The greened-over district

Trading trains in the urban congestion of the Loop, one would never think that vast swaths of grassy desolation lie to the south and west. Yet from the air (or by way of Google Earth) there is a stark line between neighborhoods with houses huddled shoulder-to-shoulder and other neighborhoods full of empty lots and isolated two-flats.

Sheltered small-towner that I was when I first came to Chicago, I thought it all looked like city--too many people too close together. It took an impulsive trip on the Green Line from the Loop to Garfield for me to see the emptiness first-hand. Bronzeville looks ravaged in the way I imagined Sarajevo or Grozny might. Long blocks hold but two or three houses, the remaining lots' rubble increasingly hidden under a patchy blanket of grass.

The perverse thought occurred to me that denizens of wealthier and more crowded parts of the city would kill for such open space--perverse given all the deaths of people and buildings to which those flat green spaces give mute testimony. Hence I'm not holding my breath for any 1950s Hyde Park-style urban renewal or 1990s Logan Square-like gentrification or 2000s South Loop-type "adaptive reuse." Nor do I think we'll see anything like a Bridgeport Village coming to Bronzeville or North Lawndale any time soon.

We talk about neighborhoods being "rough," "blighted." Run down or dangerous as they may be, most have a full complement of residences, stores, cars, evidence of life. It doesn't get much more "blighted" than neighborhoods abandoned to the poor and stigmatized by the slightly less poor and stigmatized, underdeveloped by a unequal society, burned down by some of the very people who live there, and now claimed only by the persistent regrowth of grass.

From the air or from a train, grass is deceptive.
Could be lawn, could be park, could be graveyard.