South Side character captured
3 books bring to life an area often ignored
One of the seven chapters in Lee Bey’s “Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side” is only three pages long and has to do with St. Thomas Episcopal Church, an architectural delight that the authorphotographer found by accident at 38th Street and Wabash Avenue.
Bey, former architecture critic of the Chicago SunTimes, was thrilled to discover this gem, built in the 1960s, which he describes as “an architecturally funky and bold structure,” featuring four large triangular windows and red doors set in a wall of mosaiclike glass.
The small, predominantly black church is an example of the often vibrant building designs of the South Side, which one of Bey’s sources lauds as “a curious mix of the ordinary and extraordinary.”
Bey’s book is one of three newly published works that have to do with aspects of the South Side that have been “overlooked” by the rest of the city and metropolitan region — indeed, the nation. Although this area of Chicago is the size of Philadelphia and home to more than 750,000 people, it is often written off as “a place where people are mostly black, poor, and murderous, living in squalor, disinvestment, abandonment, and violence,” complains Bey.
The reality, he asserts, is that the “South Side contains the finest collection of architecture, parks, and green space in Chicago, outside of downtown.”
Not only are there undiscovered jewels, such as St. Thomas Episcopal, but also nine Frank Lloyd Wright homes; myriad public schools and residences from the modernist disciples of Mies van der Rohe; and the D’Angelo Law Library at the University of Chicago, designed by Eero Saarinen, one of the 20th century’s most respected architects.
That library, featured on the cover of Bey’s book, is “a showstopper, with its crisp, undulating curtain wall of bluish glass that reads like the folds of an accordion’s bellows.” Nonetheless, it hasn’t been designated a city landmark or listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
It’s not alone. “The South Side … has been largely omitted from Chicago’s architectural discussion … flat-out ignored,” Bey writes.
Over and again, he describes South Side buildings that have gone unrecognized and unprotected by the city and preservationists, such as Chicago Vocational High School, 2100 E. 87th St., “an art deco and art moderne hybrid that is so detailed and accomplished” that it merits being honored locally and nationally.
Or the nearby Bowen High School, 2710 E. 89th St., which is “virtually identical” to Schurz High School, 3601 N. Milwaukee Ave., on the North Side. Schurz has been a city landmark since 1978 and on the National Register since 2011 “as an acclaimed masterpiece of Prairie School architecture.” Bowen, its twin, has gotten neither recognition.
Bey’s “Southern Exposure” is a celebration of the architecture of the South Side and a love letter to the area where he grew up and has spent much of his life.
It is also an indictment of the institutional racism that has withheld honor from the dazzlingly designed buildings to be found south of Cermak Road and, even worse, has “cruelly conspired” to drive down the value of all properties in predominately African American neighborhoods. The result, Bey writes, is that “untold millions of dollars in potential real estate equity … were robbed from property owners on the South and West Sides.”
In a second of the new books dealing with the South Side, Renny Golden’s “The Music of Her Rivers,” the centerpiece of a collection of luminous poems about hardscrabble lives is “Steel Mills.”
Those huge industrial fixtures on the Southwest Side for scores of decades, she writes, were where “Our fathers poured the gold like priests / transubstantiating molten for the world’s architecture.” That’s a wonderful image, but those aren’t the key lines.
Instead, they come in the middle of the poem when Golden writes about the men who, each workday, filed into the roar and clang of the plants:
where they risked limbs for the purchase / of a southside bungalow. Men whose
blunt fingers played accordions in Polka bands, / blues harmonicas at Theresa’s Club,
bodhran and fiddle at O’Halloran’s / whose hands worked shearing machines,
flywheels, cooling beds, gear boxes.”
The history of Chicago is filled with tensions and violence between workingclass blacks and whites on the South Side, and Golden acknowledges that in her “A Line Breaking: 1919 Riots.” Nonetheless, as she shows in “Steel Mills,” Golden sees deeper than these strains, sees how much the Poles, African Americans, Irish, Mexicans and others on the South Side share in their efforts to scratch out a life in an American society where they live on the lowest rungs.
Indeed, Golden’s book is about the common struggle of the South Side laborers with that of the immigrants who come, legally and illegally, across the Rio Grande from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and other southern nations.
While this shared experience of oppression and abuse may be forgotten at times, Golden writes in “Ná Géill, Nunca Abdicación (Never Surrender)” of Irish soldiers from the American army who, in 1847, swam south across the Rio Grande to fight with a Mexican people. They saw those Mexicans more as comrades than enemies in “a land of familiar chaos / poverty, ghosts, and rosaries.”
Later, after the war is lost and they are about to be hung, the San Patricios, as they are called, “feet bound, ropes on necks, cheer the Mexican flag,” even as it is lowered, and “America’s flag rises in a strangled silence.”
Golden builds her book around the rivers she has known: the Rio Grande, the Chicago with its Bubbly Creek, the Calumet and other Chicago-region waterways, natural and human-made, such as the Illinois & Michigan Canal, started in 1836.
This canal linking the Chicago River and the Mississippi, later replaced by the Illinois Sanitary and Ship Canal, was key to the city’s development, and the men who built it are the subject of “Magicians,” the Paddies from the Old Country but also former slaves:
We, the anonymous, caked in dirt. / Bruised hands gut meadows of canary weed, / sedge marsh alongside dark men with scarred
backs, lashed by a deeper servitude …
We are the nameless, who made / a silver highway for freight boats / pulled along towpaths by mules like us.
“The Music of Her Rivers” is a celebration of the “mules” of the past and the present, the women and men upon whose backs the world is built. In her final poem, “What the River Said,” she writes:
This river tale is mine, is Chicago’s, a history / as unsung as any in the flashpan of America’s / rise from prairie and stream to a city / torn between the labor of slaves and immigrants / and the blueprints of city barons.
Chicago’s skyline tells one story: “The city muscled and bullied skyward.” But there is more to be said: “The river, our sheanachi (Irish storyteller) and griot (African storyteller), keeper of myth / tells the other story: who lost.”
While Golden’s poems highlight all that has been shared by the working people of the South Side, white and black, Don Hayner’s “Binga” is a lesson in the many divisions between the two groups.
From 1908 to 1930, Jesse Binga, the founder and operator of the city’s first African American-owned bank, was the pride of the black South Side and of black America. Two men who didn’t agree on much — the conservative Booker T. Washington and the firebrand W.E.B. Du Bois — agreed in their praise of the Detroit-born Chicagoan.
As a high-volume real estate dealer, backed by his bank, Binga employed aggressive tactics, Hayner writes, to lead “an exodus of black families out of the cramped, crowded, and contaminated housing in the Black Belt.” And he led them into white neighborhoods, becoming “the most hated man in Chicago — at least in white Chicago.”
This was a time when clearly defined lines were drawn in the mental maps of Chicagoans — as well as in legal deeds — delineating where whites were permitted to live and where blacks could reside. Sometimes, these lines were given physical form, such as when white men strung a rope to create a border line at 27th Street and Wentworth Avenue with an attached sign: “Negroes Not Allowed to Cross this Dead Line.”
One Binga employee from those years told Hayner, former Chicago Sun-Times editor in chief, that the banker “was one of the original blockbusters.” But the author argues that Binga never employed the worst of the panic-peddling schemes through which pernicious businesspeople racially flipped neighborhoods for profit:
He simply moved black families in, and then whites moved out . ... He surely knew that white flight would often be the result, but if whites moved out, that was their business. Binga did, however, spike rents and push sale prices higher, in much the same way that many other real estate agents did.
Binga got his share of criticism from African Americans who had to pay rents that were as much as 50% higher than the previous white occupants. That, however, was nothing compared with the white antipathy toward him. He was even blamed for the race riots in 1919, in which more than three dozen people — black and white — were killed.
Several days after the violence, a handwritten letter from “Headquarters of the White Hands” was delivered to Binga’s home, asserting, “You are the one who helped cause this riot by encouraging Negroes to move into good white neighborhoods. … You know what comes next.” What came next was a series of at least eight bombings at the banker’s home and office over the next two years.
Binga survived the bombings, but his businesses couldn’t survive the Depression. His bank was closed by state regulators in 1930, and he was convicted in 1933 of embezzlement for highly questionable actions, perhaps taken in desperation to save his bank and business. He spent nearly three years in prison.
Hayner’s well-researched, well-balanced “Binga” highlights not only the life of the banker, but the South Side in which he made — and lost — his fortune. What’s clear from this book is how, for better or worse, Binga was his own man. This is what led Du Bois to praise him so highly as “outspoken … self-assertive … (a man who) could not be bluffed or frightened … (and) did not bend his neck nor kowtow when he spoke to white men.”
No wonder Binga had the South Side’s respect for so long.