What Happened to those Urban Enclaves?
March 24, 2015
SJF writes:
Alan’s recollections of St. Louis are some of my favorite postings on TTHW site, although they break my heart. When I lived as a young man in Chicago, I would travel throughout the city armed with a book, “Ethnic Chicago,” that described in detail the history of each neighborhood. My yuppie friends in Lincoln Park would not accompany me to these “bad” neighborhoods. In fact, even though they were natives of the city’s suburbs, they had never been to neighborhoods on the south or west sides of the city (Garfield Park, Humboldt Park, Jackson Park, South Shore, Bucktown, Pullman, Logan Square, Pilsen).
What I found in each of the neighborhoods astonished me. It was like a trip to a foreign country. Each neighborhood had the same elements: A massive, beautiful Catholic church that rivaled anything I had seen in Europe, attractive, well-constructed housing stock that in Lincoln Park would be worth millions, wide boulevards, large parks, old storefronts and some remaining corner taverns. In one neighborhood, the priest took me to the basement of a massive church to show me a working bowling alley and an ornate bar. He had grown up in the neighborhood when it was all Polish. He explained that on weekends, the fathers would come home from work and have dinner. Then the family would head over to the church for Rosary and Confession, and down into the basement. The fathers would bowl, the mothers would play cards, everyone would have a few drinks and the kids would run free. I know not everything was perfect, but it seemed like a wonderful life to me. When I described it to my mother, she said, “How do you think it was for me growing up in NYC? Exactly like that.”
But each of these neighborhoods, while they had all of those elements I described above, also had another thing in common that I witnessed: a population much different from the one that had built those churches, houses, two-flats, corner taverns etc.
My question to Alan and others like him is: Why did people move? If it was so great, why did they sell? Why didn’t they stand their ground and defend what was theirs? The argument about block busting is not persuasive to me because if the neighborhood were cohesive, it seems there would be general agreement not to sell, not to give in. To me, it’s the people who sold who are to blame. But it’s all lost and it’s never come back, that’s for sure.
Laura writes:
Those blockbusting forces were very powerful and included major foundations, the press and even Catholic clerics. I recommend E. Michael Jones’s The Slaughter of the Cities for a look at all those forces and how it was virtually impossible for neighborhoods to resist them. Unfortunately, Jones’s book is extremely long. Paul Gottfried wrote in his review of it at Chronicles (not online):
Jones argues that the established urban neighborhoods did not deteriorate simply because of economic crises or demographic accidents. Rather, from the 1950s on, a combination of misnamed redevelopment programs and malicious social planning turned these areas into war zones, and finally, depopulated deserts. … He insists that what motivated such experiments as busing and scattered public housing, presented as urban renewal, was at least partly a disdain for urban ethnics …
You ask why didn’t people agree not to sell. How could that sort of agreement be enforced? Given that many people had no assets other than their houses, they feared losing everything if they were the last ones to leave. Property values would indeed plummet.
But another factor was the seeming magic of suburban life and the inducements to move there, including federally-subsidized highways and mortgages. Catholics wanted to be part of that dream.
— Comments —
Paul V. writes:
My wife’s parents were the last to leave such an enclave on Chicago’s west side, a couple of blocks east of Oak Park, in 1967. An important politician and state office holder living on the block publically promised not to sell, but faded early in the game. They stayed on principle long after the economic motive was shot. The straw [that broke the camel’s back] was a hand reaching through a partially open window and taking a purse off a table. It might as well have taken the house. They lost everything, but had enough sense not to complain. I, living in New York then, mentioned it to some friends, a very nice couple with whom I had much in common, and was greeted with stony silence, probably considering that I was a friend. My in-laws had better sense than I.
Paul C. writes:
I find it hard to believe that WASPs engineered what is best described as white flight even though race was not the only reason for white flight.
Where were the WASPs planning to live? In a city of blacks. Not a chance. Not in the South. If real, evil Protestant people were secretly planning some esoteric endgame via complex maneuvers, we would have known about it via the liberal Media. There was no Internet or Fox News back then. The annihilation of their supposed ambition is some evidence there never was a plan. The reason for the failure is there was no plan, only a melee.
Maurice “Moon” Landrieu (84 years old) was a Democratic mayor of New Orleans and would be considered liberal, though I think it was simply a cynical calculation by a former Mob lawyer. (But then I have never met him.) He is smart and has a forceful personality. (He is a Catholic with nine children.) About twenty years ago, he wrote an intriguing editorial in a local newspaper. He wrote about white flight.
He gave about seven distinct reasons for white flight. Not a single one was a WASP conspiracy. The most memorable one to me was housing costs and fashion. Habitable New Orleans comprises a relatively small area because of water including swamps, which have been drained (as in Boston) to make way for urban sprawl. But adjacent parishes offered better ground, much of which had already been drained. Prices in adjacent parishes were less. People, foolishly, wanted the fashionable modern built-in kitchens, for example, in their houses.
In New Orleans, houses were separated by three-foot alleys. In the suburbs, houses had five-foot setbacks; therefore, they were separated by ten feet. Lots had yards where children could play. Now the even more fashionable Northshore has ten-foot setbacks, stretched houses, and bigger lots all for the same or a lesser price than a closer suburb. My parents moved thirty-five miles north to get there in the early 90s. It is a big, pretty parish that has controlled beauty but heavy traffic now.
Air conditioning became affordable and was more efficient in houses with eight-foot ceilings than with fifteen-foot ceilings and transoms built to make subtropical heat tolerable. We personally built “duplex” double-sliding-door closets to hold lots of stuff in one of our huge New Orleans’ style houses. You needed a ladder to put stuff in the top closets. Armoires were inadequate for increasingly affluent Americans.
Of course, as a liberal (and is typical of conservatives), he did not mention the effect that the threat of federal troops had on people who tried to patrol neighborhoods without any federal support. The supposedly WASP area of New Orleans has a much higher crime rate than the suburbs, which have a lot of WASPS, and Jews by the way.
Laura writes:
It would be simplistic to reduce it to antagonism by WASPs to the growing political power of those neighborhoods. But the fact is, major foundations and social engineers devoted great effort to breaking those neighborhoods up.
Here is an interview with Jones.
