Paradise Lost

The Collapse of Stateway Gardens

Jonathan Currie

joncurrie1211@gmail.com

Currie 1

When the last building in Stateway Gardens came down in 2007, the high-rise policy of
the mid-twentieth century had already come to be viewed as a failure. Just five blocks south, the
infamous Robert Taylor Homes were simultaneously meeting the wrecking ball. In the wake of
the demolition, experts in all fields have looked back on the Chicago Housing Authority's public
housing policies in the mid-twentieth century with a critical eye. D. Bradford Hunt, a historian
and social sciences professor at Roosevelt University who has published several articles and
books about urban planning in Chicago, attributes a large portion of the failure to poor policy in
high-rise construction. His article, "What Went Wrong With Public Housing in Chicago,"
provides a four-pronged critique of the CHA 's planning and subsequent management of their
mid-century high-rises.1 Alexander Polikoff, lead counsel in the landmark Hills v.
Gautreaux(1976) case, has written several publications that echo his oral arguments from the
case. He contends in his contribution to the Chicago Assembly book, Affordable Housing and
Public Policy: Strategies for Metropolitan Chicago, that public housing had lost focus from its
initial purpose as a temporary stop for poor families. Instead, the CHA has used public housing
as a form of isolation to keep poor blacks in designated areas. 2 Experts have examined the
issue from every angle. The one ignored voice, though, is that of the residents of the housing
project themselves. In an effort to capture the voice of the people of these condemned
neighborhoods, Chicago Historical Society employee Tracye Matthews interviewed residents
throughout the city of Chicago as part of the "Neighborhoods, Keepers of Culture" project.
Matthews 1998 interviews with residents and employees of Stateway Gardens took place in the
midst of discussions about the possible demolition of Stateway. Relying primarily on this set of
nine interviews, this paper focuses on the residents view of when and how Stateway began to

1 D. Bradford Hunt, "What Went Wrong With Public Housing in Chicago," Journal of the Illinois State
Historical Society 94, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 96-123.
2 Alexander Polikoff, "The Future of Public Housing High Rises," in Affordable Housing and Public Policy, ed.
Lawrence B. Joseph(Chicago:University of Chicago Press,1993), 195-215.

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decline, and how these people made sense of what was going on around them. Residents
attribute the decline of Stateway Gardens to several factors both internal and external, such as
generational change, gang activity, CHA apathy, and general building mismanagement. These
factors, according to the residents, began to negatively impact the neighborhood noticeably in
the 1970s, eventually leading to more drastic decay in 1990.
When residents moved into the newly completed public housing project in the former "Federal
Street Slum" area in 1957, they were impressed with their new community's aesthetic charm and
neighborhood unity. Residents reflected on this period fondly. Eddie Easley moved into the
neighborhood in 1957 at the age of eleven. He described the neighborhood as he remembered it
from his earliest memories, telling Matthews: "It was real beautiful...everybody [was] so
friendly and we grew up with everyone."3 Another resident, Lloyd Haywood, lived in the
neighborhood around the same time as Easley. During his childhood at Stateway in the late
1960s to early 1970s, Haywood took part in neighborhood activities at the local parks. Haywood
was especially fond of the way that the park was kept up so he could play softball and other
sports with his friends. He told Matthews: " You had flower beds, benches. Every spring, [the
CHA] would plant new seeds for grass, care for the field... me and the group of friends that I
had... would spend many hours a day playing them sports."4 Residents took it upon themselves
to maintain their buildings, even going beyond responsibility for cleanliness in and around
individual units. Barbara Moore, a resident of the adjacent Robert Taylor Homes(Stateway
Gardens and Robert Taylor Homes were often looked at as a super complex), remembered the
cleanliness of the community first and foremost. "Everything was clean. The grounds was clean.
The outside ramps was clean."5 During the time of aesthetic purity, resident unity remained

3 Eddie L. Eddie L. Easley, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, May 5, 1998., interview by Tracye
Matthews, Chicago, May 5, 1998.
4 Lloyd Haywood, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, July 9, 1998.
5 Barbara Moore, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, December 10, 1998.

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high, representing a time residents look back on with nostalgia. "Everybody was like family. It
was like one big family up here."6
Twenty years after Stateway was completed, residents, started to notice the cracks in their once
perfect community. There is no definitive date agreed upon by the interviewees(Easley,
Haywood, and Moore) as there was no specific even that triggered a collapse. The interviewees
instead point broadly to the five year period between 1975 and 1980. Residents started noticing
a change in the next generation of children in the community. Easley in particular found this
shift disheartening. "[The parents] started letting the kids take control. And you see the
difference. Kids is starting to kill kids. They don't have any kind of respect. They curse in front
of elders and everything."7 Moore also blamed the next generation of youths for the degradation
of building maintenance. She cites specifically their lack of willingness to participate in cleanup
efforts in communal areas. Moore told Matthews: "The older people kept it up. We would come
out like once a week on Saturdays or Fridays and... [mop] the ramp at the same time. It's hard
sometimes to get these young people to come out and [mop] a ramp... They don't feel like they're
supposed to be responsible for out there when that's open to any and everybody."8 Haywood
noticed the generational change as well in the drug trade. According to Haywood, older drug
dealers were being muscled out of business by young teens who were starting to run the
operations rather than "street-slinging" for just a cut of the trade. "Now the younger boys wanted
the money to buy clothes, jewelry and... it sort of pushed the older guys to the side."9 This new
generation of cocky, errant youngsters posed a serious threat to the established standards set by
community a generation before.

6 Ibid.
7 Eddie L. Easley, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, May 5, 1998.
8 Barbara Moore, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, December 10, 1998.
9 Lloyd Haywood, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, July 9, 1998.

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Further compounding the difficulties the difficulty of grappling with the attitudes of the new
generation was the growing activism of gangs that the residents began to see in the late 70s.
Until then, gangs were mostly viewed as social clubs in the neighborhood.10 Until late in the
1970s, the Del Vikings were the main force in the neighborhood. When the Blackstone Rangers
infiltrated the neighborhood in the 70s, tensions quickly escalated. The Vikings and the Rangers
were on opposite sides of the People and Folk gang rivalry and there was often violence between
the two. Moore recalled numerous times that boys in the neighborhood would have shootouts,
going so far as to describe it as perpetual war.11 This gives context to Easley's statement about
kids killing kids. It suggests an increase in violence, but more specifically, it points to gang
motives for these killings instead of isolated incidents. In addition to the drastic increase in
violence, gangs began using their organizations to push the expanding drug trade. Haywood
mentioned early in his interview how the teens were starting to push out the older drug dealers.
These younger dealers were increasingly gang connected, leading to a trade that evolved from
independent dealers to a more centralized trade under gang control.12 As the 70s wore on, the
residents could not help but see how gangs had turned their community into an industry of
violence and trafficking.
Supplementing the internal causes of the project's collapse was a host of external factors and
players that crippled the stability of the neighborhood. Some residents saw the CHA as the root
of the worsening conditions at Stateway. Barbara Moore in particular blamed the CHA for the
physical deterioration of the buildings. She took offense to the lack of effort in bringing in
maintenance crews to provide basic services such as patching walls or installing proper
appliances. She recalled a particular instance in which a new elevator was promised for her
building to replace the older model. Crews came in to install the new elevator cab but did not
10 Eddie L. Easley, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, May 5, 1998.
11 Barbara Moore, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, December 10, 1998.
12 Lloyd Haywood, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, July 9, 1998.

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install a motor into it. Residents were forced to take the stairs which became a burden for those
especially on higher floors, and those with physical handicaps. The replacement elevator would
not come for more than a year.13 Work orders for basic plumbing fixes or electrical repairs could
stretch out for weeks. As long as the problem was not hazard posing, residents could expect
more than just a standard amount of red tape.14 Even severe defects with sewage or drainage
could not elicit an appropriate response. Haywood noticed a pipe dripping sewage on one of the
buildings and brought it to the attention of management in hopes of getting it fixed. His attempts
to get the problem fixed were met with empty promises. "All the sewage drips down off the
ceiling of the building and you got management or whoever they be come through them
buildings just about every day or whatever, and there's nothing done about it... what you would
hear is that it's too cold to work with it... [n]ow that it's warmer, and it's still no one, you know,
working with that problem."15 A group of three buildings that Easley mentions just as "the back
buildings" were starting to sink into the ground with standing water surrounding the foundations
for days on end before being drained.16 As the buildings at Stateway began to deteriorate one by
one, it became clear to the residents that the CHA no longer made day-to-day living conditions a
priority.
Competing with the view of the CHA as an inefficient, bureaucratic overseer was a growing
feeling that the CHA had just given up on the public housing projects. Barbara Moore was very
heavy-handed in her assessment of the CHA's efforts toward her community. To her, it was
obvious that the CHA stopped trying. Moore told Matthews in her interview: "Housing got
relaxed and it was almost like [the CHA] didn't really give a damn."17 Along the way, Moore
contends, the CHA lost touch with who these units were for. Cheap materials that were being
13 Barbara Moore, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, December 10, 1998.
14 Lloyd Haywood, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, July 9, 1998.
15 Ibid.
16 Eddie L. Easley, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, May 5, 1998.
17 Barbara Moore, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, December 10, 1998.

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used to cut costs could not stand up to everyday wear, especially in areas that were heavily
concentrated with young children.18 As the leader of a tenant organization in her building, Moore
saw firsthand what efforts were like in the early days of the housing project. Over time, she
noticed a marked decline in the responsiveness by management to tenant requests. Empty
promises became the expectation for dealings with management. Eddie Easley presented his
own view of the cause of the decline when Tracye Matthews asked him where the blame should
lie. Easley told Matthews: "I blame the housing authority for the simple fact that they didn't
screen them like they did when we moved in. They were just starting to let people move in."19
Easley's insight represents a bridge between those who would attribute the decline to internal
factors, and those who would look external factors. According to Easley, the apathy by the CHA
led to a resident population that became largely responsible for the rapid drop in the quality of
life at Stateway.20 With the give and take relationship between tenants and management in ruins,
residents felt that there was little that could be gained from CHA accommodations.
In comparison to the highly contentious period of the late 1970s, residents are markedly silent
on the 1980s. This ten year period represents a gap in the narrative in which residents saw
neither significant progress nor heavy negative change like the decade before. The 80s also
represent a generational gap in Matthews' interviews. The three interviewees who evaluated the
decline that occurred in the 70s were all adults by the mid-70s. Four of the other six
interviewees were born during the 70s, and as such painted a very different picture of the
neighborhood in decline. Their contribution puts the year 1990 as the year of the neighborhood's
change. This inadvertent structural division in the interviews can demonstrate Easley's point
about different experiences separating the older residents from the next generation. Gang
violence and activity were fixtures in their community since their childhoods, so occasional
18 Ibid.
19 Eddie L. Easley, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, May 5, 1998.
20 Ibid.

Currie 7

shootings were not shocks. The residents typically saw this turn toward disorder as the fault of
gang members and the people in the development rather than the CHA for allowing the
circumstances to happen at all.
Around the year 1990, residents of the younger generation began to notice a change in
the amount of expected violence in the neighborhood. Gang involvement had risen to epidemic
levels. Chico Pinex, one of the members of the younger generation estimated that participation
of young men from the community in gangs was around 60 percent.21 Another interviewee,
Kenya Richmond, put the estimate as high as 85 percent of young men, with about 20 percent of
females also being affiliated.22 The growing size of gangs in the community only enlarged the
scale of conflict and made it more noticeable to the residents of Stateway. Dallerie Williams,
another member of the younger generation, described to Matthews the way he started seeing
gang violence escalate. "Until about '87 and that was when the boys got to really going at each
other from building to building, shooting at these boys hanging out in front of the building, like I
said I ain't never seen that before and it's surprising to me but it's not surprising."23 Dallerie
Williams' statement captures the essence of what this new gang war looked like from the
community's perspective. The shooting itself was not surprising. It was something with which
every South Side public housing resident had become familiar. What was surprising to Williams,
though, was the way in which it was being done. Openly shooting at people who are standing
out in front of buildings was unheard of. Conflicts often arose in a familiar pattern of gang
retaliation for beating up rival gang members or encroaching on the other's turf.24 Even though
residents had seen this kind of violence before, the scale became daunting, upsetting the uneasy
balance of the 1980s.

21 Chico Cornell Pinex, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, April 15, 1998.
22 Kenya Richmond, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, April 14, 1998.
23 Dallerie Williams, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, July 1, 1998.
24 Andre Williams, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, 1998.

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Residents saw the next four years turn their neighborhood into a battleground. Turf wars
dictated what routes were safe to walk on the way home. Andre Williams remembered the worst
of those four years, recounting sorrows as just a fact of daily life at Stateway. "I mean no peace,
no nothing, it was about four years straight of just shooting, constantly, everyday, you got
friends dying, you know, that's not news, it was getting worse by the minute then you know."25
The constant threat of violence was enough to break up any semblance of social balance in the
community. Residents saw the elders in the community draw themselves into their apartments
for fear of becoming another casualty on the streets. Easley gradually saw the older generation
become phased out of public life at Stateway. "[The gangs] were having people being scared to
come outside. I never noticed that until around about '90 when I was saying, 'I don't see old
people sitting out here on the bench.' They tore the benches down...the older people used to
come down and sit on the benches."26 The reality as the residents saw it was that any unaffiliated
person ran the risk of becoming a victim, but none more so than the older generation who could
not defend themselves from constant fear of theft or worse.27
Another common problem in 1990 mentioned by several interviewees was the complete lack of
community leadership, whether through tenant organizations or from a strong alderman. Easley,
a resident of the neighborhood for almost forty years at the time of the interview did not even
know his current alderman. He emphatically declared to Matthews: "We don't even know the
alderman!...All we know is until they have an election, then we'll get bombarded."28 Barbara
Moore became the president of her building at Robert Taylor but noticed that even in her
position, she was unlikely to affect any change. She relayed her skepticism about the joint
meetings between her tenant organization, the Local Advisory Council, and representatives from
25 Andre Williams, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, 1998.
26 Eddie L. Easley, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, May 5, 1998.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.

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the CHA . "A lot of the times the meetings do run smoothly because nobody objects... The white
man has to do all the thinking for us.. we have to be told everything to do."29 Other tenants
mentioned wanting to at least unite the community in light of recent talks to demolish the
housing project, but there did not seem to be enough involvement on behalf of the tenants to
prompt any action. Andre Williams voiced his frustration to Matthews about wanting to get
involved in community leadership: "There ain't been enough people for that stuff to start, I mean
they said they're gonna have a meeting for it but if I went down there it would probably be me
and two other people down there, you know nobody come to stuff like that, see they don't care
about stuff like that."30 Without any leadership to drive change in their communities, residents
felt powerless to curb the actions of the harassers in the neighborhood. This feeling of futility led
Eddie Easley to notice visible despondency amongst the residents. "People walk a little slower
than they ever have in my time being down here. Because I think they're more depressed."31
Instead of uniting around a common cause of ridding their community of negatively influence,
residents withdrew and were reluctant to make significant strides toward unifying the
community, a far cry from the early days of Stateway Gardens.
Tracye Matthews' interviews with residents of Stateway Gardens provides a direct insight into
an underrepresented voice in the debate about the failure of public housing in Chicago. The nine
residents that Matthews interviewed represent a firsthand look at an issue that an issue that has
since been written about from every point of view but theirs. The residents of Stateway Gardens
saw their development's downfall as a combination of factors both internal and external. These
findings were consistent across two generations of residents who documented the fall of a once
celebrated community in the late 1970s and an even greater decline around 1990.

29 Barbara Moore, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, December 10, 1998.

30 Andre Williams, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, 1998.
31 Eddie L. Easley, interview by Tracye Matthews, Chicago, May 5, 1998.

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Primary Sources
Andre Williams, interview by Tracye Matthews, 1998, transcript, Transcripts of Oral Histories of
Residents and Employees of Stateway Gardens, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, IL.
Barbara Moore, interview by Tracye Matthews, December 10, 1998, transcript, Transcripts of
Oral Histories of Residents and Employees of Stateway Gardens, Chicago History
Museum, Chicago, IL.
Chico Cornell Pinex, interview by Tracye Matthews, April 15, 1998, transcript, Transcripts of
Oral Histories of Residents and Employees of Stateway Gardens, Chicago History
Museum, Chicago, IL.
Credell Walls, interview by Tracye Matthews, April 23, 1998, transcript, Transcripts of Oral
Histories of Residents and Employees of Stateway Gardens, Chicago History Museum,
Chicago, IL.
Dallerie Williams, interview by Tracye Matthews, July 1, 1998, transcript, Transcripts of Oral
Histories of Residents and Employees of Stateway Gardens, Chicago History Museum,
Chicago, IL.
Eddie L. Easley, interview by Tracye Matthews, May 5, 1998, transcript, Transcripts of Oral
Histories of Residents and Employees of Stateway Gardens, Chicago History Museum,
Chicago, IL.
Kenya Richmond, interview by Tracye Matthews, April 14, 1998, transcript, Transcripts of Oral
Histories of Residents and Employees of Stateway Gardens, Chicago History Museum,
Chicago, IL.
Lloyd Haywood, interview by Tracye Matthews, July 9, 1998, transcript, Transcripts of Oral
Histories of Residents and Employees of Stateway Gardens, Chicago History Museum,
Chicago, IL.

Currie 11

Steven Allen Rogers, interview by Tracye Matthews, 1998, transcript, Transcripts of Oral
Histories of Residents and Employees of Stateway Gardens, Chicago History Museum,
Chicago, IL.
Secondary Sources
Bauman, John F., Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian, From Tenements to the Taylor Homes:
In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America. The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2000.
Hunt, D. Bradford, Blueprint for Disaster: the Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing. University
of Chicago Press, 2009.
Hunt, D. Bradford, "What Went Wrong With Public Housing in Chicago," Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society(1998-), Vol. 94, No. 1, (Spring 2001): 96-123.
Joseph, Lawrence B., ed., Affordable Housing and Public Policy: Strategies for Metropolitan
Chicago. University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Pfeiffer, Deirdre, Displacement Through Discourse: Implementing and Contesting Public
Housing Redevelopment in Cabrini Green, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural
Systems and World Economic Development, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Spring, 2006): 39-74.
Polikoff, Alexander, Affordable Housing and Public Policy, "The Future of Public Housing High
Rises," Chicago Assembly, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1993.
Polikoff, Alexander, Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black
Ghetto. Northwestern University Press,2006.
Vale, Lawrence J., Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of TwiceCleared Communities, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Venkatesh, Sudhir Alladi, American Project: An Historical-Ethnography of Chicago's Robert
Taylor Homes. UMI Dissertation Services, 1999.

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