Doomed Almost From the Start

"It angered me -- not just with the people who did it, but with the system around it," she says. "I was outraged about many things -- the way the elevators would break down, the way elderly people could not get up into their houses, the way the place looked, the way the management company spoke to the people."

She began organizing meetings, writing letters, testifying before congressional committees, agitating for change -- while raising three children, all of whom went on to graduate from college. She also became a reporter for the Residents' Journal, an award-winning bimonthly publication for and by public housing residents.

Turner's building was leveled four years ago, but she didn't wait to be forced out -- she left after she woke one night to find a giant rat nuzzling near her face.

Katie Sistrunk, who came to Taylor a single teen mother, left a widow and great-grandmother.

Over three decades, the 53-year-old Sistrunk tried to keep her 13 children busy, organizing a boys-and-girls club at a neighborhood school. She tapped into any resource she could -- even muscling a gang leader to buy chocolate bars she was selling to raise money for the group's trip to Detroit.

"They were taking these kids' mothers money, their fathers' money" for drugs, she explains. "I said, 'Let them have a little joy.' " The candy was purchased. The kids got their trip. "That," she says with a smile, "was a sweet moment."

There were ugly ones as well.

When her nephew was killed, she says, her sister had a nervous breakdown.

When a gang member threatened her son, she says, she in turn threatened to kill his mother. "She lives on 13, I live on 6," she said. "She gotta go up past me."

And when four of her nine sons ended up behind bars -- one remains there -- she had little sympathy. "You're not going to take me down and make me suffer for what you choose to do," she told them. "If you don't make it, son, it's on you."

Sistrunk -- a grandmother at 51 -- says almost all her children ended up doing well and she doesn't blame Taylor for those who got in trouble.

"It's not where you live, it's how you live," she says in her husky smoker's voice. "They had another choice . . . because they had loving parents. We were always telling them about the drugs, about the gangs, about the guns. We didn't have to tell them, they saw it."

It may strain the imagination, but this was a community, says Sudhir Venkatesh, who lived with Taylor families for about 18 months as a graduate student in the early 1990s and wrote a book about Taylor, "American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto."

"I was trying to find out where democracy happens in the United States and I found it in Robert Taylor," says Venkatesh, now a Columbia University sociologist. "I found it in the aftermath of drive-by shootings and domestic-abuse incidents. They debated, they fought over what they should do at community meetings. People were involved."

But Krystal McCraney Moore says Taylor's insular world was a crutch -- it become easy for her to lean on neighbors for everything from Pampers to delivering crack cocaine when she was too embarrassed to get it herself.

Moore's life unraveled in seven years there. Now 27, married and mother of an infant, she says she has been drug-free for three years and is working to regain custody of the three children taken from her while living in Taylor. She was elated to leave the project.

"It's the best thing that happened to me," she says.

Still, she's sympathetic to those who have a hard time making the break. "That's the only life they knew," she says. "I pray for these people . . . that they'll be able to fend for themselves in the real world."

Even now, some feel Taylor could have been saved.

"If you gave us the law enforcement like we deserved . . . if you got people in there who were normal . . . the buildings could have still been there," says Wilson, who spent 33 of his 38 years in the same Taylor apartment.

Not so, say Chicago housing officials, adding that Taylor's fate was sealed by a federal directive that requires demolition of some larger public housing developments when rehabilitation and maintenance costs exceed those of housing vouchers.

Some former residents now think the winners in the aftermath of Taylor will be developers. Poor people, meanwhile, will be shunted off to dangerous neighborhoods where they'll face the same problems they had before.

Venkatesh, the sociologist, has been following 400 families, mostly former Taylor residents. He says about 80 percent have moved to other poor areas while a small number of families have significantly improved their situation.

"The whole program is about choice -- we have to focus on what the resident wants," and often that means following their former neighbors to communities where they're comfortable, says Meghan Harte, managing director of resident services for the housing authority.

So far, of about 1,550 people who lived in Taylor as of 1999, about two-thirds have chosen federal vouchers that help pay their rent; the remainder have left public housing.

By next spring, the last building will fall. The Taylor name will be history.

* * *

Barbara Moore was one of the last tenants to leave.

She was homebound for the past year -- sidelined by a broken ankle -- and when she said goodbye to Taylor at the end of September, she left in a wheelchair.

She's now settling into an apartment a few blocks away; her daughter, Korlette, and her two grandsons, who lived a floor above her in Taylor, moved in next door.

But change does not come easy, not for a woman who lived in Taylor 40 of her 66 years.

"I just feel like I left part of my body," she says. "I feel empty and hollow inside. It was my home. I loved it. And I still do."