Our Black Year by Maggie Anderson Read Free Book Online Page B

enthusiasm for spending hours outside, we could still do our exploring while staying warm in our car. We made a concerted effort to check out Madison Street, Austin Boulevard, Chicago Avenue, Roosevelt Road, and Cicero Avenue—main arteries on the West Side. In Maywood we focused on
the main streets of 1st, 5th, 9th, and 17th avenues as well as Madison Street, exploring a different thoroughfare each weekend.
    Madison Street, the city’s official north-south dividing line, is named for the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, and runs west more than twenty miles, with four breaks, from one of Chicago’s jewels, Millennium Park, to the tony suburb of Glen Ellyn. In between it passes some of the most architecturally significant buildings and important landmarks in the city—the Carson, Pirie Scott & Co. building, Chase Tower, the Civic Opera House, and the city’s two commuter rail stations—through Greek Town, next to the House That Michael Jordan Built (also known as the United Center) and the heart of Garfield Park, with its gilded dome and conservatory. A little more than three miles west, it reaches Oak Park.
    In the early 1800s, before Chicago was incorporated, Madison was the town’s southern boundary. By the middle of the century the corner of Madison and State Streets—to this day the center point of all numbered addresses in Chicago—became known as “the busiest corner of the world” and had the highest land values in the city. In the 1860s the West Side’s population quadrupled, from 57,000 to 214,000, casting the street’s—and the West Side’s—fate as a congested, almost entirely working-class swath of the city. It pretty much stayed that way, with a mix of ethnic groups—Italians, Jews, Greeks, and Irish—occupying chunks of the West Side. Though never an affluent area, the West Side and Madison Street deteriorated as they were pounded by the Great Depression, World War II, the construction of the Eisenhower Expressway and public housing projects, and absentee landlords. In the 1950s Blacks who were crowded out of the near West Side and South Side began moving to the Garfield Park neighborhood, which is just east of Austin. As a result, racial tensions grew, culminating in the riots that erupted after King’s assassination.
    Although Madison remains the commercial lifeline of several neighborhoods on the West Side, stretches of the avenue are sketchy. In February we would find out just how sketchy.
    The section we started driving regularly—from Oak Park through the West Side—became more congested the further east we ventured.
We witnessed more life than what we’d seen further west around J’s, which was encouraging, but the blight and self-inflicted grime remained the same. In some ways the bustle was similar to that of Oak Park Avenue, one of our town’s commercial stretches, but instead of Cosi’s and the Gap, the area sported Divine Design Tattoos, a pawnshop, and a nail parlor.
    In addition, Madison was a fairly fast-paced street, not conducive to our slow cruising. All the shops were small and looked remarkably similar, which made spotting a potential gem difficult. If I saw one more church, day care center, funeral home, or liquor store, I was going to scream. What we needed to locate were a Black-owned convenience store, clothing shop, minimart, bakery, and general merchandise outlet or shoe store. It was hard to believe that we couldn’t find any. We started to blame ourselves because we hadn’t actually set foot in very many of the establishments.
    After a few failed attempts at drive-by cruising, we altered our approach in order to increase our chances. When we learned of a business on the West Side that looked to be Black-owned, the whole family would pile into the Trailblazer and head for it. On our way there we’d keep an eye open for places that looked like they might be