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Cabrini-Green—And Other Little American Hells Part One

 

By Josh LamI

 

 

"The streets are a short stop.
Either you're slinging crack rock or you've got a wicked jump shot. It's hard being young from the slums.

Eating 5 cent gum, not knowing where your meal's coming from."

 

-Christopher Wallace also known as Notorious B.I.G.

 

One Hell of an Introduction

 

In 1992, a writer by the name of Connie Fletcher compiled the true stories of 125 Chicago police officers about their experiences while working within the city. The book is titled What Cops Know. Some of the stories are humorous, most aren't. A number of these experiences occur in Chicago's most notorious housing project, Cabrini-Green. You've probably heard of the location.

 

If not, don't worry, you're about to learn of its nearly one-hundred-fifty-year-long sordid, violent, and heartbreaking past. History lessons often bore audiences, especially when rife with monotonous fact-spewing and little sense of narrative. Fret not, we would never do that to you. Most importantly, Cabrini-Green's history could never be a boring subject, even if only the most clinical and basic facts about the area were narrated by Ben Stein using a ten-dollar microphone.

 

Fortunately, there's nothing clinical or monotonous about this episode, more than ten dollars was spent on the microphone, and thankfully Ben Stein is nowhere to be found. Instead, we have one police officer's account of a heinous crime that went down in Cabrini-Green, decades ago.

 

"We had a real scary one. It was an incredible story, and, initially, when the press called and stuff, they were skeptical — "What do you mean, she got grabbed off the street? What do you mean?" There was a woman in her early twenties waiting for the bus at Chicago and Halsted, she was coming home from a friend's, about eleven at night. A car pulled up, three guys got out and grabbed her, brought her into the car—one sexually assaulted her in the car—then they brought her over to an abandoned apartment in one of the projects. And then she was gang-raped by about thirty-five people. I mean, the way she described it, it was really humiliating. They had her on a couch and they were selling her like for a dollar and [for] cigarettes and stuff. The weird part about it was... there were real young boys participating; they were making comments about her vagina... that it looked like a cat or something, like they had never seen one before.

One guy would put his penis in her mouth and another one would be putting his hand in her vagina—and laughing it up at the same time. And there would be a constant—dozens of people in the apartment—in and out, in and out. What was really strange about it, I mean, other than all the usual horror involved, was that there were so many participants. And it was a thing where the word was getting around the entire building—"Go down to Apartment 304"—and all the younger kids in the building were in there watching, and the older guys would throw them out, and they had to come up with money.

 

The kicker is they bring her outside and they slit her wrists. We found the blood. I don't know what that was supposed to do—scare her? kill her? The cuts on her wrist didn't turn out to be

 

exceptionally deep. Arrests were made on it, but we couldn't get all of them. She couldn't identify all of them. Here's the real terror of it. It was sometime later when we talked to her again. She said she couldn't walk down the street, because every time she'd see a black guy, she'd think that was one of the guys who raped her—because there were so many, because she couldn't ID them.

 

She was sitting in the office one time; I didn't recognize her, because she had dyed her hair... So they wouldn't recognize her. I don't even like to think about that."

 

Normally a story like that would make for an episode's worth of material, but today it's your introduction to Candyman country.

Cabrini-Green has enough horror to fill a series of novels. It would make for a fine mini- series on HBO or Showtime. For that reason, this exploration of Cabrini-Green will be split into two parts. Is it enough time to fully paint poverty and racial segregation's not-so-pretty picture? No. For even an adequate attempt at doing so, this episode would need to last right at one- hundred forty-seven years. Then, listener... you'd need another century to fully process it.

 

With that in mind, we'll do our best as we travel through the history of Cabrini-Green while sparing as few details as possible. For those familiar with the area or, even for Chicago natives, there's a solid chance you'll find information in this pair of episodes you weren't privy to before tapping the play button.

 

We're also going to explore some other famous housing projects around the country, to better understand an underlying tragedy woven into America's history.

 

Welcome to the projects.

 

The Slum in Our Solar System

 

Earth is a violent place. It may well be the most violent area in all the universe, we certainly have no evidence to the contrary. Granted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and astronauts have yet to physically venture beyond the moon. So declaring our home the most violent in the universe as a matter of certainty should be avoided. However, we can definitively say Earth is the most violent planet we've observed. Photos from the Hubble telescope and voyaging satellites seem to show neighboring planets like Mercury, Jupiter, Neptune, and even the disgruntled ex-planet Pluto as peaceful, quiet places. Uninhabitable and devoid of life, sure, but not violent.

 

Nearest we can figure, outside Earth's ozone, those venturing into the vastness of the cosmos will be met with pitiless indifference, but not hostility. Asteroids, comets, incomprehensibly massive star explosions called supernovae... none of these potential threats to humanity are personal, they're just part of nature. Destructive? Sure, but lacking even a modicum of intent. The death of our very own, life- sustaining Sun will occur, incinerating earth and everything on it, but in the total absence pre-meditation. So far, malicious intent has only been observed on the planet we currently occupy.

 

Out there in the depths of space, there may well exist a world more depraved than our own, but even if so, in the grand scheme of the universe... such a world would just be another housing project across town with its own set of problems.

 

It's time to come to terms with a difficult truth: We humans reside in the slum of our solar system.

 

Every other planet in the solar system has a murder rate of zero, a poverty rate of zero, no rapes, no homelessness, no crime whatsoever. If you want to know what world peace looks like, check images from the rover on Mars. The red planet may not be suitable for human life—or life of any kind—but Mars is under no obligation to provide human beings with breathable air or a comfortable climate. Some believe an all-knowing God is behind Earth's convenient living conditions, others believe it to be a natural, convenient anomaly, completely explainable through science, and of course, a large number believe in some combination of both.

 

Regardless of belief, we're not entitled to a habitable climate, or even to oxygen. We're breathing charity from the universe, sitting in the shade of trees donated by happenstance, and sunbathing in the handouts of our solar system. We all rely on these donations and however you look at things, we humans are at the mercy of laws or rulers far greater than ourselves. Be it the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, or the laws of some unelected higher power.

 

The circumstances allowing us to survive as a species generally go unappreciated. They're taken for granted, not because we're disinterested or ungrateful, but because we're preoccupied. Busy going to jobs, building relationships, fighting political battles, feeding ourselves, and if we're lucky, finding something that makes us happy. Something else that seems to consume a lot of our time is hurting one another. We as a species are seemingly predisposed to inflict serious personal harm upon all who stand in our way, and we're not shy when it comes to homicide.

 

Humans killing one another is prevalent from South Central, Los Angeles, to Durban, South Africa, to Karachi, Pakistan, and even the quiet little town of Brighton, Ontario in Canada. We've developed tools to make killing easier and more convenient. Rocks, sticks, and other blunt objects at first, but then came more efficient tools like spears, harpoons, knives, swords, bows that shoot tiny compact harpoons called arrows, and eventually guns and bombs. Guns were a serious game-changer, and handguns made murder downright convenient.

 

It's natural for people to ask why such cruelty and carnage are prevalent on our little planet, and feeling a need to cast blame somewhere is only human. Woe is she, the ponderer who yearns to find a simple explanation for the debauchery of her brothers and sisters. Behind every perceived answer is a litany of harbingers, and behind each of those, precursors. Layers upon layers of nuance, yet ever-present is the one who believes his magic fingers will quickly undo this web of unimaginable entanglement. These people seem to believe all the information they have... is all the information they need.

 

As such, observations from sidelined obtuse uncles all across the country suggest tendencies to err on the side of laziness, as correlation is misconstrued for causation.

 

A man reads that poor black neighborhoods are crime-ridden and dangerous, so he deduces that poor black people must be the danger. A financially comfortable woman believes that poverty only comes from laziness, failing to recognize the irony of her lazy explanation for the existence of the lower-class. These lines of thinking make sense only on a profoundly superficial level. Minimal scratching of the surface will lead anyone of manageable intelligence to understand that there's a bit more to poverty and violence than that.

That said, our penchant for violence can be oversimplified and packaged to the masses by converting tragedy into neat little figures called statistics.

 

According to the Geneva Declaration, at least 740,000 people, globally, die each year from armed violence, either directly or indirectly. Of those dead people, approximately 490,000 of them are killed in intentional homicides. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported a global average of 6.2 people out of every 100,000 as being victims of homicide for 2012.

 

In the United States, the FBI reported over 1.2 million instances of violent crime in 2016, of which, 17,250 murders. These statistics are informative and necessary to understand the enormity of issues like violent crime, but they're also clinical. They're generalized and impersonal. These figures can

 

be twisted to mean anything a person wants them to mean. So what's a person to do with this information? These numbers—by themselves—don't delve into the particulars.

 

They don't tell the stories of violence incubating within broken-down communities once promised to its residents as a beacon of hope. They don't address the issue of abandoned and vilified residents living an existence, rather than a life.

 

Public housing was originally introduced as an answer for impoverished people looking for a more manageable life. For a time, they were exactly that. Ultimately, it became common for these affordable concrete structures to devolve into dens of bloodshed. Drugs often fueled a ruthless economy, as volatile as it was self-sustaining. High-rise apartments with decaying interiors overlooked the killing fields people once called their neighborhood. Some of these public housing projects were so foreboding, they engendered reputations crossing county and state lines as word spread across the United States that these public housing projects were more terrifying than the horror films, for which they served as a backdrop.

 

Cabrini-Green

 

Most Americans are at least vaguely aware of a place called Cabrini-Green. Many know it was a notoriously dangerous neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois, while a large number of them have seen the projects as depicted in the 1992 horror film Candyman. Decidedly few, however, know the lurid history behind these imposing high-rise structures. Some even assume the housing project is a movie set or a fictional location altogether, conceived solely for the movie. Those people are incorrect. It was very real and the filmmakers actually went into Cabrini–Green to film both the interior and exterior shots of the projects.

 

Candyman is actually as good a place as any to enter the story of Cabrini–Green. Not for reasons of historical significance or accuracy, the story is a complete work of fiction originally written by Clive Barker. But alongside actors Tony Todd and Virginia Madden, Cabrini–Green practically plays a leading role as the cursed slum of Chicago, as haunting as it is haunted. Candyman’s setting stays with viewers long after the film ends and for reasons difficult to explain. Cabrini-Green is immediately identifiable as a scary place. The danger lurking in streets

 

and decaying hallways of this massive housing project is palpable, even when viewed through a television screen.

In a story by True Horror, the filming experiences of Candyman's cast and crew are expounded upon.

Star Virginia Madsen who grew up in Chicago stated, "Growing up here, I knew all about Cabrini-Green, you didn't even drive by there, let alone enter on foot."

 

While the gang culture in the film is touched upon often and part of the story, it is still a movie about a ghost, a monster, a boogeyman. However, when it comes to the reality of this real-life location, its reputation precedes it. In a 1992 interview, Candyman himself Tony Todd had this to say about some of his experiences filming in such a notorious area "I tried to come there with no expectations, but I still felt fear. Anybody who didn't belong there was subject to danger. The Cops told me to keep my eyes on the rooftops for snipers, and then I ran into a woman and her two children, they were hustling back from the grocery store before it got too dark, and thought the film security people were cops, she asked us when we were going to clean the projects up, which really got to me."

It truly was Hell on earth. Gangs did in fact hold the area hostage, The"Gangster Disciples" or "GD's" were the dominant gang in the area and they are the same gang members who can be seen in the film, throwing up signs in the scene where Helen and Bernadette first arrive at Cabrini. That same gang had to be put in the film as extras in order for the cast and crew to be "allowed" to film there and assure the crews safety, and while there were no incidents with the cast and crew, there is the well-known anecdote of one of the aforementioned snipers putting a bullet through the crew's van.

 

Some Chicago locals opine that the Cabrini-Green area is actually cursed... not plagued by the fictional ghost of Candyman, but by its true history. Claims of curses and hauntings are, of course, matters of speculation, purely subjective and thus will not be explored in this episode of Obscura, but it's interesting that an area can be so foreboding that some believe malevolent spirits may-well be at work. It's also a fun little mustard seen to plant in the heads of those learning of Cabrini-Green's history.

 

Little Hell

 

It was approximately 9:00P.M. on October 8th, 1871 when a fire started in a barn behind DeKoven St. in Chicago. The barn belonged to the O'Leary family. Authorities never determined what caused the inferno, but unconfirmed explanations abound. Some have suggested that a group of men were inside the barn gambling when some drunken buffoon knocked over a lantern. Quite a faux pas, considering the historic fire burned for two solid days, killed more than 300 people, and engulfed 3.3 square miles of the city. If true, apologies seem unlikely to have been accepted.

 

Another popular tale blames a cow for knocking over a lantern. Michael Ahren of the Chicago Tribune published a story making that claim but appears to be a purveyor of bovine scatology, as he admitted in 1893 to have made the whole thing up.

The official report states:

 

"Whether it originated from a spark blown from a chimney on that windy night, or was set on fire by human agency, we are unable to determine."

 

Regardless of the fire's origin, blame for its catastrophic damage lies with conditions in the city at the time. For one, that prior Summer had brought a major drought.

 

Exacerbating the situation was, well... Chicago is often called ‘The Windy City.' It's not an ironic title, the town is actually quite drafty due to its adjacency to Lake Michigan. Frigid breezes blow off the massive water body, making for some brisk Winters. Its oft perpetuated that the nickname comes from politicians in the area being full of hot air, but such claims have been debunked. Politicians have nothing to do with it. Chi-town carries that moniker for exactly the reason you'd think, which in 1871, was a damn shame.

Of all places for a fire to break out, a drought-conquered ‘windy city' strikes as being among the worst of them. Mother nature is a harsh mistress. A gusty October stood neutral as air currents propelled flames from the O'learys' barn in rapid fashion and became a ruthless conflagration, chewing through wooden structures and crispy foliage with the care and compassion of a ravenous wolverine happening upon a litter of sickly kittens. An arid metropolis was down and God kicked. Pine cottages made up most of Chicago's low-cost housing and may as well have been kindling for the historic fire.

 

In the end, more than one hundred thousand residents were rendered homeless.

A stiletto heel placed firmly against the posterior skulls of poor immigrant families in Chicago was the fact that many places of employment were also destroyed in the fire. With no job, home, or ability to remedy the situation, families resorted to building janky wooden shanties on their properties and resided there. These monuments to desperation served only as a temporary patch for their ongoing conundrum. City officials and business owners were hell-bent on preventing another near-incineration in the future, and thus, were preparing to implement new fire codes across Chicago. Looming proposed laws would require homes and businesses to be made from mortar and other material less susceptible to fire. Hordes of immigrant lower-class workers rebelled against these proposals, knowing they'd never afford such a rebuilding. At one point a group of immigrants violently stormed a city council meeting to express their frustration.

 

As a Lawrence J. Vale explained in his book, Purging the Poorest, these city leaders were not viewed in a positive light by immigrant workers.

 

"By contrast, the city's newly elected leadership pushed for "fire limits" within which, new wooden structures would be prohibited. Working-class Chicagoans viewed the proposed restrictions as something imposed by a cadre of downtown property owners who, already once burned, wised to protect their investments by insisting that lower-income people should not build firetraps anywhere else in the city. Moreover, as Karen Sawislak argues, some ethnic groups viewed the restrictions as designed by nativist proponents as a means to undermine their ability to rebuild as an ethnic enclave. Violent protestors disrupted a city council meeting

in January 1872, largely formed by immigrant groups seeking to protect the value of investment in their wooden homes and neighborhoods."

 

The city reached a kind of compromise by going forward with the new fire codes but allowed one small section of Chicago to remain unbound to those codes. Most of the city's impoverished immigrants rebuilt their wooden homes in this area, which eventually became the section of Chicago that would eventually be called Little Hell.

 

The name carried something of a double meaning. In part, people called it Little Hell because of the violent nature of its inhabitants, but it was also called that because of its location being so close to a gas house in the city. At night, flames from the gas house would appear to be igniting the sky, while roars of factory furnaces permeated the neighborhoods. Due to its relatively high Sicilian population, it was also referred to as Little Sicily, but Little Hell seems to be the name most commonly associated with that area.

Things got ugly quick in the Chicago slum. One of the first groups to exploit Little Hell's viciousness was the local Chicago police department, according to Chicagology.

 

When an old officer was to be punished, or a new one tried, he was sent to " Little Hell." Sometimes he lasted a week. If he was particularly tough and courageous, and if he had a hard head, he survived perhaps a month. Then he usually went to the hospital to furnish an interesting case of compound fracture or concussion of the brain to the clinics. "Little Hell" was a "terror district" for several years after the fire and many a bloody murder was committed within its precincts.

 

Perhaps most interesting about little hell was the heart of the area, a place at the intersection of West Oak Street and Milton Avenue which came to be known as Death Corner. Murders were displayed here in front of an audience as a form of entertainment. It became the site of more than 100 unsolved murders.

 

Perhaps most interesting about little hell was the heart of the area, a place at the intersection of West Oak Street and Milton Avenue which came to be known as Death Corner. Murders were displayed here in front of an audience as a form of entertainment. It became the site of more than 100 unsolved murders.

 

At the time, Death Corner earned a reputation of being the location of more murders than any sector of equal land area in the entire world. The Chicago Tribune published a number of articles on the heinous murders at Death Corner in Little Hell.

One of the foulest and blackest crimes which has ever been perpetrated in this city was

committed sometime during Sunday night or yesterday morning. The murdered man is Frederick Ruetz, a German and a widower, 55 years old, whose dwelling was at No. 113 Hurlbut street, in the North Division, and there is not the slightest doubt that he was killed for the purpose of robbery, for he was a man in good circumstances and was in the habit of carrying a considerable sum of money with him.

Mr. Ruetz's body was discovered about 8 o'clock yesterday morning, lying between two piles of railroad ties, opposite the freight department of the Chicago & Pacific Railroad, on Cherry street, some distance north of Chicago Avenue and west of Halsted Street. Two men who were unloading ties first saw the corpse, and on attempting to raise it up found it frozen to the earth.

Officer Whalen, who lives in the vicinity, was immediately notified, and in company with another policeman, took charge of the body and had it removed to Chicago Avenue Station. A.M. examination showed that a deep gash had been cut with an ax or hatchet on the left side of the head, cleaving the slouch hat which the deceased had on. The head was nearly severed from the body by another wound across the neck; this was evidently inflicted with a sharp knife. On the coat were the imprints of a bloody knife-blade, which makes it appear that the murderer or murderers had wiped the weapon off after committing the deed.

The writer of this article seems truly sickened by the crime like he's personally affected by it. He isn't finished yet. In fact, he's dead-set on exacting revenge on the residents of Little Hell. In the second half of this two-part episode of Obscura, we'll delve into this writer's attempt at retribution, more of Little Hell, its demolition, and the giant concrete housing project called Cabrini-Green, which was put in its place.

 

Until then, if you're needing something to tide you over, there are a number of movies featuring Cabrini-Green as the setting. As mentioned, Candyman is the most inclusive of the infamous Chicago housing project, it's also the most popular of the movies set in Cabrini-Green. It's also featured in movies like Hardball, Whiteboyz, and Hoop Dreams.

Hopefully, you found this retelling of Chicago and American history to be something of value. It's a tough story to piece together but only becomes more engrossing from here.

 

THIS IS A SEGMENT OF A 20,000 WORD SCRIPT WRITTEN ORIGINALLY FOR OBSCURA. IF YOU WOULD LIKE THE SCRIPT IN ITS ENTIRETY, PLEASE REACH OUT VIA EMAIL. 

 

 

References:

http://www.genevadeclaration.org/fileadmin/docs/Global-Burden-of-Armed-Violence-full-report.pdf (Geneva report on armed violence)

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-1 (Murder Rate Stats by the FBI)

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides (more references for world violence)

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/22/pruitt-igoe-high-rise-urban-america-history-cities (Pruitt-Igoe)

http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/ (more Pruitt-Igoe)

http://historicdetroit.org/building/brewster-douglass-projects/ (Brewster Douglas projects in Detroit)

https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/08/new-orleans-housing.html (Magnolia Projects)

https://mondediplo.com/2018/12/08neworleans (New Orleans Gentrification)

https://web.archive.org/web/20090219123030/http://www.wwltv.com/topstories/stories/wwl010709cbcjp eete.1a0a49c.html (New Orleans after Magnolia)

https://chicagology.com/notorious-chicago/littlehell/ (many references for Little Hell)

https://www.history.com/news/why-is-chicago-called-the-windy-city (Why Chicago is called the Windy City)

http://www.truehorror.net/articles/cabrini-green-the-true-horror-of-candyman/ (Filming of Candyman) https://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/ (Most infamous housing projects)