(Old Town Village West townhomes, a new mixed-income development, ca. 2009; looming in the background is the William Green Homes high-rise, part of Cabrini-Green, demolished 2011. Photo by Lawrence J. Vale)
“In 1929 a treatise by sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh famously depicted the Near North Side of Chicago as divided into The Gold Coast and the Slum. [1] Within a generation the public housing development Cabrini-Green, built in stages from the early 1940s to the early 1960s, would replace that slum — all too literally, as it turned out. For while in its early years the Cabrini project, which consisted of low-rise and high-rise housing, served as a clean and modern alternative to the horrific conditions of the neighborhood known as “Little Hell,” Cabrini-Green itself would suffer a protracted decline — to the point where it became the slum it had been meant to cure. By the early 1990s Cabrini-Green had come to symbolize the systemic failures of postwar public housing, and it was then that city officials and local developers initiated a second cycle of renewal.”
Interesting essay by Lawrence Vale for Design Observer.
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