of Modernist writers such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. The term offers
a way to codify one‘s forbearers and to construct a cultural identity in the face of disruption or chaos.
―On Creating a Usable Past,‖ Dial 64, April 1918: 338-9.
 263

Art Institute in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Under the tutelage of draftsman and muralist

Charles White (1918-1979) and painter Arnold Mesches (b. 1921), he experimented

with various forms of painterly representation. Marshall graduated from Otis with a

BFA in 1978 before moving to Chicago in 1987 where he has lived and worked to

great international success ever since.511 The nerve center of Marshall‘s artistic

achievements is a tiny studio overlooking the recently demolished Stateway Gardens

housing project on Chicago‘s South Side. From this vantage point, Marshall has

witnessed a period of Chicago‘s public housing history recently defined by social

scientist D. Bradford Hunt as a ―dysfunctional mess.‖512 Chronic underfunding has

meant that basic systems – elevators, roofs, building heat, trash collection – regularly

failed, while budgetary turmoil during the 1990s left the CHA in managerial

disarray.513 Concentrations of poverty reached acute levels, and in 1995 Henry

Cisneros, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development,

reported to congress that CHA projects comprised eleven of the fifteen poorest

communities in the nation.514 The experience of being a participant in and, later, a

front-row spectator to some of the twentieth-century‘s most appalling examples of

511
Marshall has received a MacArthur Fellowship (1997) and a National Endowment for the Arts Visual
Arts Fellowship in Painting (1991).
512
D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unravelling of Chicago Public Housing, Chicago: IL,
University of Chicago Press, 2009: 5.
513
With HUD's funding for all housing programs reduced by seventy-six percent from 1980 to 1988, the
CHA operating budget fell by eighty-seven percent during the same time period, leaving little money for
modernization of aging physical plants and apartments. Sudhir Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise
and Fall of the Modern Ghetto, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002: 116.
514
Susan J. Popkin & Victoria E. Gwiasda, Lynn M. Olson, Dennis P. Rosenbaum and Harry Buron,
The Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of public housing in Chicago, New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 2000; ―House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight,‖ HUD‟s
Takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority: Hearing Before the U.S. House of Representatives,
Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, 104th Congr., 1st sess., September 5, 1995, 21; ―U.S.
Bureau of the Congress,‖ The 100 Poorest Tracts in the United States: 1989, Report CPH-L-188,
Washington, DC, 1989.
 264

racial discrimination presented for Marshall ―a real sense of continuity and awareness

of the problems of the existence of black people in America.‖515 For Marshall, the key

problem is the issue of misrepresentation – too often residents are seen as a direct

reflection of their failed living environment.

A chance experience on Chicago‘s Dan Ryan expressway on his way to work

during the early 1990s led Marshall to channel this interest in the ill-treatment of

public housing into the Garden Project, the artist‘s most critically acclaimed series of

works to date:

So I'm getting off the expressway everyday and I see this sign, WELCOME TO
WENTWORTH GARDENS. I look around Chicago and I see that there are
three other housing projects called 'gardens'--Stateway Gardens, Rockwell
Gardens, Altgeld Gardens. I started the project as a way of contrasting the
popular notion of what a garden is supposed to be with the popular notion of
what we understand housing projects to be.516

Contrary to ―popular notions,‖ the projects are literally (in terms of community

beautification projects) and metaphorically (in terms of rhizomatic community

interconnections) gardens. Having spent his formative years in public housing,

Marshall possesses a wealth of memories that bear witness to a sense of community

and individual responsibility to the maintenance of one‘s surroundings. The artist

describes how, at the age of eight, he gained access to collectively owned garden tools,

which he used to tend the family‘s yard. The Nickerson Gardens project, he

reminisced, ―had a huge gymnasium and a large field where we flew kites.‖517 Life in

the projects, Marshall states, ―wasn‘t different than being in a house, except we paid
515
Kerry James Marshall, Kerry James Marshall, New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers,
2000: 20.
516
Lisa Kennedy, ―Flower Power: Kerry James Marshall‘s Garden Project,‖ The Village Voice, New
York, Vol. 40, Issue 41, 10 October 1995: 86.
517
Department of Museum Education, The Art Institute of Chicago.
 265

less rent.‖518 Yet, Marshall‘s paintings are in no way rose-tinted autobiographical

accounts that nostalgically crave a return to more innocent times. Rather, the

manicured lawns and pastoral splendor of Marshall‘s paintings complicate dominant

media-based ―popular notions‖ of the projects as ruinous, dangerous, socially

fragmented environments.

The artist deconstructs this one-dimensional framing by never letting the

viewer forget that this painted portrayal is an investigation, not a recreation, of the real

place. By rendering the projects' inhabitants against a cardboard cutout utopia filled

with powder-puff clouds and gilded with synthetic summer sunbursts, Marshall calls

attention to the falseness of our narrow image of them. The artist depicts a place at

once mythic and unambiguous, in order to complicate how we ―see‖ public housing.

While Marshall is modest about the ability of artwork to intervene in socio-cultural

stereotypes, stating, ―I would be incredibly naïve to think paintings at some art gallery

have the power to change the world,‖ he does believe, however, that his paintings

―contribute to the dialogue about certain issues and the way people see things.‖519

Painted between 1994 and 1997, C.H.I.A., Better Homes Better Gardens, Many

Mansions, Untitled (Altgeld Gardens), Watts 1963, Our Town, and Past Times, speak

directly to the artist‘s desire to re-imagine the history of Chicago‘s public housing in

the American visual imagination - as places that lived up to their pastoral names:520

What I wanted to show in those paintings is that whatever you think about the
projects, they‘re that and more. If you think they‘re full of hopelessness and
despair, you‘re wrong. There are actually a lot of opportunities to experience
518
Anne Keegan, ―An Artist‘s Vision,‖ Chicago Tribune: Tempo, 28 November 1995: Section 5.
519
Keegan, Section 5.
520
C.H.I.A., 1994; Better Homes Better Gardens, 1994; Many Mansions, 1995; Untitled (Altgeld
Gardens), 1995; Watts 1963, 1995; Our Town, 1995, and Past Times, 1997.
 266

pleasure in the projects. There are people whose idealism hasn‘t been
completely eradicated just because they‘re in the projects. A lot of people who
live in the projects have a Disney-esque view of the world, in spite of
everything that‘s going on there…And the bluebirds and happiness, the sun
shining so bright- all of those things are a fantasy of happiness. A fantasy of
happiness that‘s not necessarily an impossibility.521

Many Mansions (1995) (Figure 4.1), for example, depicts Stateway Gardens

(1955-2007) during its formative years. Stateway Gardens is a recently demolished

thirty-three acre public housing complex in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South

Side of Chicago. Brightly colored baskets containing stuffed toys welcome arrivals to

the new high-rise housing complex, while the slender outlines of a swing and a

climbing frame scatter the meticulously manicured gardens. Draped across the top of

the painting is a red banner that gives the work its name: ―IN MY MOTHERS HOUSE

THERE ARE MANY MANSIONS.‖522 Centre stage within this vision, three men tend

the soil, fashioning a flower monogram, ―SG,‖ to define the fertile land on which they

stand. Above them in large stenciled letters, Marshall emblazons ―IL 2-22‖ – the

official designation of the public housing site in the State of Illinois – across the

looming high-rise buildings in the distance. This organic symbiosis between gardens

and high-rises contests ―popular notions‖ which, as Marshall points out, tend to

exclusively associate gardens with bucolic golden-hued country settings and public

housing with industrial, barren landscapes and alienating, concrete high-rise

architectural monstrosities.523 For example, Daniel Coyle, author of Hardball, a book

521
Reid, 45.
522
Therese M. Southgate, ―The cover,‖ American Medical Association, Vol. 297, No. 17, 2 May 2007:
1855.
523
The city also appears as a malevolent ―natural thing‖ in sources like the detective novel and film-noir
cinema, as well as in the urban naturalism of writers like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. Readings
of the city as a form of ―second nature‖ can be found in the work of Walter Benjamin, especially in the
 267

chronicling the fortunes of a Cabrini-Green-based Little League baseball team during

the early 1990s, emphasizes the environment‘s physical harshness in his description of

the housing project: ―From afar, each building appears to have been formed out of a

single gargantuan brick and shoved end long into the earth. The only signs of life come

from the windows, many of which display shades, greenery, or in a few cases, lace

curtains. Many others, however, are burned out, empty, hollow.‖524 By presenting the

actions of residents working on or in place, Many Mansions transfigures this city/nature

dichotomy and recognizes an immersion and interconnectedness between people and

place, and subject and object; in other words, the artist re-imagines public housing as a

―middle landscape.‖525 Elaborating on this concept, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes:

Between the big artificial city at one extreme and wild nature at the other,
humans have created ‗middle landscapes‘ that, at various times and in different
parts of the world, have been acclaimed the model human habitat. They are, of
course, all works of culture, but not conspicuously or arrogantly so. They show
how humans can escape nature‘s rawness without moving so far from it as to
appear to deny roots in the organic world. The middle landscape also earns
laurels because it can seem more real – more what life is or ought to be like –
compared with the extremes of nature and city…526

Many Mansions‘ three central figures attest to this reading, reproducing the sentiments

of many residents who testify to the importance of the cultivation of flowers within

community spaces in the formation of neighborhood consciousness.

From the CHA‘s early years in the 1950s to as recently as the late 1980s,

flower competitions were fundamental to the creation of social solidarity within

Arcades Project, as well as in discussions about public space; for example, the work of Richard Sennett
and Simon Pugh.
524
Daniel Coyle, Hardball: A Season in the Projects, New York: Putnam‘s, 1993: 23. Quoted in Bennett
and Reed, 195-196.
525
J. Dou Porteous, Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics and Planning, London, UK: Routledge,
1996; Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000: 25.
526
Tuan, 1998: 24-5.
 268

Chicago‘s public housing neighborhoods (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). Elizabeth Wood, who

presided as the Authority‘s Executive Director between 1934 and 1954, initiated the

competitions as a way for residents to take ownership of their land, and to feel a sense

of permanence and responsibility for their living environment. Charlotte Young Moore

who moved into Altgeld Gardens with her parents and younger sister in 1944 recalls:

I cannot forget how the mayor would come out to Altgeld, and we‘d have this
picnic and this parade every year, and they‘d go out and select the prettiest
lawns and give awards for the prettiest flower gardens.527

Not simply a way of beautifying the neighborhood, the contests became a means

of developing social networks. Henry and Elouise Messiah who lived in Dearborn

Homes from 1950 until 1954 remember, ―The flower shows brought tenants from

various housing sites around the city together.‖528 Forged over the course of several

decades, these friendship- and family-defined participatory relationships became a

means of enhancing the cultural experiences of many members of the community.

Beyond the flower competitions, community efforts ranged from organizing informal

social gatherings with neighbors, to providing neighborly support such as information

sharing, errand running, and child care, to organizing more formal resident-initiated

service programs including reading and study groups, fire-prevention and education

programs, and organized sporting activities (Figures 4.5-4.7).529 Recently, sociologist

Mindy Fullilove has termed this kind of integrated, multi-dimensional social network -

527
J.S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago, Chicago, IL:
University of Illinois Press. 2004: 92.
528
Fuerst, 92.
529
Roberta Feldman and Susan Stall, The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents Activism in
Chicago‟s Public Housing, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
 269

the near environment within which we find food, shelter, safety, and friendship - a

―mazeway.‖ Fullilove writes:

We love the mazeway in which we are rooted, for it is not simply the buildings
that make us safe and secure, but, more complexly, out knowledge of the
―scene‖ that makes us so. We all have our little part to play, carefully
synchronized with that of all the other players: we are rooted in that, our piece of
the world-as-stage.530

Through the efforts of the community mazeway and events like the flower competitions,

residents transform empty physical space into symbolically significant places that

reinforces and reproduces the values of its inhabitants. Jazz legend Ramsey Lewis, a

former Frances Cabrini row-house resident, remembers being ―anchored‖ to his piano at

the Wayman Church in Cabrini-Green. He recalls, ―I was given free lessons at the

Wayman. Otherwise my family couldn‘t afford them…My memories of the row-houses

are all really positive. Who we were made me what I am today.‖531 By collapsing his

attachment to the physical world of space (the church) with his attachment to self and

community (―who we were‖), Lewis succinctly identifies the fundamental dialectic of

human place experience, as a complex fusion of spatial perceptions and social

relationships.532 As Tuan and Relph have both argued, ―The existential crux of place

experience is to be on the path—to belong to and identify with the place.‖533 In other

words, to be on the same ―pathway‖ as our neighbor, or to employ Fullilove‘s analogous

530
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and
What We Can Do About It, Ballantine Books: New York, 2004: 19.
531
David T. Whitaker, Cabrini-Green In Words and Pictures, USA: LPC Group, 2000: 13.
532
Psychologists Setha Low and Irwin Altman define ―place attachment‖ as a psychological process
similar to an infant‘s attachment to parental figures. They also suggest that place attachment can
develop social, material, and ideological dimensions, as individuals develop ties to kin and
community…and participate in public life as residents of a particular community. Irwin Altman and
Setha M. Low, Place Attachment, New York: Plenum Publishing, 1992.
533
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space & Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001: 6; Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 1976: 141.
 270

term, ―mazeway,‖ constitutes knowledge of a physical environment as much as it

comprises a group‘s lived experience. Marshall‘s Garden Project bears witness to this

unique socio-spatial dynamic through the compositional motif of a pathway.

Our Town, Pastimes and Better Homes Better Gardens feature roads that cut

through Marshall‘s neighborhood, virtually spilling out into the spectator‘s lap. The

path in Better Homes Better Gardens emerges from a steep vanishing point in the

background, escaping into the lower foreground amongst the domestic detritus of a

summer croquet game, like a water slide at a theme park (Figure 4.8). Marshall‘s dense

compositional trail engages the viewer unswervingly, inviting the spectator to walk

through the space alongside two teenage lovebirds. White puffs dangle like halcyon

harbingers above their heads, recalling the oral testimonies of housing project residents

who say that this is where they found their ―place.‖ Frank Reed, a long-term resident

of Cabrini-Green remembers: ―Looking back, I realized that I grew up in a

neighborhood. Our Cabrini row houses were a community. Everybody knew your

name, your mail carrier, neighbor, local storeowner. I was known everywhere‖ (Figure

4.9).534 Furthermore, the muddy brown disc of the flowerbed on the left hand side of

the painting deliberately echoes, in terms of both scale and theme, the dark circular

shadow underneath the two figures on the opposite side of the canvas. Marshall‘s

―mirroring‖ technique speaks not only to the ―rooting‖ of Reed within his lived

environment (as user, creator, and product of this place), but also - through the

inclusion of the flowerbed ―W‖ monogram that dominates the bottom left of the

534
Ed Marciniak, Reclaiming the Inner City: Chicago‟s Near North Revitalization Confronts Cabrini-
Green, Washington D.C.: National Center for Urban Affairs, 1986: 90.
 271

painting - a sense of spatial belonging and territoriality. Recalling Lewis‘ attachment

between the physical world of space (the church) and self and community (―who we

were‖), the monogram comes to signify how inhabitants‘ identities are rooted in and

defined by place, just as the identity of place ultimately is the product of is

inhabitants.535 In this sense, Marshall‘s paintings symbolize the most profound level of

place experience or what Relph terms ―existential insideness;‖ a state in which place is

entrenched in one‘s daily reality. This condition elicits a sense of absolute identity with

a place, of appreciating unreservedly ―this is where you belong.‖536 Yet, somewhat

paradoxically, this sense of belonging or ―rootedness‖ does not necessitate stasis: to

recall Lewis reminiscing about the road to career success, ―who we were made me what

I am today.‖ Marshall illustrates Lewis‘ socio-spatial mobility in Better Homes Better

Gardens. Lips sealed and eyes alert, the couple, like Lewis, head out into the world,

helped on their way by the careful addition of a garden hose in the bottom right

foreground, which acts like a perspective hook beckoning them along.

Indeed, whether crossing a street, standing outside a building waiting for a ride,

congregating at a back yard gathering, or just gazing at their children from the kitchen

window, the figures in Marshall‘s works appear to be on their way somewhere. Like

the pathway in Better Homes Better Gardens, the road in Our Town connects the

image to the spectator‘s own community or ―our town,‖ indicating that this

neighborhood is not as isolated as we are often led to believe (Figure 4.10). Amidst

decorative curlicues of festive ribbons and bluebirds of happiness, a mother wishes her

535
Mason R. McWatters, Residential Tourism: (De)constructing Paradise, Bristol, U.K.: Channel View
Publications, 2008: 46.
536
Relph, 1976: 55.
 272

children off into the day. The thought balloon from the young girl's head connects with

the chocolate box home like a dream, while her gaze points out of the frame of the

canvas and into the world outside of the projects.

From an experiential perspective, the front door, or rather the home behind the

front door, comes to signify the epicenter of human place experience (Figure 4.11).

According to Relph, the home is ―the foundation of our identity as individuals and as

members of a community, the dwelling-place of being.‖537 It is the ―central reference

point of human existence,‖ as well as ―the point of departure from which we orient

ourselves and take possession of the world.‖538 As the girl in Our Town departs from

this metaphorical starting block, she echoes the lived experience of ex-public housing

resident Gwendolyn Duncan Alexander, one of the first people to move into the low-

rise complex, Mother Cabrini Homes, in 1943. Alexander recalls an inherent sense of

mobility in the projects: ―Cabrini was ideal because I was free to go anywhere I

wanted.‖ 539 Residents achieved this sense of freedom – albeit contained freedom -- via

the points of social contact encountered along the community mazeway. Maude Davis

who moved into Altgeld Gardens in 1949 remembers, ―You felt free to go into your

neighbor‘s house, free to ask your neighbor for anything, because they were always

sharing and giving…We freely shared toys, whatever we had. Altgeld is where I

learned to ride a bike. And it was on someone else‘s bike.‖540 As an analytic device,

the speed connoted by the motion of Marshall‘s bike suggests that orientation in public

housing is constructed out of the order of the body in situ, negotiating urban pathway
537
Relph, 1976: 39.
538
Relph, 1976: 20, 40.
539
Fuerst, 212.
540
Fuerst, 137.
 273

structures and integrated community networks.541 Marshall‘s forked road motif

gestures not only towards the reality of being free to explore the supportive mazeway

of one‘s near environment, but also to the fundamental paradox of this spatial

situation. Despite their ―immersion‖ in place, some residents were free to experience

the world ―outside‖ the projects.

The adolescent figure in Untitled: Altgeld Gardens is in a similar state of

motion to other characters in Marshall‘s Garden Project series (Figure 4.12). Resting

on his hands and knees on a purple blanket, he faces the viewer and seems to be in

transition between reclining and rising. To one side a white chimney seeps threatening

blood-red stains onto a sundial with the letters AFDC (Aid to Families and Dependent

Children). Like the forked road in Our Town, the crossroads behind the figure implies

the variety of socio-spatial options available to him: to choose a path that leads to a life

of crime and bloodshed – the ascribed route of dystopian ―popular notions‖ -- or to

choose a more original option. Located at a line of demarcation between Altgeld

Gardens and the viewer, the teenager is therefore a gatekeeper between the worlds of

past and present, life and death, housing project and the world outside. Listening to a

radio that blares, ―Our day will come and we‘ll have everything,‖ Marshall‘s figure

has already made his choice.542 Specifically, the figure‘s posture of predestination

corresponds with the painter‘s own experience as a former resident of public housing.

541
In a 2004 interview with Elizabeth A. T. Smith, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Chicago, Marshall corroborated this viewer‘s reading of the work, stating: ―Through it (bike motif) I try
to provide loose parameters inside of which you can think about some of the complexity of project life.‖
These include "optimum mobility and fluidity" and "freedom as the dominant theme in black cultural
production." Ken Johnson, ―Social Satire and Metaphor in a Multimedia Exhibition,‖ The New York
Times, 17 December 2004; Walter Robinson, ―Marshall Arts,‖ Interview, November, 2005: 86.
542
―Our Day Will Come,‖ Ruby & The Romantics, Composers: Bob Hilliard and Mort Garson, 1963.
 274

In numerous interviews over the years Marshall has described how, as a child, he

pleaded with his mother to let him stay late after school to leaf through his teacher‘s

prized scrapbook, which contained colorful postcards from exotic lands far away.

When asked by art critic Calvin Reid about what influence these early experiences in

Watts had on his career, the artist responded, ―it seemed like there were signposts all

over the place saying, ―Artists this way…‖ Everywhere I went I met the perfect person

to get me to the next level.‖543

Marshall‘s successful career has taken him one step further than his teacher.

His art has been included in many exhibitions including the 1997 Documenta X, the

1997 Whitney Biennale, the 1999/2000 Carnegie International, and the 2003 Venice

Biennale. Like the teenage figure in Untitled: Altgeld Gardens, Marshall achieved

success by negotiating the ―third‖ place between the home and the world outside.544

Marshall is not alone in this respect; America‘s public housing communities produced

people who have gone on to distinguished careers in the fields of entertainment,

academia, sport, and politics. Award-winning singer and actor Jennifer Hudson, jazz

musicians Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler, actor Laurence Tureaud (otherwise known

as Mr. T), boxing champion Pernell Whitaker, and Governor of Massachusetts Deval

Patrick, all spent their formative years as residents of Robert Taylor Homes on

Chicago‘s South Side. President Obama recently nominated U.S. Circuit Judge and ex-

public housing resident, Sonia Sotomayor, for a seat on the Supreme Court. Describing

543
Reid, 42.
544
―Third element‖ is the term given by public housing scholar Terry Haywoode to define the spatial
realm between the home and the world. The first element is ―private‖ and the second is ―public.‖ The
third element provides the base for political action. Terry Haywoode, ―Working-class Feminism:
Creating a Politics of Community, Connection, and Concern,‖ Ph. D. Dissertation, The City University
of New York, 1991: 76.
 275

her childhood in a recent article for the New York Times, Sotomayor identified the

Bronxdale Housing project she grew up in as the ―launching pad‖ for her success.545

Obama, too, named the judge‘s "extraordinary journey" in life as one of the main

reasons for choosing her as a nominee.546 Drawing strength from the Bronxdale

Housing project community mazeway, Sotomayor is a success because of rather than

in spite of her public housing roots.

Fundamentally, these success stories confound ―outsider‖ expectations about

the capability of public housing residents. For example, a recent byline in an article

about Sotomayor in Time declared, ―Nobody expects you to be chosen someday for the

Supreme Court when your father was a welder with a third-grade education. Nobody

expects you to make it to Princeton when you come from a public-housing project.‖547

Like an elevated train breaking through into the fierce light of a Chicago uptown

summer day, the penetrating gaze of Marshall‘s figures appear to contest these low

expectations.548 For example, the young girl in Our Town runs out of the frame of the

painting with fists closed, her right arm raised in a gesture reminiscent of "black

power." The almost disquieting frontality of the gardens‘ inhabitants operates in a

similar way to the path motif. The large-scale, frontal positioning of the figures and

their direct gaze has the effect of consuming the gallery space, and, as a consequence,

the gallery visitor as well. In other words, the fearless gaze demands that the viewer
545
Lizette Alvarez and Michael Wilson, ―Up and Out of New York‘s Projects,‖ The New York Times, 29
May 2009, <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/nyregion/31projects.html> (accessed 9 February
2011).
546
Lacayo, Richard. ―Sonia Sotomayor: A Justice Like No Other,‖ Time, 28 May 2009,
<http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1901348,00.htm> (accessed 9 February 2011).
547
Lacayo, 28 May 2009.
548
The prismatic effects of the sunbeams in Marshall‘s paintings function in a similar way to the
road/path/outward gaze of his protagonists. Casting their golden polygonal shapes over the painting,
they function as arrows pointing out of the frame of the canvas, and out of the ghetto.
 276

questions the context of the black subjects within the painting insofar as they question

the context of black subjects outside the painting: Their gaze is rhetorical, asking if

their lives can be accorded a self-respect associated with everyday life. The direct

confrontational gaze of the figures, along with their position on clearly designated

environmental paths, disentangles the ―tangle of pathology‖ narrative prevalent in late

twentieth-century social science analyses of the inner-city and points towards a self-

assurance too rarely witnessed by those unfamiliar with life in public housing.549

Marshall expands this dialogical theme by challenging us, both visually and

metaphorically, with the ―blackness‖ of his subjects. On first inspection, the apparently

simplified inky skin of the figures, punctured only by the whites of their eyes, seem to

reflect the racist notion that all African-Americans look alike. Upon closer

examination, however, one deciphers the subtle variations in black and dark gray tones

that comprise each face. Hence, the figures operate as rhetorical symbols of blackness

-- as psychological and perceptual portraits of hybridity and multiplicity. Inspired by

the prologue of Ralph Ellison‘s book Invisible Man, which describes the condition of

invisibility of black people in the U.S., Marshall used the blackest of black paint in

order to depict what he describes as an ―unmediated blackness,‖ an invisibility that is

conditioned by the political and social realities of America, rather than by any lack of

density.550 As Marshall has described:

549
For a longer discussion of the late twentieth-century discourse on the ―urban crisis,‖ see chapter three.
William Julius Wilson, ―The Ghetto Underclass: Social Science Perspectives‖, The Annals of The
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Vol. 501, January 1989: 300.
550
Marshall has referenced Ellison‘s book as an influence in numerous interviews over the years. For
example: Helen Molesworth, ―Project America.‖ Frieze, No. 40, May 1998: 73; Ken Johnson, ―Social
Satire and Metaphor in a Multimedia Exhibition,‖ The New York Times, 17 December 2004,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/17/arts/design/17john.html. (accessed 23 December 2010).
 277

(The Garden Project paintings are) a very visual image of invisibility, which
has the paradoxical quality of being present and absent at the same time. The
problem was how to bring that figure close to being a stereotypical
representation without collapsing completely into that stereotype. I was playing
at the boundary between a completely flattened-out stereotype, a cartoon, and a
fully resonant, complicated, authentic representation – a black archetype, which
is a very different thing. The archetype allows for degrees of complexity that
the stereotype always minimizes or undermines.551

The painting‘s hieratic stylization encourages the spectator to suspend reflexive

judgments long enough to see the complexities that have been set in motion. In other

words, the unmediated blackness of the figures operates paradoxically to generate a

space of mediation and, thus, a space for dialogue about the ways in which many

outsiders typecast public housing residents. Marshall‘s figures are, therefore, the very

reversal of Ellison's metaphoric invisible man; like Hudson, Patrick, and Sotomayor,

their visibility contests ascribed racial stereotypes that position black public housing

residents as pathological, static, a-historical, hopeless casualties of poverty.

It would be naïve, however, to present the projects solely in terms of socio-

spatial potentiality and career success. The figures in Watts 1963 (Figure 4.13),

Marshall‘s only non-Chicago based work, encapsulate this reality. The painting is

engulfed by a broad field of grass, two towering palm trees and yellow daisies, which

obscure a somber housing authority sign. In the foreground, among a flowerbed of

daisies, are three children dressed immaculately in white shorts and sneakers.

Interrupting this pleasant scene, however, are the shadows of the figures, which all fall

in the wrong direction, toward the sun. The presence of two unidentified shadows

leaving a teenage boy somnolent in an ominous pool of dark shadow, lends the picture

551
Marshall, 117.
 278

a sinister and fatalistic air. Since the boy in an inanimate, lifeless position is the oldest

of the three children, we may choose to interpret this narrative to imply that life in the

projects results in death at an early age. Here, Marshall acknowledges the very real

danger and violence that came to affect many young project residents during the late

twentieth-century. Projects such as Cabrini-Green experienced a period of notoriously

high rates of crime and gang violence.552 According to a data report by the Chicago

Reporter, during the late twentieth-century, black male public housing residents

between the ages of fourteen and nineteen years of age were seventeen times more

likely to become involved in illegal activities than young white men of the same

age.553 Despite these undeniable problems, it is possible to interpret the second young

male figure in Watts 1963 as having risen from the other boy‘s inactive state. Marshall

guides the third figure, a young girl, out of the bottom right of the canvas by her

shadow in much the same way that he directs the children in Our Town out of the

bottom left hand corner by the path. Flanked by a red banner spouting the motivational

phrase ―THERE‘S MORE OF EVERYTHING,‖ these figures are determined not to be

just another murder statistic.

Marshall‘s survivalist agenda extends to the most critically celebrated of the

Garden Project series, Many Mansions (Figure 4.1). The painting borrows from the

powerful X-based composition of the Raft of the Medusa (1819) by the French

552
Cabrini-green crime, 2006 no‘s of cases: Battery, domestic battery- 248, Criminal trespass- 163,
Criminal damage- 92, Narcotics- 193, Burglary- 128, Assault- 44,
<http://www.chicagocrime.org/locations/cha_apartment/> (accessed 6 May 2006).
553
Alden K. Laury, ―Fighting the Odds,‖ The Chicago Reporter, 8 September 2007,
<http://www.chicagoreporter.com/index.php/c/Cover_Stories/d/Fighting_the_Odds> (accessed 27
November 2010).
 279

Romantic painter Theodore Géricault (Figure 4.14).554 Géricault‘s painting depicts the

Algerian immigrant survivors of the ship Medusa, which floundered off the west coast

of Senegal in 1816. Specifically, the painting captures a moment recounted by one of

the survivors when, prior to their rescue, the passengers tried to signal to a ship on the

horizon. It disappeared, and in the words of one of the surviving crewmembers, "From

the delirium of joy, we fell into profound despondency [sic] and grief."555 The ship, the

Argus, reappeared two hours later and rescued those who remained. This incident was

the result of tragic mismanagement and became a liberal cause célèbre in France when

the survivors were able to tell their stories. In his compositional selection, Marshall

acknowledges that during the mid to late twentieth-century public housing was

―abandoned‖ by housing authorities across the country. Despite initially improving

―peoples lives by building subsidized housing for low-income urban families unable to

obtain ―decent, safe, and sanitary,‖ over time these ideals were distorted by the

implementation of repressive housing policies, underfunding and mismanagement.556

Racially based site-selection decisions meant that many of Chicago‘s public housing

projects were located in already overcrowded slums, leading architects to build upwards

in the form of high-rise projects. As I describe in the Introduction, by the late 1960s,

Mayor Richard Daley had withdrawn crucial services like police patrols and routine

building maintenance from the projects, which resulted in the neglect of elevator repairs,

554
Marshall acknowledges this inspiration in an interview with Therese M. Southgate, for the article,
―The cover,‖ in the American Medical Association, 2 May 2007, Vol. 297, No. 17: 1855.
555
Christine Riding, "The Raft of the Medusa in Britain: Audience and Context." In Crossing the
Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Patrick Noon, 66-94. London:
Tate Publishing, 1993, 77.
556
Wim De Wit, ―The Rise of Public Housing in Chicago, 1930-1960.‖ In Chicago Architecture and
Design, 1923-1993: Reconfiguration of an American Metropolis, ed. John Zukowsky. Munich: Prestel-
Verlag, 1993: 232-245.
 280

the vandalism of lobbies and corridors, and the use of stairwells as garbage dumps. By

1975, President Nixon placed a moratorium on public housing construction, which

expanded waitlists for tenancy at existing and deteriorating developments. Ten years

later, President Reagan reduced federal funding for public housing maintenance,

rehabilitation, and construction from $35 billion to $7 billion annually. Many residents

also insist that the CHA stopped screening tenants by the 1970s, which increased the

presence of ex-convicts, gang members, and drug users. Cabrini-Green resident Wanda

Hopkins recalls: ―I think they just gave up on us.‖557

By choosing to base his composition on a painting where the main protagonists

survive institutional neglect, however, Marshall re-imagines public housing as a place of

endurance and hope. Raised on the shoulders of his comrades, the central black

protagonist in Raft of the Medusa extends his arm out of the canvas (and on to survival)

via a light-filled diagonal axis, which stretches from lower left of the canvas up to the

horizon in the top right. When applied to the historical context of Many Mansions,

Marshall‘s artistic reference not only implies that survival in the projects is utterly

dependent upon a supportive group dynamic, but also that this group is led by a

determination to break-through ascribed framing devices. In this sense, the painting

operates rhetorically as a space of mediation, asking the viewer to liberate their

appreciation of residents from Chicago‘s public housing from the limited contexts

allowed by most ―popular notions.‖ Indeed, just as Marshall‘s figures asks us to look

beyond their apparent matte black uniformity, so by breaching the painting‘s

metaphorical ―frame‖ of expectations, the ―survivors‖ of the Many Mansions demand

557
Whitaker, 121.
 281

that we look further than the narrative of neglect and despair most often ascribed to

public housing‘s history: to re-imagine the projects as a place of survival and

perseverance.

―In spite‖ of shared hardships, the mismanagement of their living environment,

and political abandonment, over the years, many residents survived life in the projects

by developing resilient bonds of community and networks of mutual support. The

withdrawal of crucial services, the chronic mismanagement, and the arrival of the

high-rise developments, far from damaging the community infrastructure, actually

solidified and enhanced place-based bonds; To put it spatially, the higher up the

buildings go, the deeper and greater the bond of the community within. The broad

timescale considered in the Garden Project series - Watts 1963 to the present day -

illustrates the unflinching continuity and cumulative perseverance of this community

network. Marshall pursues this idea with the least known and yet most intriguing of the

Garden Project series, Past Times (Figure 4.15).

In this work Marshall revives the romantic social ideologies and symbiotic

human/environmental harmonies present in pastoral paintings such as Giorgione‘s

Tempest (c.1508) and Edouard Manet‘s Dejeuner sur L‟Herbe (1863). In recalling

these idealized landscapes, Marshall applies the vocabulary of what artist and theorist

Dan Graham calls an ideology of ―utopian forms that constitute a better or ideal

society‖ – a synchronization designed to unsettle viewer‘s expectations.558 A father

and son sit in a park listening to music; against an omnipresent flat blazing sun,

558
Dan Graham, ―Introduction: Dan Graham‘s History Lessons.‖ In Rock My Religion, ed. Brian Wallis.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 1994: xvi.
 282

African-American figures enjoy the stereotypically upper middle-class white pastimes

of golf, croquet, boating and water-skiing. The action of the figures in addition to their

direct, confrontational gaze challenges the idea that these are all-white activities. As in

other works in the Garden Project series, the painting‘s romantic vista disrupts any

easy claim to racial essentialism. Meanwhile, a narrow pathway traverses its way from

the background to the foreground of the painting, its starting place and target extending

beyond the canvas frame. This volumetric formation (the distinct foreground, middle

ground, and background) has the effect of creating a level of heightened tension, where

the impending action or psychological communication, foreshadowed and delivered, as

if seen in a long shot of a single scene. Moreover, this temporal depth works to

spatialize the generational links between the father and son, emphasizing, again, how

place experiences are time-deepened. While the father listens to Smokey Robinson‘s

song ―Just my Imagination‖ (1971), the son‘s radio supplies Snoop Doggy Dogg‘s

―Got my Mind on my Money and my Money on my Mind‖ (1994). As musical riffs

evanesce into the air above their heads like the steam rising off a coffee cup, Marshall

emphasizes the important role music plays in defining not only historical periods, but

also in preserving personal memories. Framed by the path motif, this spatio-temporal

musical convergence of time—of then and now, father and son—signifies the

sequential trail of memories provoked by the red brick high-rises in the distance. Set

high on a hill like Cinderella‘s castle, the public housing building becomes, as I

mention in the previous chapter, a ―memory palace,‖ a place that functions as a visual

cue, reminding the residents of their past and the past of their predecessors.559

559
In 1596 Matteo Ricci devised the technique of the ―memory palace.‖ It is a mnemonic link system
 283

Recalling Pierre Nora‘s definition of place as space where memory

―crystallizes and secretes itself,‖ Past Times, which was completed in the same year

the CHA announced the Plan, embodies a particular moment on the pathway of public

housing history.560 At the end of the path on the lower right hand corner stands a pot

containing long plant-like tendrils; from the ends of each leaf dangle crisp white sheets

of paper. These blank canvases seem to pose the problem of the embodiment of

memory in a place where, despite the destructive effects of urban renewal, a sense of

historical continuity persists: How do we frame (conserve/represent) the history and,

thus, memories of a place that no longer exists?561 In the following section I offer a

partial answer to this question via a discussion of the ways in which some current

residents remain connected to their old neighborhoods through rituals of solidarity and

efforts to conserve community landmarks. When we think about it this way, memory

of the past connects to hope for the future. As writer Mary Gordon puts it, ―There is a

link between hope and memory. Remembering nothing, one cannot hope for anything.

And so time means nothing.‖562 The preservation of a sense of place is, then, an active

moment along the pathway from memory to hope, from past to future. If Marshall‘s

blank canvases pose questions about the preservation of a sense of place, then the

spatial re-conceptualization provided by Roth‘s Portal offers, if not a definitive

based on places and the architecture in places that allows a person the means of committing large
quantities of information to memory. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1966.
560
Pierre Nora, ―Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,‖ Representations 26, Spring
1989, 7.
561
Nora, 7.
562
Mary Gordon, ―My Mother is Speaking from the Desert,‖ The New York Times, 1995: 47.
 284

answer, then an alternate way of appreciating what it means to be dis-placed from

one‘s memory palace.

Portal

While Marshall portrays mid twentieth-century public housing as a dreamy

pastoral paradise, Roth‘s Cabrini Green Forest jolts us awake with an interpretation of

the socio-ecological trauma of urban renewal. The title to Roth‘s series of exhibitions,

Zones of Dissolution, encapsulates this sense of upheaval. Each project within the

series involves the German artist‘s interpretation of a specific threat to place: tunnels

lead to clandestine hiding places, concealed rooms disclose god-forbidden secrets,

covert stairways trail off into the night, mountains contain wartime headquarters, and

isolated houses in the woods hold fearful suspicion. Describing Roth‘s approach to his

work, the critic and curator Luca Cerizza writes, ―Proceeding backwards in search of

clues, like a kind of social spelunker, or an archaeologist of modernity, he digs into our

recent past with an acute investigative ability, in order to reveal the more

unfathomable truth hidden behind these appearances.‖563 These ―reconstructions,‖ as

Roth calls them, have been exhibited internationally in locations including the

Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig, Germany, the Kunsthaus Glarus in

Switzerland, White Cube in London, Artist Space in New York, and the Dallas

Museum of Art.564 For the 2006 exhibition, The Well, at the South London Gallery, for

563
Luca Cerizza, ―temporal asymmetry: the psychogeography of daniel roth,‖ Tema Celeste, Vol. 21,
No. 96, March/April 2003.
564
Roth coined this definition in an interview with artist Otto Berchem in the article ―Underground
Connections,‖ Metropolis Magazine, No.3 June/July, 2008.
 285

example, Roth reconstructed a network of ―lost rivers‖ that run beneath London.565

Turning the creaking Victorian gallery on its head, Roth brought the forgotten

tributaries of the River Thames to the ground‘s surface by filling the exhibition space

with a skeletal system of rusty and leaking pipes. The oily, sewery contents of these

cylinders seeped out, staining the pristine walls, and forming black puddles on

concrete gallery floor.

A central motif common to all Roth‘s installations is a fiberglass well (Figure

4.2). Just as the legendary wardrobe provoked exploratory desire in the children in

C.S. Lewis‘ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so Roth‘s physical and mental

portal invites the viewer to cross this psychic threshold to explore the geographically

and temporally distant world beyond: in other words, to immerse oneself in place. In

Cabrini Green Forest, the Portal has been breached, the mine thoroughly quarried,

and Roth has resurfaced from his excavation with a vast physical archive of

documentary proof of the land below ground.566 Through a frenzy of hand-written

texts, graphite wall drawings, sculptural forms, and architectural maps, we learn that

the land beneath Cabrini-Green is labyrinthine terrain reminiscent of a Grimm‘s

Brothers landscape. Drawings depict sinewy roots weaving in and out of the

foundation of the high-rise public housing buildings above like a body‘s interior

network of veins and arteries, while faint neuron-like graphite wall drawings trail over

every inch of the gallery interior, like a rash on the architecture‘s skin (Figure 4.16).

565
The Well, Daniel Roth, The South London Gallery, U.K., February 1 st-March 12th 2006.
566
Heidegger‘s ―ontological excavations‖ have inspired a particular approach to understanding the
social process of place construction. He creates ―a new way to speak about and care for our human
nature and environment,‖ so that,‖ love of place and the earth are scarcely sentimental areas to be
indulged only when all technical and material problems have been resolved. They are part of our being
in the world and prior, therefore, to all technical matters.‖ Heidegger, 47-8.
 286

Roth intersperses these visceral two-dimensional drawings with lumpen wooden

sculptures, placed like petrified anatomical specimens around the gallery (Figures 4.17

and 4.18). Roth‘s underground wilderness and the trove of corporeal relics retrieved

from within, succinctly illustrate the very real rhizomatic socio-spatial

interconnections that exist above ground within Chicago‘s public housing

neighborhoods. Moreover, the artist‘s conscious omission of figures reinforces the

inexorable interconnections between place and dweller within public housing: In the

Portal and Cabrini Green Forest, both conjoin to give way to a larger ―mazeway‖ of

place identity.

Beyond Roth‘s archive of mazeway memorabilia, however, other elements of

the exhibition suggest a contested underground pathway, at odds with the world above.

The organic vestiges, which one can initially read as evidence of utopian

communitarianism are, upon closer inspection, bound just a little too tight. Sculptures

of fir, woven bark, and leaves sprout like daggers from the gallery‘s whitewashed

frame, leaving needles and clumps of dirt on the gallery floor like the casualties of a

well-fought battle (Figure 4.19). In another section of the exhibition, the jutting limbs

of tree branches pierce a corner wall, seemingly resistant to Roth‘s quest to take the

underground-forested path over-ground.

In making clear the relationship between bodily trauma and the site specificity

of the Chicago housing project, Roth identifies a current conflict, which is all too real

in the hearts and minds of many Cabrini-Green residents. Motivated by the racial and

socioeconomic inequalities that have alienated the predominantly African-American

population from their city neighbors since the 1970s, the Chicago Housing Authority is
 287

razing its projects and replacing them with mixed-income accommodations. During the

inception of the Plan in the mid 1990s, the CHA and the tenants‘ elected Central

Advisory Council negotiated a relocation rights contract providing that all lease-

compliant families who were CHA residents as of 1 October 1999 had a right to return

to their rehabilitated communities upon completion of the new accommodations.567

This ‗Right to Return‘ policy has allowed some residents such as ex ABLA tenant

Sherell Lane to return to their old neighborhood.568 Appearing as a guest on a National

Public Radio show, Lane regaled host Renee Montagne with a description of the final

days before her move into her new three-bedroom, two-bathroom Roosevelt

condominium, ―I used to walk down villages569 to see as it was coming up, and then

when they put the light in and stuff, it was just like something they took out a

magazine and just set down. So I just, I love it, I loved it, it's lit up, it's beautiful. I love

it.‖570 Unfortunately, for some of the other fifty thousand people who once lived in

Chicago‘s public housing, returning to their old neighborhoods is beyond their reach.

In 2005 the Chicago Tribune reported that in the case of Cabrini-Green over six

thousand residents were moved out with a Housing Choice Voucher (which caps rent

at thirty percent of income) with the promise that they would return to find better

homes and neighborhoods, yet fewer than one-hundred public housing families moved

567
Robin Snyderman and Steven D. Dailey, Public Housing in the Public Interest: Examining the
Chicago Housing Authority‟s Relocation Efforts, Chicago, Ill: Metropolitan Planning Council, 2002: 5.
568
The name "ABLA" was an acronym for four different housing developments that together constituted
one large site. Those four developments were: the Jane Addams Homes, Robert Brooks Homes
(including the Robert Brooks Extension), Loomis Courts, and the Grace Abbott Homes.
569
The common nickname for the ABLA homes is "the village," or "the vill," in reference to its
proximity to University Village.
570
Cheryl Corley, ―Critics Hit Chicago Public Housing Efforts,‖ National Public Radio, 27 July 2007.
 288

back into the mixed-income community.571 Instead, as I describe in the Introduction,

according to the Chicago Housing Authority Choice (CHAC), a group helping track

relocated families, ninety-three percent of displaced residents have settled in

communities that are majority African-American and seventy-five percent in

neighborhoods that are considered struggling, high-poverty areas.572 As housing policy

analyst Edward Goetz states, ―mixed-income developments have typically not

generated significant levels of social interactions across income groups.‖573

Yet, for some residents, the trauma of this move pales in comparison to the

ordeal of separation from the community mazeway. Their mazeway is being shattered

only to be replaced by a traumatic stress reaction that Fullilove refers to as ―root

shock‖:

Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one‘s
emotional ecosystem. It has important parallels to the psychological shock
experienced by a person who, as a result of injury, suddenly loses massive
amounts of fluids. Such as blow threatens the whole body‘s ability to
function….Shock is the fight for survival after a life-threatening blow to the
body‘s internal balance.574

Just as the body has systems to maintain its internal equilibrium, so, too, the public

housing resident has ways to maintain the external balance between herself and the

world. The erasure of one‘s socio-spatial infrastructure represents the fragmentation of

some of the essential components of residents‘ group identity leading Fullilove to refer

571
John Bebow and Antonio Olivio, ―CHA moves tenets out-but not up,‖ Chicago Tribune, 27 February
2005.
572
Such as Engelwood, Roseland and South Shore. John Bebow and Antonio Olivio, ―CHA moves
tenets out-but not up‖:―At the halfway mark of Chicago‘s decade-long Plan for Transformation,‖
Chicago Tribune, 27 February 2005: 1.
573
Edward G. Goetz, Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America, Washington
D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 2003: 82.
574
Fullilove, 11.
 289

to urban renewal as ―an amputation by the city of its own flesh.‖575 For example,

Seward Park, which is located in the shadows of the Cabrini-Green high-rises, has

undergone a recent facelift. While the park once offered the youth of the housing

project a valuable space within which to exercise and meet up with friends, in 2005 the

Chicago Parks Department privatized the space, implementing fees to access the sports

facilities, thereby rendering access prohibitive to most Cabrini-Green tenants. Resident

Jason Smith laments the loss of this space, ―Those (basketball) courts brought the

community together…All of this thrown out for condos.‖576 Jason‘s brother Jeremy

also bemoans the loss of community landmarks:

There used to be these community stores where you could go in and get what
you need, and it was priced to people like my family but now these furniture
stores that are real exquisite. There was also a community Laundromat that‘s
gone, and barbershop, candy stores, because they can‘t keep up with the
rents.577

Meanwhile, a Blockbuster, Starbucks, and the grocery store Dominicks replaced a

nearby New City YMCA and, ―When Blockbuster and Starbucks arrive,‖ says resident

Deidre Brewster, ―You know the writing is on the wall.‖578 For Brewster and many

other Cabrini-Green residents, this writing spelled the erasure of their homes, their

surrounding neighborhood, and their lives as they once knew them.579

The arrival of the new chain stores alienates some housing project residents to

such a degree that they become outsiders in her own home; in effect, ―placelessness‖

replaces Brewster‘s sense of place. Relph defines the concept of placelessness as the

575
Robert Campbell, ―Phantom pain: A neighborhood lives on after its destruction,‖ Architectural
Record, April 2006: 63.
576
Siobhan O‘Connor, ―Two Tales of One City,‖ Good, March/April 2008: 93.
577
O‘Connor, 93.
578
Brian Smith, ―The Store in the Middle‖, Chicago, February 2004: 74.
579
Smith, 2004: 74.
 290

"undermining of place for both individuals and cultures, and the casual replacement of

the diverse and significant places of the world with anonymous spaces and exchangeable

environments."580 A recent article in the Chicago Sun Times, identified this spatial

dynamic within Chicago‘s new mixed-income developments, reporting that there are

currently a staggering forty-three Starbucks stores within a three-mile radius of Cabrini-

Green.581 One of the unashamedly (non)-distinguishing features of a place like

Starbucks is, of course, that it remains the same despite its spatial location. An

internationally notorious catalyst of gentrification, the omnipresence of Stabucks

represents the broader corporate take-over in Chicago in the form of the homogenous,

privatized mixed-income communities springing up around the city. In contrast to

Starbucks, the New City YMCA, the local Laundromat, barbershop, and candy store

were one of a kind, specific features on the landscape of the city‘s Near North Side.

Roth allegorizes the unique nature of these community landmarks in Cabrini

Green Forest. Nearly impossible to photograph or duplicate, Roth‘s faint ribbon-like

graphite drawings seem purposefully designed to eschew reproduction as if to

emphasize Cabrini-Green‘s site-specific irreducibility. Describing the ―frozen‖ nature

of his works in an interview with Otto Berchem, Roth states, ―The thin lines have cost

some photographers nerves. They are indeed very difficult to document. And I like the

fact that a wall drawing also disappears in reality after a show.‖582 Like a slow motion

version of a camera flash, the viewer follows each silvery graphite line as they morph

together to form a dense atmosphere, like a gas streaming out; after a time – the

580
Relph, 143.
581
―Starbucks Takeover,‖ The Chicago Sun Times, 8 October 2008: 20
582
Berchem, 2008.
 291

duration of the exhibition -- the images dissolve, encased forever within a thin crust of

white gloss wall paint. When Roth does attempt to carry ideas forth from one

exhibition space to the next, he eschews direct replication in favor of subtle

adaptations. As the writer and critic Mai-Thu Perret has observed, ―Images, objects

and locations that appear in one project often resurface later in a different work, like

extra clues, buried for the attentive viewer, to the structure of the new tale; and

individual projects, although they carry the came title, are often transformed and

adapted from one venue to the next.‖583 The oneness inherent in Roth‘s works reflects

the distinctiveness of community landmarks in Cabrini-Green. Existing in a unique

place, local landmarks in Cabrini-Green survive as the last remaining physical vestiges

of a community slowly being swallowed up by vacuous, standardized, mass-produced

chain stores.584

Some tenants have not reacted passively to recent changes, however; in fact,

many residents have made concerted efforts to act as caretakers of these places, to

prevent the erasure of community landmarks and to maintain and renew place identity

within public housing. As I described at the end of the previous chapter, many

displaced residents remain connected to their old neighborhoods by returning to attend

583
For example, ―701XXKA,‖ was first conceived for the Inside White Cube program at the White
Cube Gallery in London and shown in January 2003, then later reinstalled in two different places, at the
Grazer Kunstverein and the Unlimited Section of the Basel art fair. For each venue, the artist adapted
the installation, removing some elements and adding and transforming others. Mai-Thu Perret, ―Exhibit
A,‖ Black Dust Passages, Museum der bildenden Kunste Leipzig, Germany: E.A. Seemann Verlag,
Leipzig, 2003: 89.
584
For these residents, their community landmarks are the last remaining physical markers of their civic
identity as not only residents of public housing, but also American citizens. For years, residents of
subsidized housing residents were denied this status due to America‘s possessive ideological investment
in individualist home ownership as a marker of national belonging. The existence of the last remaining
traces of community independence symbolizes a social citizenship, belonging, and inclusion arguably
radically at odds with widespread American self-conceptions.
 292

public housing building reunions, commonly referred to as ―Old School‖ parties, while

children who have established trusting relationships with teachers and friends

commute for miles to attend schools around their old projects. Ramsey Lewis

maintains his association with his childhood home, Cabrini-Green, by regularly

working with public housing-based youth organizations and by returning to his old

elementary school, Edward Jenner, to perform holiday concerts for the students and

staff.585 Faced with the demolition of his home, lifelong Cabrini-Green resident and

Heneghan Wrecking Co. demolition worker, Kenneth Hammond, maintains his

attachment to his childhood home by preserving pieces of its architecture and offering

them to others for comfort (Figure 4.20).586 The activities of these former residents

exemplify Fullilove‘s assertion that the relationship between home and dweller is like

that of ―Siamese twins, conjoined to the locations of our daily life such that our

emotions flow through places, just as blood flows through two interdependent

people.‖587 This fusion of subject (Hammond) and object (home) illustrates the all-

enveloping nature of insider platial experience. Imbued with sounds, smells, noises,

and feelings of moments shared, Hammond‘s life is recorded on the walls of his

former home, insinuated into the space by life. In the chapter ―Intimate Experience of

Place,‖ Tuan argues that this profound relationship with place is a multi-sensorial

experience, which involves ―our whole being, all our senses.‖588 Hammond‘s

collection of architectural remnants is, therefore, a physical embodiment of human

585
Whitaker, 11.
586
Kelly Kimbriell, ―Rising Values,‖ Chicago Reporter, July 2005,
<http://www.chicagoreporter.com/index.php/c/Cover_Stories/d/Rising_Values> (accessed 9 February
2011).
587
Fullilove, 10.
588
Tuan, 146.
 293

attachment to place - a synthesis of subject and object to such a degree that they each

constitute a meaningful part of the other.

Roth‘s physical archive of remnants—the maps, drawings, and

photographs—signal an absence caused by the disorientation of root shock but,

moreover, the desire of some residents to attach themselves to the material dimensions

of their past. Roth employs the gallery‘s white-washed walls as a planar frame upon

which to stage this sensorial mental tussle. Dangling precariously like the central pulse

of a metronome, the walls proffer woven roots and twigs as if inviting the viewer to

take hold of physical elements of this place. Moreover, rendered as permeable

membranes, the walls become a corporeal frame within which to reflect the resilience

and current determination of a community striving to ‖hang on.‖ As if drawn by a

powerful centrifugal force, the jutting limbs of tree branches pierce the porous crust of

the wall like fingernails pushed deep into pale flesh. The branches come to symbolize

the platial rooting of public housing, and, in turn, bear witness to the efforts of

residents who utilize the position of their home or business as a territorial tactic in

defiance of the Plan. Indeed, while most independent stores in Cabrini-Green have

succumbed to the influx of homogenous chain stores like Starbucks and Blockbuster,

some, like the owners of the Green Food Mart, are determined to remain rooted and

preserve their existence against the threat of an external force.

Squeezed between the new mixed-income development, Old Town

Village, the Green Food Mart has stood as an anchor of attachment to the public

housing residents in Cabrini-Green since the mid 1970s (Figure 4.21). Frustrated

requests from the private developer MCL Companies to the owners to sell their
 294

building and vacate the block have met with a steadfast refusal. ''It is an eyesore,''

says MCL President Daniel Mclean, ―The fact we‘ve had to build around it is

outrageous.‖589 The tiny grocery store is physically unattractive: gunmetal slabs

guard its entrance like prison gates on a penitentiary, while spray-painted gang

signs, RIP tributes and angry slurs cover its exterior walls. However, standing alone

like a lighthouse in a sea of glossy red brick townhouses on one side and bulldozers

and construction crews on the other, the store, like the walls in Roth‘s installation,

is invested with emblematic significance. Symbolically nested at an intersection

between the past and future, the gray unassuming façade of the building is a

stubborn remnant of neighborhood life. Just as the interstitial spaces in Marshall‘s

paintings - the stoops, front yards and pathways - provide a base for political action

space, so too, the intermediary space of the Green Food Mart functions as an

incubator of social mobilization. For example, four years ago, in defiance of a

newly erected ―Old Town Village‖ sign nearby, the disgruntled owners spray-

painted ―Cabrini‖ in bright orange letters over the front façade of the store to

designate its continuing presence in the neighborhood (Figure 4.22). Recalling

Marshall‘s depiction of spatial ownership through the use of the ―W‖ flowerbed

monogram in the painting Better Homes, Better Gardens, the owners of the Green

Food Mart employ the name of their neighborhood as a territorial tactic of

resistance against the threat to their workspace. The act of marking the façade of the

store works to define public space as public - a physical setting within which to

589
―Green Food Mart,‖ Crain‟s Chicago Business, 1 March 2004.
 295

stage a public discourse about the privatization and corporate takeover of city

space.

The struggles of subsidized housing residents and business owners for the

rights to and control over the physical setting of their environment not only mediates

the satisfaction of everyday material needs for shelter and food, but also facilitates the

maintenance and defense of place-based identity. Owner, Ali Hussein, describes a

typical day in the store: ―People come back time and time again, the Mart is like the

old Cabrini apartments themselves: not as nice as the new condominiums on the

surface, but a place where residents feel at ease. In fact, they treat it like their living

room.‖ Frank Reed, a long time resident of Cabrini-Green remembers: ―Looking back,

I think I grew up in the Mart. Everybody there knew your name, your mother, father,

sister or brother. Multiple generations of the same type of people‖ (Figure 4.23). These

recollections correspond with environmental psychologist Claire Twigger-Ross‘ view

that to qualify as a place within which place-identity can be formed, it must be

―associated with a certain group of people, a certain lifestyle and social status‖ (my

emphasis).590 Hence, the Green Food Mart enables residents to feel at ease amongst

those who share their particular socio-cultural situation.591 The store‘s position as a

stable core of place-based identity production is not just a response to recent events

however, as Reed states, an attachment to this place has endured for ―multiple

generations.‖ Reed‘s recollection contributes to what Edward Casey refers to as the

590
Claire Twigger-Ross, M. Bonaiuto & G. Breakwell, ―Identity theories and environmental
psychology.‖ In Psychological theories for environmental issues, ed. Mirilia Bonnes, Terence Lee &
Marino Bonaiuto. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003: 203-233.
591
Ashild Lappegard Hauge, ―Identity and place: A critical comparison of three identity theories,‖
Architectural Science Review 50 (1), 2007: 44-52.
 296

―time density‖ of places, ―the sense that it has something lasting in it.‖ As Casey

observes, ―The time of cultural implacement (and the time experienced in that

implacement) is that which informs a place in concert with other human beings,

through one‘s bodily agency, within the embrace of a landscape.‖592 In this sense, the

―Cabrini‖ sign operates as a physical marker of this endurance. By advertising the

name of the area in fresh paint on the façade of his store, Hussein designates that, for

some, this is a place worth knowing about and identifying with, at the same time as

instilling a sense of pride linked to historical attachments to the place. This pride stems

from the fact that unlike the timeless and, therefore, ―placeless‖ cookie-cutter chain

stores and the row houses which now decorate its periphery, the Green Food Mart

carries with it the weight of previous generation‘s needs and struggles. The

preservation of the ―Cabrini‖ sign is, therefore, intimately tied to the idea of place-

based memory: residents‘ personal memories and collective memories interconnect

with those of family and neighbors to create a spirit of shared identity through shared

territory.593 This place-based sense of solidarity is, in turn, the psychological catalyst

needed to promote its preservation.594 As a storehouse of usable memory, the Green

Food Mart acts a vehicle through which some residents unite against the threat of

urban renewal.

592
Casey, 33.
593
The multiplicity of diverse attributes or the ―time density‖ of a place furnishes it with the means to
house memory. As Gaston Bachelard notes, ―if the house is a bit elaborate…our memories have refuges
that are all the more clearly delineated.‖ The Poetics of Space, Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press,
1994: 8.
594
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997: 9.
 297

The same could be said for the continuing presence of the Strangers Home

church, which stands little more than two blocks from the Green Food Mart and is also

threatened with demolition. Located at the intersection of Division Street and Clybourn

Avenue – one of Chicago‘s grid-busting diagonal arteries – the over one-hundred-year-

old church occupies a place in history as unique as its geographic location (Figures

4.24 & 4.25). The graying, weathered mural, which decorates its exterior walls,

symbolizes this rich past. Entitled All of Mankind: Unity of the Human Race (1972),

the mural by acclaimed Chicago muralist William Walker, comprises a textual

pantheon of dead political martyrs and heroes lost to atrocities and violence. Framed

by circling doves, the names of Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, John F.

Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and the victims of the My Lai massacre and Kent State

shootings appear under the heading ―We Mourn Our Loss.‖595 Already famous for his

work on other Chicago–based murals such as the South Side‘s The Wall of Respect

(1967) and Cabrini-Green‘s Peace and Salvation (1970), in 1972 William Walker was

invited to represent the ―love and unity‖ of the Cabrini-Green community on the side

of one‘s of its most important community symbols, the church.596 The fact that the

mural has remained untarnished by graffiti for thirty-five years is testament to the high

esteem with which the surrounding community regards it. While the building on which

the Wall of Respect was painted was damaged and destroyed in 1971, the All of
595
The mural is similar to paintings from Marshall‘s Souvenirs series (1997–98). In each painting of the
series, an African-American figure with wings is accompanied by lists of significant African Americans
of the past and, in two cases, by a banner emblazoned ―We mourn our loss‖ and including portraits of
John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.
596
Walker‘s Wall of Respect (1967), which depicted African-American heroes, spurred an outdoor
community mural movement beginning in Bronzeville, Chicago. The movement spread to the
neighborhoods of Pilsen, Hyde Park, Uptown, and Humbolt Park, and to cities throughout the country as
an urban public art movement. Victor A. Sorrell, (Bill) W. Walker Oral History, Washington DC:
Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, 1991.
 298

Mankind mural, on the other hand, has survived the churches change of ownership and

the shifting tides of residents and identity.597 Like the Green Food Mart‘s ―Cabrini‖

sign, the mural is a textual marker of place, connecting the remaining local community

to its vanishing past.

This mediation between past, present, and future extends to Walker‘s

compositional choices. The lack of foreshortening in the mural removes depth and

therefore temporality, thereby situating the past - or more specifically, residents‘

memories of the past - firmly in the present (Figure 4.26).598 This is a formal

manifestation of what Marianne Hirsch has termed ―postmemory,‖ described as the

relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic experiences that

preceded their births but nevertheless constitute memories in their own right.599

Moreover, Walker illustrates what Hirsch terms ―written-in‖ memory: ―The

writing…is ―written in memory‖—both written in memory, out of one‘s memory, and

written-in memory, a memory inscribed on the skin of the image itself, as a tattoo

might be.‖600 Like the owners of the Green Food Mart who ―tattoo‖ the name of the

neighborhood as a territorial tactic of resistance against the threat to their work space,

so the names ―written-into‖ the mural relate to the persistence of the church as a locus

of collective social memory. Presented on the same flattened plane, the names of

greats from the civil rights era are spatially entombed, like an artifacts of time, in the
597
According to report by the Getty Conservation Institute, which works to advance conservation efforts
through scientific research, Chicago has no remaining community walls from the 1960s. The Institute
also reported that almost all of the thousands of community murals from the 1970s are gone, the All of
Mankind mural being one of the few exceptions.
598
Jon Pounds, Interview with author. Chicago Public Art Group, Chicago, Il. 24 May 2008.
599
Marianne Hirsch, ―Marked By Memory: Feminist Reflections on Trauma and Transmission.‖ In
Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community, ed. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Daniel Tougaw. 71-
92. University of Illinois Press, 2002: 86.
600
Hirsch, 86
 299

here and now, as if to symbolize not only the tumultuous times in which the mural was

painted, but also to inspire ongoing political mobilization.

Much like the narrative temporality embodied in the mural, Roth encases the

past in the present by rendering black and white photographs, maps, and hand-written

notes on the flattened plane of the gallery walls like the framed pages of a complex

storybook. Roth superimposes time onto place, thus suggesting the ways in which

memory can be built into the fabric of a place. Like the historical depths embodied in

the trans-generational musical notes in Marshall‘s Past Times painting, so the archival

remnants in Roth‘s exhibition, which transect and overlap with sinewy wall drawings,

suggest that memories are like markers on an infinite timeline where no point is any

more important than the next. In this sense, Hammond‘s piece of concrete, the Cabrini

sign, and the All of Mankind mural are instrumental material parts of this framework

that, while unimportant as singular archival artifacts, are vital when considered as part

of larger historical connections to place. For what binds together the memories of

public housing residents is not the fact that they are contiguous in time but, rather, that

they are synchronized with a whole ensemble of physical and social structures

common to the community.601 When residents recount how ―we‖ worked together to

overcome past obstacles and ―we‖ achieved unexpected successes, they reinforce this

sense of historical connectivity. This community collectivism corresponds with

geographer David Harvey‘s assertion that, ―Community activism can be a very

important moment in more general mobilization. In this context we have to think about

601
Paul Connerton, ―Social Memory,‖ How Societies Remember, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1989: 36.
 300

the construction of community not as an end in itself but as a moment in a process.‖602

For instance, in its black and white state, Roth‘s photograph of a Chicago railroad

tunnel indicates Cabrini-Green‘s relationship to a wider historical story (Figure 4.27).

While the names on the mural call to mind a sequential trail of memories, so the

photograph invites the viewer to imagine the volumetric formation of the history

surrounding the housing project. As an analytic device, the speed connoted by the

motion of train as well as its position on a track, or path, suggests that this story is

ongoing process, not a onetime event.

In sharing this story within the public forum of the Donald Young gallery,

Roth‘s exhibition serves to highlight a particular historical moment on this path, a

turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense

of memory being torn. Laid out on pedestals and hung at eye view as opposed to the

gallery standard sixty-two inches, the exhibitions photographs, sculptures, maps, and

drawings demand close analysis. Yet, the maps are un-coded, the photographs dateless,

and the drawings so faint they are barely visible. For Roth, delicate contour lines,

traces of habitation and hints suffice; the rest he leaves for the viewer to fill in with

their own imagination. Digging through the relics, the artist suggests paths through

which the enlightenment can be found if you choose to look hard enough. Roth

corroborates this reading of the work, stating:

There is no such a thing as the story for me, in terms of one linear story. I‘m
interested in places that carry cryptical information leading to a world behind
things. I use these places to create multi-directional, open-ended stories, using

602
David Harvey, ―Contested Cities: Social Process and Spatial Form.‖ In from Transforming Cities:
Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions. ed. Nick Jewson and Susanne MacGregor, 17-25.
London: Routledge, 1997: 24.
 301

different media…There are several trap doors you can fall through and this
feels for me like an extension of space.603

In this sense, Roth‘s Cabrini Green Forest, like Walker‘s mural and Marshall‘s

Garden Project series, makes an urgent call for the social topography of Chicago‘s

public housing and its history to be deciphered and recognized as a valuable cultural

asset.

This conversational theme extends to the experience of ―vicarious insideness‖

offered by Roth‘s centerpiece, Portal (Figure 4.2). Paradoxically, the aerial perspective

at which the viewer approaches the well seems to deny any potential dialogism. The

birds-eye-view is, of course, metaphorically associated with a surveying gaze and a

comprehensive yet reductive overview of place. In Roth‘s installation, however, the

bird‘s-eye-view is a locus of questions rather than definitive answers. Through its

reflection, the Portal collapses and fuses the distance between the body of the

spectator and the water‘s surface, thus perspective loses its stance and we view and

enter Roth‘s underground world at the same time. To cite Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri‘s discussion of the relationship between order and space in the contemporary

world, ―there is no longer an outside‖ and ―power is, simultaneously, everywhere and

nowhere.‖604 Roth‘s dissolution of space symbolizes the breaking down of distance

and objectivity, and represents the possibility of subverting the conventional paradigm

of Chicago‘s public housing space. In other words, the outsider deconstructs the social

and ideological differences separating public housing residents from the rest of the

city, in turn creating an ―extended‖ space of enlightenment and realization. As

603
Otto Berchem, ―Underground Connections,‖ Metropolis Magazine, No.3 June/July, 2008.
604
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2001.
 302

freelance art and architecture writer Charissa Terranova identifies in her analysis of

Roth‘s work, ―Rather than teaching us about morals in the present state of reality,

Roth's work seeks to reveal something about the state of reality itself. Reality is

extendable, porous and always in flux.‖605 Terranova continues, ―(Roth‘s) work offers

a mirror onto the reality of our own--a global environment in which there are no moral

absolutes, an international condition in which there can be no one group of individuals

harbouring an inborn moral grammar.‖606 Falling through Roth‘s ―trapdoors‖ and

finding themselves in this extended space of socio-spatial illumination, the viewer

transcends ―outsider‖ status and acquire what Relph terms ―empathetic insideness‖ - a

chance to meet the moment of feeling and seeing that residents like Cabrini-Green

resident Maurice T. Edwards know firsthand.607

Introduced at the start of this chapter, Edwards impassioned rally cry for the

preservation of his home highlights the need for open portals of communication

between project residents and CHA officials and property developers. Concluding his

letter to The Chicago Reporter, Edwards states:

I have a dream that one day the low-income housing projects will be
heard…I‘ve heard the mayor say that he wants all kids‘ dreams to come true.
Will he help mine come true, or was that just a lie that politicians tell to get the
votes that they need?608

By asking the viewer to acknowledge and respect Chicago‘s public housing as a site of

deeply rooted social interconnections – to recall Edwards: ―it is a part of us‖ -- Roth

generates a dialogue absent throughout the project‘s history and, in particular, during

605
Charissa N. Terranova, ―Fragments of Fantasy,‖ Dallas Observer, 3 February 2005,
<http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2005-02-03/culture/arts.html> (accessed 10 December 2010).
606
Terranova, 2005.
607
Relph, 1976: 54-55.
608
Edwards, March 2006.
 303

the planning stages of the current urban renewal initiative. For example, Mayor

Richard Daley proclaimed that Cabrini residents viewpoints will be heard throughout

the entire decision making process only after announcing the Plan. As lawyer Richard

Wheelock, of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago states, ―The best of Cabrini-

Green has been totally ignored. The community that exists there has not been involved

or taken into account in the planning process.‖609 Even recently, the CHA has been

criticized for its closed planning meetings and disregard for the residents‘ input. Given

its history of corruption and mismanagement, the CHA needs to have an open and

honest dialogue with residents and the public. Independent monitor Thomas P.

Sullivan emphasizes this point, writing in his 2003 report on the relocation process that

―glowing but inaccurate and misleading descriptions…inevitably call into question the

reliability of the CHA as to all its other claims of success for the Plan of

Transformation.‖610 Deverra Beverly, life-long resident of ALBA Homes on the Near

West Side confirms this feeling of exclusion: ―Transformation can work as long as

they get input from those that live here. I have a problem when outsiders don‘t make

sure those who live here have input. To them it‘s a job. With us, it‘s more than a

job.‖611 In other words, residents should be actively involved in the design and

management of the Plan instead of having the initiative forced upon them.

In response to these criticisms, in 2006, the Metropolitan Planning Council and

the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation held an open forum to discuss

609
Blair Kamin, ―Who Controls the Future of Cabrini-Green?,‖ Architectural Record, Vol. 185, Issue 9,
1997: 65.
610
Thomas Sullivan, Independent Monitor‟s Report No.5, Law Firm of Jenner & Block, 8 January 2003,
<http://www.viewfromtheground.com/special/sullivan/monitoringreport5.html> (accessed 6 September
2010).
611
James G. Muhammad, ―Housing Museum Planned,‖ Metro News, March 20-March 26, 2008: 8.
 304

strategies for successful community building and resident engagement in mixed-

income communities.612 One of the forum‘s featured panelists, Stanley Lowe, vice

president of community revitalization for the National Trust for Historic Preservation

and former executive director of the Housing Authority of Pittsburgh, highlighted his

involvement in the transformation of Pittsburgh‘s Manchester neighborhood into a

vibrant, mixed-income community. According to Lowe, public housing residents were

engaged in most aspects of rebuilding the community; not necessarily in the bricks and

mortar plan for housing, but in everything else: schools, parks, social services, and

other activities in the broader community. According to fellow panelist Sandra Moore,

president of Urban Strategies, successful resident engagement begins by asking an

important question, ―What do you want?‖613 The answers to this question help to drive

the management strategies and processes for successful community building and

engagement. Perhaps the most crucial component of a successful mixed-income

community, according to Lowe, is the need to preserve a sense of the original

neighborhood, through architectural consistency, and the conservation of local naming

and community landmarks. Moore also highlighted the importance of developing a

―mechanism for listening‖ across income levels, such as Manchester‘s community

newsletter and ―sensitivity‖ meetings used to generate trust and bridges of

communication between housing authority‘s and residents. As an analogous

612
Laura Broussard, ―Strategies for Successful Resident Involvement in Mixed-Income Communities,‖
Metropolitan Planning Council, 22 September 2006.
613
Urban Strategies works with Public Housing Authorities across the country to creatively design and
implement services that address specialized needs of individuals and families and link them to a variety
of relocation services. They also design comprehensive plans in collaboration with the community so
that the plan reflects a community‘s values and vision for future strength.
 305

―mechanism for listening,‖ Roth‘s Portal highlights this need for open portals of

communication between divergent urban social groups.

Cabrini Green Forest offers no universal or definitive answer to these

problems as such, rather through a series of pathways of contemplation it provides an

alternative way of seeing and appreciating the deep-rooted social interconnections that

exist and have always existed within Chicago‘s public housing community. The Portal

proposes a reality ―through the looking glass‖ inviting dialogical intervention and

awareness of one‘s own positionality within the process of urban renewal. In this

sense, Roth‘s topographic fictions offer public housing resident and vicarious gallery

go-er alike the chance of a new beginning. To borrow curator Daniel Birnbaum‘s

summary of the Zones of Dissolution series, ―The real horror would be if there we no

labyrinths behind the closed doors. Thus the phantasmagoria really represents an

escape route.‖614

In depicting Chicago‘s public housing as a multi-layered, pathway-laden

landscape, Marshall‘s Garden Project series and Roth‘s Cabrini Green Forest invite

non-public housing residents to re-imagine Chicago‘s housing projects as sites of

spatial contiguity and place-based identity, and to recognize its endangered social

institutions as places worthy of preservation. By taking us on a transcendental journey

from outside to inside, Marshall and Roth challenge the myth oft propagated on mixed-

income accommodation billboard advertisements that ―A COMMUNITY IS COMING

SOON.‖ Rather, Marshall and Roth establish that: A COMMUNITY IS HERE. In fact,

as Edwards states, it is a part of us.

614
Daniel Birnbaum, ―Notes from the Underground,‖ Frieze, Issue 72, February 2003: 80-81.
 306

CONCLUSION

If places are indeed a fundamental aspect of one‘s experience in the world, if

they are sources of security and identity for individuals and for groups of
people, then it is important that the means of experiencing, creating and
maintaining significant places are not lost.615

In these few simple words, Edward Relph encapsulates the fundamental

philosophy underlying my dissertation: Chicago‘s public housing is a place worthy of

preservation. Yet, when applied to high-rise developments like Cabrini-Green, Relph‘s

quote also stands at odds with all we have come to learn about this environment from

popular visual culture. I began this dissertation by considering the early formation of

negative visual representations of Chicago‘s subsidized housing. The black and white

Look magazine photograph of a young African-American public housing resident

staring vacantly through the bars of the high-rise Robert Taylor Homes in 1965 set the

tone for the remainder of my analysis of dominant late twentieth-century visual and

cultural imaginings of this place (Figure 0.7). Fifty years of visual and cultural

denigration--conjured up in one-note, distorted images of crime, joblessness, teenage

pregnancy and rampant drug use—established clear racial and social boundaries,

shaping subsidized communities like Robert Taylor into the proverbial anti-place, a

territorialized space to be controlled and, yet, avoided at all costs. The ideological

dominance of this ‗black hole‘ spatialization in the American psyche can be summed up

in the fact that unlike other individuals, public housing residents do not live ―at‖ an

address, but rather ―in‖ the projects. Between 1970 and 2010, Chicago‘s public housing

615
Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 1976: 9.
 307

residents gradually became, in the words of a Black Enterprise magazine article from

1978, ―tarred with the exceptional image‖ of isolation, despair and social pathology.616

Through an analysis of destructive televisual, filmic, and mainstream media

journalism narratives, I have addressed the ways in which the projects have been

mythologized in late twentieth-century popular visual culture as sites that deserve to be

demolished. By reducing the complex political issues of economic stagnation and cuts in

social spending into chaotic, ruinous narrative messages, visual culture (inadvertently or

not) supported and continues to support the city‘s recent residential gentrification and

justifies the CHA‘s repeatedly fumbled efforts to involve subsidized housing residents

in a meaningful neighborhood planning process. Provocative headlines, dramatic

photographs and sensational imagery frame Chicago‘s public housing residents as non-

citizens, living in a place that isn‘t a community, thereby enabling CHA and city

officials to proceed with the wholesale demolition of public housing and new, upscale

privatized residential development. By the time the CHA announced the Plan in 2000,

housing authority representatives considered the city‘s public housing to be of such little

lasting public value that they proudly told reporters of their intentions to ―erase‖ all

trace of the city‘s subsidized housing from the metropolitan matrix. In an interview with

The Wall Street Journal in 2002, CHA executive director Terry Peterson described the

authority‘s overarching aim for the Plan: ―You won‘t be able to tell where public

616
Ernest Holsendolph, Bob Maynard, and Grayson Mitchell, ―Public Housing: Promises, Promises,‖
Black Enterprise, September 1978: 22.
 308

housing exists. That‘s the goal.‖617 It has been the aim of the foregoing analysis to

demonstrate the inaccuracy and wrong handedness of this approach. Indeed, Peterson

failed to account for the existence of those who consider Chicago‘s public housing to be

what Relph defines as a ―significant place.‖

Supported by field observations and on-site interviews conducted in Chicago‘s

public housing communities between 2006 and 2009, as well as research in the recently

opened archives of the Chicago Housing Authority, I investigated individuals and

groups spatial attachment. While the city of Chicago has attempted at several points to

leave residents out of the planning process, through the efforts of activists and with the

aid of outside lawyers, some residents have been able to fight for their own housing, to

regain their seat at the table and participate in deciding their own housing future. This

resistance has taken the form of activities including Beauty Turner‘s lifelong activism

and Ghetto Bus Tour initiative and the investigative journalism of Chicago‘s only public

housing newspaper, Residents Journal. These examples of ―using space‖ highlight a

kind of spatialized agency and the need to move beyond the mainstream, stereotypical

political and cultural image of public housing as a socially isolated environment filled

with a passive, dysfunctional population. Utilizing the conceptual tools enabled by

contemporary spatial theory, I then explored visual and cultural productions that

reflected more accurately some residents‘ lived spatial practices. The television show

Good Times, the comic book series Give Me Liberty, the horror film Candyman and the

artwork of Kerry James Marshall and Daniel Roth, resist hegemonic interpretations of

617
Jonathan Eig, ―Chicago Hope: In Doomed Project, An Unlikely Twist: Community Thrives; As City
Razes High-Rises, Those Left Behind See Their Lives Improve; Jeremiah walks to Boxing,‖ The Wall
Street Journal, New York, N.Y.: October 3, 2003: A1.
 309

public housing tenants by illustrating individuals‘ and groups‘ creation, possession,

enhancement or simply ―use‖ of space in the form of everyday patterns of movement

and via grassroots conflicts over the management of their living environments. The

connection of the spatial to the social, or more properly, the reconceptualization of the

social as also intrinsically spatial, has been perhaps the most important element in

releasing Chicago‘s public housing from the realm of the dead.

The overarching theme of revitalization seems particularly apt as I write this

conclusion on the very day--December 9th 2010, to be exact--the final tenant of

Cabrini-Green moves out of residence. This morning, a CBS Chicago news article

reported the case of Annie Ricks, a state-employed nanny and mother of five, forced to

move from the fifteen-story high-rise at 1230 North Burling Street. Surrounded by

camera crews from national and international new media, Ricks jostled her way across

the icy abandoned lot towards the waiting Big ‗O‘ Movers truck when one journalist

asked jokingly, ―Will you miss it here?‖ Looking the reporter dead in the eye, Ricks

snapped, ―Of course, I‘m going to miss it!‖ before slamming the vehicle door in the

journalists face.618 The news report finishes with an oddly touching sight and sobering

reminder of the emotion underlying Ricks‘ retort. Panning across the deserted asphalt

playground, the CBS News camera settled on a long distance view of a partly

demolished neighboring Cabrini-Green building (Figure 5.1). Five decades worth of

colorful interior D-I-Y paint jobs lace the building‘s exterior like a patchwork quilt,

618
―Cabrini Green‘s Last Tenant: ―I Will Miss It,‖‖ NBC Chicago, 9 December 2010,
<http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local-
beat/Cabrini_Green_s_Last_Tenant___I_Will_Miss_It__Chicago-111630149.html> (accessed on 30
December 2010).
 310

reminding viewers and the creative lives that existed above and behind the grey

cement exteriors and caged-in balconies and in spite of dominant visual ideologies. A

separate news article from the day concluded with a quote from former resident, Keith

Magee, who located the source of Ricks‘ emotion by describing Cabrini-Green as an

―icon of the era.‖ ―This building will be torn down, so there will not be the structure

here but will be the memory Miss Ricks will have. That story and how we share it is

important to America," Magee said.619 As a former resident and now the executive

director of the city‘s new National Public Housing Museum, Magee is correctly placed

to recognize that, aside from its undoubted crime and pervasive poverty, Cabrini-

Green was also a home to thousands of people. As a wrecking ball implodes the final

remnants of the city‘s public housing, it becomes more important than ever to heed

Relph‘s advice and that ―the means of experiencing, creating and maintaining

significant places are not lost.‖620 Therefore, by way of a conclusion, I would like to

consider Chicago‘s National Public Housing Museum, a place that did not exist at the

inception of this dissertation in 2006, but which stands today as a tribute to the lives of

those who once lived in the city‘s subsidized housing.

National Public Housing Museum

In 1998, life-long resident and president of the local council for ALBA Homes

(Abbott-Brooks-Loomis-Addams), Deverra Beverly and fellow long-term resident and

friend, Beatrice Jones, conceived the idea of a National Public Housing Museum.

619
Emily Schmall, ―Last Resident of Chicago‘s Cabrini-Green Faces Uncertain Future,‖ AOL News, 9
December 2010, <http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/09/last-resident-of-chicagos-cabrini-green-faces-
uncertain-future/> (accessed on 12/30/10).
620
Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 1976: 6.
 311

Beverly explains, ―I‘ve been in public housing all my life, and I saw all the buildings

coming down, getting demolished. I knew someday the children were never going to

know that the public housing community was a community.‖621 Beverly approached

the CHA‘s Central Advisory Council, and, in 2006 CHA commissioners agreed to give

Beverly and her fifteen-strong advisory team--comprised of a selection of business

leaders, philanthropic organizations and present and former residents--conditional

support. The CHA approved plans to renovate a vacant, seventy-year-old, three-story

brick housing unit, Jane Addams Homes—a fragment of the once sizable ALBA

Homes—and turn it into a facility to document, explore, and interpret the history of the

city‘s public housing. Describing the purpose of the museum, the former resident

explains, ―This museum will be the only one of its kind, and we‘re hoping that it will

open up a lot of understanding about public housing. We want to get rid of the

stereotypes,‖ 622 and ―keep the good memories alive.‖623 The CHA‘s donation is

contingent upon the non-profit raising the seventeen-million dollars it will cost to build

the museum by the anticipated opening date of 2012, but the blessing from the CHA‘s

board of commissioners has made it easier to attract funding from both federal

government and private philanthropists. Donors so far include the Richard H.

Driehaus, MacArthur, Alphawood, Joyce, and Polk Brothers foundations; Boeing

Company; Chicago Community Trust; LaSalle Bank; Woods Fund; Ariel Investments;

the Illinois Humanities Council; the National Equity Fund; and the National
621
Elizabeth McNamara, ―The National Public Housing Museum Takes Shape,‖ National Trust for
Historic Preservation, 3 May 2010, <http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/story-of-the-
week/2010/an-american-story.html> (accessed on 3 January 2011).
622
James G. Muhammad, ―Housing Museum Planned,‖ Metro News, March 20-March 26, 2008: 8.
623
Sheila Elliot, ―Nation‘s first, only public housing museum coming to Taylor Street,‖ Near West
Gazette, 2008.
 312

Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The institutionalization of public housing

within a museum setting, in conjunction with this financial support, serves as a kind of

respectful acknowledgement of the history of subsidized housing and establishes a

sense of permanence at odds with the transient, dystopian denigrations usually attached

to this space.

Jane Addams Homes opened in 1938 as the first federal government housing

project in Chicago and stands today as the last remaining public housing unit on the

Near West Side, symbolizing a seventy-year history of strong social interconnections.

Beverly recalls, ―It was brand new when I came, it was a community. We had gardens,

flowerbeds and a small community center…We know there was lots of good in public

housing. Everybody and everybody‘s mother knew everybody.‖624 Former Robert

Taylor Homes resident, Credell Walls, an Illinois State Coordinator, expresses a

similar sentiment on the museum‘s website:

I lived in Robert Taylor Homes, in the 4946 S. State Street building from the
year 1976-1995. Despite the hardship and violence that has been advertised and
spread via mouth and media, I miss my community. I've always dreamed about
bringing my children by and saying to them "this is where your daddy used to
live." I still can, but the buildings are gone. All I can show them is a piece of
land. I can help them imagine what I've seen and experienced but they will
never experience it for themselves. I have written songs and raps that have been
inspired by my childhood in Robert Taylor. As an adult, when I look over the
lyrics, I am always amazed by what I was thinking about at the time I wrote
them and wished that I had journaled (sic) about my experience more.625

Of course, not all former residents retain fond memories of public housing. Some

residents including former ABLA tenant Darla Riley recalls on the museum‘s

624
Kate Grossman, ―CHA museum should tell both good, bad,‖ Chicago Sun Times, 18 August 2008.
625
―Stories and Memories,‖ National Public Housing Museum,
<http://www.publichousingmuseum.org/site/epage/52296_663.htm> (accessed on 3 January 2011).
 313

―memories‖ blog page, ―It was complete madness. There were gangs, drugs, shooting,

people kicking on your door. It was crazy.‖626 Indeed, as Chicago Tribune journalist

Blair Kamin recently acknowledged, public housing‘s history elicits a zealous

response and there are those who might deem the museum ―a gruesome joke—a

museum celebrating hellish high-rises?‖627 Yet, the avoidance of a dipped-in-aspic

nostalgia is at the heart of the museum‘s ambitions. Sunny Fischer, executive director

of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the proposed museum‘s primary backer,

explains, ―We don‘t intend to avoid the horrible stories. But with a museum and

education center, we felt we could expand people‘s perceptions of what public housing

was, is, and could be.‖628 Like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York

City, the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, and other social history

museums throughout the world, the National Public Housing Museum will create a

place for social reflection, public dialogue, and education that acknowledges both the

positive and negative aspects of subsidized housing‘s history.

In place of the abstract interpretation public housing‘s history provided by most

mass media portrayals, the museum aims to provide visitors with an understanding of

larger issues like public health and education in Chicago‘s subsidized housing from the

viewpoint of individual families. The local community will advise on and develop

exhibitions and programming thereby generating many of the museum‘s activities. In

conjunction with Chicago Public Schools, for example, the museum is developing a

626
Grossman, 18 August 2008.
627
Blair Kamin, ―National Public Housing Museum Proposal Moving Forward,‖ Chicago Tribune, 18
July 2008 <http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/2008/07/national-public.html> (accessed
3 January 2011).
628
Grossman, 18 August 2008.
 314

public housing curriculum, which will see young people trained to interview, go into

the field, learn first-hand accounts, and capture the oral histories of people in public

housing. Susanne Schnell, the director of the museum‘s planning phase hopes that the

museum says, ―We want to continue to build an archive of oral histories because we

want a lot of the exhibition content to be based on the first-voice experiences of people

who have been in public housing.‖629 Once open in 2012, resident-led tours will guide

visitors through the museum, which will incorporate an interpretive study center,

exhibition space, lecture theater and a library. Drawing on the power of place and

memory, the museum will illuminate the experience of life in subsidized housing by

recreating period living spaces of apartments during eight consecutive decades (1938–

2002). Original artifacts, CHA documents, music and artwork of the periods donated

by former residents, as well as interactive and multimedia displays such as an oral-

history recording booth, will detail the lives of families who lived in the Taylor Street

building. According to the Chi-Town Daily News, in order to counter racial

stereotypes, the earliest rooms will have furnishings typical of a working-class Italian-

American family – an acknowledgement of the project‘s first immigrant residents and

the neighborhood‘s Italian culture.630 ―The one thing that people need to understand is

that public housing is not an African-American experience,‖ explains Magee, ―It‘s an

629
Kingsley Hammett, ―The History of Public Housing,‖ Designer/Builder, September/October 2008:
19.
630
Adrian G. Uribarri, ―Chicago Museum to Meld Public Housing‘s Past and Present,‖ Chi-Town Daily
News, June 15, 2009,
<http://www.chitowndailynews.org/Chicago_news/Chicago_museum_to_meld_public_housings_past_a
nd_present,28435> (accessed on 3 January 2011).
 315

American experience.‖631 The museum will provide a space for those unfamiliar with

life in public housing to question their formerly unexamined beliefs about this place.

While the museum developers finish the building‘s interior renovation work

before the 2012 deadline, the museum has exhibited temporary shows around the city

in places such as The Chicago Tourism Center Gallery. Between October 2010 and

April 2011, for example, the History Coming Home exhibition--sponsored by The

Chicago Community Trust, The Reva and David Logan Foundation, and The Boeing

Company--revealed public policies, oral histories, and artifacts from public housing in

cities from Chicago to Boston and New Orleans to Sacramento. The core of this

exhibition consisted of a 1950s-style public housing apartment that visitors could walk

through (Figure 5.2). Inside the 20 ft X 20 ft installation, a living room, kitchen, and

bedroom filled with artifacts from public housing residents and a video captured

various aspects of the public housing experience. Objects on display include a trumpet

and Boy Scout paraphernalia from former Congressman Louis Stokes, a desk donated

by Sunny Fischer, and a coffee pot, dishes and metal roller skates from PJ Fitzgerald,

who once lived in the Jane Addams Homes. Photographs of public housing luminaries

including Chicago‘s restaurateur Dick Portillo and pianist Reginald Robinson, and

nationally like Philadelphia‘s Bill Cosby, Brooklyn‘s rapper Jay-Z and Georgia‘s

President Jimmy Carter line the walls of the gallery. In acknowledgement of the less

celebratory aspects of public housing‘s history, the exhibit also includes framed

newspaper articles reporting drugs arrests and murders. Beneath a poster that asks,

631
Whitney Paige Green, ―National Public Housing Museum Receives Grant, Executive director,‖
Chicago Flame, 30 March 2009, <http://www.chicagoflame.com/2.9141/national-public-housing-
museum-receives-grant-executive-director-1.1294873> (accessed on 4 January 2011).
 316

―Drugs. Violence. Welfare mothers. Stolen childhoods. Flower gardens. Helpful

neighbors. Loving families. Which is the true story of public housing? Both-at

different times- and both at the same time,‖ hangs an image of Dantrell Davis, a seven-

year-old boy killed by gang crossfire in Cabrini-Green in 1993 while walking to

school. By examining the lessons of public housing--its success and its failures--the

museum‘s exhibitions and public forums will make important connections between

contemporary and future urban challenges.

The desire to spark a civic dialogue about contemporary approaches to

affordable housing and public policies that influence poor and working class citizens is

perhaps the primary force driving the creation of the National Public Housing

Museum. Not only will the museum seek to maintain and honor the memories of

people's experiences with public housing in Chicago, but it will also be a place where

we can learn the history and use it to enrich our current understanding of subsidized

housing. As Katharine L. Bensen, secretary of the museum's board of directors, says of

the museum, ―It's forward-looking because we also have a 'think tank' whose

participants are academics from the leading universities in Chicago, researching issues

of housing, race and poverty, and talking about public housing in the 21st century."632

The museum will house The International Center for the Study of Housing and

Society, a global consortium of researchers, practitioners, and public policymakers that

will convene workshops, call for papers, and publish a journal. According to an article

in Designer/Builder magazine, ―Several distinguished scholars have signed on and

declared there is a gap to be filled in study and dialog on innovative policies and best

632
Green, 31 March 2008.
 317

practices in government-sponsored housing.‖633 One of the first events on the center‘s

program includes a meeting on January 11th 2011 during which all of Chicago‘s 2011

mayoral candidates will be asked to participate in a ―Conversation on Public Housing

in Chicago.‖ The panel, including public housing residents, academics and members of

the media will pose important questions to each candidate about the Plan with the

needs of the residents and communities they serve. Overall, the study center will focus

on making important linkages between the social, political, and economic forces that

shaped and continue to have an effect on public housing, both in Chicago and

nationally, including the Plan, affordable housing, sustainable design and architecture.

The museum‘s overarching concern to address both the past as well as the

future of America‘s subsidized housing extends to its exterior design. Architect Peter

Landon of Landon Bone Baker Architects will attempt to lend the existing structure a

modernist, urban appearance without diminishing its historic significance. He will do

so by cladding the front exterior of the building in a metal-mesh screen that will wrap

around the street corner but intentionally stop short of covering the entire Taylor Street

façade (Figure 5.3). The see-through layering will reveal the past even as it awards the

building with a fresh identity – in mapping the past onto the present, the seen onto the

unseen, Landon‘s design provides a dramatic backdrop for Chicago‘s public housing

history. By placing a level of transparency over this history—one unhindered by

disassociated, dystopian interpretations—the museum, much like this dissertation,

offers a new way of seeing and imagining Chicago‘s public housing in the American

visual imagination.

633
Hammett, 20.
 391

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