American Pharaoh Read Free Page B

revitalize downtown by pushing poor blacks out, replacing them with
     middle-class whites. But Daley’s most striking accomplishment was Chicago’s deeply troubled public housing projects. Daley
     used public housing as a repository for thousands of blacks who might otherwise have ended up moving into white neighborhoods. 8 He built new public housing in the form of densely packed high-rise towers, and he placed them in Chicago’s black ghettos.
     Many of these projects ended up along a single street in the South Side ghetto. The State Street Corridor, as it came to be
     known, remains today the densest concentration of public housing in the nation. Daley was also responsible for the final touch:
     routing the Dan Ryan Expressway to follow the neighborhood’s traditional racial boundary. The fourteen-lane Dan Ryan separated
     the State Street Corridor from the white, working-class neighborhoods of the South Side — including Daley’s own neighborhood
     of Bridgeport.
    Daley may well have saved Chicago. He reigned during an era in which suburbanization, crime, and white flight were wreaking
     havoc on other midwestern cities. Detroit, Kansas City, Cleveland, and Saint Louis were all prosperous, middle-class cities
     when Daley took office, and all declined precipitously after World War II. In a twenty-five-year period after the war, Detroit
     lost one-third of its
Fortune
500 companies; by the mid-1970s, it had become the nation’s murder capital, with twice as many killings per capita as any
     other large American city. That never became Chicago’s fate. In large part due to Daley, the city’s downtown business district
     expanded at the same time Detroit’s was collapsing, and much of its sprawling white, working-class “Bungalow Belt” remained
     intact. 9
    Daley created a city that, in the famous phrase, worked. The question was, for whom did it work? Daley championed working-class,
     ethnic neighborhoods like his own beloved Bridgeport, and fought to preserve and expand Chicago’s now-thriving downtown. But
     for every middle-class neighborhood he saved, there was a poor neighborhood in which living conditions worsened. For every
     downtown skyscraper that kept jobs and tax dollars in the city, there was a housing project tower that confined poor people
     in an overcrowded ghetto. Over time, the Daley-era housing projects turned into “vertical ghettos,” rife with crime and social
     dysfunction. Today, Chicago is the nation’s most racially segregated large city: about 90 percent of black Chicagoans would
     have to move for the city to be integrated. Chicago is one of America’s wealthiest cities but, remarkably, nine of the nation’s
     ten poorest census tracts are in Chicago’s housing projects. Most of these are in the State Street Corridor. 10
    During the civil rights era, Chicago blacks often referred to Mayor Daley as “Pharaoh.” Civil rights activists saw Daley as
     an oppressor and a taskmaster — as an unrelenting Ramses to Martin Luther King’s Moses. Daley was a pharaoh in this sense,
     but also in others. He ruled over his empire with pharaonic power, the kind of absolute power that few American politicians
     have ever wielded. His twenty-one-year reign over Chicago was of dynastic proportions. And like the pharaohs of old, Daley
     built a city and filled it with awesome monuments — an imposing legacy that, for good and for bad, has survived long after
     his death, and that will likely continue to carry out his will for generations to come.

CHAPTER
    1
    A Separate World
    R ichard Joseph Daley was a product of the bloody world of the Chicago slaughterhouses. Chicagoans of his day, both Catholics
     and non-Catholics, located themselves by referring to their local parish — they came from Saint Mary’s or Saint Nicholas’s.
     Daley came from Nativity of Our Lord, the parish church of his childhood, where he would be eulogized seventy-four years later.
     Nativity was founded in the