The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [11]
But even as the Irish gained a foothold, Bridgeport remained an edgy place, as new waves of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians all settled into the neighborhood, most of them drawn by work in the nearby Union Stockyards. The groups eyed each other dis trustfully and segregated themselves to specific blocks. Ethnic strife was an almost daily occurrence, as gangs enforced the georacial boundaries and often battled each other in the streets. Carter Harri son Jr., Chicago’s first native mayor, grew up in Bridgeport, and famously described it as “a place where men were men, and boys were either hellions or early candidates for the last rites of the Church.”
The Bridgeport gangs were the city’s most ruthless racial en forcers, and largely responsible for the 1919 race riots, which erupted when a black boy drowned in Lake Michigan after white youths threw stones at him because he was swimming off a white beach. As blacks began protesting, hordes of white Bridgeporters bent on “protecting” their community began roaming the South Side in a seven-day-long spree of violence that resulted in the deaths of fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks.
Despite all the tensions between its residents, for the first half of the twentieth century the neighborhood flourished. Five Bridgeporters went on to control City Hall—a mayoral legacy unmatched by any other Chicago neighborhood. But once the meatpacking houses started closing down in the 1950s, the fragile economic and social alliances that had held the neighborhood together collapsed. The more prosperous population moved out, low-income housing developments went up, and one of Chicago’s most intransigent criminal cultures took hold. By the time the Williamses moved in, Bridgeport was as tough and as racially charged as it had ever been, with gangs composed of a hodgepodge mix of impoverished whites, Latinos, Italians, and Chinese fighting each other and the blacks for control of blocks, corners, drugs, and honor—a battle for the bottom that hit home with newcomers the moment they or a loved one were attacked by somebody who had been there first. Skin color, address, and income determined where you stood in the battle, and who your allies were, regardless of the fact that nobody liked or even comprehended it. You either played by the rules or, if you were willing to resort to violence, you made your own.
Place was preconditioning, and the particular patch of Bridgeport the Salvation Army set the Williamses down on was known as the Bridgeport Homes, one of the few “white projects” in the city. They comprised a square block of two-story brick row houses, eighteen units in all, with a total of about 250 residents. They were small compared with infamous Chicago projects like Cabrini Green or the Dearborn Homes, but what they lacked in size they compensated for in gloom. When they were built in 1943, they were hailed as stylish, low-income housing of the future, but the one future its residents looked forward to more than any other was the day they moved out. Unfortunately for many of the Homes’ inhabitants, that day often got so obscured by the omnipresent traumas of poverty that it receded beyond the horizon altogether.
It took two days for the power company to turn the heat on. It was the dead clear of Chicago’s winter when even clouds seem to hide for warmth. Malinda and the kids slept bundled up in their Salvation Army clothes, with blankets and some food from the local Pentecostal church. Later on, the church also brought some beds and a sofa and a table, but that just reminded Art that they were entirely dependent and in for the long haul.
Art hated the homes from the beginning and attempted to run away within days. For this twelve-year-old, that meant stealing off to find his father. He recruited Jason