“Gentrification seemed like a battle you could win.”
This is Shutdown Corners, a newsletter about how coronavirus is reshaping urbanism
I had a few more timely pieces I’m proud of publish this past week, including a New York Times story about water reuse tech in commercial buildings and a Bloomberg CityLab piece about homelessness in Los Angeles. But I’m going to step away from the news cycle for a moment and spend this newsletter indulging in a feature I wrote for Chicago Magazine that wallows a bit in nostalgia for a place I formerly called home.
The story in question, “When the Real World Came to Wicker Park,” is an oral history of the time Chicago protestors and indie intelligentsia stopped being polite, and started really protesting the filming of the Real World in Chicago. Yes, this really happened during the summer of 2001 (see the video above). A ragtag group of anti-globalization activists, housing advocates, artists, and others raised hell for weeks outside of the house where Viacom/MTV was filming a new season of the famous reality show. That particular season purported to showcase one of the city’s famously artsy neighborhoods, which you likely via Chicago indie rock, or as the filming location for movies like High Fidelity.
Eventually, the protests/gatherings were shut down by the Chicago police, and there were arrests and even civil suits. The protests aren’t well known because none of them were ever aired, since the producers wanted to sidestep controversy. The season is perhaps best known for the cast’s somewhat staged reaction to 9/11.
This was an absolute joy to report. I was a college student at the time and found this whole event fascinating, and doing interviews allowed me to engage in some nostalgia for a neighborhood I’d lived in for years (Danny’s RIP) and a city I still consider my hometown.
That specific nostalgia for a place—especially for spaces where formative events, from meeting friends and significant others to hanging out at certain bars and seeing concerts—is a powerful force. I imagine we’ve all felt this feeling a lot more in the last few months, when we maybe revisited a place or city after being away due to the pandemic, or finally walked around the neighborhood instead of darting in and out of stores and buildings in masks.
It’s a lens through which many identify gentrification; the neighborhood no longer resembles the time when it felt like my neighborhood (of course, it’s very easy to conflate a moment in your life with a place). Same thing with Wicker Park, a neighborhood that had arguably gentrified for more than a decade, at least, before the protests; many people identified the area withy the ‘90s indie rock heyday and Liz Phair, or the ‘80s art scene and the coffeeshop Urbus Orbis.
Of course, it’s a very personal feeling, and one that rarely accounts for those who lost more than a favorite watering hole or social space. From the viewpoint of the Puerto Rican residents who were displaced from Wicker Park during the ‘80s when development and speculation began, MTV arriving to film was a symbol gentrification was complete, not a catalyst for it to begin.
One of the threads I tried to tug on in the story was what the definition of gentrification was, and when it started. It was a nebulous concept, until I spoke to a few researchers and longtime residents of the area. Below are some exchanges with a Puerto Rican community leader and academic left out of the final story, with detailed, specific insight into gentrification that had nothing to do with specific stores arriving or closing.
Jose Lopez (executive director of Puerto Rican Cultural Center): Puerto Ricans were gentrified out of Lincoln Park. They were gentrified out of Lakeview. They were gentrified out of what today would be the near West Side, now the University of Illinois. And the gentrification in Wicker Park really begins in the mid 1970s, not in the 80s.
John Betancur (Professor of Urban Planning and Policy at University of Illinois-Chicago): You had all these people looking for opportunities to buy cheap. A market was created in Lincoln Park, but those houses went quickly. The real estate people who read a report the city did about architecturally valuable buildings in West Town told potential buyers to go to Wicker Park. This was in the end of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Look at Caton Street, it’s one block long, a cul-de-sac, all beautiful buildings, and people bought them and started rehabbing them. The name of the company was Easy Life Real Estate Management.
Jose Lopez: In Wicker Park, actually I could tell you exactly the date in 1973, they began to rehab two buildings, one on Hoyne, and another one on Hirsch and Damen. All of these homes began to be developed. And then it starts to be called Wicker Park. It used to be called West Town, but that had a bad reputation, that was a Puerto Rican community.
John Betancur: In those days, the ones who moved there first weren’t gentrifiers, they were called pioneers. They grouped together and they formed the Wicker Park Committee or took it over, I don't remember if it was already existing or if they just took it over. And then they started organizing events to attract more people to move to Wicker Park. They also started opposing the development of any low-income housing. They only wanted wealthy people to move in and they started promoting that. They also worked with some artists and created Around the Coyote (a local arts fest). Wicker Park was at one point supposed to be designed with a boxing ring, but the white gentrifiers convinced the park district to change the design the Puerto Rican community wanted, and created a more passive picnic-type park for themselves.
Jose Lopez: Then you had white artists moving into the community. They begin to rent cheap apartments and helped raise the rent. How? I have a building that I'm renting to a family for $600, somebody comes along, two artists move in. They can afford to pay $1,000, $1,200. So they immediately create a problem for the people living there. So there are two forces here. One was the real estate, the other, white artists. For me, the idea of gentrification, if it’s looked at as an issue of class, has its limitations. It has to be looked at from the vantage point of racism and obviously the vantage point of colonialism.
I’m struck by the specificity of their responses. The name names, identify specific buildings and block, talk about how the process happened. Neighborhoods aren’t frozen in amber, but it’s jarring when the backdrops to some of our most cherished memories get rearranged or torn down, not to mention losing actual homes and a feeling of connection with the neighborhood fabric.
There were a lot of people who, when I asked them about this story and the protests, thought it was so funny, just hilarious and silly that these protests even happened. What weird, entitled protestors thought scaring away a reality show meant anything, or that they were the vanguard against the capitalist real estate machine? One protestor told me earnestly that “It was the early years of the battles against gentrification in U.S. cities, and I don’t mean to be silly, but it seemed like a battle you could win at the time.” Maybe that’s naive, but it’s certainly a hope many people have shared in a changing city.
Reading List
Plug for my editors new podcast “It’s Just A Room: Productivity And The Return To The Office.” Come for the great insight into the larger question of what the return to office means, and stay for Mike Philips English accent.
I also suggest you make time for this excellent Southside Chicago architecture tour presented by the great Lee Bey (registration begins tomorrow).
Thanks for checking out Shutdown Corners, a newsletter written by me, Patrick Sisson, a freelance writer in Los Angeles covering the trends, tech, and policy shaping our cities. Please consider referring to a friend, and if you were sent this, please subscribe yourself. Send any tips, feedback, suggestions, or questions to patsisson@gmail.com.