Doomed Almost From the Start

But the point is obvious: Avoid the conditions that spawned Taylor, which, at its peak in the mid-1960s, swelled with 27,000 residents, three-fourths of them children. It was the kids who got hurt playing in elevator shafts, the kids who died in gang crossfire.

"I saw so many kids get killed . . . and I didn't want that to happen to my child," says Katie Sistrunk, who says four of her 13 children were shot at Taylor. She calmly details the arm and leg wounds they suffered and the exact spot each was injured -- the playground, the elevator, the streets. The lesson was clear: No place was safe.

"I called it Little Beirut," she says. "Even if you could relax for a minute, it wouldn't be nothing but a moment. You were never at a place where you could say, 'Things are going to be fine.' "

Taylor became a city within a city, fueled by an underground economy. People sold everything from food to compact discs from their apartments. The big-ticket items, though, were heroin, crack, cocaine and marijuana sold by gangs who commandeered buildings. By one estimate, between $5,000 and $10,000 in drug money changed hands every day in the early 1990s -- a time when nearly 96 percent of the residents, many single mothers, were jobless.

One tower was wryly dubbed "Freedom Town," meaning every kind of drug was sold freely within its walls.

There's no mystery now why Taylor failed.

"You just can't stack poor people on poor people . . . where there are no jobs, the schools are failing, there's no grocery store, no pharmacy, all the things you take for granted in a community," says Terry Peterson, who recently stepped down as Chicago Housing Authority chairman.

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But 44 years ago, the doors opened with great hope.

"This project represents . . . what all of us feel America should be -- and that is a decent home for every family," Mayor Richard J. Daley said at the dedication in 1962.

Even then, there were doubts.

Daley -- father of the current mayor, Richard M. Daley -- didn't want high-rises and had been warned they'd be hard to manage and unwholesome for families, Hunt says. But voters who were the backbone of Daley's political machine opposed public housing in their neighborhoods, empty land was scarce, and the federal government balked at the high costs of low-rises.