One family's experience of White Flight and the racial transformation of Chicago's South Side (an online novel)

Chapter 1 -- An Overview

The History

Homesteaders began to settle in South Shore Valley around the 1880s. In the early days, the land was primarily swampland, covered by burr oaks and wild flowers. It was cut off from the rest of the area by railroad tracks on all four sides and was difficult to reach.

It was located on an area originally called "Stony Island Ridge" which became the property of the Calumet and Chicago Canal and Dock Company. The land was considered a part of what was then known as a much larger Village of Hyde Park. In 1889, the Village of Hyde Park was annexed by the City of Chicago, and sectioned into several communities.

A wave of new residents migrated to the area in the early 1890s, most affluent white collar workers from the steel mills on Chicago's East Side. It also attracted some merchants who owned businesses in South Chicago.

Most of the original inhabitants were Polish, but they were quickly followed by Italian and Irish immigrants. They settled in the area west of Stony Island. The area to the east was unsettled and remained prairie.

It was after World War II that the area saw its largest growth with a large influx of Jewish families, some of whom joined to form a Synagogue nearby in 1950.

The early homesteaders there remained mostly Jewish. South Shore Valley had become one of the many satellite Jewish communities that were growing in strength and size in the Chicago area.

In the early 1960s, Black families began moving into the area just west of Stony Island Avenue. The street was considered an economic and social dividing line. Community leaders based around their religious institutions, Rodfei Shalom Synagogue at 90th Street and Jeffrey (Jeffery -- it's spelled both ways sometimes) Boulevard in Pill Hill, and Bethany Lutheran Church across the street at the top of the hill on 91st Street, began to speak about "staying" and not fleeing from the encroaching middle class Black movement.

But, by early 1968, that ad hoc effort, which was the result of a general community consensus, and that crossed religious and ethnic lines to include many non-Jews, had been broken. The first Black families began to cross Stony Island Avenue into South Shore Valley in a steady and deliberate trickle, aided by real estate land speculators and panic-peddlers.

The Geography

Officially known today as Calumet Heights, it is divided into several smaller communities. The larger community is bounded by 87th Street on the north, by the New York Central and S&TL Railroad on the west, by the Illinois Central Railroad (CRI & P Railroad) between 94th and 95th Streets on the south, and diagonally northwest to southeast by South Chicago Avenue and the Skyway on the east.

"Stony Island Heights" is located west of Stony Island Avenue. A large portion of the area between Stony Island Avenue and Jeffery Boulevard is popularly called "Pill Hill", and was originally called "South Shore Valley." The area rises about 40 feet on a slight incline - a limestone ridge - from 91st Street to the top of the "hill" at 92nd Street, running from east to west. Technically, the area east of Jeffery is called South Shore Gardens, although the name was rarely used. Eventually, the name South Shore Valley has come to include the entire area between Stony Island Avenue on the west and the Skyway on the east, between 87th Street on the north and the Illinois Central Railroad on the south. Jeffery Boulevard runs north and south through its center.

South Shore Valley is the name that most people I knew had come to use to describe where we lived.
South of 95th Street was Jeffery Manor. North of 87th Street was the community of Avalon. Just north of 83rd Street was South Shore proper. East of the Skyway was James H. Bowen High school and South Chicago. The area was a truly ethnic hodgepodge of Jews, Mexicans, Italians, Serbians, Croations, Poles, Greeks and some Arabs.

My family

My father was born in Jerusalem, Palestine in 1901. He had worked at the main Post Office in Jerusalem in his youth, salaried by the British Government. In the early 1920s, he received permission to come to the United States where he settled with an older brother, Mousa (Moses) who worked at Rolling Green Country Club in the Northwest Suburbs near Arlington Heights. They lived together with relatives in a home on the city's Near North Side on Clybourne Ave.

In 1941, dad enlisted and joined the US Army. He had some college, studying Law at DePaul University. He served during World War II with the US Fifth Army in Europe and was honorably discharged in 1945. He had worked with the O.S.S. which later became the CIA.

After the war, he married and with the support of the Veteran's Administration, he bought a home on 87th Street, one block west of Stony Island Avenue. His first wife, Walbert Mueller, had died giving birth to my older brother on Christmas Eve, 1948. She was 24.

My brother was sent to a Lutheran foster home in Westfield, Wisconsin, where he lived until my father remarried in 1952, to my mother, Georgette. My dad and mother had only met a few months earlier during a pre-arranged visit to Bethlehem where my father traveled at the urging of his sister, Helen, to find a wife. It had been five years since Walbert's death and his son needed a mother. Dad first saw my mother as she carried a jug of water from the Bethlehem well in Manger Square. The marriage was arranged. I was born the following year. My sister, Linda, was born in 1954.

In 1954, they purchased a small ranch home at 9906 South Forest Avenue, located several blocks west of South Park Avenue (later renamed The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive). There, my mother learned to speak English with the Greek woman who lived next door, Esther Hansen. I recall one morning that a Polish woman with a heavy accent came to meet my mother. She lived in the apartment building down the block from us. I was only three or four years old, at the time, but as the woman spoke to my mom in her broken English, I had to repeat the words to my mother who could not understand what she was saying.
Around 1957-58, my family moved to 8928 S. Luella Avenue, just before the state extended what is now the Dan Ryan Expressway and built the Calumet Expressway slicing through the very center of our block and bringing 99th and Forest Avenue to an abrupt southern halt.

The home on Luella Avenue had cost them about $12,000. It had two bedrooms and was a two-story, brick Georgian. Dad worked at Sinclair Oil Company as an accountant. He made slightly more than $4,000 a year, which was lower than the salaries earned by the families of my closest friends. My father died in the summer of 1970. In the years before we moved, mom went to work as a factory worker on a conveyer belt at the Solo Cup Company, which was located just south of 95th Street, past Stony Island Avenue. It had a nice garage and they later built a screened in porch which had moveable, narrow window slats that sealed it from the cold.

My father had to pay a small "incentive" to the local Alderman, at the time, to get the city permit to have the porch extension to our house built.

I remember sitting on the front steps on the day that we moved in to our Luella Avenue home, meeting the girl next door, Sharon Zurek, who was my age. Her brother Frank was my brother's age. Mom and dad painted the inside of the home the day before the movers brought in our few furnishings. Mom gave us hard boiled eggs that we seasoned with salt as we sat on the cement front steps admiring the beautiful homes and lawns, a community built, they said, to accommodate and help settle veterans from the War.