‘Ghetto’ tour showcases Chicago projects
The yellow school bus rumbles through vacant lots and past demolished buildings, full of people who have paid $20 for a tour of what was once among the most dangerous areas of this or any other city in the United States.
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By the time the city started pulling down or rehabilitating the projects in the late 1990s, each one had its own headlines that spoke to the failure of public housing in Chicago.
At Cabrini-Green a boy was struck by a bullet and killed as he walked hand-in-hand with his mother. At the Ida B. Wells project, a 5-year-old boy was dangled and then deliberately dropped to his death from a 14-story window by two other children.
And at Robert Taylor, where the illegal drug trade thrived, a rookie police officer was shot to death on a stakeout outside a gang drug base.
Turner could even add her own story. She saw a teenage boy shot on the very day she arrived at the Robert Taylor Homes in 1986.
In Chicago or you can take a bus tour of some of the most infamous housing projects in the nation but the tour isn’t what you would expect. It would be easy to take visitors to the South Side and scare them nearly to death, bring them within audible range of gunshots so they have stories to take home. Instead this tour is about bringing attention to an issue for different reasons, so that the housing projects that have been and are slowly being torn down and the residents that once lived in them won’t be forgotten. Right now they are being forgotten. The new mixed income developments that go up where low income projects once stood only have room for a fraction of the people that once lived there and of those spaces only a fraction of those are allocated for the lower income residents. The intended result is to force the people that once had a place to live out of their homes, out of their neighborhoods, and with luck, out of the city. The tours meant to shine some light on these invisible, displaced people but of course out-of-towners are the wrong people to target.
[via MLive.com]
