Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Neighborhood History Project

CABRINI GREEN - CHICAGO
By: Phuong Nguyen & James Truty

Location...


Cabrini-Green places at the Near North Side Neighborhood, Chicago City.It is bordered by Scott Street on the north, Larrabee Street on the east, Division Street on the south, and Haslsted Street on the west.

General History

Every one knew about Cabrini-Green such as one of the most infamous public housing projects in Chicago city and
even in America with murders, fights and a dark history. Some informations below can tell you it's history and the reason why it became infamous like people often said about it...

IMMIGRANTS AND THE BEGINNING....

Swedish first arrived to Chicago between the years of 1850s and 1880s and also first inhabited the territories.Like the Chicago boomed in 1880, the Swedish immigrants made Chicago become one of the largest communities all over the world at that time. They largely settled around the Chicago River in the Near North Side neighborhood that's now known with the name "Cabrini-Green" .They were also accompanied by a large arrival of Irish immigrants.

In the great numbers of the Sicilians moved in, displacing the incumbent Swedish and Irish populations, for a brief period from the turn of the century to the 1920s, the area was called "Little Sicily."

According to the CHA( Chicago Housing Authority), the early residents of the Cabrini row houses were predominantly of Italian ancestry.
In 1962, a majority of residents in the completed complex were mostly black. "White flight" from the complex escalated over
the following decade; in 1970s its population was almost entirely black.

CABRINI-GREEN DURING WORLD WARS ...!!!

WORLD WAR 1
During the great onset of W
orld War I, European immigrations stalled, and the Great Migration of African Americans to midwestern and northeastern cities began.Cabrini-Green had been one of the most impoverished neighborhoods on the north side of the Chicago, and with the beginning of the Great Depression, conditions worsened for the neighborhood's new arrivals. In fact, the western portion of the Near North side, while very accessible to both the Chicago River and the city's bustling downtown Loop, has always been a landing place for people often migrants that are in rather desperate circumstances. The housings were integrated and many residents were held jobs.

WORLD WAR 2
Those changed in the years in and after World War 2,when the nearb
y factories that provided the neighborhood's economic base closed and laid off thousands of people. By the start of the World War 2, city's officials recognized a need to assuage the growing despair in the Near North.
The Cabrini Row Houses were built to help returning war veterans and impoverished residents , and they housed approximately 600 families. Then, in 1958 the Cabrini extension was added to the project, adding the fifteen red and tan high-rise buildings with about 2,000 units. During World War II, the Chicago Housing Authority razed "Little Hell" and built a low-rise apartment project for war workers, naming it the Frances Cabrini Homes after the first American canonized by the Catholic Church. . War veterans shared the tenements with African Americans, Sicilians, Puerto Ricans, and Irish immigrants for the first 15 years.

AND IN THE RECENT PAST...
Lawns were paved over to save on maintenance, failed lights were left for months, and apartments damaged by fire were simply boarded up instead of rehabilitated and reoccupied.
During the worst years of Cabrini-Green's problems, vandalism increased substantially. Gang members and miscreants covered interior walls with graffiti and damaged doors, windows, and elevators. Many residents urinated in the hallways which were rarely cleaned.
While Cabrini-Green was deteriorating during the postwar era, causing industry, investment, and residents to abandon its immediate surroundings, the rest of Chicago's Near North Side underwent equally dramatic upward changes in socioeconomic status. First, downtown employment shifted dramatically from manufacturing to professional services, spurring increased demand for middle-income housing; the resulting gentrification spread north along the lakefront from the Gold Coast, then pushed west and eventually crossed the river.
By the 1980s, Cabrini-Green become the most notorious public housing project in the city or even in the country.
Anyway, as the industrial areas surrounding Cabrini-Green were replaced, the land on which Cabrini-Green placed was becoming more desirable.
In the year of 1990s, developers had converted thousands of acres of former industrial lands near the north branch of the Chicago River (and also the north, south, and west of Cabrini-Green) to office, retail, and housing.

CABRINI-GREEN 'S POPULATION.....




FUTURE PLANS
Left the dark history,Cabrini-Green has been becoming more bright and beautiful such as one of the most famous neighborhood area of Chicago city.Over time, Cabrini-Green's location became increasingly desirable to private developers.

In 1999, the CHA created a 10-year plan, it would effectively destroy the Cabrini-Green housing projects, replace them with mixed-income housings that will be built for former tenants of Cabrini-Green as well as new middle-class applicants.The CHA seemed every one to be beyond repaired and has begun to raze all of them, except for the original Cabrini Row Housings, which will stay, the new mixed-income housing will be low-rise constructions that provide residences in a wide range of prices.

The neighborhood is now home of many Chicago's nicest restaurants, shops, stores, high buildings which are changing the nature of the neighborhood. Like Gold Coast, River North, Old Town, and Lincoln Park, Cabrini-Green is easily one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in all neighbor of Chicago.


THESE PICTURES BELOW WILL TELL YOU HOW CABRINI-GREEN LOOKS LIKE IN THE RECENT PAST AND PRESENT. WITH A BEAUTIFUL LOOKING LIKE THAT, NO ONE CAN BELIEVE THAI IT WAS CALLED A "LITTLE HELL" OF CHICAGO ....





































































1 comment:

  1. This is still mostly copied from websites without citing the source. That constitutes plagiarism and will give you a zero on this assignment if you do not correct it soon.

    Where is the evidence of your interviews?

    See James blog for more.

    ReplyDelete