Whatever you do, don’t try to tell Peggy Byas that her home is in the projects. She lives on the tenth floor of a CHA high rise at 706 E. 39th St. (officially known as Pershing Road); she might have called it “the projects” when she moved in 22 years ago, but not now.
Past management of the agency–eight managing directors between 1983 and 1988–has been such that the CHA does not even know how many people live in its 38,685 housing units, but it’s safe to say that if they were separately incorporated they would constitute the second largest city in Illinois. Some 15,455 of those units are family apartments in high-rise buildings surrounded by empty plazas; and although they are not the majority of CHA units, they dominate its public image.
Decker’s group–formerly the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, even more formerly the Metropolitan Housing Council–has a better-than-average reason to interest itself in the CHA. Fifty-two years ago, in the depths of the depression, it lobbied to create the public-housing agency, and then gave up its own director, Elizabeth Wood, who ran the CHA until 1953.
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First, of course, she had to decide whom to ask. Working through the CHA’s residents’ advisory groups (Local Advisory Councils), MPC staff selected three buildings from developments in different neighborhoods: 1230 N. Burling (in Cabrini-Green), 4414 S. Cottage Grove (Washington Park), and 706 E. 39th (Ida B. Wells; the street, by the way, is officially designated Pershing Road, but no one in the building seems to call it that). These were “obviously not the worst buildings,” says current MPC project director Leroy Kennedy, “but maybe not the best either. The thought was that it’s difficult enough dealing with high rises at all, without starting out with the worst, and then having people say it won’t work.”
At 706 E. 39th, the MPC found that neighbors Patricia Perry and Peggy Byas had long been concerned about the decline of the CHA and of their building. “It wasn’t anything that happened all of a sudden,” says Byas. “Gradually there’d be no grass planted. Then the playground wasn’t kept like it ought to be. Something would break, and they’d take their time about fixing it.” Perry: “The service was really good when I moved in [ten years ago]. If you had a plumbing problem, say, the plumbers would be out in a couple of days. About five years ago, it got worse–it’d take maybe three or four weeks for a plumber.”
“Where I live now is my home,” says Perry flatly. “My friends are there. We have the most wonderful view of the lake. It’s beautiful, to be able to look out and see the sailboats, and see the downtown buildings. . . . I don’t feel I should have to move when I can improve where I live.” Adds architect Thomas Hickey of Weese Hickey Weese, who consulted with residents on possible redesigns of the building, “They don’t even want to move [temporarily] from floor to floor while rehabilitation is going on. It’s like living in a neighborhood–you might never get those people back together again.” Byas concludes, “I’ve been here when it was good, and I’ve been here when it was bad, and now it’s going to be good again. I want to be here to see.”
“We put out a flier the next Saturday, and the one after that we painted. We had people who had never come out to a meeting, who saw we were doing something [and came out to help]. By three o’clock we had both sides all painted. It was fun. We worked together as a team. . . . One young man, who doesn’t live here and was said to be a bad influence, went to the store and bought hamburger meat and buns, and when we got done, we all had a barbecue! So we agreed then that we’d have a little party after every cleanup.”
