WILLIE REED, 56, ICKES HOMES / DEARBORN HOMES
Willie Reed remembers when the Ickes Homes on the South Side were a mixed- income community. It was the 1960s. Soon after he was born, he and his family moved into apartment 204 at 2222 S. State. Ickes had just opened seven years earlier. “It was beautiful down there,” says Reed, 56. He remembers climbing trees and eating candy in them. Come December, every Ickes building had a Christmas tree on the roof. He’d walk outside, and people greeted him like family. And the CHA took care of the place.
“At the beginning, they were fixing things up. When I was 5, 6 years old, I can remember them waxing the hallway. When I was, like, 11 years old, I got a job sweeping up, cleaning the buildings up…. But, over time, they started deteriorating.” Families moved out. Gangs and dealers moved in. The CHA “could have gotten rid of that crowd, and it would have made it better.”
Reed’s strategy for avoiding problems: “I minded my own business, and I worked.”
In 2006, the CHA started emptying the buildings. Reed, who was on the maintenance staff, helped board up and close them. He’ll never forget seeing the building where he grew up demolished.
“When they tore down my building, I sat there and cried,” he says.
The building next to his, at 2322 S. State, got the wrecking ball, too, even though it had just been rehabbed.
Reed and other residents had to move out. He got laid off. The last of the Ickes buildings was torn down in 2010.
He moved a few blocks down State Street to the Dearborn Homes. “I like it,” he says, “but I wish I was back home.”
Since 2010, the former Ickes site has sat empty except for the south end of the property, turned into an athletic field for Jones College Prep, which is two miles away in the South Loop.
Last year, the CHA finally announced redevelopment plans: a new, mixed- income development along South State, from 22nd to 24th, where the Ickes Homes once stood.
The agency says it will include 887 apartments — 244 of them for CHA residents. But more than 800 families lived there when the buildings came down. — Mick Dumke