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Chicago's Block Clubs
How Neighbors Shape the City
By Amanda I. Seligman The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-38599-0
CHAPTER 1
Protect
In March 1952, a staff member from the Chicago Urban League visited the 2200 block of West Maypole Avenue to check up on a block club she was trying to organize. Her notes reflect frustration. The block had great potential as "one of the best where we could have shown concrete results." In the past, its resident homeowners had demonstrated their ability to maintain their properties to high aesthetic standards. Newer, younger residents, however, showed less inclination to put their energies into their immediate surroundings. The League worker could not entice the older residents to put forth any more effort. She observed that the long-standing homeowners "resented the apathy of the young people and the new residents who were not concerned about beautifying." Her notes complained, "This, the worker does not really understand because some of the people the[r]e are those who are termed as the better type Negroes, who are in the higher economic bracket and it seems to her that, if for no other reason, that they have decided to remain in the block, they ought to organize and beautify." She concluded that prospects for organizing a successful block club were grim: "It seems to be an impossible task to get the two groups together."
Implicit in the staff worker's brief notes were a range of assumptions that informed the League's program: block clubs should improve the physical environment; established, property-owning black Chicagoans should teach more recent southern migrants their standards for community upkeep; and the resulting beautiful blocks could be used as a public demonstration that African Americans were responsible urban residents who made good neighbors. In the middle of the twentieth century, Chicago's majority white population reflexively interpreted black settlement as signaling a block's inevitable decline. Demonstrating that blacks did not automatically damage their neighbors' goodwill or property values was an important Chicago Urban League goal. While the League's tactics — including fruitless trips, like the worker's visit to the 2200 block of West Maypole — were particularly-time consuming, the organizing of block clubs served the League's overall mission to acclimate the urban north and migrant African Americans to one another.
The League's program laid the foundation for the spread of block clubs across Chicago in the twentieth century. From the first, organizers and participants understood the protection of their immediate surroundings as a central purpose of block clubs. At a minimum, street cleanups and gardens elevated the character of the landscape. The anticipated consequences of physical improvement were numerous and sometimes spectacular. Improvement could signal local upkeep standards to residents and other interested observers such as potential neighbors, outside critics, gang members, and criminals. At various times, participants believed that communicating local vigilance demonstrated the high quality of the blocks' residents, encouraged good neighbors, fended off decay, protected property values, improved children, deterred crime, and warned away undesirable residents.
No single block club generated all of these expected benefits. As Chicagoans through the twentieth century adopted the Urban League's block club structure, members infused the clubs with meanings and goals consistent with their own specific concerns about contemporary urban life. The activities of block clubs reveal how Chicagoans' concerns shifted during the twentieth century.
At the same time, while block club members' collective actions suggested solidarity among participants, they also reflected tensions among neighbors. For example, the visit of the League's organizer to the 2200 block of West Maypole illuminated the class fractures among Chicago's African Americans. The League's organizing staff quietly struggled with block clubs dominated by property owners, who resisted participation by their home-renting neighbors. On the South Side, the Hyde Park–Kenwood Community Conference (HPKCC) spread the Chicago Urban League's model of block organization among its largely white constituency and to similar Chicago organizations that sought urban renewal. While HPKCC members refrained from the outright objections to residential integration that were common in Chicago's all-white neighborhoods, their block clubs largely embraced the goal of ridding Hyde Park of its deteriorating buildings — and, consequently, their often poor and black occupants. By the late 1950s, whites on Chicago's South and West Sides adopted the block club as means to control and protest the arrival of black residents on their streets; whether the interlopers were renters or property owners did not matter to segregationist groups. In the 1970s, by contrast, North Side block clubs consisting almost entirely of renters tried to remedy the neglect of absentee property owners who were unresponsive to the requests of individual tenants. In the twenty-first century, the CPD organized block clubs that used both social and environmental approaches to drive out criminals. All of these differences among neighbors revolved around two central questions: Who had the right to occupy a block, and who had the responsibility for its maintenance? A shared interest in a particular block did not imply consensus on the answers to these questions.
The cleanliness and social order of any given block depended on multiple parties: its various property owners, residents, visitors, local commercial and industrial enterprises, and urban service workers such as garbage collectors and police. While some stakeholders fulfilled every responsibility their positions implied, others did so imperfectly, or actively produced further disorder. Block clubs allowed members to push their neighbors and the city government to live up to the formal and informal commitments that they believed residence, property ownership, and governance entailed. They often pressured government to fulfill its promises. For example, when they endorsed neighborhood efforts to attract urban renewal funding, or petitioned for increased police patrols, they were attempting to extend the influence of government on their streets. At two key moments, government officials also used block clubs to try to induce local improvement efforts from city residents. The high point of block club participation in Chicago almost certainly occurred during World War II in response to the federal government's organization of a war-supporting club for every block in the region. Beginning in the 1990s, the CPD's community policing program and a few aldermen encouraged residents around the city to form block clubs to improve public safety and beauty — two things which contemporary social science theory suggested were interrelated.
Deficiencies in the urban landscape reflected shortcomings of both residents and the municipal government. Neither kept order perfectly. Block club members stepped into the gap between the prerogatives of private owners and the duty of municipal government to protect the urban environment. They manifested organizers' recognition that neither individual efforts nor municipal action alone were sufficient to create a cityscape in which they wanted to live. From the early twentieth century onward, many Chicagoans put their efforts into collective, voluntary action as an appropriate middle way to shape their residential neighborhoods.
Antecedents
Proximity foisted common concerns on neighbors. In the nineteenth century, people who owned property in developing parts of Chicago formed the earliest antecedents of block clubs. Neighbors who shared adjacent street frontage created associations to build local infrastructure. Historian Robin L. Einhorn's Property Rules argues that up to 1865, Chicago's politics were characterized by a "segmented system." This form of municipal "privatism" was designed to prevent the use of taxes to redistribute wealth, even for ostensibly public purposes. Only "abutters," owners of adjacent properties, had the right to petition for the installation of specific local improvements such as sidewalks under this system. In return for the privilege of deciding whether they wanted an amenity, they were taxed for its cost. Even though in theory all Chicagoans enjoyed the public good of infrastructure, landowners benefited particularly from any resulting increase in their property values. Thus, it was reasoned, they should have to pay for its expense. This system resulted in an uneven distribution of such improvements across the city. As Einhorn observes, the relative wealth and local interests of property owners were "visible in macadam, plank, and mud and recorded in the high death rates in working-class neighborhoods."
The formally segmented system ended with the Civil War, industrial pollution in the Chicago River, and the arrival of street railways. These events dramatically demonstrated that the public interest serves multiple constituencies. But remnants of this system survive in the twenty-first century in the use of special assessment taxes for local municipal improvements. The circulation of petitions and "remonstrances" (counterpetitions) among neighboring property owners — who may well not live nearby — is not the same thing as a formal (or even informal) block club. Ann Durkin Keating points out, however, that the process of special assessment on a "block by block basis" made the street a natural unit for nineteenth-century improvement associations. The segmented system established for Chicago the principle that adjacent property owners could act collectively for their common, sometimes narrow, local interests.
In the twentieth century, the circulation of racially restrictive covenants reinforced the idea that property interests depended on the neighbors. As African Americans migrated north in the years during and after World War I, white property owners built up a system of racial segregation to forestall black neighbors. In addition to fears about the social consequences of interracial contact, two related sets of concerns about property informed whites' prejudices. First, they asserted that the presence of nonservant African Americans as neighbors would depress the value of their real estate property when they tried to sell it. Second, they claimed that black Southerners would not maintain their homes in accordance with acceptable standards, thereby exacerbating their unwelcome effect on their neighbors' property. Although nineteenth-century black Chicagoans often lived intermingled among the city's white population, racially segregated neighborhood residential lines formed and hardened with the onset of the Great Migration around World War I. Violence directed against black "pioneers" who attempted to integrate white areas of the city sent a very clear message that African Americans should not venture beyond the established residential districts on the South and West Sides. To reinforce the segregation of the housing market, the Chicago Real Estate Board encouraged the formation of all-white block organizations. The pressure of a dramatically increasing black population in a restricted housing supply, however, meant that African Americans continued to search for new places to make homes.
Some white property owners eschewed violent tactics for keeping blacks from occupying nearby property. Instead, they relied instead on a pair of related legal mechanisms: racially restrictive deeds and covenants. A racially restrictive deed was language written into the legal document that described a particular property. It specified that no matter who owned the land, African Americans and other unwelcome neighbors were not permitted to occupy it — unless they were servants. A racially restrictive covenant, by contrast, was a binding agreement among a group of neighbors that they would sue anyone who permitted nonwhites, or other enumerated undesirables, to live in the area. Creating a racially restrictive covenant required locating and communicating with the people who owned property in the covered area, whether they lived on the street or elsewhere. A covenant was not the same as a block club; it was a legal arrangement. Signatories did not hold regular meetings or spin off other events. Its purposes were limited, as when abutting neighbors agreed to invest their money in common improvements such as sidewalks. But the practice of creating restrictive covenants provided Chicagoans with the precedent of local, voluntary collective action rooted in proximity and property ownership.
In 1948, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case of Shelley v. Kraemer that it was unconstitutional for courts to enforce the provisions of racial restrictive covenants and deeds. But Chicagoans did not immediately abandon covenants. In the early 1950s, a few block organizations in the Hyde Park–Kenwood area created "conservation agreements." These extralegal covenants committed property owners to using their buildings only as single-family homes, as defined by Chicago's zoning code. In keeping with the HPKCC's preference for combining racial liberalism with class exclusivity, an agreement signed by members of the 5200 Greenwood Avenue Block Group specified: "The parties hereto desire to protect property values in the above described area and to develop and improve the said area and the surrounding community for themselves and all persons irrespective of race, creed, or national origin." A similar "property owners agreement" in the nearby 5200 block of South Ellis Avenue committed signatories to communicating with neighbors about any planned substantial alterations or sales. The document, however, was explicit that it was a nonrestrictive covenant: "It involves no legal obligations. The whole point of it is to build mutual confidence and to permit cooperative activity."
On the national level, the idea that the block was a basic organizing unit of urban life gained intellectual traction in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Patricia Mooney Melvin's The Organic City documents a formal experiment in block organization conducted in Cincinnati, Ohio, between 1917 and 1920. Mooney Melvin credits Stanton Coit of New York City's Neighborhood Guild settlement house with originating the idea of block-level local governance in the late 1880s. Coit intended to organize block residents into delegations that were to "oversee all municipal services in the neighborhood and to raise sufficient money for a 'variety of economic, educational and recreational activities'" and "eventually to federate them in a single city guild." Coit failed to implement this vision in New York City, but the idea survived.
In 1914 the progressive reformer Wilbur C. Phillips elaborated Coit's concept into a detailed "social unit plan" to support delivery of public health services. With the support of an initial $63,000 raised from wealthy New York City donors, in 1916 Phillips founded the National Social Unit Organization. This group funded a pilot of the "social unit" idea in Cincinnati's Mohawk-Brighton neighborhood. The Cincinnati experiment's major focus was provision of health and welfare services to infants and small children. Under Phillips's guidance, beginning in December 1917 the Mohawk-Brighton Social Unit Organization (MBSUO) designated thirty-one block organizations, held local elections, and compensated local "block workers" for their labor connecting residents to the organization's services. Phillips also organized occupational councils for physicians, nurses, social workers, teachers, clergy, businessmen, and trade unionists to interact with the residents' council. Although the effort to provide health care was successful, in 1920 the MBSUO fell under attack from Cincinnati's mayor, who interpreted the organization as a threat to his power base. The mayor derided the concept of such local governance as socialism, a potent charge in the wake of the Red Scare in the United States and the Russian revolution. In November 1920, the MBSUO dissolved itself. Because the block organizations were created and funded from above rather than built from the ground up, it is unlikely that they survived the demise of the larger group.
The Chicago Urban League
Roughly simultaneously with Phillips's social unit experiment, local chapters of the National Urban League also began cultivating block clubs. Although sporadic, the Urban League's program was the first serious block organization effort in Chicago. The ultimate influence of the Chicago Urban League's block organization program far surpassed the numbers of its clubs. The League's work among middleclass African Americans established block clubs as a Chicago institution. A century after the National Urban League's affiliates began their work, a block club organizer employed by North Side Alderman Ameya Pawar said simply, "It's in our DNA."
Founded in New York City in 1910, the National Urban League and its affiliates were devoted to helping Southern black migrants adapt to life in the urban north. The Urban League operated on a model of class-based racial self-help. Middle-class African Americans transmitted their values and behavior to others, thereby "uplifting" them and the race as a whole. For its first half century, the League's primary program was "industrial" work, connecting black migrants with job opportunities and training them in appropriate workplace behavior. Several League chapters around the United States also engaged in block organization work, which they pointed out with pride in publicity materials. But whenever affiliate finances were strained, block work was sacrificed to sustain the industrial work.
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Excerpted from Chicago's Block Clubs by Amanda I. Seligman. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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