The variation within the eight and a half square miles of these neighborhoods reflects Zorbaugh’s notion of a city of contrasts, but the renters in all three shared much of the same misery. World War II was only the latest population reshuffling for “America’s heartland city,” which had seen its share of racial, ethnic, and labor strife since the nineteenth century. Mapping these neighborhoods racially and ethnically cannot be reduced to “melting pot” metaphors.10 Identities and experiences were far too diverse for that. In fact, in the postwar apartment building, the conflicts were often intragroup as much as they were between people of different races and ethnic histories.
Most diverse was the Near North Side, long an immigrant quarter, populated by Irish, Italians, Germans, and Swedes. During and after World War II, those same groups found themselves living among new African American migrants from the South and Japanese American “resettlers” (as the government called them). The Near North Side, especially, was a neighborhood of renters. Only 8.7 percent of its dwelling units were owner occupied by 1950, and, in general, this was a grittier, more transient region of the city. During the war, the Chicago Housing Authority saw an opportunity to fight some of the area’s blight (one pocket was known as “Little Hell”) by building low-rise apartment housing for the city’s fast increasing population of war workers. The first installment of Cabrini-Green, as it was called, was completed in 1943, and the people who moved in reflected the diversity of the neighborhood.11
This public housing complex was among the shiniest and newest in an aging city. Seventy percent of the Near North Side’s single-family and multifamily dwellings had been built before 1920, but that was not much higher than for the city as a whole (63 percent). The difference was in how owners treated their buildings and the people who lived inside them. War migrants who could afford only low-grade worker housing on the Near North Side lived much like European immigrants in American cities at the turn of the century. A notably high percentage of Near North units (40.5 percent) were classified as “dilapidated” and had no bath or sink, a rate over twice as high as that for the city. Not surprisingly, the people who lived in these flats suffered in other ways. They had higher rates of tuberculosis and infant mortality, and 71 percent of them received some type of public assistance, again, more than double the rate for the rest of the city (31.2 percent).12 Closest to Chicago’s downtown, the Near North Side simply absorbed more of World War II’s disruption and displacement; it was the first stop for working-class migrants trying to find their wartime footing, who would eventually try to settle in somewhat better neighborhoods like Lincoln Park and Lakeview.
Lincoln Park’s pre-World War II immigrant population looked similar to the Near North Side’s, with the addition of Poles, Slovaks, and other eastern Europeans. After 1945, European-origin immigrants still predominated, but an increasing number of African Americans and Japanese Americans decided to move north, refugees, of sorts, from the environs of the Near North Side. Still, they were a tiny percentage of a largely white ethnic population. There was just a bit more breathing space in Lincoln Park, its name reflecting the lush and expansive public park along Chicago’s lakefront. The industrial and the residential shared tight quarters, though, and the housing supply was mainly for renters, not aspiring homeowners. The Depression and war had motivated Lincoln Park’s owners to turn big flats into smaller units—and then neglect them. Public housing was in this neighborhood, too, making it some of the best of Lincoln Park’s apartment stock. Completed in 1938, the Julia C. Lathrop Homes was a New Deal Public Works Administration project, but it was open only to the ethnic whites that dominated the area’s population. When the war ended, white residents in some quadrants began to beat back a slide into the “slum” category, an effort almost always tinged by racial fears. They coalesced as something of a protective association to contain the conversions that had been the hallmark of the war and to hold landlords responsible for building upkeep. This brought some hope, mainly for whites, that postwar Lincoln Park could be a place to settle.13
Just to the north, Lakeview offered a vision of what working-class prosperity might look like in peacetime, but it was still a neighborhood with the markings of wartime stress, and it would be for some time. Lakeview’s native and foreign-born residents were also largely of European origin and the war did not alter that. Here, Chicago’s war workers could find modest homes and larger apartments, and they could play in their own neighborhood. For sports fans, there was Wrigley Field, for shoppers, there was a busy retail area anchored by a Wieboldt’s department store—which, despite the rationing of wartime, was still a wondrous “palace of consumption” with price points and an attitude hospitable to the working class. Lakeview had a small number of African American and Japanese American residents, likely refugees from the Near North Side who had looked for something in overcrowded Lincoln Park, and then finally found habitable space in Lakeview.14
City census data identify both Lakeview and Lincoln Park as “essentially” or “technically” residential, even though both had major industrial sections. And renters still predominated in both, with only about 14 percent of the dwelling units owner occupied, almost double that of the Near North Side but still just under half the 30 percent rate for the city. Walking down the street after VJ Day, an apartment seeker in Lakeview or Lincoln Park would see many “for rent” signs in the windows of carved up buildings, but the rooms and flats were in better shape. For example, only 14 percent of Lakeview’s dwelling units were classified as dilapidated and without private sinks or baths, a much lower rate than on the Near North Side and less than half the rate in Lincoln Park (27.5 percent). Still, this was not luxury. Many rented just decently enough to avoid the “dilapidated” category, hardly the gain they were hoping for in the peace.15
Back on Elm Street, we can see how such conditions bred conflict well before the war ended. On the 400 block of West Elm Street, Peter and Mary La Dolce were the husband and wife managers of a building that stretched over several addresses in the industrial quadrant of the Near North Side. Tenants lived in twenty-two flats, many of which had five rooms—certainly big for the time, considering how many property owners had subdivided large apartments. The building itself, 400–410 West Elm, was an older structure that resembled others in the area. The Chicago Plan Commission surveyed the vicinity in 1948 and found apartments and single-family homes of brick or frame construction, usually three stories tall; more than half were over fifty years old, built around the turn of the century. Scattered throughout were factories and warehouses as old as the housing stock: Montgomery Ward’s mail order operation, a Dr. Scholl’s plant, and an Oscar Mayer meatpacking house anchored the industrial southwestern part of the neighborhood. Large tracts of vacant land lay adjacent to some of these factories and apartments, reminders that financial ruin could move in next door and stay a while. The area’s two parks were something of an oasis, visual counterpoints to the brick and smoke, but even the Plan Commission noted that on this end of the neighborhood, “very little foliage can be observed.” For residents, this left a rather schizophrenic landscape of industrial busy and blighted idle—with little green.16
Residents living at 400–410 Elm ranged from solidly working class to poor, and their building managers were apparently not much better off. Peter and Mary La Dolce did not own the property, a Mr. Louis Brugger did. But like many owners in the neighborhood, he did not make a home there: he made money there. The La Dolces did not live in the building either. They lived only a few blocks away—a short walk, thankfully, because it was their job to deal with the almost daily needs of people living in close quarters. The La Dolces occupied a curious class position: as Brugger’s building managers or hired landlords, you might say, they had considerable power over tenants through rent collection and the prerogative to either fix a broken window or let a tenant live interminably with a cold draft. On the other hand, they were also Brugger’s employees, a relationship that began in August 1944, when they signed a lease to manage his property. They paid Brugger a flat sum per month, which gave him a steady income and relief from the daily hassles of property management. In return, the La Dolces were to run the building as a business, profiting from collecting rents that exceeded their own monthly payment to Brugger and the maintenance costs to keep things in habitable shape. Although
