But at Cabrini-Green, no one was coming to fix them. Drug dealers preyed on the young, gangs took hold of public spaces. Around the same time, spurred by overwhelmingly negative local media attention, Cabrini-Green gained a broader cultural currency in fictionalized portrayals such as the TV sitcom Good Times and the film Cooley High.
In these depictions hit a terrifying nadir in Candyman , a horror film set in Cabrini-Green. Throughout 70 Acres we watch McDonald watch the neighborhood he knows and loves give way to a new community designed to exclude him. In the mid- 90 s the federal government created a new program that gave local housing authorities millions of dollars to demolish severely deteriorated public housing buildings and build new homes in their stead.
Much like the projects were in their early years, these new communities were premised on the idea of uplifting the poor. Cabrini-Green was the first site of this experiment, but by the early s it was taken to scale across Chicago under Mayor Richard M.
Burling is demolished. The representative tries to continue his rehearsed speech despite growing clamor. At another meeting a community activist criticizes a city official for not consulting with Cabrini-Green residents before launching into demolitions.
She chastises the man for interrupting her. As the demolitions continued through the early s, large groups of residents marched, picketed, and even sued the city to win the right to take part in the planning for the new neighborhood. But despite their efforts very few were able to return and live at the new mixed-income developments that have been built in Near North.
Just as Little Hell had been purged of its poorest residents, so was the Cabrini-Green neighborhood. Only the choicest families who met a strict set of requirements were allowed to return to the new housing with idyllic names like Parkside of Old Town. For Brewster the apartment at Parkside came at the expense of her relationship with her eighteen-year-old daughter.
Guests at public housing apartments in her community were also strictly monitored. The idea of mixed-income housing was partly inspired by architectural New Urbanism which favored low-rise residential and commercial architecture woven into city street grids , and partly by neoliberal notions of competition and self-realization. The poor would pick themselves up out of poverty if they just lived next to more affluent people who could offer them a positive example of how to live and work, the reasoning went.
McDonald is just fifteen when he first appears in footage from , but he is articulate about what the loss of the public housing buildings means. In an unexpected encounter, McDonald and his friends are able to speak to Daley directly.
Daley waxes poetic. No one lives in the past. Living in the past. In American culture this phrase signifies a kind of backwardness, something anathema to the national spirit of progress. This plan, however, met resistance from Cabrini Green residents who feared they would be displaced by middle class newcomers as part of the gentrification of the area. The residents formed the Coalition to Protect Public Housing which demanded that housing in the area remain affordable. The Coalition, however, was not successful.
By most of the Cabrini Green units had already fallen to the wrecking ball to make way for the construction of condominiums and town homes in the new North Town Village.
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Tony Todd once recalled being told to watch out for snipers during production, and a production vehicle was actually hit by a sniper's bullet near the end of the shoot, although thankfully no one was hurt. The tumultuous legacy of the Cabrini Green housing project ended in , when the last of its buildings was torn down. However, Jordan Peele returned to the area for the new Candyman 's production. Michael Kennedy is an avid movie and TV fan that's been working for Screen Rant in various capacities since In that time, Michael has written over articles for the site, first working solely as a news writer, then later as a senior writer and associate news editor.
Most recently, Michael helped launch Screen Rant's new horror section, and is now the lead staff writer when it comes to all things frightening. A FL native, Michael is passionate about pop culture, and earned an AS degree in film production in He also loves both Marvel and DC movies, and wishes every superhero fan could just get along.
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