South Africans got it right when they made “kuning,” the isiZulu word that roughly translates to “it’s a lot,” one of the defining words of 2023.

It was a lot this year.

2023 seemed an epoch of crises: the highest number of global conflicts in three decades, myriad climate disasters that claimed more than 12,000 lives, and the erosion of democracies worldwide.

Amid all of it, Zócalo was here—sifting through the pressing stories and providing context, perspective, and humanity.

Our favorite 15 essays of the year, selected by the Zócalo staff and you, our readers, remind us that even in overwhelming times, people forge ahead. They think deeply. They ask questions. They create. They build community. And they even have some fun.

May you enjoy revisiting these writings as much as we did, as we ready to ring in a new year.

Boxers Know the Power of an Entrance

By Rudy Mondragón

Can anyone make an entrance like a boxer? Before moderating the Zócalo panel “What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions?,” scholar Rudy Mondragón made the case that the boxing ring entrance is the most important ritual in sport. More than a mere act of bravado, he writes, a ring entrance communicates everything from pride to dignity to political protest—in just a few ephemeral, glittering, bombastic moments.

A boxer’s entrance is more than just flash. It’s how they make their mark in the sport and the world, scholar Rudy Mondragón writes. Above, William “El Gallo Negro” King wears a Mexican sarape with a rooster and a sombrero de charro, embracing his Afro-Mexican roots. Photo by Rudy Mondragón.

How Is a Poem Like a Political Campaign?

By Derek Mong

Most of us haven’t given much thought to how poetry and political campaigning might be alike. But Zócalo contributing editor Derek Mong, who won a National Arts and Entertainment Journalism award for this essay, has given it serious thought. Aside from the obvious—that “both benefit from a clipboard”—he unearths deeper threads tying the pursuits together.

My Work as an In-Home Caregiver Shouldn’t Be This Hard

By Alva Rodriguez

Alva Rodriguez is one of more than 550,000 caregivers in California’s In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program—workers who help an estimated 650,000 disabled, blind, or elderly Californians continue living in their own homes. Writing from Fresno for our The James Irvine Foundation-funded series “What Is a Good Job Now?,” Rodriguez describes the deep precarity of the job—“one of the toughest and worst-paying you will find”— and reflects on ways to improve this essential line of work.

What Mourning Looks Like in Monterey Park

By Wendy Cheng

On January 21, 2023, a gunman opened fire and killed 11 people at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, resulting in the deadliest mass shooting in Los Angeles County history. Wendy Cheng writes about the outpouring of community support and solidarity in the wake of the attack, and the ways a public memorial for the victims reflected the city’s unique multiethnic and multiracial history as a home for “immigrants and lost ones.”

Whose Sedona Is It, Anyway?

By Tom Zoellner

During the pandemic, Sedona, Arizona, temporarily stopped advertising in high-end travel magazines. In the place of well-heeled visitors have come day travelers and overnighters from nearby cities that some residents say are destroying “Slo-dona”—and the town finds itself stuck in a fierce debate about whether it should “yank back the welcome mat to the middle class,” writes Tom Zoellner. Published in the fall, the piece generated enough chatter that just recently the city and the chamber of commerce put out a joint statement in response.

Intellectual Snobbery is for the Birds

By Tim Birkhead

Ornithologist Tim Birkhead shares how an encounter with a hobbyist birdkeeper who breeds bullfinches (who are, if you aren’t aware, “humbly endowed”) led him down a new line of research into the phenomenon known as sperm competition, and a better understanding of reproduction in birds. While the subject of Birkhead’s essay might make a middle schooler giggle, the story itself makes a powerful point: Researchers need to listen to people outside academia’s ivory tower.

Tim Birkhead, one of the world’s leading bird biologists, shares why being open to learning from people outside of academia’s ivory tower—in this case hobbyist birdkeepers—can lead to “unexpected and exciting results.” Photo by T.R. Birkhead.

Dianne Feinstein’s Most Important Job Was an Unofficial One

By Joe Mathews

Zócalo columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews has made some big proclamations this year. That San Diego is California’s “finest college town.” That we should call it the California, not the Colorado, River. That the Santa Cruz otter absolutely should have bitten back. But one of his most memorable takes came in the wake of Dianne Feinstein’s death. Reflecting on her long tenure in U.S. political life, Mathews makes a case that her greatest role in office was as California’s “last ambassador to the American government.”

Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later

By Margaret Burnham

For two years, Zócalo has worked on a project supported by the Mellon Foundation that asks: “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?” This essay by Margaret Burnham, director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, shows how such reckonings can lead to action and change through the story of John Henry James. In 1898, James, a Black man in Virginia, was accused of raping a white woman, murdered by a lynch mob, and posthumously indicted for assault. Burnham details how, 125 years later, a judge dismissed the indictment thanks to a campaign by historians, lawyers, and community members. The decision opens a “path forward for a crucial American reckoning with a thousand-plus state executions of Black males accused of assaulting white females,” Burnham writes.

The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago

By Mike Amezcua

Historian Mike Amezcua explores the parallel struggles of mid-20th century Black and Latino Chicagoans overcoming segregation and making space for their communities. “This history of Latino placemaking is far less known than the civil rights struggle led by King,” Amezcua writes. “But it remains an important context for later developments in Chicago’s urban and political history.” Readers were passionate about Amezcua’s piece, writing it in as a favorite in our audience survey.

My Mom is Out of Prison, But I’m Still Not Free

By Angel Gilbert

Most young people look forward to college as a time of independence, but when Columbia University student Angel Gilbert started school, she had already been on her own “for far too long.” In her Zócalo essay, Gilbert, one of millions of young people who have had an incarcerated parent, shares what it was like to grow up with a mother behind bars. “My emotional pain will never truly heal,” she writes. However, she adds that once she reaches her goal of becoming a lawyer, all of her experiences ensure that she will fight harder for her future marginalized clients.

Destined to Be Trans, Muslim, and Indonesian

By Amar Alfikar

Growing up in a traditional Muslim neighborhood in Java, Indonesia in the 1990s, Amar Alfikar, a trans man and activist, shares how he leaned into family and faith to understand—and embrace—his true identity. “If it was not for my family’s acceptance, I would have left my religion,” he writes. “Instead, I am pursuing an academic career in theology and religious studies and have become firm in my faith and thinking about gender diversity in Islam.”

Can Two Friends Agree to Disagree on Abortion in Post-Roe America?

By Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox

Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox found sisterhood raging about injustice—but they disagree about abortion. Read how they’ve worked to maintain their bond in post-Roe America. “Being truly pro-life or pro-choice requires us to knock down rhetorical barriers and focus on the areas where we wholeheartedly agree,” they write, “that every child has a right to be placed on a path to success and that no mother should have to sacrifice her own success to make that happen.”

Where I Go: The Candy Wrapper Museum

By Darlene Lacey

Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting old candy wrappers. Eventually, she turned her hobby into an online museum. For our series “Where I Go,” she gives truth to the adage that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and shows the power of appointing ourselves as the curators of the things that matter to us the most.

Candy Wrapper Museum curator Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting for her “roadside attraction.” Building the online museum has led to all kinds of surprises—including being sent a Necco scrapbook saved from a dumpster (pictured above). Courtesy of author.

Zócalo’s Diaspora Jukebox

As part of Zócalo Public Square’s 20th birthday celebration, we’ve been sharing the sounds of the Southland with “Diaspora Jukebox,” a series of playlists that celebrate the unique communities and musical traditions that represent greater Los Angeles. Our first “drop”—which had us moving to the rhythm of the city, dancing like it was 1982, and partying like a Zacatecano—culminated in an IRL dance party we threw at the Port of L.A. 

The Human Costs of Building a World-Class City

By Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap

And, drumroll please: Our first-ever audience choice award goes to authors Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap! They take a clear-eyed look at New Delhi’s effort to “polish” the city ahead of this year’s G20 summit, at the expense of poor and working-class people. “Rather than improving life in the city for everyone,” they write, “the beautification projects funnel public resources into creating a cosmopolitan bubble for a few.”

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2023 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Who owns your favorite park?

That might seem like a strange question. Many people assume that “we”—the public, the people—do. But from New York’s High Line to Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, parks in U.S. cities are increasingly managed, financed, and policed by private groups that have little accountability to the public. Just as many other services once seen as public goods—such as healthcare, schools, and water utilities—have increasingly become the property of corporations and wealthy financiers, public space, too, has been privatized.

Historians locate the origins of urban park privatization in 1970s New York City, when the city’s dire economic crisis spurred budget cutbacks of all kinds. These led to the establishment of the Central Park Conservancy and the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, both founded in 1980 with the goal of using private wealth to offset cuts to public funding for parks. The benefactors behind these organizations weren’t looking to aid all parks suffering from declining budgets—just those frequented by wealthy white people and tourists.

Two decades later, when the Friends of the High Line was founded in 1999 to rehabilitate a former railroad right-of-way on Manhattan’s West Side, having a private organization play a key role in the development of a park was neither novel nor controversial. It had become normalized, expected, and celebrated that new parks would involve the private sector.

When the High Line’s first section opened in 2009, it was toasted by critics and the public as a transformative urban park: it featured a unique mix of built and natural materials, and was situated three stories above city sidewalks. But the political and economic bases that made the High Line possible were equally transformative. The park marked the culmination of three decades of neoliberal changes to urban park governance, cementing the outsized role of private groups in park development, financing, and organization. Just as the High Line’s strange aesthetic mix of wild-looking plants and industrial relics set among a linear walking path has been widely copied, urban boosters across the U.S. mimicked Friends of the High Line’s strategy of mobilizing public-private partnerships to produce architecturally acclaimed green spaces.

In Chicago, park developers leaned on the Trust for Public Land, a national group that provides private funds and organizational support for privatized park projects, to build the city’s answer to the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail (also known as The 606). In Houston, where private influence has long held sway in urban development projects, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership relied on private funds for 91% of the initial funding for a linear postindustrial space along the city’s central waterway, including $30 million from ex-Enron billionaires Rich and Nancy Kinder.

There are more to come. Emboldened by the success of Buffalo Bayou Park, the Kinders have since granted $70 million to the Memorial Park Conservancy. In New York, billionaire High Line donor Barry Diller has taken a similar tack, battling various opponents to develop a $250 million privately managed park, Little Island, in the Hudson River.

Visitors to these shiny new parks might ask: So what? What’s so bad about a few architecturally brilliant parks being paid for with private dollars?

The problem with the High Line, the Bloomingdale Trail/The 606, Buffalo Bayou Park, and other parks like them is that they aggressively accelerate an unequal parks landscape. The same cost-cutting of public parks funding that started in the 1970s advances today, and its effects most harm poorer communities and communities of color, where local private resources to offset defunding don’t exist to nearly the same degree. These inequalities deepen even further when we consider that private parks organizations wield their clout to direct public funds to underwrite upscale, privatized parks like the High Line, which received $144 million in public money for its construction. The racial and economic geography of private park investment keeps the spaces from being accessible to a broad public.

The parks’ privatized security deepens this inequality. Private managers like the Friends of the High Line and the Buffalo Bayou Partnership also get to decide park rules—rules that can and do differ from those of city-run parks. Focusing on the “quality of life” violations that viciously cleansed urban public spaces of homeless people in earlier decades, the gaze of private security frequently trains itself on the people of color and poor people who visit these spaces. Few of the tourists that the parks are designed to attract—able-bodied, middle-class, white—care or even know about this aspect.

Recently, private park boosters have moved forward with proposed improvements to parks in communities of color. In Chicago, this has taken the form of developing similar parks in Pilsen (El Paseo) and the Far South Side (Big Marsh) in an effort to make park-building appear equitable. In New York, organizers have initiated plans for Queens’s answer to the High Line, QueensWay, a project billed as “a gateway and introduction to New York City’s most diverse communities.” In Houston, the Kinder Foundation gave $3 million to the Emancipation Park Conservancy, private keepers of a local symbol of Black freedom and have recently announced a $100 million offering to expand Buffalo Bayou Park into the historically Black neighborhoods east of downtown. These developments appear to offer some measure of racial equity into urban park landscapes, but given that few new park plans are tied to affordable housing, there is little question that these new parks will drive up local housing values, potentially leading to the displacement of long-term residents of communities long starved for park access.

The trend of investment in parks recalls the political strategies honed by 20th-century master planner Robert Moses, who was the force behind decades’ worth of bridges, highways, and public housing in New York City and its surrounding areas. Moses recognized that rallying the public to support park projects was easy, because of the social goods that they represented (never mind that his parks were usually concessions connected to disruptive infrastructural projects like highways). Biographer Robert Caro writes that, for Moses, “parks symbolized something good, and therefore anyone who fought for parks fought under the shield of the presumption that he was fighting for the right—and anyone who opposed him, for the wrong.”

The symbolism of parks remains powerful today. Wealthy benefactors use parks’ collective image as public, universal goods to push through plans that do not benefit the public, but that serve the private coffers of real estate developers and corporations, and those—like the philanthropists themselves—who are invested in building the symbolic and cultural power of their respective city. As elites build new park spaces in their own image, they deepen inequality and shape cities’ public realms as consumerist and securitized, to be squeezed for every last drop of private profit.

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In June of 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference headed north to Chicago to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement in a series of marches through all-white neighborhoods intended to take aim at the city’s deeply-entrenched residential segregation.

They marched through Gage Park and the surrounding neighborhoods of Chicago’s Southwest Side, where rows of bungalow homes provided a perfect visual. The modest houses were within buying reach for many Black families, but decades-old restrictions and discriminatory practices by real estate agents barred African Americans from purchasing there. Dr. King guided his supporters with a powerful sermon that had a simple message: “My place is in the sunlight of opportunity, my place is in the comfort of the good house, my place is in Gage Park.” But the presence of the civil rights activists soon ignited a violent backlash by white Chicagoans.

At the same time as King was putting Southwest Chicago in the national spotlight, Latino Chicagoans were in the midst of their own parallel struggle for access to restricted housing and urban space. Long before King’s arrival, Mexican Americans had been prevented from purchasing homes in Gage Park and surrounding areas by housing discrimination and threats of violence. So while the violent response to King’s marches was directed at civil rights activists and the idea of integration, it also shaped Latino Chicagoans’ community-building efforts. The powerful white backlash prolonged restrictions on urban space, forcing Latino Chicagoans to anchor their residential, civic, and economic lives on the boundary lines of segregation.

The struggle for a Latino place on the Southwest Side began in the 1910s and 1920s, when thousands of Mexican immigrants poured into Chicago to work in stockyards and slaughterhouses. A Mexican enclave formed behind the Union Stock Yards, part of a larger area known as the Back of the Yards. The neighborhood was already internationally infamous, as the setting of Upton Sinclair’s jaw-dropping 1906 novel The Jungle, an exposé of the unsanitary conditions in which America’s consumer meat was produced. Its working class, predominantly Central and Eastern European residents reluctantly allowed the Latino enclave to exist, as long as it remained tightly contained within a few city blocks.

White Chicagoans often fortified neighborhood boundaries through real estate industry practices that prohibited Black Americans from buying in their neighborhoods. Racial violence also wrought terror, and Mexicans quickly learned from the white mob violence perpetrated against Black homebuyers. “We were isolated there—we dared not move out of that district,” recalled Monico C. Amador, who grew up in Back of the Yards in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1944, his father was shot and killed just outside the neighborhood by a white man who resented the presence of Mexicans there.

For working-class white residents between the 1920s and 1950s, the old, hard-scrabble Back of the Yards neighborhood and its packinghouse jobs served as a gateway to nicer parts of the Southwest Side. Neighborhoods like Gage Park, Chicago Lawn, West Lawn, and Marquette Park were only blocks away from the stockyards but represented—as one former resident put it—a “move away from the immigrant experience.” Their coal-heated, octagon-shaped, brick bungalow homes, sitting on identically-sized lots, provided the comfort of suburban-like sameness within the city. But everyone knew that these neighborhoods were completely off limits to anyone who possessed dark skin, spoke Spanish, or both.

In the 1950s and 1960s, years before Dr. King arrived, both Black and Latino Chicagoans began to challenge this unspoken rule, seeking to escape the overcrowded environs of their respective segregated landscapes, pushing further west and south in search of better homes. These efforts to challenge housing restrictions provoked an intense campaign by whites, parish groups, homeowner associations, and the lending industry, who banded together with real estate agents in the mid-1950s to draw a new restrictive boundary along Ashland Avenue, a major north-south thoroughfare, agreeing to keep homes west of Ashland all-white.

Like previous racial boundaries, the Ashland covenant was enforced through discrimination and violence. The Southwest Side of the 1960s simmered with white power groups, including a large chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, Operation Crescent (which championed “white community control”), a youth gang called the United Patriots, the John Birch Society, and an openly segregationist Gage Park Civic Association. All these groups fed Southwest Side residents with fears about the nearby presence of Blacks and Latinos.

In 1966, when King’s Freedom Movement arrived, that fear erupted into racial mob violence. “The racists … threw rocks and bottles and cherry bombs at the marchers, carried signs advocating White Power, and chanted invectives,” historian Simon Balto writes. During one march, a thrown brick struck King himself in the head, causing him to bleed.

In August, King retreated. The Chicago Freedom Movement ended its campaign for open housing, walking away with few if any gains, and went down in history as a setback for the civil rights leader and Black Chicagoans.

Though Chicago’s Mexican and Mexican American communities were also affected by housing discrimination and racist hatred, by and large its members did not join King’s supporters in their demonstrations. Some Latino activists took to the streets throughout the 1960s, but far more Mexican Chicagoans pursued a parallel but divergent path, working within the limits of segregation restrictions to lay crucial groundwork for Latino politics and placemaking—an effort to build a social infrastructure of inclusion, familiarity, and relevance—with the hope that successful business and political power would gradually erode housing restrictions.

During the 1960s, the Mexican community built commercial, cultural, and political institutions right up to Ashland Avenue’s colorline. By the late 1960s, the avenue was home to the headquarters of both the Mexican American Democratic Organization and the Mexican Chamber of Commerce, two key organizations that would build relationships not with the civil rights movement but instead with the all-powerful Richard J. Daley machine, seeking political inclusion no matter how minor the concessions the city’s powerbrokers offered. That push for limited inclusion won out over more direct participation in the Chicago Freedom Movement—or at least over a more forceful challenge to segregation and the violence of white supremacy.

This history of Latino placemaking is far less known than the civil rights struggle led by King. But it remains an important context for later developments in Chicago’s urban and political history. Perhaps most notably, the Latino community in Chicago helped secure the 1983 election of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, whose support came from a broad, multiracial alliance for which shared housing discrimination and political neglect were key catalysts for action.

Today, Chicago’s Southwest Side is a wellspring of grassroots organizing by young progressives who challenge the current political-economic system that keeps working-class nonwhite Chicagoans struggling. These residents value Gage Park not for its exclusivity or legacy of white power, but instead for its roles in King’s active advocacy for broad structural change. And on any given day, along the area’s commercial corridors, one can hear regional Mexican music blasting from giant speakers and see Black Lives Matter signs on storefronts—a far cry from the summer of 1966, when the two communities, in spite of shared struggles, stood apart.

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We think the ghosts will come to us as we sit in Kaitlyn’s car, once our car, on top of the man-made hill that houses the only mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery. Small blue orbs dot the landscape. Ghost hunting shows often cite orbs as a sign of a haunting. But these are just battery-operated lamps that families have left next to their dead’s gravestones.

We figure this spot under the tree is a good place to hide from the few cars that might drive by in the night, going from Urbana to Champaign or vice versa. I turn the ignition off.

“Now what?” Kaitlyn sighs. Our ghost hunting inexperience is evident.

Three months ago, I had stood in our kitchen, now my kitchen, and said: I’m gay. At first, I had said I would find a new place because she had loved the garden in the backyard. But she wanted to go because she didn’t want to be in a house haunted by our former togetherness.

Over the remains of our marriage, we both wanted to create a celebration for our new friendship and a new tradition—one last ours. Inspired by the then-new show “Ghost Hunters,” we’d search out ghosts on Halloween, our shared favorite holiday. We decided to call it Wake the Dead.

Fog from the cold creeps up the windows. Silhouettes of the tree’s branches knock against the back window.

“What was that?” Kaitlyn whispers

“What was what?” I look around, afraid. The idea of seeing a ghost seemed fun, the increasing possibility as we sit in the dark cemetery, not so much.

“Thought I saw something moving across that way.” She points towards a row of graves.

I don’t see anything. Still, as the cold bleeds in through the vents, making everything feel even creepier, a thought whispers to me that we shouldn’t be there.

“Want to go?”

She nods. I drive as fast as I can on the twisty cemetery road in the dark. We go back to my apartment to eat pizza and watch a comedy. We laugh hard at anything slightly funny.

The author’s ceramic figurine in Chicago’s AIDS Garden—a place he believes is crowded with gay ghosts or ‘lavender apparitions.’ Courtesy of author.

Maybe we didn’t see anything because ghosts don’t hang out in cemeteries. According to Shane McClelland, co-founder of the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters, they tend to return to places they associate with happiness or a place where they experienced trauma.

McClelland’s group hosts a YouTube show called “Queer Ghost Hunters.” In contrast to regular ghost hunting shows, all the investigators on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are queer, and the subjects of their investigations are queer ghosts.

I started watching Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters in April 2022, while researching my memoir about my relationship to ghosts. Like my queerness, ghosts have always been with me, even when I didn’t want to acknowledge them. I started to notice my father’s ghost standing behind me three years ago when I remembered that he had molested me. Those memories brought on PTSD, major depression, and generalized anxiety disorder. I stopped showering. I slept with the lights on. No matter where I went or what I did, he was there, his hand hovering above my left shoulder.

But just as ghosts can haunt places of pleasure or trauma, that “you are not alone” feeling can be scary or be a comfort. Like I once accepted being queer, I eventually accepted being haunted. My once-casual interest in ghosts has become a full-fledged fascination. Now, instead of fearing being haunted, I devote much of my free time to seeking queer ghosts and writing haunted memoir, a term I coined, about the lived experience of being haunted. Ghosts have led me to a community of others also welcoming ghosts into their lives.

I’ve found that queerness and ghosts go together in fundamental ways. For one, our lack of queer history is a haunting. Rather than camera-ready scares, the hunts on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are a vehicle for finding and sharing queer history. By seeking out our ghosts and telling their stories, we defy erasure.

But in “Queer Ghost Hunters”, the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters focus their searches on places of trauma, like prisons and abandoned asylums. They don’t go anywhere the queer ghosts might have had fun. If we are to memorialize places of queer trauma—and I believe we should—we also need to memorialize places of queer joy. For me, the power of queer ghost hunting lies in the way that it offers a means to acknowledge the co-existence of loss and celebration in queer, haunted spaces.

AIDS Garden Chicago balances this coexistence. Built on the ruins of what used to be a cruising and queer gathering spot known as Belmont Rocks in one of the city’s gay-friendly northern neighborhoods, the garden’s site memorializes a joyful part of Chicago’s queer history. Chicago Reader described Belmont Rocks as “the rare spot where the queer community could mix and mingle in broad daylight all summer long” and “nothing short of a gay paradise.”

Opened this year, the AIDS Garden’s centerpiece is a 30-foot, green Keith Haring sculpture titled Self-Portrait. Its defiant, joyful figure has its left leg and arm raised, as if photographed mid step. The park that circles the sculpture has concrete walking paths, benches, and pink and orange flowers. Through QR codes, visitors can scan to hear a still-growing collection of stories from those who lived through the crisis years in Chicago, as well as stories about those who didn’t make it. Because not a lot of storytelling exists about the Midwest during the height of the AIDS epidemic, the park is vital in making space to witness queer history and lives.

The author’s ceramic ghost stands in front of a 30-foot Keith Haring sculpture at AIDS Garden Chicago. Coutesy of author.

On the day I visit, the garden is busy: Cinnamon fills the air from the churros being made by the nearby food stand; closer to the lake, the air smells of sweat and sunscreen. People picnic under the shade of the trees surrounding the garden, while others hurry by to get a spot on the grass close to the lake. Some sunbathe on the concrete lip between the garden and the lakefront walkways just like in the historical pictures of Belmont Rocks. All of it feels like a way of honoring the space—laughing, taking in the sun, being with friends by the lake, just like the ghosts who haunt this space did when they were alive. It is a communal space for the living and the dead where the feeling that you are not alone is a comfort.

I’ve brought my own ghost to the garden, a ceramic figurine. I lie on my stomach on the crisp summer grass right in front of the sculpture to get a picture of the two together. The garden, I imagine, must be crowded with gay ghosts—or “lavender apparitions,” this more delightful descriptor courtesy of the podcast History Is Gay’s Halloween episode featuring the Queer Ghost Hunters. Just as ghosts are evidence of history, lavender apparitions prove queer people have always existed—even when we didn’t have language for queerness, even when some try to make us vanish.

Wake the Dead was a one-time event. Kaitlyn started her own tradition the next year: a Halloween costume party. Eventually, we phased out of each other’s lives, and I moved out of central Illinois to find my new home in Chicago, a city that provides space for queer history, celebration. Here, through searching out queer ghosts, I’ve reclaimed the ghost for myself just as I have the feeling of being haunted—two things the frightened version of me hiding from ghosts in that car in Urbana-Champaign would not have thought possible.

My new home is also walking distance to a local gay beach on Lake Michigan. I walk along the sand-covered concrete ridge that separates the beach from the preserved prairie dunes, the tall yellow-green marram grass stretching out towards the dark gray-blue water, towards the lighthouse with the rainbow base, on one of the first warm days. The dunes are themselves an unofficial cemetery of those lost to settler genocide. As I sit on the beach, the Chicago wind picks up, and sand swirls in the wind as if it’s dancing. I try to record it on my phone, to document what feels magical. I know I won’t capture it, but that’s OK. I let myself enjoy this lavender apparition, enjoying movement after being frozen for the winter. A gay ghost, as in a happy one.

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The role of memory-keeper is a tangled one, as Rebecca Makkai discovered when she interviewed patients, doctors, nurses, activists, and historians who lived through the AIDS epidemic for her 2018 novel, The Great Believers. The book is a provocative read during the COVID-19 crisis as we find ourselves in a state of anticipatory grief, knowing that our world is and will be forever changed by this moment, but not yet knowing what picking up the pieces will look like—or who will be left to do so. Seeing the pandemic paralleled over the summer with epidemics of both economic inequity and violence against Black lives, we are watching every injustice of our society revealed in real time.

Will COVID contribute to another “Lost Generation”? That sobriquet—popularized by Gertrude Stein and her protégé Ernest Hemingway—is most commonly applied to those who came of age during the First World War. It also specifically denotes the Americans who flocked to Paris in the war’s aftermath to try to process their new reality through literature. But Makkai is more interested in the way F. Scott Fitzgerald uses it in his essay “My Generation,” about how the war completely transformed his peers:

We were the great believers. Well—many are dead, and some I have quarreled with and don’t see anymore. But I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved—and who now walk the long stormy summer.

The novelist bestows the same title on those who witnessed and suffered during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s to early 1990s. The U.S. government’s initial reaction to AIDS, which was first documented in 1981, was to ignore, downplay, and dismiss it. Members of the Reagan administration mocked its severity, and the president did not even publicly acknowledge the disease until 1985. By the time he left office in 1989, more than 89,000 Americans had died of AIDS.

In the wake of such incredible loss, the role of memory-keeper is complicated by questions of survivors’ guilt, which Makkai found plagued many of her interview subjects: Did they deserve to tell these stories? Why were they the ones left to do it?

One subject felt guilty about sharing a deceased friend’s story because he thought that had his friend lived, they likely would have grown apart. He told Makkai he felt “unworthy being the keeper of his legacy.” But memories are the way that the dead live on—and it falls to the survivors to protect and share them.

The Great Believers centers around Yale, a gay man living in 1980s Chicago, whose friend group is decimated by AIDS. Employed at a Northwestern University art gallery, he helps acquire the art collection of Nora, a friend’s elderly aunt who studied art in Paris before World War I. Nora has her own reasons for bestowing her valuable collection. Among the pieces are those made by a former lover, an aspiring artist who suffered nerve damage in his hand during the war and committed suicide not long after. Over half a century later, Nora worries he will be lost to history. By donating his artwork alongside that of his better-known peers, she feels she is securing—and passing along—his memory.

Much of Makkai’s novel considers how memory and art are intertwined. How do “interruptions of history into our lives” impact people and generations, and how do we contend with those disruptions? Reading diaries from the WWI era, Makkai shared in an interview that she was struck by “severe trauma that was really not dealt with in any way at that time.”

The Great Believers is itself a piece of art crafted in response to traumatic events. As someone who grew up in Chicago during the AIDS epidemic, Makkai was stunned by how little the disease’s devastating impact on the city’s gay community had been documented. She spent several years researching the crisis and interviewing survivors to accurately capture the struggle in her novel. And in empathically transmitting the thoughts and experiences of her characters, whose lives unfold in times not necessarily experienced by her readers, her book becomes a fictional yet very real meta-memory keeper.

When we finally emerge from this current pandemic and period of protest, our vision will be altered and redefined by our memories. We will at once see the world as it was before and as it is after. As Makkai writes poignantly of present-day Chicago through one character’s eyes: “How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand that it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?”

In our near future, we will see the empty spaces, the lost potential of lives ended too soon and passions not pursued because so many lives were taken, either by disease or by violence. Speaking of her friends who were never able to return to their studies or cut-short careers, Nora says, “If I told you Picasso died in the war, you’d understand. Poof, there goes Guernica. But I tell you Jacques Weiss died at the Somme, and you don’t know what to miss.”

Whether on an individual or societal level, we will mourn what has been lost—both the tangible and ephemeral. Importantly, we will also see the world as it should be, for grief can be a politicizing force. The higher COVID-19 death rates among people of color, especially in the Black, Latinx, and Native American communities, expose longstanding inequalities in our health care system. The horror of a national death count that is fast approaching 200,000, and the Trump administration’s mishandling of the crisis—worsening the pandemic’s effects and unnecessarily costing lives—could further power the fight for a national health care system and a more equitable economy and justice system.

The fight for health care justice is a battle that those who lived during the AIDS epidemic helped forge. The Great Believers chronicles the cruelty of the Reagan administration’s inaction and that of the bureaucratic health care system, as HIV+ characters struggle to afford drug treatments, grapple with insurance companies to cover their treatment, and agitate for the government to recognize and respond to the crisis.

In encouraging Yale to come to an organizing meeting, a friend tells him, “Everyone I know who isn’t political, it’s just because they haven’t tapped into their anger.” Later, that same friend convinces Yale to attend a demonstration, where he puts his own body on the line. The action Makkai portrays in her book actually unfolded in the streets of Chicago, organized by activist group ACT UP in April 1990. It targeted the American Medical Association’s policy against national healthcare and successfully campaigned for changes at a local Cook County hospital, where beds had been sitting empty due to lack of funding and where female AIDS patients had been denied care. Yale’s politically active friend, a young, white male lawyer, highlights the role of solidarity in the battle: “If we’re not fighting for poor black women who need beds at County … we’re as bad as the fucking Republicans.”

There are lessons to be learned from their activism, ones Makkai says resonate with the current struggles: “[W]e can see … how to support each other through crisis, how to pace ourselves for long-term survival, how to both survive and fight—that you can take care of yourself and fight for yourself and others at the same time.”

For all the loss and heartbreak that The Great Believers lays bare, the core of the novel proves ultimately hopeful because it underscores that we are the memory-keepers of this moment. What we choose to remember and how we choose to respond will define our own legacy.

The post The Anticipatory Grief of Living Through a Pandemic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

During her first trip on the train, Kimura had ridden with the windows closed and the shades down, by order of the military. This time, as a parolee and not a prisoner, she was allowed to gaze at the world beyond.

Kimura, just 28 years old, was headed to Chicago with urgent matters on her mind. Her government jailors, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), had just issued a “work leave” policy, an official permission slip for her to live “normally” on the outside, but only if she could find—and hold—full-time employment. She needed a job to remain free, and the strangeness of her predicament weighed on her.

Later in life, Kimura (not her real name) described having a “marked feeling of self-consciousness” as she rode the train, which was packed with American G.I.s riding to and from military bases. The soldiers turned out to be open and friendly, but the experience still jarred. “I thought everybody was looking at me,” Kimura told an interviewer. She braced herself for “some sort of unpleasantness.” That train ride was her route out of formal wartime imprisonment, but Kimura’s war wasn’t over—and wouldn’t end for some time.

The story of the incarceration of people of Japanese heritage is a familiar one. After the Pearl Harbor bombing in 1941, U.S. officials stoked a racial hysteria in which Japanese Americans were defined as an internal enemy loyal to Japan, and thus a wartime national security risk. Government agents rounded up Japanese Americans and shipped them to prisons in California, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and Arkansas, and if we include those detained as “leaders,” then the captivity geography extends to even more states. Japanese American families lived in crowded, spartan, temporary quarters that they sometimes had to finish building themselves, so hastily and poorly planned was the forced evacuation. They spent much of the war as captives.

But what happened to the prisoners next—when people like Kimura had to forge new lives in unseen, far-flung corners of the country—is also an important American war story, and one many of us haven’t heard. These smaller stories—of train rides, job searches, and apartment hunting in new cities—complicate narratives of war and national identity.

The WRA called Kimura a “resettler,” but she was a refugee, really. President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, signed in February 1942, had empowered the military to remove Japanese Americans from much of the West Coast and even part of Arizona. It remained in effect until the end of the war—so by law, work leave applicants like Kimura could not go home. They could go East, though, so WRA officials pointed work-seekers to Chicago—a place where jobs were plentiful, and Japanese Americans might ride out the war in urban anonymity, under “a cloak of indifference,” as a WRA study put it.

In January 1943, the WRA opened its first “field office” in Chicago. At least 20,000 Japanese Americans migrated there between 1943 and 1950. Kimura was part of a Nisei vanguard, a wave of young, single migrants, first men and eventually young women, who would test the waters and lay the financial groundwork to bring parents, grandparents, and younger siblings along.

Kimura left Manzanar at the same time as about a dozen others, and she had mixed feelings: She was scared and worried about leaving her family, but she was eager, even excited, to see what a big city could offer. Stories of anti-Japanese violence circulated in every camp, and while no one would have called an American city “safe,” Chicago was at least “a safer bet,” according to Shotaro Frank Miyamoto, a Japanese American from Seattle who was forcibly relocated to the Puyallup camp, and later became a scholar of the Chicago resettlement.

Once they survived the train trip, Japanese Americans had to navigate the city. They had to report directly to the WRA’s Chicago office, register, and start searching for a job and a place to live. When they found both, they had to relay that information back to the office; if they ever changed jobs or residences, they had to report that, too. The WRA had the right to call anyone back to camp, at any point, for what it deemed “sufficient reason,” a security phrase just as nebulous and arbitrary as the rationale for incarceration. Chicago’s new Japanese American residents were not in captivity but they were still in custody.

It was not easy to rebuild community in such circumstances, and despite WRA assurances about Chicago’s friendliness, Japanese Americans described a mixed reception. They could rely on Japanese American mutual aid groups and some white allies, but relocating was often frightening and frustrating.

Chicago was a big, noisy place, made even bigger by the bustle of war. It was a hard place to make home, especially because the WRA directed Japanese American refugees to disperse once they got off the train. WRA director Dillon S. Myer warned against the creation of a “Little Tokyo” in the city. He envisioned a postwar multiculturalism where races mingled at work and at play, but his racial liberalism was myopic, and ignorant of the trauma of forced removal.

West Coast Japanese Americans had to figure out the Midwestern city’s racial maps, informal borders, and unwritten rules on their own. When they knocked on a door of a building with a “for rent” sign, some got flat-out refusals—“no Japs!”—while others encountered clumsy dodges: the apartment was already taken, and the landlord had merely forgotten to remove the sign. Sometimes refugees found acceptance, based on a racial stereotype that they would be compliant, quiet, and clean tenants. There is some evidence that white Chicagoans of German origin—with memories of their own vilification during World War I—were willing to rent to refugees, to broker a wartime racial accord even if only as landlord and tenant.

Chicago resettlement ad. Courtesy of the Chicago Japanese American Yearbook, 1948.

Resettlers could live only where rents were low and tolerance high. Like many young Nisei, Kimura landed first in a Chicago hostel, one of the few in the city run by religious groups who offered early housing assistance to refugees. Hostels were filled to capacity with migrants, so Kimura quickly left to room with a girlfriend elsewhere in the city. When her siblings applied to leave Manzanar too, she searched for a larger apartment that might also accommodate her parents and other relatives, whom she thought would follow. Each inquiry with a potential landlord felt like an audition. Kimura described the hunt as “the hardest thing I ever did in my life,” a remarkable statement from someone who had just left a concentration camp. After several refusals, which “might be racial discrimination, but I wasn’t sure,” she found a run-down building that lacked every basic amenity, but had enough flats to accommodate her family. As Kimura later described it, “our return to normal life was in cramped quarters and it was hard.” When she compared notes with other resettler families, she realized they all had suffered in the same way.

Despite the counsel to disperse, in the end, Kimura and other resettlers did exactly what so many racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. had done before them: They huddled and leaned on each other. They bought apartment buildings, grocery stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, beauty parlors, and flower shops. Told to scatter by the WRA, they instead formed their own urban villages in different parts of Chicago. The agency was uneasy about this racial concentration, but it nevertheless cheered Japanese American entrepreneurialism. The Chicago field office was set up only to launch Japanese Americans, not to sustain them.

Indeed, the WRA was more concerned about Japanese Americans’ long-term financial dependency than their threat to national security. WRA documents from the period maintain an almost singular focus on getting detainees back to self-sufficiency. Myer called the Japanese American incarceration “the problem of caring,” a bizarre phrase which belies the cruelty of the policy but reveals much about a growing realization that putting people in wartime custody might foster postwar dependency. How long would it take Japanese Americans to resume, in Myer’s words, a “useful American life with all possible speed”? Was the government now obligated to “care” for a population it had removed from its sources of income and wealth? The work leave policy seemed a good solution, for it both compelled and enabled Japanese Americans to fund their own recovery—the American way—and it reassured the cities receiving refugees that they “would not become public charges” in peacetime.

But there were inconsistencies and inequalities in the approach. The WRA admonished young workers like Kimura to keep the first job they found instead of shopping the market for higher pay, a free-market right celebrated as fundamentally American during wartime. Initially praised as “industrious and intelligent workers,” Japanese Americans were later accused by Chicago’s WRA director of being ungrateful and lazy when they defied unfair conditions or quit to take a better job. Some employers even began to call them “60-day Japs” to lament their labor mobility.

Japanese Americans in Chicago, even under constant watch, were able to build a Midwestern, urban Asian American community—absent before the war, made by its malice. When World War II ended, however, their recovery continued to be encumbered by the race-based mass detention and relocations they had endured: burdens no other Americans shared. For Japanese Americans, peace was not a date, it was a process. Indeed, it wasn’t really clear when hostilities ended and peace began. Did the war end when they left camp for a job? When formal evacuation orders lifted in 1944? On VJ-Day in 1945? Or when the final WRA camp closed in 1946? Some Japanese Americans who settled in Chicago said the war didn’t feel “over” to them until they were able to buy their first homes in the suburbs, in the early 60s.

Novelist and literary scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen notes that “all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” As we mark the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end this year, we have another chance to remember not only the war but the postwar stories of Americans like Kaye Kimura—stories that lay bare how some of World War II’s citizens sacrificed and lost, not for their country but at the hands of it.

The post How Japanese Americans Built a ‘Useful American Life with All Possible Speed’ in 1940s Chicago appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Chicago’s rise was so sudden and so astounding that many observers concluded it must have been predestined by nature or God, a view that echoed the 19th-century belief in the inevitability of American expansion and progress known as Manifest Destiny. In 1880, for instance, the former lieutenant governor of Illinois, William Bross, told members of the Chicago Historical Society that, “He who is the Author of Nature selected the site of this great city.” In 1923, in an address to the Geographical Society of Chicago, a University of Chicago geographer, J. Paul Goode, argued that the city’s location made its growth inevitable. His talk was titled “Chicago: A City of Destiny.”

Nature had, indeed, endowed Chicago with a crucial locational advantage: The city sits between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, making it possible for people working or living there to travel by boat all the way to the Atlantic Ocean or to the Gulf of Mexico. But geography alone would not secure the city’s destiny: Chicago’s growth, like that of many other American cities, was also predicated on government-led engineering projects—and the mastery of our most essential resource, water. Between the 1830s and 1900, lawmakers, engineers, and thousands of long-forgotten laborers created a new, manmade geography for Chicago—building a canal and sewers, raising city streets, and even reversing a river. These monumental feats of engineering—as much as nature—spurred Chicago’s miraculous growth, and provided a model for other American cities to engineer their way to success.

The promise of Chicago’s geography was immediately obvious to the first Europeans who passed through the site in 1673. Fur trader Louis Joliet and Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette paddled up the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers, crossing a short, but sometimes terribly muddy land route, or portage, to the Chicago River—which, in turn, flowed into Lake Michigan. Marveling at the route’s imperial possibilities because it connected the Gulf of Mexico to territories north of the Great Lakes, Joliet reported to the governor of French Canada, “we can quite easily go to Florida in boat” by building only one canal. Such a canal would link Quebec to the fertile lands of the continental interior where, Joliet advised the governor, there would be “great advantages…to founding new colonies,” thereby expanding the reach of its lucrative fur trading operations.

The French never undertook the canal or fulfilled their imperial vision. But even without a canal, the portage remained a vital, if often unpleasant, route for fur traders. In 1818, Gurdon S. Hubbard, an employee of the American Fur Company, paddled from Lake Michigan up the Chicago River to its source about six miles inland. At that point, their boats had to be “placed on short rollers…until the [Mud] lake was reached.” For three days, the men slogged through the portage. “Four men only remained in a boat and pushed with…poles, while six or eight others waded in the mud alongside…[and still] others busied themselves in transporting our goods on their backs.” All the while, the men were beset by leeches that “stuck so tight to the skin that they broke in pieces if force was used to remove them.”

By the 1830s, Illinois officials, inspired by the success of New York’s Erie Canal (1825) and the Ohio and Erie Canal (1832), began construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which was designed to harness gravity to siphon water out of the Chicago River—effectively reversing the river’s flow so that it went away from, rather than into, Lake Michigan. The bold, costly plan called for making a “deep cut” channel through very tough clay called hardpan. The state began construction in 1836. Within a year, though, the Panic of 1837 struck, and by November 1841, Illinois had largely stopped work on the canal. By 1842, the state’s debt was $10.6 million and annual interest payments were $800,000. The canal—along with spending on a railroad and the failure of the state bank—had plunged Illinois into ruin. In 1843, the state abandoned the canal project, having already spent $5.1 million dollars.

The Chicago River in 2015. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Real estate investors, who had a lot to lose if Chicago’s growth stalled, urged the state to resume canal construction. New York City land speculator Arthur Bronson and a group of Chicago boosters found lenders who were willing to provide the state with an additional $1.5 million to complete the canal. The lenders had one condition, however: To cut costs, the state had to abandon the deep cut for a cheaper, shallower channel. Instead of using the “deep cut” channel and its gravity-fed system to reverse the flow of the river, engineers would use pumps to push a smaller volume of river water into the canal without forcing the river to reverse its course. Crews began digging again in 1845, completing the project in 1848.

Just as Joliet had imagined, the canal transformed Chicago into a major center of trade. On April 24, 1848, the first cargo boat to arrive in Chicago by canal, General Thornton, hauled sugar from New Orleans through the city on its way to Buffalo. In its first decade of operation, the canal carried a staggering amount of freight: 5.5 million bushels of wheat; 26 million bushels of corn; 27 million pounds of pork; 563 million board feet of lumber. With the canal—and later the railroads—Chicago became an increasingly attractive location for manufacturers. Cyrus McCormick, for example, moved his mechanical reaper factory from Virginia to the banks of the Chicago River less than a year before the canal’s imminent completion.

While the canal established Chicago as a major city, it also created problems whose solutions required still more engineering. One such issue arrived on April 29, 1849, when the John Drew, from New Orleans, carried cholera into the city. Within hours of the boat’s arrival, its captain and several passengers died. The disease spread rapidly throughout the city, sending physicians rushing from patient to patient to soothe fevers, cramps, and diarrhea. One-tenth of the city’s 29,000 residents contracted the disease and 678 died.

In swampy cities like Chicago, waterborne diseases like cholera thrived. By 1854, the city had survived epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and dysentery, killing as many as 1,500 people at a time. Though scientists had not yet identified the germs that caused these diseases, even casual observers understood that illness spread in places with poor drainage. In 1850, the newspaper Gem of the Prairie observed, for example, that parts of Chicago were “quagmires, the gutters running with filth at which the very swine turn up their noses.” From the “reeking mass of abominations” beneath the plank streets, the paper contended, “miasmas wafted into the neighboring shops and dwellings, to poison their inmates.” The only solution was “a thorough system of drainage.”

So, in 1855, officials mounted a dramatic attempt to rescue their city with another massive engineering project by hiring Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough, an engineer renowned for his work on Boston’s water system, to raise Chicago out of the muck. First, Chesbrough laid the sewers above the streets, positioning them so that gravity would carry their contents into the Chicago River. He then filled the streets with dirt, covering the sewers and elevating the city’s thoroughfares as much as eight feet above the buildings that flanked them. Many Chicagoans built staircases from the street down to their front doors. Others raised their structures—more than 200— using jacks.

As Chicagoans hoisted their buildings and the city began growing anew, Chesbrough’s sewers flooded the river with waste, causing new problems. The Chicago River flowed directly into Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water. Initially, the volume of sewage was small and lake water diluted its polluting effects, as Chesbrough had calculated. But, when Chicago’s population tripled from 100,000 in 1860 to 300,000 in 1870, the amount of feces, chemicals, and decaying animal matter making its way into the waterways multiplied. The putrid smell of the river became unbearable and pollution began to flow into the city’s drinking water.

It was time for more engineering. In 1865, Chesbrough and state officials decided to manage Chicago’s water pollution by enacting an old proposal: making a deep cut through the Illinois and Michigan Canal and, this time, actually reversing the Chicago River and sending the city’s sewage down the canal, away from Lake Michigan. After six years, on July 15, 1871, throngs of people crowded the riverbanks to see workers chop down a temporary dam separating the river and the canal. The onlookers threw pieces of straw on the river and watched as they slowly began to float toward the canal, and away from their drinking water.

Ever since, Chicago has continued to grow, and most of the time, its river has run backward. In 1900, the Sanitary District of Chicago, a regional government agency, completed the new, deeper Sanitary and Ship Canal, which has largely kept the dirty Chicago River running away from the lake, even as the metropolitan area has grown to 9.5 million people today.

The reversal of the river marked a crucial juncture in the story of Chicago’s miraculous rise. It was the culmination of a series of great engineering projects orchestrated by the state that created the conditions—sewage, drinking water, and a route between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins—for Chicago to become the great industrial metropolis Carl Sandburg described in 1914: “Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.”

Chicago’s history confirms the old adage that geography is destiny. But the city’s experiences also suggest that geography is not just a fixed fact of nature, as Bross and Goode had implied; geography is also something continually made and remade by people and governments, a thing as fluid as water itself. Chicago’s model of growth—based on government-led water engineering projects—was duplicated by other cities—such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas—in the 20th century. This history of engineering-led growth in Chicago and other cities is both inspirational and a cautionary tale for our current age, when climate change demands that we engineer our cities to keep rising seas at bay. If geography is destiny, Chicago’s history offers the hope that fate is still partly in our hands.

The post How Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Swamp and Became a Modern Metropolis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Though Candyman is rumored to dwell inside one of the looming high-rises, what’s most terrifying here is really the idea of the inner-city location. Decades before writer-director Bernard Rose’s horror flick arrived in theaters, public housing for many Americans had come to represent the unruliness and otherness of U.S. cities. And Cabrini-Green stood as the symbol of every troubled housing project—a bogeyman that conjured fears of violence, poverty, and racial antagonism.

Like many mid-20th-century public housing projects across the Northeast and Midwest, Cabrini-Green was conceived as a model of civic redevelopment, and as a source for a more democratic form of urban living. It was built in stages on Chicago’s Near North Side beginning in the 1940s—first with barracks-style row houses and then, in the 1950s and 1960s, augmented by 23 towers on “superblocks” closed off to through streets and commercial uses. It contained 3,600 public housing units in total, with a population exceeding 15,000, packed tightly into a mere 70 acres of land.

The Cabrini-Green area, along the banks of the Chicago River’s North Fork, previously had been an industrial slum, home to a succession of poor immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and southern Italy, in addition to a growing number of African Americans who had fled from the Jim Crow South. The smell of sulfur and the bright flames of a nearby gasworks had given the river district the nickname “Little Hell.” House fires, infant mortality, pneumonia, and juvenile delinquency all occurred there at many times the rate of the city as a whole.

Public housing was seen as a cure for the area’s decay and disrepair. At the dedication of the Cabrini row houses, in 1942, Mayor Edward Kelley declared that the modest and orderly buildings “symbolize the Chicago that is to be. We cannot continue as a nation, half slum and half palace. This project sets an example for the wide reconstruction of substandard areas which will come after the war.”

Then, as now, the for-profit real estate market had failed most low-income renters. During the 1940s, the rental vacancy rate in Chicago fell to less than one percent. A quarter of the existing homes were falling apart and needed to be replaced. In the city’s segregated black neighborhoods, families were excluded from the open housing market, and conditions there were even more dire. New public housing offered renters a kind of salvation—from cold-water flats, firetraps, and capricious evictions. For many families, the Chicago Housing Authority promise of a “decent, safe and sanitary home” felt like a leap into the middle class.

But as time went on, the Chicago Housing Authority, like many big-city authorities, was perennially underfunded and disastrously mismanaged. In Chicago, as elsewhere, high-rise developments were built intentionally in neighborhoods that were already segregated racially. After the 1950s, as large numbers of Chicagoans fled the city for the suburbs, and manufacturing jobs disappeared as well, public housing populations became poorer and more uniformly black. The amount collected in rent—as a proportion of a resident’s income—declined. Deficits ballooned; maintenance and repairs lagged.

The developments, with their isolation and high concentrations of poverty, were treated increasingly as isolated vice zones by both police and criminals. By the time of Candyman, Chicago was home not only to three of the country’s 12 richest communities but also, amazingly, to 10 of the country’s 16 poorest census tracts, all of them including large public housing complexes.

Partly because of its proximity to Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast neighborhood, Cabrini-Green became “notorious” for crime, but this reputation was complicated. Other public housing developments in the city were larger, poorer, and had higher rates of crime. In the extreme segregation of Chicago, though, Cabrini-Green remained that uncommon frontier where whites still crossed paths with poor blacks. The complex was noted as a place to avoid, or to go to, for felonious offerings.

Cabrini-Green, therefore, entered the popular imagination as the embodiment of the “inner city,” becoming the setting of the prime-time sit-com Good Times, of movies, urban crime novels, documentaries, rap songs and endless media coverage. There was a recurring Saturday Night Live skit in the 1980s about a teenage single mother—her name was Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson. The public housing project had made it onto a Mount Rushmore of scariest places in urban America.

What Candyman captures is this muddling of what is real and imaginary. Cabrini-Green was both an actual place with an array of serious problems, and a nightmare vision of fear and prejudice. A horror movie is often about what isn’t seen; it requires menacing visions to fill in the shadows of the unknown. The real Cabrini-Green had plenty of violent crime, but it was also home to thousands of families who had formed elaborate support networks and lived everyday lives. The fictional Cabrini-Green in which people believed in a murderous, hook-handed spirit was the pure creation of that fear. “The old dark house on the hill has always been the standard setting of horror,” director Rose explained. “But it seemed to me that the big public housing project was the new venue of terror.”

Rose created an elaborate backstory for his film’s killer that tapped into numerous racial tropes. In his previous life, Candyman was a gifted portrait artist, the son of a slave at the turn of the 19th century whose father earned a fortune after the Civil War by inventing a means to mass-produce shoes. Candyman fell in love with and impregnated one of his subjects, a white woman, and the girl’s father hired thugs to lynch him, chasing him to the site of the future Cabrini-Green, sawing off his painting hand before setting him on fire. In his reincarnated form, Candyman (Tony Todd) appears in the movie gaunt-cheeked, towering in a fur-lined trench coat, possibly as hell-bent on miscegenation—Virginia Madsen’s Helen is a dead ringer for his postbellum beloved—as on murder.

“Just as urban legends are based on the real fears of those who believe in them, so are certain urban locations able to embody fear,” Chicago film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his three-out-of-four-star review of the movie in the fall of 1992.

Poster for the 1992 horror film Candyman. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Candyman arrived in theaters as the very meaning of “inner city” was already changing again, a signifier not only of danger but of wealth and a mounting wave of gentrification. At the beginning of the 1990s, Chicago’s population ticked up for the first time in 40 years. The area around Cabrini-Green was booming with new development and an influx of young white professionals. It’s at this moment that the ghetto actually became scarier. The era’s yuppies inhabited “transitioning” neighborhoods, and reports of crime were being imagined as near-misses—just a wrong turn away. You can see these anxieties in the alarm bells then sounding over the coming tides of “crack babies,” “wilding” teens, and “super-predators” (as well as in other similar films of the era such as After Hours and Judgment Night).

In one scene in Candyman, Helen reads about a real-life crime that occurred in Chicago public housing: A man was able to enter neighboring apartment units through connected bathroom vanities so cheaply constructed that he simply pushed in the mirrors to create a passageway. Returning home, she discovers that in her own high-end condominium bathroom the same is true. Helen learns that her building was originally part of Cabrini-Green. It’s a preposterous plot turn that feels true to the moral panic of the moment. In only a matter of time, Candyman himself invades her apartment.

In the years since Candyman came out, more than 250,000 units of public housing have been demolished across the United States. The last Cabrini-Green tower—and the final public housing high-rise in Chicago not reserved for the elderly—came down in 2011. The clearing of these high-rises was touted as an effort to revive the city and to rescue the families who had been trapped in the generational poverty of public housing. Mayor Richard M. Daley promised that former residents would now be able to share in the benefits of the resurgent city. “I want to rebuild their souls,” he declared.

Less looming mixed-income developments—blending market-rate and heavily subsidized households—replaced many of the same public housing buildings that were used to clear the slums of a half-century before, but by design, only a small number of the old tenants were able to move into the new buildings. With Section 8 housing vouchers, most former residents (along with their souls) ended up renting private housing in predominantly black and under-resourced sections of Chicago’s South and West sides. The demolitions didn’t do away with the poverty and isolation that afflicted the city’s public housing; these problems were moved elsewhere, becoming less visible and no longer literally owned by the state.

Today, only one in five U.S. families that are poor enough to qualify for a subsidy receive any sort of government support as city rents rise while wages for all but the highest earners stagnate. Half of all renters now pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent; a quarter pay more than 50 percent. Fewer and fewer people can afford to live close to the economic activity of the inner city. For the first time, the United States has a greater number of poor people living in suburbs than in cities.

At the end of Candyman, the residents of Cabrini-Green gather together outside their high-rises and light an immense bonfire. It’s a purge that exorcises the phantasm as well as the horrors of public housing. In 2014, twenty-two years after the film’s release, the Chicago Housing Authority opened up a lottery for people to get onto the waiting list for either a public housing unit or a voucher. Despite the stigma of dysfunction, danger, and dilapidation, one in four of Chicago’s million households entered the lottery for a Chicago Housing Authority home. The real horror of people going without adequate housing remains.

“Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman….”

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Cynics may dismiss these memories as mere reflections of cold retail strategies. But for Chicagoans, the emotional connections are real, as they are for shoppers across the country who cherished the family-owned department stores that anchored their downtowns. Bostonians had Filene’s. Atlantans had Rich’s. Detroiters had Hudson’s. Clevelanders had Halle’s. Philadelphians had Wanamaker’s. Though conceived primarily as commercial centers, they evolved into larger institutions of American life—places where families of various castes and classes were welcome to take in the spectacle of services and goods, no admission fee required.

No time was this truer than the holiday season. And before the age of online shopping and franchise-heavy megamalls sent them to their demise (Marshall Field’s, for one, was converted into a Macy’s), these stores held a significant place in our collective Christmas memories.

But how did these houses of retail come to inspire such fond feelings?

Marshall Field’s in 1949.

That’s the question that I, as a historian, became fascinated by growing up in Chicago, where Marshall Field’s was as much a part of the soul of the city as our Lakefront or our Cubs. As a child, I would meet my grandmother under the famous clock at State Street and Washington Boulevard, and head up to the Walnut Room for lunch with my grandfather, who worked at Field’s as the buyer for the linen department for 25 years. When the change to Macy’s was announced, protestors gathered under the clock with signs reading “Field’s is Chicago—Boycott Macy’s.” They have been picketing there every fall since 2005. This year’s signs read, “If the Cubs can win the World Series, Marshall Field’s can come back to Chicago.”

Christmas wasn’t much of a holiday anywhere in America when Potter Palmer arrived in Chicago in 1852 and opened a dry goods store. By the turn of the century his successors, Marshall Field and Levi Leiter (and later just the now-eponymous Field) had built it into the premiere department store in the Midwest, known for impeccable customer care, generous return policies, quality merchandise, and a vast array of services (from tea rooms to relaxation rooms, shoe repair to hotel bookings—all of which kept shoppers in the building and reaching for their wallets).

Christmas, however, had received only modest attention. The store eventually began advertising Christmas cards and gift merchandise, and in 1885, they opened a seasonal toy department (which later became year-round). The first mention of holiday decorations at Marshall Field and Company came in 1907. The store had just opened in a monumental new building featuring the Walnut Room, and restaurant employees reportedly put up a small Christmas tree.

Marshall Field’s at Christmas in 2005, the last year before it was rebranded as a Macy’s.

By 1934, the tree stood 25 feet high. By mid-century, Field’s laid claim to the world’s largest indoor Christmas conifer: a 45-foot evergreen hoisted atop the Walnut Room’s drained fountain. It took 18 decorators and three-story-high scaffolding to trim the live evergreen. To kids, it looked like it stretched all the way up to the sky.

Through the decades, department stores like Marshall Field’s employed ever more elaborate strategies to lure shoppers. As the smell of Mrs. Herring’s Chicken Pot Pie wafted from the Walnut Room, massive “ice” reindeer soared over displays, oversized candy canes and evergreen garlands wound down the aisles, and giant stars and mega snowflakes floated in the skylight. In dizzying displays of holiday spirit, Field’s insides conveyed top-to-bottom Yuletide joy.

And then there were the Marshall Field’s gift boxes. Each one bore the elegant calligraphy of the company name, signaling that the gift inside was worth savoring. It was not unheard of for gift-givers to repurpose the notoriously sturdy containers, packing them with “imposter” goods from other stores, both out of frugality and in an effort to impart that ineffable Field’s glow.

Crowds in front of Marshall Field’s in 2005.

Field’s had good reason to continue these traditions. But their real power came from transcending their original commercial purpose. For many Chicagoans, Marshall Field’s at Christmas was transformed from a wonderfully stocked department store into a near-sacred family ritual.

None of these rituals was more legend than the holiday windows.

In 1910, thanks to improved glass manufacturing that could create massive transparent panels, stores across the U.S. began mounting elaborate window displays, and efforts quickly escalated as they became a powerful lure for shoppers.

Marshall Field’s inventive window designer, Arthur Fraser, used the big corner window at Washington Boulevard to showcase holiday gift merchandise. His first panel featured animated carousels and gift-ready toy trains. But in 1944 the store’s new stylist, John Moss, ditched the hard sell in favor of narrative windows—recreating Clement Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas. The story panels were such a hit they were repeated the next year.

Soon a new holiday window trend took hold: store-specific mascots. Montgomery Ward’s claimed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Wieboldt’s concocted the Cinnamon Bear. Not to be outdone, one of Moss’s co-designers, Joanna Osborn, conjured Uncle Mistletoe, a plump, Dickens-like figure decked out in a red great-coat and black top hat. With white wings, he flew around the world, teaching children the importance of kindness at Christmas.

The first window displays of Uncle Mistletoe went up in 1946 in a series titled A Christmas Dream, which featured the generous old man bringing a young boy and girl to the North Pole to visit Santa. In 1948, Uncle Mistletoe got some company in the form of Aunt Holly, and the pair became a merchandizing bonanza. Over the years, shoppers could buy dolls, books, ornaments, coloring sets, molded candles, cocktail napkins, hot pads, puppets, glassware, and even used window props.

Protestors in front of the recently rebranded Macy’s on Chicago’s State Street, formerly Marshall Field’s, in 2006.

As time went on, Field’s window decorators mastered the art of fake snow (a combination of kosher salt and ground-up glass) and detailed animatronic antics. I remember when the windows had a Nutcracker theme. Below the big scenes depicting the main store were tiny windows where tiny mice figurines were enacting their own delightful version of the story.

At their peak, planning and designing the annual displays began more than a year in advance, with an eager public waiting every November for the reveal of each new theme. Tens of thousands of fans made pilgrimages from Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to crowd around the earnest State Street displays in childlike awe.

There was a marketing aspect to the windows, of course. Delighted viewers, suffused with the seasonal spirit, would hopefully pop inside to shop. But there was no commerce in the displays themselves. Like many of the holiday creations inside, people became attached to the spirit, not the sales. The store’s brand became more than just the goods it sold, which ebbed and flowed over the years. For generations of Chicago families, Marshall Field’s simply inspired Christmas cheer.

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