Chicago, Illinois

                                        1951

The West Side had been stagnant for years.

Names on mailboxes had remained the same year after year, and if not the same name than certainly the same European derivation of that name, or the neighbor’s name.

In the years following World War II, millions of people from throughout the world flocked to America, and in particular to the city of Chicago.

The Europeans came, some with more, most with less, but all came bringing their own culture, wanting to be with their own kind, and settling, as silt in water, upon the suited financial ledges in the existing melting pot ghettos and, for the most part, harmonizing with those who came before them.

But now, slowly, all but unnoticed except by those who lived along the constantly changing, eroding borders, the European names on mailboxes changed, from Mazisyk, Binkowski, D’Angelo and Shapiro to “American names”: Smith, Jackson, Washington, Davis and Robinson.

As the multitudes flooded into the city, both from within and outside the borders of America, the ghetto neighborhoods grew constantly, continually encroaching inward, and the existing natives began to move either deeper into the melting pot, temporarily away from the erosion, or, if they had the means, out of it completely, to the suburbs or cities of Berwyn, Cicero and Brookfield to the west; Oak Lawn, Evergreen Park and Blue Island to the south; Lincolnwood, Skokie and Morton Grove to the north.

Previously well-maintained buildings changed hands and the newly found money was transferred out of the old neighborhoods and into the new… Into high-rise apartment buildings for the wealthy… Into shopping centers and countless tracts of suburban, pea-pod houses.

The blight was not the fault of the encroaching people because they were the victims, but rather the fault of the political representatives of the previously existing people for allowing the onset of these destructive conditions. Graft was widespread. Building violations ran rampant and, against all existing building codes, the new landlords subdivided individual two- and three-bedroom apartments into two, and even three separate apartments with shared bathrooms and Pullman-type kitchens.

The previous space housing a single family of three, four, five or six people became the spaces for two, three or even four families.

As the existing families vacated their ghetto apartments, the vacuum they left was quickly filled.

As the socioeconomic makeup of the neighborhoods changed, moderate to low income, previously decent neighborhoods became filthy, over-crowded slums, and in the passing of those going and those coming misconceptions and prejudices were formed that lasted lifetimes.