By Sharon Cohen
Associated Press
Sunday, October 22, 2006; D01
CHICAGO The menacing row of concrete apartment towers where four of Katie Sistrunk's children were shot is almost all gone now, replaced by weeds and fields, mud and memories.
The cagelike balconies that looked like prison tiers to Beauty Turner have all but disappeared.
The gangs that peddled crack to Krystal McCraney Moore have found new places to haunt.
One hollow-eyed lookout still paces at the entrance of the last high-rise, watching for police so he can alert drug dealers who lurk in the graffiti-scarred, darkened stairwells.
This is the end of the Robert Taylor Homes, the final days of what once was the nation's largest housing project. Four decades ago, its 28 towers overflowed with thousands of some of the poorest people in America. Now there's just one rotting building and a few dozen holdout tenants.
This month, the stragglers will leave, some reluctantly, a step ahead of the wrecking ball.
The rise and fall of Taylor is the story of a Great Society promise that became a debacle, of intimidating high-rises that became a national symbol of failure, of a community that, at times, became a war zone.
It's also the story of poor people who survived an unforgiving world of roaches and rats, frozen pipes and broken elevators, vicious gangs and drugs -- but still mourn a place they called home.
"It's the end of an era," says Turner, a resident for 16 years who became an activist and chronicler of public housing. "It's the end of a community. You can say the people who made it through these buildings had the courage of a lion and the strength of an elephant. . . . But they had no say, they were voiceless."
* * *
The obituary for the Taylor Homes might read this way:
Born in 1962. Welcomed by politicians with fanfare. Doomed by age 5. Ailing for decades. Dead at age 44. Among the causes: mismanagement, shrinking federal dollars, government blundering, neglect, poor design, drugs and, above all, too many poor people packed in too little space.
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.
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.
* * *
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.
So Taylor was built. And every dire prediction came true.
"You can blame Mayor Daley but he didn't do it alone. He had the backing of city government and HUD," says Susan Popkin, a co-author of "The Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago."
Popkin also says the bungled concept for public housing extended to the design: no showers, outdoor elevators vulnerable to Chicago winters, pipes that were frequently vandalized and caused flooding. "You couldn't have built those things any more clearly to say, 'You don't matter,' " she says.
But early on, Taylor -- named after the first black housing authority chairman -- did seem a welcome change. Its large apartments and new appliances had replaced cold-water flats and slums.
"Growing up was good," says David Wilson, who was literally born in Taylor 38 years ago. "Three bedrooms -- sheesh, man, you thought you was in heaven. At night it was beautiful. There were lights on every porch."
Wilson's childhood was typical of the early days; his family was headed by two working-class parents. "Everybody knew everybody," he says. "If your child got lost, he got found. At night, you didn't see any kids. Everybody back then was scared of their parents."
The good days faded fast.
From 1967 to 1974, the percentage of working-class families plummeted from 50 percent to 10 percent, Hunt says; those on public aid jumped from slightly more than a third to 83 percent.
The downward spiral continued.
Over the next 20 years, jobs in steel and other smokestack industries that offered black workers a steppingstone into the middle class disappeared. Federal budgets shrank. The buildings deteriorated; garbage piled up from broken incinerators; mailboxes and laundry rooms were vandalized. Repairs took months. After a fatal fire in the 1990s, one building was found to have 436 code violations.
The vacancy rate rose. Empty apartments, many on the top floor, became drug dens. The crack epidemic exploded. So did gang violence.
When Beauty Turner arrived in 1986, she witnessed the shooting of a teenage boy on her very first day.
"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."