Chicago, Then and Now

Chicagoans long took a certain pride in this criminal tradition. Never called the Mafia, organized crime in Chicago was generally referred to as the Syndicate or the Mob or the Outfit, and sometimes just the Boys. So big was the Syndicate presence in Chicago that at least one of the local television news channels kept a special correspondent, a man named John Drummond, to cover Mob news. Organized crime often led off a news broadcast or garnered a front-page headline, as when Allen Dorfman, an adviser to the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa and an all-around fixer, was gunned down in the parking lot of the Lincolnwood Hyatt. Mob figures—Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo, Sam Giancana, Joseph Lombardo—were celebrities, known throughout the city. A juicy bit of gossip was when Mob guys showed up to play golf at the Tam O’Shanter Country Club. Best, sound advice had it, to let them play through.

I myself, in the early 1970s, ran into a few of the Mob figures at the Riviera Club, where I sometimes played racquetball. Gus Alex, said to have been head of Mob gambling and prostitution in Chicago, was among them, and I remember locker-room discussions in which they expressed amazement at America’s dithering in Vietnam. The strong should never take any crap from the weak; “blow the bastards to hell” was their view. The Mob influence reached all the way down to high schools, where football parlay cards—beat the spread on three college games and win $6 on a $1 bet—were always available. An Italian customer of my father’s told him that if he ever had a cash-flow problem, the Boys were ready to help out.

Jews in the chiefly Italian Mob tended to play administrative roles. Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, a Galician Jew, was the Syndicate’s legal and financial adviser from the Capone days through the middle 1950s. Jewish bookies were not uncommon in Chicago. My mother’s older brother, “Lefty Sam” Abrams, was one. He eventually owned a few points in the Riviera in Vegas. I may best establish my uncle’s social standing by mentioning that Sinatra was at his granddaughter’s wedding. After her brother’s funeral, my mother, peering into his closet, counted 27 ultrasuede jackets.

In our neighborhood lived a man named Maury “Potsy” Pearl, a Jewish bookie whose bodyguard drove his son, a friend of my younger brother’s, to school every day. A friend of mine’s father, a borax man who had scored heavily in the aluminum-awning business, made the mistake of dabbling in boxers, which meant connecting to the Syndicate, which controlled the sport, with the result that one day he found himself pursued simultaneously by the FBI and a brute named “Milwaukee Phil” Alderisio. People in the Chicago of those days took a certain pride in their often tenuous connections to the Mob.

The Mob today seems to have retreated to the point of oblivion in Chicago. Prostitution and gambling, its two chief sources of income, have dried up. Gambling is now available on the Internet, and, with the advent of the pill and the sexual revolution, nice girls have all but put prostitutes out of business. The illicit big money these days is in drugs, and the trade is monopolized by drug lords working out of Latin America and the Chicago gangs who serve as their distributors. One is hard-pressed to name any prominent Mob members in current-day Chicago because, one gathers, there are none.

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By the time of my birth in Chicago in 1937, “the city of the big shoulders,” in Carl Sandburg’s phrase, had developed a considerable slouch. Not that there was ever much truth in Sandburg’s sentimental poem of 1914, but in my boyhood there was at least still a Chicago stockyards, and on warm summer nights, with a wind blowing in from the south, even in my far north side neighborhood of Rogers Park one could smell the abattoir roughly a hundred blocks away. One of the standard grammar-school trips, one which I am not at all sorry somehow to have missed, was to the stockyards, where tons of dead animal flesh and entrails were on view and where large men stunned cows with sledgehammers before slaughtering them.

Chicago was nothing if not a reality instructor. Political idealism never really came alive in this city. By the 1930s, the Irish were in firm control of city hall, their machine nicely lubricated by patronage, corruption, and organized crime. Edward J. Kelly was mayor from 1933 to 1947; he was followed by Martin H. Kennelly and then the 21-year term of Richard J. Daley. With a brief pause for the negligible mayoralties of Michael Bilandic, Jane Byrne, and Harold Washington, Richard M. Daley (le fils, as he was never known), served as mayor of Chicago for 22 years, bringing us up to the less than impressive tenure of Rahm Emanuel.

My father, with more than a light touch of irony, used to say of Chicago aldermanic elections: “Strange, a man putting out a quarter of a million dollars to get a job that pays $20,000 a year. It doesn’t make sense.” The only person who mattered politically in Chicago when I was a kid was your precinct captain; he might get you a parking permit or out of jury duty or some jerseys for your kid’s baseball team. In Chicago, the game of politics was fixed, locked in. My mother, who was never guilty of reading a word about politics in the Chicago Daily News and later the Sun-Times—Colonel McCormick’s isolationist Tribune was not allowed in our apartment—dispensed with my father’s irony on the subject of Chicago politicians. Raising her coffee cup, little finger bent, she remarked: “They’re all thieves, you know.” No one so far has proven her wrong.

The Chicago of my boyhood was an intensely Catholic city. Ask someone where he lived and he was likely to answer with the name of his parish (St. Nicholas of Tolentine, St. Gregory’s). Catholic culture was everywhere in the country a hundred-fold stronger then than now, and the Catholic atmosphere was especially strong in Chicago owing to its large populations of Irish, Italians, and Poles. So Catholic did the place seem—with priests in cassock, nuns in habit everywhere part of the cityscape—that as a young boy I took Catholicism and Christianity to be coterminous. The Bing Crosby movies of those years—Going My Way (1944), The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)—reinforced this sense of Catholic omnipresence. A now-forgotten actor named Pat O’Brien made a living playing a priest in the movies. How many cinematic murderers he prayed for while accompanying them on their way to the gallows or electric chair would be difficult to calculate.

In the courtyard building on Sheridan Road to the north of ours lived the Cowling family. The father, Sam Cowling, did a regular comic bit called “Fiction and Fact from Sam’s Almanac” on the then immensely popular national radio show called Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club. Sam’s beautiful wife was named Dale, the same name, older moviegoers will recall, as Roy Rogers’s wife. Their boys, Sam Jr. (who was my age) and Billy, both went to St. Jerome’s, thence to Loyola Academy, and thence to Jesuit Georgetown University, though they probably could have gotten into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Catholicism of their kind has vanished from American life.

Among Chicago’s many sobriquets—Windy City, Second City, City on the Make, City That Works—the City of Neighborhoods had the highest truth quotient when I was growing up. So geographically stratified by ethnicity and race was Chicago that a kid had only to tell where he lived than you knew his ethnic heritage, his family’s income, and whether the family ate in the dining room or kitchen, his father in a collar or in his undershirt. Apart from going into the Loop to shop at Marshall Field’s or Carson Pirie Scott or to Wrigley Field for a Cubs or Bears game, there was no reason to leave the friendly confines of one’s neighborhood. The neighborhood contained everything—church or synagogue, schools public and parochial, shops, like-minded neighbors—one might possibly require. If our family hadn’t had cousins living in the far south side neighborhood of Roseland, I might never have known Chicago had a south side until I was in my adolescence.

Ethnicity and race was the organizing principle behind Chicago neighborhoods. Greeks, Italians, Poles, Irish, Jews all wished to live among their own, and they did so. Our own neighborhood of West Rogers Park, to which we moved in 1947 from Rogers Park along Lake Michigan, was changing from white-collar gentile to ascending middle-class Jewish. My father bought a two-flat, and our renters, living on the second floor, were the Andersons, Mr. and Mrs. Anderson and Mrs. Anderson’s unmarried sister, Edna, all then in their late 50s. Mr. Anderson worked at a nearby bank. Mrs. Anderson spent the day in housecoat and curlers, dressing shortly before her husband returned home. The only words of Mrs. Anderson’s I can recall, and the family lived above us for more than a decade, are: “Mr. Anderson gets a nice lunch at the bank.” What they thought of us invading Jews I do not know. “There goes the neighborhood” would not be a wild guess.

West Rogers Park was roughly 30 percent Jewish when we moved in, but soon the balance shifted to well over 60 percent. Devon (pronounced Dih-vonne) Avenue, the main shopping hub in West Rogers Park, quickly became markedly Jewish in character. Within an area of eight-or-so blocks, there were three Jewish delis and three Chinese restaurants (one, the Pekin House, had an owner who over the years served so many Jews that he began to dress and look Jewish himself). The two men’s stores—Turner Brothers and Aidem & Dess (the latter featuring color-coordinated window displays)—were Jewish-owned, and so was the high-line women’s shop called Seymour Paisin, where shoppers were offered a cocktail while trying on clothes. Later a Jewish bakery and a shop selling K-rations (kreplach, knish, kugel, kasha) moved in. All very happy and heimish.

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One of the marked changes in Chicago in recent decades has been in the character of its neighborhoods. West Rogers Park, for example, has become largely South Asian. Today on a Saturday night Devon Avenue resembles nothing so much as Mysore or some other provincial Indian city. Tamil is heard everywhere. Women walk about in saris, men in white cotton kurtas and trousers, young boys in cricket sweaters. Sikh turbans are not uncommon. Stores sell live chickens, also goat meat. Cell-phone shops have chargers available that work in electrical outlets on the other side of the world. Sari shops are abundant. Asian vegetables are on offer at the greengrocer’s, and Indian restaurants predominate.

Along with the East Indians in current-day West Rogers Park live Haredi, or ultra-orthodox, Jews—chiefly farther west, past California Avenue. Ner Tamid, the conservative synagogue from which I was bar–mitzvahed in 1950, is out of business. West Devon is now rife with orthodox synagogues, Jewish day schools, and yeshivas. There are kosher butchers, religious bookstores, bakeries, and most of it closed on Shabbos.

Many of the old Chicago neighborhoods have undergone gentrification. A notable example on the north side has been Andersonville. A once rather drab neighborhood of working-class Swedes and Germans, it is known today as Mandersonville, home to older gays and lesbians—as opposed to the younger Boystown, the city’s second gay neighborhood, farther south, around Belmont and Broadway, a place much more go-go. Years ago I wrote a short story in which a woman in the Andersonville restaurant M. Henri remarks to her lunch companion that in the old days when Jews and blacks moved in people used to say, “There goes the neighborhood”; now, when gays move in, they say, “Here comes the neighborhood.” And so it has been with Andersonville, which is filled with pleasant restaurants and interesting shops, has a striking absence of people begging on its streets, very little crime, and modest houses and apartment buildings carefully kept up—a splendid instance of progress without disruption.

One sees this gentrification throughout the city in such neighborhoods as Ravenswood (where Rahm Emanuel lives), Roscoe Village, Lake View, Bucktown, Logan Square, Wicker Park. Entirely new neighborhoods have been created, too, such as South Loop and West Loop. South Loop in my youth was a skid row with a sprinkling of light industry. West Loop, another skid row, which back then had only dreary bars and no restaurants or nightlife of any sort, is now the center of au courant dining in Chicago. Both South and West Loop are now populated chiefly by the young. Much more than in the past, Chicago seems a city for the young, a place where to be in, say, one’s early 30s seems ideal.

Hyde Park, the neighborhood of the University of Chicago, an enclave of intellectual life surrounded by black neighborhoods on three sides, remains much the same despite a rather energetic program of interventionist urban renewal in the 1950s and early ’60s led by a man named Julian H. Levi, which left the neighborhood’s main shopping streets bereft. Saul Bellow, a longtime resident of Hyde Park, once told me that they ought to erect a statue to Julian Levi for his urban renewal efforts—and then blow it up. In my student days at the university in the middle 1950s, Hyde Park was already a slightly dangerous neighborhood, and the Midway Plaisance, a strip of land between the south end of the campus and the black neighborhood of Woodlawn, was known as Apache territory.

The sweeping changes that have done most to alter the human topography of Chicago have been the decline of the city’s heavy industry and the increase in its black and Hispanic populations. Chicago lost some 411,000 factory jobs between 1947 and 1982, or roughly 60 percent of its total. The stockyards closed, the steel mills followed, stores went under, real income went down. More and more whites moved out to the suburbs, and Chicago lost its place as the nation’s second-largest city to Los Angeles. Chicago today is roughly one-third black, one-third Hispanic, and one-third white. The city’s working-class character is gone.

Not surprisingly, blacks more than any other group were hurt by the reduction of factory jobs. The city’s 26 black neighborhoods (defined by having a 75 percent or more black population) were further affected by the destruction, through urban renewal, of two mammoth public-housing complexes, the Robert Taylor Homes on the near south side and Cabrini-Green on the western edge of the near north side. This caused many already trouble-burdened black families—fatherless, unemployed, with delinquent kids—to move into already struggling black neighborhoods.

In my youth, blacks—Negroes as they then were—played scarcely any obvious, or perhaps I should say visible, role in Chicago. Then as now the city was highly segregated, with blacks living almost exclusively in the south side section of town known as Bronzeville. As a small boy, the only black person I came in contact with was the sweet-natured Emma, who came to clean our apartment on Tuesdays, and died there one day.

At six or seven years old, I made the mistake of reciting to my father the poem that begins “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” In a rare fit of fury, he gave me a strong lecture on the parallel pasts of persecution of blacks and Jews, and underscored how Jews were the last people who should be prejudiced against blacks. A man who backed up his sentiments with his actions, my father had a black secretary and blacks were predominant among the eight or ten people who made costume jewelry in his one-floor factory in a five-story building on North Avenue. (The building is now the site of a glitzy gym in the youthful Wicker Park neighborhood.)

In that earlier day, whites could go into black neighborhoods much more easily—that is to say, more securely—than blacks could go into white ones. I was one of six adolescent Jewish boys who one night drove into the heart of Bronzeville to sample the bordello services of Iona Satterfield, the ex-wife of Bob Satterfield, the heavyweight whom I saw knocked out in the second round by Ezzard Charles in 1954 at Chicago Stadium. Larry Goldenberg parked his father’s maroon and white Buick Roadmaster at the curb at 4246 South St. Lawrence in front of Iona’s apartment without giving its or our safety a second thought.

Going into certain tough Italian or German neighborhoods was much more daunting. After a game against Waller High School, our mainly Jewish Senn High School basketball team was ambushed and beaten up by young Brando-ish thugs. Playing against Amundsen High School, we heard anti-Semitic chants coming from the stands.

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The Democratic machine remains in power in Chicago, though not so firmly or all-pervasively as in earlier decades. Some years ago, the political scientist Milton Rakove pointed out the non-ideological character of the machine in Chicago, which was chiefly interested in keeping its members in power, things under control, and the financial rewards of patronage rolling along. Keeping things under control, alas, has also meant keeping blacks segregated, or so argues the historian Andrew J. Diamond in a recent book called Chicago on the Make.

Diamond’s attack on the Daleys, père et fils, is that they didn’t merely ignore black neighborhoods in Chicago but actively worked against their advance by keeping them strictly segregated. The Dan Ryan Expressway, he holds, was built to slow black incursion into the white neighborhoods of the southwest side. The campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago was placed where it was, on the southwestern edge of the Loop instead of in Humboldt Park where it might have uplifted the Puerto Rican neighborhood, to keep west side blacks from moving closer into the Loop. The Daleys did this, Diamond argues, through strategically planned urban-renewal projects, through capturing anti-poverty funds from federal programs and putting them to their own uses, and through their extensive efforts to build up the Loop, encourage tourism, and protect the city’s wealthier neighborhoods: Streeterville, Lincoln Park, Lake Shore Drive. The result was blacks segregated in hyperghettos and the hegemony of what Diamond calls “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism, the great villain of Chicago on the Make, is defined by a Berkeley political scientist named Wendy Brown as “a rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life”—or, in other words, as putting monied interests before human ones.

The deterioration of most black neighborhoods in Chicago is not up for argument. Ridden with crime, without amenities, lacking even necessities (many are “food deserts,” a term denoting the absence of supermarkets or even convenience stores in some of them), the general desolation of these neighborhoods is such that, Diamond reports, “the Mexican aversion to settling in and around black neighborhoods—an aversion shared by Chicago’s next largest Latino group, Puerto Ricans—was so strong that by 2000 Chicago displayed the highest degree of segregation between blacks and Latinos among the hundred largest cities in the United States.” The black west side, long ago the home of much of the city’s Jewish population before its migration to the north side and thence to the plush suburbs of the North Shore, saw 28 blocks all but destroyed by fire after the black riots following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. These blocks have never been rebuilt.

If blacks once seemed all but invisible in my Chicago, today they are ubiquitous. Turn on the local news, a depressing experience in itself, and all too many nights one will be greeted by the sight of a black woman weeping because of the death by shooting of a son, or grandson, in a gang killing, or of a young daughter having been hit by a stray bullet. A picture of the dead boy or girl, often in high-school graduation cap and gown, will appear, and an uncle or aunt or older sibling comes on to attest to the sweetness and promise of the deceased. The killers are seldom apprehended, for the understandable reason that neighborhood residents are terrified of retaliation if they turn them in. Then there are the news items about carjackings, muggings on the El for cell phones, stolen cars crashed into Michigan Avenue shops in jewelry robberies, and groups of black youth storming into the Gap and other such shops to grab jeans or other items.

Diamond lays the blame for the hell that most of Chicago’s black neighborhoods have recently become on Richard M. Daley. While mayor, Diamond argues, Daley’s “public relations team made sure to use every gang incident to claim that gangs rather than the mayor’s policies were to blame for the two main problems African Americans had been complaining about for years: defective schools and brutal cops.” Chicago police animosity toward blacks, which included “Red Squads” used to disrupt earnest efforts at community organization, supplies a leitmotif in Chicago on the Make. The author also characterizes the large number of blacks and Latinos appointed to Richard M. Daley’s cabinet as, using Michael Katz’s phrase, “the management of marginalization.” Diamond is no easier on Rahm Emanuel, Daley’s successor, calling him “Mayor 1%.”

A month or so ago, after a particularly brutal weekend of gang killings in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, I heard a black man, an angry resident of the neighborhood, shout at a television reporter, “They better get some programs down here fast.” What “programs,” I wondered, did he suppose would seriously help? In Great American City (2012), a book about contemporary Chicago, Robert J. Sampson made the argument, based on a vast arsenal of social-science research, that troubled neighborhoods have their greatest chance of maintaining order through community organization. Sampson argues, in the less-than-convincing language of contemporary social science, which always seems to set reality off at a comfortable distance, that “whether through the enhancement of age-graded mentorship and monitoring of adolescent activities as a form of collective efficacy, increasing organizational opportunity for citizen participation in decision making, or enhancing the legitimacy of government institutions that have eroded trust among those served, we need a surgical-like attention to repairing or renewing existing structures rather than simply designing escape routes.”

To have organization one needs leadership, and part of the problem in Chicago is that black leadership has been—I can think of no more kindly word for it—dismal. Most black politicians and clergy appear to have been in business for themselves. Beginning with William Dawson, a black alderman who sold himself to the Richard J. Daley machine, through the never-camera-shy Jesse Jackson and the disappointing Senator Carol Moseley Braun to the Black Panther-turned-congressman Bobby Rush, no one has emerged to organize and lead Chicago’s black population out of the wilderness of their increasingly crime-infested neighborhoods, where drug trafficking, high unemployment, and disproportionate poverty rates reign and seem unlikely soon to decline.

The recent black protest movements seem irrelevant in the face of such misery. Even Diamond is dubious about the efficacy of the Black Lives Matter movement to accomplish more than traffic jams and attracting television cameras. He mentions that a Pew Trust study found “only 15 percent of Hispanics and 14 percent of whites claimed to strongly support” the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2016 and 2017, of the nearly 1,500 killings in Chicago, 22 involved the police, the target of Black Lives Matter. Not many people, and no putative black leaders, meanwhile, have stood up to ask why, if black lives truly matter, black-on-black gang murders have been allowed to arrive at the horrendous level they have.

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Early in Chicago on the Make, Andrew Diamond refers to the “culturization of politics,” which he describes as “the transfer of political acts and events onto the terrain of culture, where they become disassociated from questions of structure, power, and, ultimately, political mobilization.” On the penultimate page of his book, he again notes that many whites are “still invested in cultural explanations of poverty in the other [that is, black] Chicago.” The cultural, as opposed to the political, argument holds that while admitting the toll of racial discrimination in the past, something has meanwhile gone deeply wrong with urban black culture.

The argument is scarcely news. As long ago as 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” which when it first appeared was greeted with derision by nearly everyone, black and white, on the left. In his report, Moynihan argued that the gap between black and other groups was widening owing chiefly to the breakdown of the black nuclear family. Too few black fathers were on the scene and this, even more than continued discrimination by race, was responsible for the wretched conditions in which too many blacks in America found themselves. In a crucial, and much excoriated, sentence, Moynihan wrote: “The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.”

Whatever the flaws in the cultural argument—and not least among them is the fear that it can lapse into racism with its implication that black culture (and hence blacks themselves) is inherently inferior—few people are likely to note any valuable advances in that culture over the past 60 years. Compare Nat Cole to Jay-Z, Duke Ellington to Chance the Rapper, or the brilliant essays of the young James Baldwin to the racial tirades of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the sense of the regress of black culture—from one of elegance and pride to soaking in victimization—is staggering, saddening, depressing in the extreme.

Meanwhile, political correctness makes any meaningful criticism of the new black culture from outside all but impossible, if only by keeping the country’s best minds from addressing the subject. Toward the close of his career George Kennan thought about turning his interests from foreign policy to domestic problems but found himself unable to do so, he noted in his Diaries in 1975, “when one of the greatest of the problems is the deterioration of life in the great cities and when one of the major components of the problem this presents is the Negro problem, which is taboo.” Those black writers—Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, William Julius Wilson—who think outside the victimhood box are repudiated for doing so.

Every newly arrived immigrant group has in darker moments thought itself, however briefly, victimized, but by now too many American blacks have so clung to the notion that victimhood itself has become the center of their sense of themselves and has all but usurped any other identity. They have been encouraged in this victimhood script for decades and decades, first by liberals and now by progressives, to the point where it could be argued that the left generally has contributed as heavily to the condition of contemporary blacks as lingering racism. In fact, encouragement in the belief that all black problems are at root owing to racism is certain to keep blacks in their place, and might itself just be the ultimate racism.

Chicago is today two cities, one gentrified and grand, the other devastated and despairing, both within a single municipal boundary. The situation is intolerable. Something has got to be done, and, complex, difficult, and arduous as the task is, if it is one day to get done, however great the goodwill of many whites in the city, the black population of Chicago will, like every racial and ethnic group before it, have to do it pretty much on its own.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. His The Ideal of Culture: Essays (Axios Press) and Charm: The Elusive Enchantment (Taylor Trade) will both be published in 2018.