Doomed Almost From the Start

Survivors: tens of thousands.

Taylor has been coming down for the past decade, building by building, part of a nationwide movement to rid big cities of decaying, dangerous housing that warehoused the poor.

Nearly 186,000 public housing units have been approved for demolition in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia and several other cities, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. About 80 percent already are gone.

The federal government also has allocated about $5.6 billion to refashion former public housing areas into smaller communities that combine families of different incomes.

But among big cities, Chicago's public housing stands apart.

It has the most ambitious blueprint for starting over: a $1.6 billion, 10-year "Plan for Transformation" to demolish most of the public housing high-rises (44 of 53 are already gone) and replace them with mixed-income communities.

It also has the most notorious history, with a seemingly endless list of tragedies. Just this past May, a 21-year-old woman from California with bipolar disorder mysteriously plummeted from the seventh floor of Taylor's last tower. A reputed gang member has been charged with assault and kidnapping. The woman survived, with brain injuries.

Along with the horrors are scandals and corruption that led to a four-year federal takeover of the Chicago Housing Authority in the 1990s. Despite major changes and progress since then, the past has proven hard to forget.

"Chicago is the largest story of failure," says D. Bradford Hunt, a Roosevelt University professor who's writing a book about the city's public housing. "It created these enormous ghettos that were so cut off . . . they really were islands in the city."

The Taylor Homes -- whose population was 99 percent black -- was the granddaddy of them all, two miles of 16-story towers, more than 4,300 apartments shadowing the busy Dan Ryan Expressway. The Ryan was a dividing line -- black to the east, white to the west.

Along with four other projects on the South Side, Taylor was part of a stretch once considered the highest concentration of poor people in America.

The planned new community is a dramatic departure -- 2,500 rental apartments, condominiums and townhouses, only a third for public housing residents, no building taller than four stories. Some are skeptical such an ambitious project will come to pass.