‘Face of Cabrini-Green’
A lost child, a legacy of failure and a changing neighborhood
Ona cold Saturday at the end of October, the corner of Division Street and Cleveland A venue was consecrated. A small crowd bowed their heads and prayed along with a man whose voice projected out to the whole block. “We glorify your name, Lord God, for the life and the legacy of Janari Ricks.”
They stood next to new condos whose listings boast of soaking tubs and wraparound balconies. A couple of blocks south were the Cabrini-Green rowhouses, the last vestige of the old neighborhood, where Janari lived and died. Jalisa Ford, Janari’s mother, bowed her head and wiped away tears. It had been three months since her 9-year-old son was fatally shot. She had worked fierce ly for this moment, when an honorary street sign bearing his name would be unveiled.
When the prayer concluded, she straightened up and strode into the gathered crowd. There was no trace of the tears.
“I hope that this will bridge the gap of everyone just coming together, making a change, and making a difference on the Near North Side, as a community, as a whole,” she said.
Moments later, to loud cheers, the signwas uncovered: Honorary Janari RicksWay.
Cabrini- Green, the public housing complex once infamous nationwide as a symbol of crime and urban blight, has been slowly demolished over the past two decades. Its mostly Black residents were scattered around the city, replaced by new retail and sleek condos forwealthier, mostly white newcomers.
It is the most prominent test of the Richard M. Daley-era housing policy that, in the name of economic integration, displaced thousands of low-income Chicagoans, promising they would eventually get new homes among more affluent new neighbors. And fortunes have started reversing in the neighborhood once known as “Little Hell,” whose history of deep poverty and violent crime stretches over parts of three centuries.
It is a corner of the city where anyone can see a new Chicago bumping up against the old. But the divide between the remaining Cabrini residents and their richer neighbors remains stark, and relations have grown tense. Exactly howthe past and future will mesh is uncertain.
The city set those changes in motion before Janari was born, and they will continue after his death. But for years to come at the corner of Division and Cleveland, there will be a memorial to Janari Ricks.
A child of Cabrini
Janari grew up in the last remaining strip of inhabited rowhouses, along the west side of Cambridge Avenue. The yellow brick is cleanandwell maintained. There are hostas planted next to the front doors and roses in the courtyard. Across the street stand the vacant rowhouses, boarded up, smothered in dirt and ivy, uninhabited since 2012 and left to the squatters and rats and raccoons. A mile to the east is the glittering Gold Coast.
The infamous Cabrini highrises, the “reds” and the “whites,” were demolished years ago. Their residents moved to faraway CHA projects, used vouchers for private housing, relocated to designated CHA units in the new construction nearby, or dropped off the rolls.
But many former residents, now scattered across the city, are still drawn to what’s left of the neighborhood. Despite — or perhaps because of — decades of instability, they said, unusually strong bondswere formed.
“We’re all fromthe same neighborhood. It’s like (Janari’s) my child,” said Jermaine Savage, a row house native who returned for the street-sign ceremony. “That’s how we look at each other’s kids, and everything. So it really hurt to see that happen to him because I knew everybody involved, even the guy that supposedly did it.”
Janari was killed in an extraordinarily violent year wracked by the pandemic and civil unrest, one of Chicago’s bloodiest in two decades. Fifty children age 12 and younger have been killed or wounded by gunfire citywide so far in 2020.
But the attack that claimed Janariwas uniquely Cabrini.
Crowds of past and present residents gathered at the rowhouses many evenings this summer. They grilled, they played music, they laughed, they fought. July 31was no different.
That evening, Janari was playing with his best friend, Kyler, who was heading into his grandmother’s rowhouse to get a video game controller while Janari waited in the courtyard.
Moments earlier, Darrell Johnson and another man had been fighting over a woman, neighbors said. Johnson made a threat, left the area and came back. Prosecutors later said he “went hunting” for his intended target, who happened to be in the courtyard not far from where Janari was waiting.
Johnson walked up a nearby alley and aimed shots through a gate, firing into the crowded courtyard, witnesses said.
On hearing the gunfire, Janari first ran toward Kyler’s mother, who was close by on a porch.
When a bullet caught him in the back, he turned and ran south — toward his own home. He only made it as far as the next courtyard before collapsing on the sidewalk.
Cabrini eyewitnesses came forward eagerly. The shooter, they said, was Johnson, their former neighbor. They recognized his distinctive hair and his pronounced limp.
“We’re in a community where everyone knows everybody. Even the shooter. He knew me,” Ford told the Tribune. “He knew that was my son, he knew my family. He knew (Janari’s) dad. And he had all the opportunity to just— as he thought about it, he knew that he could have said ‘I’ll just wait.’ But he didn’t.”
Johnson was charged with first-degree murder and held without bail pending trial.
“It was so many people out here, it was so many families out here, it happened in front of a lot of kids,” Courtney Springfield, Kyler’s mother, said outside her mom’s rowhouse.
Kyler and Janari had been inseparable. Sometimes Springfield catches her son looking at pictures of Janari, or going on his TikTok page.
He rarely goes outside anymore. She brought him to the unveiling of the honorary street sign, but he didn’twant to stay out for long.
“I guess he don’twant people to talk to him about it,” she told the Tribune. “He just try to suppress it. He toldmy mom, he said when he thinks about it, he don’t like how his chest feels. Like, it hurt his heart or something.”
A universe apart
The reds and the whites were cleared out to makeway for a new kind of high-rise, the kind with coffee shops and day spas at the ground level, the kind that attract the affluent. They have sprouted up in a wide ring around what remains of Cabrini, such that the dilapidated vacant buildings and the Cambridge Avenue rowhouses are nestled in a kind of valley. They are a shortwalk away, and a universe apart.
Some residents of the newer condos and town homes around Cabrini met the news of Janari’s death with dread and frustration, but not surprise.
Something like this was almost bound to happen, they told the Tribune. Beginning in the spring, they said, they noticed more parties, fights, gunshots and fireworks like sonic booms, late into the night nearly every night. The kind of Cabrini courtyard that hemmed in a small crowd of people during Janari’s shooting also acts like anamplifier, beaming sound out to the whole neighborhood.
The Tribune spoke to several residents of the new buildings surrounding the rowhouses. Most would not give permission to use their names, citing fears of retaliation from-neighborhood residents or professional repercussions. They are conscious of the optics: the racial, socioeconomic overtones of their unease.
There had been disturbances at the rowhouses in prior years, they said. But they were occasional, and easier to ignore. Something about this hectic summer made it escalate dramatically.
They had been trying, and failing, to get police, aldermen and the ChicagoHousing Authority to do something about it.
Representatives of more than a dozen nearby buildings, representing some 2,000 residents, got organized.
They measured decibel levels every night for two and a half months and found that on the vast majority of those nights, the noise reached a level above the city’s noise-control ordinance limit. They coordinated their calls to 911. They held conference calls with theCHAandwent to a police beat meeting. One resident hired a consultant to try to find out if it was physically possible for a bullet from the rowhouses to be fired into their home.
A 26-page slideshow they presented to the CHAin early August detailed their grievances formally and anonymously. Many said they were thinking about moving.
“I have a 3.5-year-old daughter who is now terrified of loud sounds, when they’re setting off fireworks in the middle of the night, she starts shrieking and shaking until we can console her,” was the message of one resident.
“Why can’t this part of the neighborhood behave, like the rest,” wrote another.
In the three months leading up to Janari’s death, the group had multiple calls and meetings with CHA, police and Ald. Walter Burnett Jr., 27th.
“We’re in a community where everyone knows everybody. Even the shooter. He knew me.” — Jalisa Ford, Janari’s mother
CHA, they said, told them it was the police’s responsibility. Police told them it was the CHA’s responsibility. And the partying continued, though some residents said things calmed down after Janariwas killed.
Springfield, who witnessed the shooting, said some of the newer residents have made their thoughts about the rowhouses very clear.
“Every summer night, if we out here barbecuing, they throw eggs,” she said, pointing to a condo building across the alley. “They be out there partying, so it’s funny to us. We been here all our life, we can’t come out and party, but they had a whole balcony filled, kicking
it.”
Springfield said she had heard of the group of condo residents organizing — but the way she had heard it through the grapevine, they had banded together to complain that the rowhouses were an eyesore.
“They spend too much money to be looking at (us),” she said. “They come from wherever they came fromand saywe got to go.”
The area’s new residents said they strongly doubted anyone threw eggs at partyers in the courtyard, though they said if that did happen, it would be reprehensible. Theyvehemently denied they wanted to push longtime residents out of the neighborhood.
All they wanted, they said, was some peace and quiet— and more security.
Raymond Richard, a Cabrini native and a longtime community activist, also heard about the views of the area’s newcomers.
“Now, what they said (is) the music’s too loud. This is ourway of life. Your way of life is on the rooftop with your wines,” he said from his office at Holy Family LutheranChurch, just north of the rowhouses. “You do what you do. We do what we do. … No, I can’t pay $3,500 a month. Hell no. I’m not going to pretend like I can. But does that make you better than me? No it don’t.”
“This is precious land. This is
our land. And we’re going to fight like hell for ours,” Richard said. “We ain’t going to let nobody come in and bombard us and be like the new city and push us out. They can build all around it. If (it) ain’t inclusive, we’ll burn it down.”
Cabrini in his blood
Darrell Johnson, Janari’s alleged killer, grewup in the Cabrini high-rises. For a time, he lived in one of the “reds” on Hudson, across the street from the nowvacant rowhouses where Jalisa Ford grew up.
Like so many displaced as the high-rises came down, he moved around to various neighborhoods on the South Side: Englewood, then South Shore, then Brighton Park.
And like many others, he kept coming back. His brother Dionta did too. One of Dionta’s trips back to the old neighborhood got him killed, shotby at least one assailant in 2006 near Division and Clybourn.
But that didn’t keep Johnson away from Cabrini. The pull toward home — an old neighborhood, an old territory— is strong.
Most of the rowhouses’ current troubles can be traced to former residents, said Ald. Burnett, a Cabrini native who has represented the area since the 1990s.
It’s “people who used to be in the neighborhood who come over there and do their thing,” he said. “If they were like that when they’re living there they’d likely lose their lease … they feel like it’s still their land, that they’re home.”
Janari, like Johnson, had Cabrini in his blood.
His father, Raymond Ricks, grew up in the “whites,” the beige-colored high-rises north of Division Street. Raymond’s mother, Annie, was the final per
son to move out of the last high-rise before it was demolished in 2011, a few months after Janariwas born.
Jalisa Ford’s family, like Johnson’s, came north from Alabama during the Great Migration. Her mother and grandmother lived in the rowhouses, where Jalisa was raised with her brother and sister.
Cabrini was home, but she made sure it was not her whole world. She went to grammar school in Lakeview, where she was one of only a handful of Black students. The other kids looked down on her for not having name-brand clothes, and it took years before anyone wanted to sit next to her. Whenshe got home in the afternoons, the Cabrini kids teased her too: “Oh, you think you’re better than us?”
Her sisterwent away to military school. She said her mother often struggled with drinking and depression. So Jalisa and her older brother, Andre, grew as close as siblings could be. There were no secrets between them, she said.
In 2003, 17-year-old Andre was shot in the back in one of the red high-rises onHudson.
“Wrongplace, wrongtime, being with thewrongperson. Theydidn’t aim at him, but they didn’t know how to aim. And one of the bullets caughtmy brother,” Ford said.
He had been expected to survive, and was planning to transition froma hospital to a rehabilitation center, Ford said. But he died in the hospital after what Ford described as a botched procedure to change his breathing tube. His death tore her apart. Andshemoved away, for a time, to live with her aunts on a quiet block on the West Side near the Oak Park border. But she came back. She didn’t want her mother to be alone, and besides, the rowhouseswere home.
“I felt safe coming back,” she said. “(My brother) wasn’t an intended target, just like my son wasn’t an intended target. So I didn’t feel likewewere in any type of danger or anything, because it wasn’t his fault.”
‘My mother’s nightmare’
Jalisa Ford felt that pull toward home after her short time on the West Side. She went back and spent the rest of her teenage years at Cabrini. That’s where she met Raymond Ricks.
It was a Romeo and Juliet romance. At the time, the guys in her rowhouses were feuding with the guys in his high-rises. He would sneak down from the highrises to meet her, and she would steal out to see him in the whites.
She became pregnant at 17. Her family was angry, she said, they expected more of her than teenage motherhood.
“But of course I showed them otherwise,” she said, with a forceful kind of pride in her voice. “I did graduate high school, I didwork.”
When she learned she was having a boy, she felt instantly that it was the reincarnation of her brother. She chose Janari’s middle name, Andre, as a tribute to him. As Janari grew older, he looked and acted just like Andre, she said. And then he met a similar end.
“I’m relivingmy mother’s nightmare all over again,” Ford said.
Ford and her fiance called Janari the “face” of Cabrini-Green — the kind of child who was looked upon as a model of what after-school programs and neighborhood resources could nurture.
Everyone who met him described him as astonishingly bright: an outstanding student who spoke good Spanish for his age, with a dazzling command of
obscure sports statistics. This spring, he helped his father’s fiancee study for herGED.
Last year, Ford said, they were at a nearby Whole Foods when he heard two men speaking about him in Spanish, saying something to the effect of, “somebody needs to be in this aisle towatch this kid, ‘cause he’s still picking up stuff,” she said.
“My son turned around and said to them, ‘ My mom’s right here, I’m not going to steal anything,’” Ford said. “He told them that in Spanish.”
He idolized the Golden State Warriors, especially Stephen Curry; he wanted to play basketball professionally when he grew up. Fordwas careful not to tellhim that some players get drafted out of high school. She wanted to make sure he had a backup plan.
“I used to always tell him, ‘you want to be a basketball player, you gotta get a good what?’ And he would repeat it: ‘education,’” she said.
And the backup plan for Janari was construction.
“He was only 9, and that’s the way he thought: ‘I want to be in the development business. I want to build buildings,’” she said.
For a child who grew up in a valley of rowhouses surrounded by new modern high-rises, whose whole life had been scored to the ringing of jackhammers and cranes and backhoes raising Near North condominiums, it seemed a natural fit.
But Janari is gone, and the construction continues.
A delicate dynamic
WhenChicago police Sgt. Chris Schenkwas a child, he used to ride his bike all theway from his home in West Rogers Park to CabriniGreen, 10 miles away. He was curious. Hewanted to explore.
“I was a kid, I didn’t know any different,” he said. “And then when I told my mom, she said, ‘Where’d you go?’”
Schenk, 48, hasbeenworking in the Near North patrol district on and off, but mostly on, for nearly two decades. He is the kind of cop who shows up to neighborhood barbecues and peace marches and block parties. He gives out his cellphone number.
Residents smile when they see him. They pose with him for pictures. The big uniformed white guy sticks out, but everyone is grinning.
It wasn’t always like that. It took seven or eight years for some of the neighbors to trust him.
“Friendships begin with, what? ‘Hello, my name is Chris.’ Introduction, right? Communication,” Schenk said. “I would stick aroundandlistenandjust letthem talk to me.”
One drizzly November morning, Schenk walked past the rowhouses. He was greeted by a CHA security guard, and asked her if her boss was around for a quick hello. A man emerged from the front door of a rowhouse and flagged him down.
“Every day I try to provemyself to the community,” Schenk said. “All I can think is about what can I do to double up onmy efforts.”
That kind of policing, residents said, is in sharp contrast to the cops who are stationed at each end of Cambridge Avenue. They generally come in from other districts, and take the opportunity to sit in a squad car and earn overtime.
Sending police into neighborhoods where they have no re
lationships can cause real problems, said Vince Carter, who has coached sports in Cabrini for decades.
“They’re saying, ‘OK, you can do overtime but we’re going to send you to Cabrini,’” Carter said. “So first of all, before you even say yes or no, once you say yes, you’re already perceiving, ‘Well, they wouldn’t be asking me to go over there if some stuff’s not going on.’”
Cops respond by assuming some kids just running across a street must be into mischief or worse, he said.
“… So then when you get here and you start seeing whatever, you know, some kids running across the street, you’re thinking they’re doing something wrong. And so now you stop those kids. And so now those kids got an attitude toward you, ‘Why you stopping me?’
“And so to me, that sets the wrong example. But if you have community policing and, I’ll just say Sgt. Schenk … knows that Demetrius is running because he’s probably trying to get to the basketball court. Because he knows that he plays basketball. So he’s not going to stop him, because he already knows that this is the good kid in the neighborhood.”
Burnett said police and the CHA need to do more to root out the troublemakers, speculating thatCHAsecurity might be scared of the residents.
Recently, he said, police and security have started checking IDs of people they encounter on Cambridge, to see if they belong.
Maurice Edwards, a neighborhood activist, said hewants police to take it a step further and do an early-morningsweep of the whole neighborhood.
“That’s tomake sure that everybody who’s laying their hat under these roofs, in these apartments here, belongs here,” he said as he walked down Cambridge Avenue. “And the weapons are cleared out here … as well as the drugs, the squatters, whatever you have.”
Edwards is vice president of the Cabrini- Green Local Advisory Council, a resident advocacy organization. He grew up in the whites, including in the building where a Target now stands. He nowlives in aCHApublic housing unit embedded in a block of stylish, modern townhomes within walking distance of the rowhouses.
The city’s public housing policy has shifted toward such mixedincome developments in recent decades, theorizing that economic integration will reduce crime and improve neighborhood stability.
Edwards is keenly aware of the delicate dynamic between the old and new neighbors.
“If you’re new to Chicago, it wouldn’t take you long to figure out Cabrini-Green sits on prime land,” Edwards said. “We have always known that through generations, coming up. And I understand it, theywant us out.”
He thought for a moment about who “they” were.
“Does the ‘they’ turn out to be the rich people, the political people, or who?” he said. “The suburbanites that want to come from the suburbs, the yuppies, who are the ‘they’? The ‘they’ seem to be a mixture of everything.”