Our last class for this semester! We consider the history of Cabrini-Green in Chicago and the current redevelopment of the neighborhood.

1. Visual Culture
and the
American
Dream

2. agenda 12.3.15
case study: Cabrini-Green in Chicago
what is the American Dream?: definition from classic text
the visual culture of the Dream
what comes after the Dream?

3. CHICAGO
The Story of Cabrini-Green

5. The name “Little Hell” was derived from the large gasworks at Crosby and Hobbie
streets whose flames lit the skies at night. Furnaces could be heard for blocks as coal
was poured into the ovens and moistened with water from the Chicago River to create
gas that was used for heating, cooking and lighting.

6. The city's newest immigrants (at that time Italian and Irish) were housed
to this area.

7. Housing and factories are sited directly next to each other.

8. The landscape of "Little Hell."

9. The neighborhood had a reputation for danger and crime.

10. Goose Island
In 1853, William B. Ogden, a Chicago real estate developer,
built a channel to provide a more straightforward alternative
to Chicago River’s winding North Branch.
The result was an island, the only island in Chicago.
It quickly became a haven for Irish immigrants who were so
poor they couldn’t afford proper housing. This island became
part of the “Little Hell” neighborhood.

11. early Chicago map showing the Branch Canal that created Goose Island

13. Goose Island
today

14. Goose Island 2015
Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute
• awarded to Chicago 2014
• $70 million in federal funds
• $16 million from the state
• another $250 million from private industry, like
General Electric, Rolls-Royce, Procter & Gamble,
Siemens, Lockheed Martin and Dow Chemical Co.
• managed by UI Labs (Universities and
Industries)—a subsidiary of U of I

15. Goose Island today
Goose Island today

16. map showing the location of Goose Island

17. Near North
During World War II, the Chicago Housing Authority razed
the "Little Hell" neighborhood and built a low-rise apartment
project for war workers.
They called it the Frances Cabrini Homes after the first
American canonized by the Catholic Church.

18. Timeline: Early Years
1929 - Harvey Zorbaugh writes "The Gold Coast and
the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago's Near
North Side," contrasting wealthy Gold Coast, with
poor Little Sicily (“Little Hell”)
1942 - Frances Cabrini Homes (two-story
rowhouses), with 586 units in 54 buildings,
completed. Initial regulations stipulate 75% white and
25% black residents. Holsman, Burmeister, et al,
architects.

19. Cabrini Homes, 1942
housing for war workers

20. Cabrini Homes, today

21. Cabrini Homes, refurbished on the left side of the photo, vacant on the right side

22. Alamer Lee Vassar
“I came to Chicago in 1942. I moved into a building at 1230 North
Larrabee on October 2nd of that year. There wasn’t no projects
here then and my husband was in the service. That’s what brought
us up here from Mississippi. I got a job and went to work. Back
then they would beg you when you walked out the door, sayin,’Do
you wanna work for me, do you wanna work for me?’
“It was beautiful down here. They used to have
this festival and parade in the summer, and they
had these lights that run from Chicago [Avenue]
all the way up to North, and we used to sit out
in front of 1230 and look at the people drivin’ by
and parkin’ their cars—whites and colored
people at that time—and everything was lovely,
I mean, beautiful. And the kids they’d go around

23. Paulette Simpson
“My mother was the second person to move into 502. The
elevator excited me and everything was perfect. If you had a
problem with anything in your house, CHA was out there
within 24 hours or less. They were on top of everything then.
I went to Jenner school. I played out in the playground. I
went to Lower North Center to take dancing classes, and I
used to go to Stanton Park for swimming.”

24. Cabrini Homes, after WWII
1958 - Cabrini Homes Extension (red brick mid- and high-rises),
with 1,925 units in 15 buildings, is completed. A. Epstein &
Sons, architects.
1962 - Green Homes (1,096 units, north of Division Street) is
completed. Pace Associates, architects.

27. Wanda Hopkins
“We moved here September 1, 1960. We were the second ones in
the building at 534 W. Division.
When I moved in it was just so beautiful, the buildings wasn’t
grayish the way it is now but really the white color, and the
apartments were so new, and the floors were shining…I was about
four or five…
It was so new and so pretty and the grass was green….My mother
says you’re really crazy to remember all that, but I look at it now
after all these years and I can just remind myself of how it was and
I can tell people that this was not the original plan. But I remember
other families moving in, and these were all white families, and
someone organized the Cub Scouts and the Brownie Scot because
I remember I became a Brownie…I remember the Brownie uniform
and all that, my brothers were in the Cub Scouts.”

28. Wanda Hopkins (continued)
“Yeah, and we used to live right next door to a white family,
I’ll never forget, we’d spend the night at each other’s house,
stuff that you’d never think of would happen back then. I
remember Alice and Sally. I lived in 402, they lived in 403. My
mother never felt that anything would happen to me when we
spent the night at each other’s house, and her mother never
felt that….It’s almost unheard of now. But I keep tellin’ people
the way it is now was the original plan, and I just wanted
them to know that. I guess that’s why I kept it all in my
memory.”
(p. 53)

30. Cabrini-Green, 1990s
1994 Chicago receives one of the first HOPE VI (Housing
Opportunities for People Everywhere) grants to redevelop Cabrini-
Green as a mixed-income neighborhood.
1995 Demolition begins.
1997 Chicago unveils Near North Redevelopment Initiative, a
master plan for development in the area. It recommends
demolishing Green Homes and most of Cabrini Extension.
1999 Chicago Housing Authority announces Plan for
Transformation, which will spend $1.5 billion over ten years to
demolish 18,000 apartments and build or rehabilitate 25,000
apartments. Earlier redevelopment plans for Cabrini-Green are
included in the Plan for Transformation. New library, rehabilitated
Seward Park, and new shopping center open.

31. Old Town Village West townhomes, a new mixed-income development, in the
background is the William Green Homes high-rise, part of Cabrini-Green, later
demolished. [Photo: Lawrence J. Vale]

32. North Town Village mixed-income housing, on the left, with the last of the
Cabrini-Green high-rises on the right; the high-rise was demolished in 2011.
[Photo: Lawrence J. Vale]

33. the new improved Near North side

34. now, "Parkside of Old Town"

35. The new Cabrini Target, opened in 2013.

36. outcome re: low-income units
"And yet, nearly 20 years into the redevelopment, there exist
fewer than 400 replacement public housing units, counting
both the Cabrini site itself and the mixed-income
communities in the broader neighborhood. With nearly 3,000
deeply subsidized apartments already torn down, the 586
Cabrini row houses — the low-rise housing that has so far
survived the clearance — seem likely to fall next."
—"Up," p. 14

37. outcome, continued
"The CHA assures ex-Cabrini residents forced from vacated
and demolished buildings that they can enter the lottery for
replacement units on site and in the neighborhood; but all the
existing apartments reserved for public housing residents are
already occupied, and the prospect of achieving the 700
units mandated in the consent decree depends upon the
completion of the glacially implemented new construction on
the Cabrini Extension North site — still unfinished from the
HOPE VI grant of 1993. And even if new units do materialize,
the screening processes — even under the more liberal
terms negotiated though the consent decree — ensure that
most ex-Cabrini households will not be welcomed." [Up," p.
14]

38. “[The American Dream is] that dream of a land in which life should be
better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each
according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European
upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have
grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high
wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each
woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are
innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are,
regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."
—James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (1931), 214-215
Adams’s text is quoted at:
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/lessons/american-
dream/students/thedream.html

39. "...not a dream of motorcars and high wages merely..."

41. Louis Vuitton window display with sculptures by Frank Gehry

43. Frank GEHRY, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2014 (art museum branded with LV logo)

44. Frank GEHRY, Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2014

45. fashion +
beauty in a
fashionable
setting:
supermodel Liu
Wen at the
opening the
Fondation LV
is art just a
decorative
element in the
lives of the rich?

46. Olafur Eliasson, "Inside the Horizon," 2014, installed at the Fondation

47. Ellsworth Kelly at the Fondation
is this the role of art in
our society?

48. design used to create deliberately hostile urban environments

49. is this the role of design in our society?

50. the pavement is colder than a bench, harder than a bench, and less secure than a bench

51. Sylvie FLEURY
ELA 75/K (Won’t Smudge Off)
2000
is art's only role to
sugarcoat social
inequality?

52. Krzysztof Wodiczko
• born 1943 Warsaw,
Poland
• emigrated to Canada in
1977
• established residency in
NY in 1986
• teaches in Cambridge,
MA at MIT and the
Graduate School of
Design (GSD) at
Harvard

53. Krzysztof Wodiczko
Homeless Vehicle, Variant 5, 1987-9
Aluminum, fabric, wire cage, and hardware
60 x 36 x 56 inches (152.4 x 91.4 x 142.2 cm)

55. Krzysztof Wodiczko
Homeless Vehicle, Variant 3, 1987-9

56. Homeless Vehicle in use,
Washington Square Park,
NYC

57. Krzysztof Wodiczko
Homeless Vehicle, Variant 3, pictured outside Trump Tower, NYC, 1988

58. Wodiczko, Projection onto South Africa House, Trafalgar Square, London, 1985

59. detail of projection

60. "Bat Signal," OWS, November 17, 2011

61. Stay in touch, y'all! Thanks for all your thoughtful comments and for our group
discussions this semester!