Jane Byrne is the only woman to run Chicago, serving as the city’s 50th mayor from 1979-1983. Portrayed as a “a shrill, charging, vindictive person” by her competitor Michael Bilandic, Byrne was the first mayor to appoint a female African-American school superintendent, and the first mayor to recognize Chicago’s gay community. She also, in 1981, called the fire department back to allow Dan Goodwin to continue to climb the Hancock tower (Goodwin had already successfully climbed the Sears Tower).
All in all, Jane Byrne was a pretty badass mayor (am I allowed to say badass? I’m gonna say badass. My apologies to who edits this. But she was badass). She was a key player in social equality, successfully banned handgun possession for guns unregistered or purchased after an ordinance instituting a two-year re-registration program, cutting back drastically on gun related violence, and revitalized locations such as Navy Pier and the iconic Chicago Theater. What could have possibly led to the downfall of Chicago’s first lady-mayor? Some blame sexist politics, some blame labor and teacher union strikes during her term, but many blame a particular stay at Cabrini Green.
Cabrini Green, a Chicago Housing Authority development on Chicago’s Near Northside from the 1940’s to 2010 (when the last tenant building closed -- the last high rise was demolished in 2011), has become synonymous with the dark side of urban living and the class and race conflict that runs rampant in Chicago’s history. Located just a mile from the affluent Gold Coast, the 70 acres that were once the limits of Cabrini Green have since been torn down and gradually remodeled in recent years. In 1981, Jane Byrne and her husband came to stay there.
The stay was meant to draw attention to the crime and violence that made the housing project and others like it notorious nationwide. The publicity stunt ultimately backfired, however, when Byrne carried out her stay with an ensemble of ever-present police officers and body guards. For extra security measures, her apartment’s back entrance was welded shut, a technique that would later be copied by gang members to fortify their own apartments after the mayor left her short-lived residency. She only stayed 3 weeks. What was meant to be an insightful political tactic ultimately became a press failure.
In 1997, 16 years after Jane Byrne’s stay in Cabrini Green, the barely alive body of a nine-year-old girl was found in a stairwell of one of Cabrini Green’s high rises. The girl was still alive, but had been raped, beaten, strangled, poisoned with insecticide, and had her throat crushed and her stomach and chest covered in gang symbols. She awoke from a coma, but has lived since as blind and mute.
Her attacker was later found to not be a gang member, but had used the symbols to throw off investigators. He was sentenced to 120 years in prison. Girl X became a national symbol for urban poverty and violence, and brought to light the unregulated state of Chicago’s housing projects. While Cabrini Green was the most famous, there were many others just like it. Only four years before Girl X was found, two boys (ages 10 and 11) threw five-year-old Eric Morse out of the 14th floor window of the Ida B. Wells Homes.
While the Near Northside today flourishes as a mixed income neighborhood, let us not forget that it has a very recent tragic history that is in no way currently absent from Chicago. Since January 1, 2015, there have been 2,332 deaths from shootings. Not reporting violence or acknowledging the reality of these crimes further allows them to continue. This is not a new problem, and it is not a problem that has even begun to be overcome.
