Amid chaos, signs of life in city’s neighborhoods
A struggle for control as good people soldier on
The book’s not out yet, but the exploring is over, at least for now. For the last two-and-a-half years, my major project has been a book titled “Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods.” Scheduled for release on Sept. 24, it tells the stories of 37 communities in the older part of town, including several that are currently in the news for all the wrong reasons.
I got to know those communities, on at least a basic level, while I was doing research for the book, a process that required both archival work and long days in the neighborhoods themselves. Traveling on foot and by bicycle, I took a leisurely, up-close look at virtually every street in the central city, covering hundreds of miles in the process. I also talked to roughly 200 people, on front porches and crowded sidewalks, in back alleys and quiet parks. Much of my time was spent in neighborhoods where mine was one of the very few white faces — Harambee, Lindsay Heights, Amani, Midtown, Washington Park, Sherman Park and several other predominantly black communities on the north and west sides.
Those neighborhoods are on my mind as a spasm of violence grips the inner city this summer. Milwaukee recorded more homicides in the first seven months of this year than it had in all of 2014, and the non-fatal shootings and stabbings barely rate a mention in the newspaper. Nothing — neither pleas from the mayor nor appeals from the pulpit nor increased police surveillance — has been able to halt the epidemic.
A disproportionate share of the carnage is taking place in the older north and west side communities I visited for “City of Neighborhoods.” Those areas, in fact, make up most of the eight square miles that account
for 93% of the city’s gun violence. Anyone reading the news could easily conclude that Milwaukee’s inner city has devolved into a shooting gallery, where chaos reigns supreme and outsiders risk their lives just by driving through.
That is emphatically not the case. My own unscientific survey convinced me that life in the central city is far more nuanced and significantly more hopeful than the news reports would indicate. I came away from my explorations certain that every block, and I mean that quite literally, has its share of law-abiding, peace-loving citizens who are doing their best to create coherent lives, with fewer resources but no less resolve than in the whitest suburbs.
It’s true that many of them seek that coherence under conditions that would discourage all but the hardiest suburbanite. During my winter and spring rounds last year, I was surprised to find a number of inner city residents who actually dreaded the coming of summer because that’s when the streets come back to life. Cookouts are counterbalanced by shootouts, firing up the grill by fires in the houses next door.
“It can get crazy around here,” said a N. 21st St. resident. Her block in the Amani neighborhood is pockmarked with vacant houses that have been stripped of everything worth taking, and they stand like mute and malevolent ghosts in what had once been a vibrant neighborhood. After dark come the sounds of what I would take for firecrackers in Bay View, but north siders know better. “It’s idiots with guns,” said a Burleigh St. homeowner. “I agree with the right to bear arms, but not these idiots.”
By day, the busiest local businesses tend to be undersized corner stores selling nothing but snacks, sweets and soda. Some sidewalks carry a steady procession of junkers bringing their booty to the nearest recycling center in shopping carts and baby strollers. The entire landscape of the inner city is thinning before its residents’ eyes. Demolition sites look like tooth extractions when the houses come down and like fresh graves when the wreckage is covered with dirt. The result can be a slow-motion demographic collapse. In the census tracts that define the heart of Lindsay Heights (N. 7th to N. 20th streets between Locust and Galena streets), the population plunged from 39,440 in 1950 to 8,685 in 2010. What’s going on is the Detroitization of Milwaukee’s central city.
These conditions are like urban wallpaper, ubiquitous and accepted as normal. And yet people continue to live there — by habit, by necessity and by choice — because decay and violence are only part of the story. There is not a single neighborhood in central Milwaukee that doesn’t show clear signs of new life. On dozens of blocks I’d see a house coming down on one side of the street and a new roof being applied on the other. Hundreds of vacant lots have been reclaimed for new homes, and there are whole subdivisions that wouldn’t look out of place in the suburbs. An older woman on King Drive said that she’d seen plenty of change in her 25 years in the neighborhood. “Some lately’s for the better,” she concluded. “It’s building up.”
Much of the recent progress is the work of public agencies, churches and nonprofit groups, but individuals play a key role as well, even on the meanest streets. I’m thinking of a couple — let’s call them Willie and Esther — I met on N. 37th St. near Galena. (Like everyone else referred to in this story, they are African-American.) When Willie and Esther moved into their rented lower flat six years ago, drug dealers were conducting business in their front yard, and the dealers would hide their stash in the couple’s mulberry tree whenever a squad car approached. “You’d come out on your own front porch,” Willie said, “and people’d be sitting there, smoking weed.”
Enough was soon enough. Esther chased two girls around the corner with a baseball bat, and her husband videotaped the action as soon as he came home from work every day, creating evidence for the police. Their flat was firebombed and their windows were broken, but the couple endured.
“We wasn’t going to leave until we was ready,” Willie declared. “Sometimes you got to fight the fight.” Things are better today. “No one tries to take stuff out of your mailbox,” said Esther, “and you can sit out on your porch late at night.”
Block by block, even house by house, the forces of chaos and the forces of order are locked in a struggle for control of the inner city. The balance is constantly shifting, and it appears that chaos is winning this summer. Eighty percent of the shootings involve people who know each other, but that leaves plenty of room for ancillary damage. A bullet fired from one sinkhole of depravity and desperation can have a devastating impact across the street or down the block.
But don’t conclude that the chaos is general. A chasm miles wide and oceans deep separates the lawless from the law-abiding in the central city, even when they live on the same blocks. It’s not unusual to hear a black homeowner blast “those people,” especially “those young people,” with pure scorn, and no wonder. The residents I met on my ramblings are just as troubled by unruly kids and falling property values as anyone in Brookfield or New Berlin would be, and their interest is intensely personal. It’s their safety that seems compromised, their houses that could be targeted, their investment that could evaporate.
As this long hot summer continues, think of the victims, certainly, but don’t write off entire swaths of the city as uninhabitable urban jungles. Think also of the lives going well there, of the people still trying, of the Willies and Esthers who are fixtures in every neighborhood. Reacting with fear and disgust won’t do a thing to solve the problems of the inner city. It is in the ground of compassion that solutions take root.