Reflection on Urban Renewal
My career as a photojournalist began in Chicago when I moved there to attend school and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Many of my class assignments for my Photojournalism class required me to spend hours and hours walking the streets of Chicago. My professor would give assignments based on one word. He would sends us out looking for things like weather, faces or angles. Once he assigned my class to photograph “Chicago.” One of the pictures I turned in was of a chain-linked fence with a bulldozer on the other side. I don’t think I fully understood then why I turned that picture in. I did notice that there was a lot of construction going on near downtown.
Once I traveled to the South side of Chicago to photograph one of the apartment buildings in the notorious Robert Taylor Home being tore down. I first saw the crane demolishing the building from my seat on the Red Line train. The Robert Taylor Homes were a very prominent set of buildings that lined State Street on the South side of Chicago, minutes from downtown. The rows of dilapidated apartment buildings were in striking contrast with site of Chicago skyline.
As I approached the area, I could see a crane with a wrecking ball attached smashing into the building removing large chunks with every swing. The Robert Taylor Homes were projects that were known for violence and drug dealing. The City of Chicago had decided to turn the area that incorporated the Taylor Homes into a mixed income community.
All along State Street on the south side of the city there was increasing visual evidence of change. The area was slowly transforming from low income apartment buildings with burnt out and boarded up windows, to expensive condos and townhouses. The people who used to inhabit the Taylors were being relocating to other areas in the city, far away from the valuable land that immediately surrounded downtown Chicago.
The removal of poor black people from valuable downtown real estate seems to be similar to the urban renewal polices of the past. In “Downtown America: A History of the place and the people who made it,” by Alison Isenberg, she points to how the Housing Act of 1949 helped advance plans to reconstruct poor neighborhoods in order to improve downtown areas. This act helped us see the beginnings of the current urban renewal policies surrounding gentrification that is reshaping American cities today.
This week in our class discussions we also talked about how business played on the nostalgia of the past to encourage shopping in places like the Inner Harbor, Gaslight and Faneuil Hall. We talked about how Second Wave Feminism helped reshape the demographic groups that marketers focused on. We learned how Main Street became the center stage of the civil rights movement and the places where blacks expressed their frustrations with racial inequality by rioting. We discussed how the riots helped increase white flight from downtown, as business like Kress and J.C. Penny also moved to the suburbs to service them.