The Last Days of the Ickes:

Editor’s Note:

The Harold Ickes Homes. In Chicago, they just call them “The Ickes.” Named after the Secretary of the Interior under Roosevelt, the public housing project, like many in Chicago and other major urban areas, once marked a new beginning for a burgeoning middle class in the post-war years. By the late 1960s, Ickes, not unlike the more well-known Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor developments, slid deeply into a base for gangs, drug activity and violence. Once home to 1000 families, 79 now occupy the three remaining buildings yet to be demolished.

The Ickes were the last of Chicago’s major large-scale projects to remain standing. A major undertaking to demolish the community and develop mixed income housing began in summer 20009. The 150-day demolition project is expected to reach completion in December.

Until the end of the demolition, EbonyJet.com will gather thoughts, photos, video and memories from present and former residents, neighbors and activists on the last days of the Ickes.

FLOYD WEBB, Filmmaker
2310 S State St.
Circa 1963-64.

We moved into the Ickes in late 1958 when life in public housing was not so bad, there were lots of complete families. Folks had jobs, The halls and stairs were mopped every day. There were flowers and grass all around. Comiskey Park was a 20-minute walk away and this guy, Lefty, coached the projects’ Little League team.

Lefty took a bunch of the kids to the last Negro Leagues game at Comiskey, I heard. Lefty was a legend in the projects. Then they paved over the field, one hundred square yards of it. Tar! You could land and airplane on it. King Alfred Plan?

We were close to the Lake, walking distance to the museums and downtown, we had a train station and a lot of us male children got hustles - meaning work, real work from the age of 7. We had Policy errands (some of us), that’s running numbers to you young folk. Chinatown, The Chicago Defender, Johnson Publishing, Chess Records, and Guey Sams in Chinatown, among the many places to do odd jobs and get paid to buy snowballs and penny candy and those new Marvel Comics.

Vietnam had not yet happened, My dad was on the Lake at 31st St in a missile base watching for Russians. Then all our lives changed when he was sent to Alaska, then to Vietnam, those damn commies were everywhere. Now he sought them out on foot in the jungles. God bless America ‘cause at least we got out of Mississippi (Goddamn)...I guess.

When you are born, you just get here. You get born where you live. This was a large part of what I was to become in those early years. King had come to 24th and Wabash to my church, Quinn Chapel. I even shook his hand after protesting about getting no access when all these damn strangers came and got all the seats. Me and my buddies waited for him outside. We later sneaked away to one of the marches and found out non-violence was way worse than violence in our young minds. We could not hit back. But you know how that is...spit on a brother and "thump-thump" in your chest.

Malcolm X walked on 25th and Federal, Castro had ridden into Havana. We watched monks light themselves afire and I heard old black men from the World Wars expound on Buddhist philosophy between sips of Wild Irish Rose, while I passed on the way to Quinn Chapel Church, an outpost on the Underground Railroad. For a while this was liberated territory for a kid. A great mystery to be explored, then to venture out from, into the urban junglee.

Looking at these now empty shells I remember how a teacher I had at Haines School in Chinatown pointed out the similarities, the structural design of our buildings...how it was related to "architectural design" and we heard names like Mies Van der Rohe, Wright and Burnham back then. Teachers loved to teach and in my class we loved to learn.

I guess a part of me really felt the destruction of this place long before it was torn down. It held so much promise and then turned into a  Village of the Damned, minus the glowing eyes. I knew something was wrong when the flowerbeds stopped being seed and the grass had pathways that were joined to the walkways. Still it was home. My first scars are from here. My first knife was for more than dinner. I wanted to defend my books.

All that was left was the doorway one day. I thought of my career soldier uncle walking his new German wife and her two German children through these doors and my fascination at what it must have looked like, in 1965.

How could this be the last thing standing? I remember Ms. Jessie and her lover. Ms Jessie was clean, meaning well dressed. She dressed like a man but was nice to us children she deemed worthy. We watched her one evening in front of the tavern across the street wielding a razor in slow motion at some man who challenged her right to be who she was. She was not one for mess, or messing with her woman, and she was cool with us. No one told me to hate her. She had a hard heart full of love and a fast blade.

All those memories, making way for progress and the derailed promise of the Olympics. Heroin came in 1967. The real wrecking ball. Kids who beat me up fell victim first, as users and sellers. We were gone by then. My father’s return from Vietnam helped us dodge that bullet possibly. Who knows? We left for Fort Benning, Georgia. Went to an integrated Methodist Church on the base and sang "hymns." Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Georgia with no flava.

There it is, folks. 2310 gone, y'all.

We’re still here, all of us alive. All of us mostly sane. Many of us still got jobs, some don't. Chinatown remains, I watched Chinese people walking over there taking pictures. I never saw that before. There is the legend of one Chinese girl coming to ride the elevators. She survived that but she was never heard from again until 45 years later in an email over the internet.

I am missing BoyJack, Luther, Mr. Gaynor, the twins Dennis and Denise, Ms. Noonan across the hall and her snuff errands I would run. Officer Booker T. and his German shepherd who played bebop on residents’ heads some nights. I have forgotten more names then I remember. People still recognize me from the Ickes. Even in LA, and in South Carolina.

Something always survives a passing. Some memories will always resonate.

RELATED BLOGS AND STORIES ABOUT THE ICKES
Megan Cottrell’s blog, One Story Up 
FLICKR: Chicago: Lost, Destroyed, Razed 
Sun-Times: Photographer John White Chronicles the Downfall of the Ickes