For its first fifteen to twenty years, residents described Altgeld—or, more colloquially, just “the Gardens”—as “this heavenly place,” “just paradise,” as two different residents recalled. “It was just really a wholesome place to live,” a third remembered. “There was a feeling of family throughout the entire development,” said a fourth. The Gardens was its own world: almost anyone who worked had to own an automobile because public bus service to and from Altgeld was poor at best. “We felt so isolated and away from the mainstream of what was occurring in Chicago…. We were cut off from a lot of opportunities,” one resident explained.
Loretta Freeman Augustine grew up in Lilydale, married a man from Altgeld at age nineteen, and lived in an apartment there from 1961 to 1966, when the couple moved to a single-family home in Golden Gate, just to the west. “The community had a stability” during those years. “People had nice lawns with beautiful flowers,” and it was “very much a family-oriented community.” The Carver High School basketball team, under Coach Larry Hawkins, won the Illinois state championship in 1963.
By the late 1960s, things had changed for the worse. Many blamed the CHA, which had evicted residents when their incomes rose above the ceiling allowable in public housing. “People were being forced out because they were over the income,” one woman recalled. Dr. Alma Jones, hired as Carver Elementary School’s principal in 1975, had had a similar experience some years earlier at the CHA’s LeClaire Courts. “It was absolutely beautiful,” but “my husband got a raise, and they put us out: excess income,” she recalled. “I was devastated because I had just had twins … it was heartbreaking.” It was also destructive. “That eliminated everybody who was upwardly mobile, because if you … started to progress, then they put you out, which was the worst thing that could possibly happen” because “you take out the element of folk who know how to live in a community.”
One young man who grew up in Altgeld in the 1950s returned to the Far South Side twenty-five years later as a police officer. Initially “there were very few troubled families. I would say less than 5 percent. When I returned, I saw that the 5 percent was still residing in that development, but so were their children, and grandchildren, it was just a procession. The 5 percent had expanded to 85 percent.” Another resident said, “It began to change in the 1970s. I don’t think it really started to decline until the drugs became prevalent.” A 1972 Tribune article marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Our Lady of the Gardens parish described Altgeld as a place “from which long-time residents are striving to get out” and stated that drugs and crime were the Gardens’ top problems. As Father Al Zimmerman commented, “With no job prospects, the temptation to turn to drugs is powerful.”32
In April 1974 Altgeld made news in a different fashion when the entire facility was evacuated after a tank containing 500,000 gallons of silicon tetrachloride ruptured at a tank farm just ten blocks to the north. “A dense cloud of fumes half a mile wide” drifted toward the project, and almost twelve hours passed before residents were allowed to return home. More than two hundred people were hospitalized from exposure to “a heavy cloud of hydrochloric acid” that was generated when clueless workers turned firehoses on the tank, making the emissions far worse, rather than notify public officials. Chicago soon filed suit against Bulk Terminals, the tank’s owner, and the Tribune quoted a state official as saying, “It should be a criminal offense to know of a leakage of toxic materials without reporting it immediately.”
A 1982 citywide neighborhoods study found that Altgeld’s needs were especially dire. “The physical isolation of this community from the rest of the city” was so great that “residents of this area are rural rather than urban poor,” it noted. Tenants believe “that job training is one of their community’s most important needs,” but people who had never held a job needed to be taught “how to look for work.” Yet “many do not own cars,” and public transport was still “frightfully poor.” The Gardens’ one small food store shocked the outsiders. Not only did it smell “particularly bad,” but rats were now regularly “visible in the food store during daylight hours.” That study pointedly advised that “Altgeld Gardens needs an advocate and/or organizer to improve the coordination of the many municipal services provided to the development, and to work with the private sector to help create employment opportunities for local residents.”
Altgeld residents were theoretically represented by a local advisory council, but by the early 1980s, the council had for years been dominated with an iron fist by its president, Esther Wheeler, or “Queen Esther” to many dismayed residents. “Her whole concern was nobody would take her place, or usurp her authority,” Carver principal Alma Jones later explained. “She was extremely authoritarian and she owned Altgeld.” But come September 1982, residents had a new opportunity to organize against the toxic waste, garbage, and sewage that surrounded them, when Hazel Johnson, a forty-seven-year-old widow and mother of seven who had first moved to the Gardens in March 1962, founded People for Community Recovery (PCR) and attracted a small band of active members.
Hazel’s husband John had died of lung cancer in 1969, at age forty-one, and by the early 1980s, questions arose about the long-term health of those living at Altgeld. In late April 1984, Hazel saw a television news story about a study of cancer rates in the Far South Side. Its statistics were alarming, yet Illinois EPA director Richard Carlson brushed aside the findings. In response, Hazel contacted the IEPA, which tried to placate her with some pollution complaint forms. She responded by distributing several hundred of them throughout the Gardens over the ensuing six months.33
In late 1983, a new organizing effort began in the Eden Green community. Madeline Talbott and Keith Kelleher, two Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) organizers, had met Tom Joyce while working in Detroit, and Tom’s Claretian Social Development Fund provided the initial seed money to launch ACORN in Chicago. ACORN’s Eden Green organizer was Grant Williams, who had worked for ACORN in Philadelphia and St. Louis. Williams viewed Eden Green as more promising turf than Altgeld, but after a founding meeting of South Side United Neighbors, Williams expanded his work into the Gardens. He contacted Lena and her IACT colleagues about the new-dumps moratorium, but in Altgeld, the residents’ biggest concern was the poor public bus service to the outside world. By March 1984 Williams had interested a reporter from Chicago’s premier African American newspaper, the Defender, in Altgeld’s transit plight, and a community meeting to oppose possible service cuts by the Chicago Transit Authority drew a good crowd.
By summer, Williams had signed up some eighty-three dues-paying members for ACORN—$16 a year—but by late August, he was moving to Detroit, and a brand-new University of Chicago graduate, Steuart Pittman, would take over in September.34
Before the end of summer 1984, Jerry Kellman also made his first successful forays toward enlisting some Protestant pastors to join his previously all-Catholic CCRC. His first two recruits were Rev. Bob Klonowski of Hegewisch’s Lebanon Lutheran Church and Rev. Tom Knutson of First Lutheran Church in Harvey, a far-from-prosperous suburban town two miles southwest of Altgeld Gardens. Also joining CCRC was St. Anne Parish in suburban Hazel Crest, whose new pastor, Father Len Dubi, had known Kellman for more than a decade. The city parishes’ DCP designees first met Kellman and their CCRC colleagues from St. Victor and the other predominantly white congregations at Tom Knutson’s church in Harvey.
An early August issue of the Daily Calumet ran a prominent story heralding CCRC’s “phoenix-like return.” It quoted Kellman as saying he hoped sixty churches would join by October, and that by year’s end he wanted to have “a full range of support programs for laid off workers.” His top goal was to devise “a long-range plan for economic development,” and within a year he hoped to have “three or four full time employees.” Fred Simari and Gloria Boyda from St. Victor were appointed to a task force overseeing the new federally funded suburban job retraining program, but the program would not be able to accept applications until December or January.35
Throughout the fall of 1984 and early 1985, IACT, Hazel Johnson’s PCR, and even ACORN appeared more visibly active than CCRC and DCP. A mid-September appearance by IEPA director Richard Carlson at St. Kevin