Seacrest wrote:
long time guy wrote:
Seacrest wrote:
long time guy wrote:
.
Seacrest wrote:
Correct.
ABLA, Horner, Brooks, Ida B Wells, Stateway, Cabrini and Ickes were in serious trouble before Reagan was ever elected.
Instituting a rent policy which insured that working class families would move out never to return sure didn't help the situation. If there was any hope that policy killed it.
Working class families who could afford to leave were already doing so. Street gangs and the drug trade were already taking control in those projects.
Places like Dearborn and Wentworth were a different story.
They were always transient but when he instituted that policy it was a game changer. There was an exodus and Ickes, Dearborn, Wentworth, Stateway, and Wells are all spots I'm familiar with. I grew up in that area and I have been in all of them at one time or another.
Once he implemented the policy there were no longer working families. Crack cocaine didn't really come into play until 86-87. The working class begin leaving around 83 and were gone by the time the crack epidemic hit.
If I were to tell you that there was a time when Public Housing paid for itself (without federal funding) would that surprise you?
Dearborn, Wentworth and Lathrop were never controlled by street gangs like the other places were.
The high rises in Ickes, ABLA, Stateway and Horner were totally controlled by street gangs before 1980. Hell, the two cops killed at Cabrini by sniper fire were knocked off in 1970.
I was gone before crack took hold in the mid 80's. By then white guys were forbidden to do the type of work I had been doing there. Prior to then, they were only forbidden to work in Robert Taylor.
They sold a lot of weed during the 70's but not really Powder cocaine because it was too expensive for the clientele that they were serving. I was really young then and not privy to as much but old enough to know what was going on. Just being around in some of my friends cribs at a really young age you'd see the stuff on trays with razor blades.
I wasn't born when the 2 cops in Cabrini were killed but I saw it on a documentary and actually showed it to one of my classes before.
My grandmother lived in the 911 building on Sedgwick. I used to be over there all of the time as a kid. I was there when Jane Byrne moved into one of the buildings on division back in 80.
The buildings were wild don't get me wrong. It just seemed that the crack epidemic and the exodus of the working class put the nail in the coffin. When I was a kid about 7-8 we'd always here that they were going to tear them down but no one believed them. By the mid 90's they really had no choice. They were as close to urban terrorism as this city has ever seen..
I remember being in the Ickes at one of my high school friend's crib getting a haircut. I'd just graduated from college and was subbing.
22nd and 24th streets were nvolved in a war over drug profits. One of the guys that I know claimed that he had a grenade and he was prepared to drop it on one of the buildings located on 22nd street. He said that he wasn't going to do it because it would kill a number of innocent kids.
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The Hawk wrote:
This is going to reach a head pretty soon.