Chicago To Raze 1907 Building on Michael Reese Hospital Campus

By Margaret Foster | Online Only | Dec. 7, 2010 

1907 Main Hospital Building, Michael Reese Hospital campus, Chicago

Credit: Landmarks Illinois

Not long ago, the city of Chicago dreamed of hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics. Of course, every host needs an Olympic village, and last year, Mayor Richard Daley convinced the city council to spend $86 million to purchase the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital campus, co-designed by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school. The idea was to raze the campus and replace it with state-of-the-art housing for athletes.
Then Chicago lost out on the Olympics, with the 2016 summer games awarded to Rio de Janeiro. But any relief felt by preservationists quickly dissipated when the city proceeded to demolish seven Gropius-designed buildings anyway, hoping to sell the land to developers. And though Daley had promised to spare the 1907 main building of the campus (a high rise designed in the Prairie Style and a structure unaffiliated with Gropius), last month, the city announced that due to severe deterioration, the main hospital building could not be saved after all. Its roof leaked, and squatters had vandalized the structure, stripping it of valuable copper.
"The Chicago Fire Department, following an inspection of the main hospital building, determined that it posed an actual and imminent danger to the public and recommended it be demolished," Erin Lavin Cabonargi, executive director of the Public Building Commission, said in a statement last month.
In preparation for the main hospital building's demolition, a two-month abatement process will begin next week, and demolition should be completed in about four months, according to commission spokeswoman Mimi Simon.
"It was a surprise," says Jim Peters, president and executive director of Landmarks Illinois, which fought to save the main hospital building and the Gropius-designed structures. "We've long felt that this was the one building that was safe."
The city estimates that it would cost $13.2 million to stabilize the main hospital building (designed by Chicago architects Schmidt, Garden & Martin) and $2 million to raze it.
"The city did precious little to secure the building from squatters and the rain," Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote last month. "The building is crumbling (because the city let it crumble), so now the city has to tear it down."
Landmarks Illinois is currently turning to another surviving building: the 1950 Singer Pavilion, a collaboration between Chicago architects Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett and Walter Gropius and his Cambridge, Mass.-based firm. The preservation group is asking the city's Public Building Commission to develop a plan to mothball or stabilize the pavilion.
The Michael Reese Hospital's location—in the South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville, a place long afflicted by urban renewal—contributed to its demise, Peters says. "Many people just didn't know about this," Peters says. "Unless you went there, you never saw it, so it's been very hard getting the public's attention."

Losing the Michael Reese structures, Peters says, is "kind of a black eye for preservation. Unfortunately it's at the end of a 20-year term of a mayor who otherwise has been a tremendous advocate for historic preservation."

The New Jim Crow

Dear Harold,

We’ve all heard the statistics, and most of us have simply become numb to hearing them. For many people, the over-incarceration of Black people is simply a fact of life. It shouldn’t be.

Thanks to legal scholar and professor Michelle Alexander¹ we now have a new book that explains how we ended up with a criminal justice system that targets and endangers Black communities, as well as ideas on what we can do to free ourselves from that system’s clutches.

When we put the book — The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — in the hands of 20 ColorOfChange members to review, the response was unanimous. In addition to giving the book glowing reviews, they all wanted the entire ColorOfChange community to know about it.

It’s why we’re now inviting you to get your own copy (and one for your friends or family as well, in time for the holiday season), as well as participate in a conference call with Professor Alexander in the new year to discuss it.

You can get your copy here:

http://act.colorofchange.org/go/284?id=2126-1436905&akid=1771.1389429.ERFqIh&t=4

Professor Alexander’s book outlines the evolution of drug laws and how their ongoing effects on Black America parallel the role that segregation played in the period following the Civil War and preceding the Civil Rights Movement.² And it raises questions about what it will take to build a movement that can reform the broken drug laws that fuel high incarceration rates.

Criminal justice reform is key to our community — a third of Black men will spend part of their lives in prison,³ and Black children are more than six times more likely to have a parent incarcerated than White children.⁴ ColorOfChange members have demonstrated time and again that they want to change the status quo. More than 59,000 ColorOfChange members called on Congress to remove the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, and nearly 25,000 sent a statement to Senator James Webb of Virginia, thanking him for his attempts to overhaul our approach to incarceration.

We believe — and the ColorOfChange members who read and reviewed the book agreed — that the book will help us, as everyday people, stand with even more power to advocate for change. Ms. Alexander is herself a longtime member of ColorOfChange.org, and she’s agreed to speak with those of you who read the book, and answer any questions you have. We’ll contact you again early in the new year with more information about how to participate in that conference call, which is sure to be informative and powerful.

Here’s what ColorOfChange.org members are saying about The New Jim Crow:

“This book explains how this new Jim Crow came to be and how deeply ingrained it is now in the American psyche. Unless we really understand how this happened, we’ll never break this vicious cycle of African-American overincarceration… How many family members of prisoners lie about their relatives in the penal system in an effort to mitigate the stigma of criminality? This system penalizes entire families. [The book] was such an eye opener."
— Irma, Washington, DC

“This book will give you a good understanding of the system, its historical roots, its origins in the War on Drugs, the complicity of the police and legal system leading to mass incarceration of people of color, and the tragic result of creating a permanent caste system based on color. It opened my eyes and stirred my soul.“
— Larry, Freeland, WA

“This isn’t a fight for the lawyers. This is a fight for regular people, the non-experts, the advocates, the sympathizers, the human beings who care and want to care more. Fertile ground for change is wherever we are, however we are, and accessible to those of us with less than sizable monetary wealth or a law degree.”
— Thuha, Fountain Valley, CA

For more on The New Jim Crow and to get your copy, click here:

http://act.colorofchange.org/go/284?id=2126-1436905&akid=1771.1389429.ERFqIh&t=6

Thanks and Peace,

-- James, Gabriel, William, Dani, Natasha and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
   December 9th, 2010

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Black leadership nationally is stratified along class lines and economic issues

It's obviously unclear whether this Detroit can again be joined to the desolate, exhausted Detroit of so many of its neighborhoods. There are all sorts of reasons longtime Detroiters are suspicious of government planning: the network of freeways that permanently scarred the city in the 1950s and '60s (and simultaneously sucked the life out of it) were another era's idea of urban redevelopment, as were the spirit-deadening public-housing projects that replaced paved-over neighborhoods. In the spring, a prominent local minister declared that the mayor's shrinkage plan amounted to "ethnic cleansing" — an odd (and offensive) charge to throw at an effort proposed by an African-American mayor, his largely African-American planning officials and the African-American consultant who is the project's point person. At one of the community forums where planner Toni Griffin and her city colleagues attempted to explain the planning process, members of a group calling itself By Any Means Necessary vowed to oppose not a specific plan, or a specific sort of plan, but whatever plan emerged. (Read "Detroit Tries to Get on a Road to Renewal.")
Some city officials, citing Griffin's out-of-town provenance — rarely a positive attribute in Detroit — wish to diminish her influence. ("If they marginalize her," says the Kresge Foundation's Rapson with a stern finality, "they're on their own.") And it's reasonable to question whether Bing, the former basketball player and steel-company executive who ran for mayor as a nonpolitician, has the political skills to do what's necessary. Will he, for instance, be able to tell individuals and community groups who have labored hard to save their neighborhoods that their efforts have failed and the city is walking away from them? Early on, Bing said he was interested in only a single full term, which would presumably free him to act without fear of reprisal at the ballot box. Now some of the philanthropic foundations, understandably desiring continuity, want him to stick around. Paradoxically, this might require him to pay greater heed to political power brokers disinclined to support something that comes from any agency not under their direct control.
But the essential challenge for everyone involved in the effort to reinvent this storied and suffering city, says Bing aide Marja Winters, is, "How do you get people to think optimistically again?" The likely answer might be found in one of her office's promotional handouts. It's a statement attributed to Heaster Wheeler, a former city firefighter who is now executive director of the Detroit branch of the NAACP.
"The best way to predict the future," Wheeler says, "is to create it."

Racism is hardly a thing of the past!

BY JESSE JACKSON

Is Jim Crow back? Are African Americans, particularly African-American men, once more suffering systematic discrimination on the basis of race -- a discrimination that locks them out of equal rights and basic citizenship?
The question is incendiary -- and seems unreal. This is the post-racial America, where an African American can be elected president. Overt expression of racism is no longer socially acceptable. So, how could anyone allege the revival of Jim Crow laws, the laws that locked blacks into a permanent underclass under segregation?
Listen to the hard logic offered by Michelle Alexander, a law professor and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness. Professor Alexander makes the following points:
• More African Americans are under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• More black men were disenfranchised in 2004 than in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• More than half of working-age African-American men in major urban areas -- according to one report, as much as 80 percent in Chicago -- have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination.
These staggering figures aren't because African Americans are more prone to violence and crime. As Alexander points out, incarceration rates are not related to the rate of criminal activity. Crime is at a relatively low level in recent years, but incarceration has remained high.
The primary reason for our high rates of incarceration is the war on drugs. The courts have given police a virtual exemption from the Fourth Amendment in the war on drugs. This freedom to stop, search, seize and arrest clearly has discriminatory effects.
This drug war has been waged intensively almost completely in communities of color, even though studies show that drug use is remarkably similar across racial lines. The use of drugs isn't much different, but young African-American men are stopped more often, searched more often, arrested more often and prosecuted more often.
This isn't about drug-related violence or even about major traffickers. Alexander cites studies that in 2005, for example, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, while only one out of five were for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity. Most of the increase in incarcerated drug offenders came from marijuana use, a drug widely available on campuses across America.

These are stunning facts. The U.S. has developed a prison-industrial complex -- with private prison companies listed on the stock exchange -- that, in Professor Alexander's words, "locks an extraordinary percentage of our population -- a group largely defined by race -- into permanent, second-class status for life."
Yet, this system is largely immune from constitutional challenge. The courts have decided that overwhelming evidence of the discriminatory effect of policies -- the fact that African Americans are deprived of their rights for life in disproportionate numbers -- is not sufficient. Proof of conscious, intentional racial bias in intent and action must be shown.
The result is shocking -- yet is accepted largely in silence. The drug war, the court system, the privatized prison-industrial complex have provided the means of disenfranchising African Americans in large number.
This has implications in elections, in juries, and in school and poverty subsidies. Clearly it is time to end the silence -- and confront the reality.