Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 14

  In the suburb of Calumet City, two towns south of the East Side, desperate steelworkers turned for help to their priest. Father Leo Mahon was so distressed by his parishioners’ plight that he organized the Steel Country parishes into the Calumet Community Religious Conference, which won a $500,000 grant to open a job bank for laid-off steelworkers. In 1985, the conference was looking for a black organizer to serve its inner-city chapter. Unable to find the right candidate locally, the group took out an advertisement in a magazine called Community Jobs. The ad was read by a twenty-three-year-old Columbia University graduate at the New York Public Library. Thus, the shutdown of Wisconsin Steel brought Barack Obama to Chicago, where he began his rise to the presidency of the United States. Obama counseled steelworkers still in denial about the disappearance of their industry. Blue-collar aristocrats bejeweled in gold chains and diamond rings, they planned to ride out their layoffs on unemployment and union benefits. In the past, they’d always gone on strike, returned to work, and earned more money than ever. Why would it be different this time? The brightest were retrained as computer programmers. The less fortunate landed near-minimum-wage jobs at the Sherwin-Williams paint factory or Jay’s Potato Chips or Brach’s Candy. None ever again earned as much money as they’d earned pouring steel.

  The East Side’s isolation had insulated the rest of Chicago from the soot and stench of the mills. Now the steel industry’s disappearance was more remarkable than its presence had ever been. In the early 1980s, Chicagoans assumed their city was headed for the same scrap heap as Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Gary.

  “The city was seen as a vestige of America’s industrial past,” said Gery Chico, a young lawyer who later became Mayor Richard M. Daley’s chief of staff. Between 1967 and 1982, Chicago lost 250,000 jobs and a quarter of its factories. From a population of 3.8 million, Chicago dwindled to less than 3 million, falling behind Los Angeles in population. As Chicago lost industry and railroad traffic, the Loop decayed until its busiest institution was the Pacific Garden Mission, the soup kitchen and homeless shelter where the radio program Unshackled! was recorded. The city tried turning State Street into a mall and building condominiums near the mission, but the people who could afford to buy the condos had dismissed urban life as fit only for tramps, drug dealers, welfare mothers, halfway-house mental cases, and immigrants paying their dues in America.

  In 1976, after spending sixteen years in London as a foreign correspondent, journalist Richard C. Longworth took a job with the Chicago Tribune. The city he had left in 1960 was provincial and coarse—“the Sixties was still the industrial era. It really was the city of Big Shoulders. It was not a cosmopolitan city. A steak and baked potato was as good as it got. It was a polluted city. It was a rough city. Corrupt as hell. The cops were just being reformed. But it was also a middle-class city. There were good salaries. Steady work. It gave a stability to Chicago.”

  Longworth returned to a Chicago that was still provincial and coarse—except now it was lower-class. As he drove around rediscovering his hometown, he thought, “I’ve seen worse neighborhoods in Third World cities.” After Wisconsin Steel closed, Longworth was so alarmed he wrote a five-part series entitled “Chicago: City on the Brink.” Long-worth wrote:

  Chicago’s basic problem is that it is losing industries, stores and jobs. Because of this, it is losing tax money. Because of this, it won’t be able to support itself, to pay for the services of a going city. And because of this, it will lose more industries, stores, jobs and taxes.

  Poor schools, political instability, the economic decline of the entire Frost Belt region, the slow decline of Chicago’s heavy industry, land shortages, poor city services, and a fixation on the Loop at the expense of the rest of Chicago all contribute to the cycle.

  The cycle has been going on for 30 years. There is no reason to think it will reverse when the present recession ends. According to available evidence and many experts, there is no reason to think it will ever turn around.

  Chicago was also one of the most racially divided cities in the nation. When blacks arrived from Mississippi and Alabama to build weapons for the World War I doughboys, they were forced to live in a narrow strip of land known as the Black Belt. The ghetto finally burst open in the 1950s and ’60s, consuming most of the South and West Sides, despite Mayor Richard J. Daley’s efforts to hold back the tide by crowding blacks into housing projects and walling off their neighborhoods with highways. Chicago’s greatest monument to segregation was the elevated track that carried the Burlington Northern Railroad through the Southwest Side. It separated Lawndale, a once-Jewish neighborhood that had “turned” in the 1950s, from South Lawndale, whose Polish and Ukrainian residents established the tracks as a racial barrier. After the West Side went up in flames following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., South Lawndale began calling itself “Little Village” to dissociate itself from the Negroes on the other side of the tracks.

  In 1983, six and a half years after Old Man Daley’s death, Chicago elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington. Unlike Coleman Young, Washington did not represent a Black Power takeover (although plenty of whites saw it that way). He was a fluke winner of the Democratic primary, in which Daley’s son, Richard M., and the incumbent mayor, Jane Byrne, had split the white vote.

  Taking office during one of the bleakest years of the steel crisis, Washington seemed like more proof that Chicago was finished. A black mayor was like a black neighbor, but on a citywide scale: once he moved in, everything went to shit. Every falling-apart city had one. A white alderman spoke the fears of his constituents when he begged the mayor-elect, “Don’t let this city become another Detroit.” Washington didn’t have a black majority behind him, so he couldn’t have behaved like Coleman Young even if he’d wanted. And since Chicago elected its city council ward by ward, rather than citywide, Washington was opposed by a bloc of white aldermen determined to prevent him from diverting the city’s dwindling jobs and money from their neighborhoods to the black neighborhoods. Their leader was Fast Eddie Vrdolyak.

  A local comedian called the antagonism between the black mayor and the white aldermen “Council Wars,” and Time magazine nicknamed Chicago “Beirut on the Lake.”

  “Council Wars really slowed things down for Chicago,” Longworth said. “You didn’t want to invest in Beirut on the Lake.”

  RICHARD C. LONGWORTH DUBBED the declining states of the industrial North the “Frost Belt,” an antonym to “Sun Belt.” Since the Sun Belt was stealing all their jobs, the term seemed to apply not only to desert skies but to President Reagan’s “Morning in America,” whose sun rose in the South but never reached the Great Lakes. Auto sales were at their lowest since the early 1960s, while housing starts were the worst in fifteen years. If Americans weren’t buying cars and houses, auto companies and developers weren’t buying steel. High interest rates increased the value of the dollar, which made the American market more attractive to German, Brazilian, and South Korean steelmakers. Beginning in 1979, the U.S. steel market began shrinking, while foreign manufacturers increased their share. By the mid-1980s, America was importing 30 percent of its steel.

  Toward the end of his hopeless challenge to Reagan, in 1984, Walter Mondale spoke to three hundred steelworkers outside the LTV mill in Cleveland.

  “Mr. Reagan has presided over the virtual dismantling of our industrial base,” Mondale said. “He has pursued a policy of official cruelty toward industrial workers. Mr. Reagan’s policy toward the industrial belt of America is ‘Let it rust.’”

  Then, reaching back to a phrase from the 1930s, Mondale accused Reagan of turning the Midwest into “a rust bowl.” It was meant to evoke the Depression, still alive in the memories of elderly voters, by echoing “Dust Bowl,” the scene of the nation’s worst economic suffering during Mondale’s boyhood. While Mondale introduced “Rust Bowl” to political discourse, he didn’t coin the term. A Time magazine article on the early-eighties recession was headlined “Booms, Busts,
and Birth of a Rust Bowl.”

  “As demand for metals lurched lower and layoffs swelled, the once pulsing industrial belt that stretches from Illinois across to western New England took on her grim, ground-down demeanor of a half-century earlier, acquiring the glumly descriptive epithet of Rust Bowl,” wrote reporter Christopher Byron, as fond of neologisms as any Timespeaker.

  Once Mondale popularized “Rust Bowl,” it underwent a journalistic transformation to “Rust Belt,” so it conformed to other regional nicknames, such as Bible Belt, Sun Belt, and Frost Belt. In his book The Nine Nations of North America, journalist Joel Garreau labeled the continent’s industrial quadrant “the Foundry.” But as the postindustrial replacement for “the Arsenal of Democracy” and “the Ruhr of America,” “Rust Belt” stuck.

  ALDERMAN VRDOLYAK’S VOW to reopen Wisconsin Steel had turned out to be empty. He’d failed to save U.S. Steel, as well. The mills had assisted Vrdolyak’s political rise. By the time the steel crisis struck his ward, Vrdolyak was not only the most prominent member of the city council, he was chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party’s Central Committee: boss of the most powerful political machine in America. No politician in Chicago controlled more patronage, but Vrdolyak demanded a price: votes, from the jobholder and every member of his extended family. The mills had been Vrdolyak’s path to power. After the mills closed, Fast Eddie used that power to keep control of his ward by handing out city jobs—which made him even more powerful, because the jobholders didn’t report to U.S. Steel, they reported to Eddie.

  Latinos were easy—and desirable—recruits. They had a lot of kids, which made the men desperate for work, and they had a lot of aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins who could be told, “Vote Vrdolyak.” Because of the mills, Latinos had lived in South Chicago longer than in any other part of the city. They had their own church—Our Lady of Guadalupe—and they were tolerated by Stosh and Chester at the ironworkers’ tavern, who figured it was them or the colored. Tony Navarro and Al Sanchez both grew up in South Chicago and both worked for the city at Vrdolyak’s sufferance. Navarro was a plumber. Sanchez was a community resource specialist in the Department of Human Service, a liaison between city hall and the neighborhood, able to dole out favors. In exchange for Vrdolyak’s clout, the young Latinos hustled precincts for the boss.

  “When the steel mills were going, nobody needed the politics,” Navarro said. “They were making big money in the steel mills. When the mills went down, it was a whole different ball game. People were begging for jobs. I had so many guys I knew in the eighties that lost their families, wives left them because they lost their jobs. They went to drugs, selling drugs. Went to jail.”

  Selling your family’s vote to the Anglo (if you could call a guy named Vrdolyak an Anglo) jefe was a minor humiliation compared to destitution, divorce, and the Illinois Department of Corrections. Suddenly popular, Navarro was visited by a frantic steelworker who wanted to know how to get hired by Vrdolyak.

  “How big is your family, Danny?” Navarro asked the laid-off dad.

  “Thirty, forty,” Danny said.

  “Write ’em all down, make an appointment to see that motherfucker Al Sanchez,” Navarro instructed. “Tell him you’ll kiss his ass on State and Madison and everyone in your family will, too. You’ll get the job.”

  Danny did as he was told and was granted a job on a garbage truck.

  “Tony,” he said the next time he saw Navarro, “I could kiss your ass right now. He’s going to give me a job.”

  Now that Chicago politics had arrived in this most isolated corner of Chicago, Vrdolyak became much more than an emissary to city hall from a distant, misunderstood province. He was the local don. East Siders directed visitors to his keep, which was one of their few remaining tourist attractions. The house was twice as large as the surrounding bungalows. So was the yard: Vrdolyak had taken over an alley to make room for his swimming pool and tennis court. In a blue-collar neighborhood, he was the guy who’d made it big. With his University of Chicago law degree, he built a firm that occupied a block-sized building, with the name “EDWARD R. VRDOLYAK” in two-foot-high letters.

  Every election, Vrdolyak had a new plan for Wisconsin Steel.

  “I’m going to tell them I’m reopening Wisconsin Steel,” he told his precinct captains before appearing at a rally with Mayor Jane Byrne, Harold Washington’s predecessor.

  “You’re a fuckin’ liar,” one brave captain said to him.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” Vrdolyak said. “I’m going to tell ’em anyway.”

  Failing to bring back the mills was not Vrdolyak’s downfall. Vrdolyak was the face of the white ethnic backlash against Mayor Harold Washington. After the ethnics lost their city council majority to a mongrelized caucus of blacks, Latinos, WASPs, and Jews, Vrdolyak made a decision guaranteed to kill any political career in Chicago: he ran for mayor as a Republican. His Latino precinct captains refused to follow their boss into the party of Ronald Reagan.

  “Hey, that’s it,” Navarro told Vrdolyak. “I cannot knock on a black or a Latino door and tell them, ‘We’re Republican.’ And you just lost your job in a steel mill? I’d get my ass kicked.”

  Instead, they defected to a bigger boss. After Harold Washington died, Richard M. Daley, son of the Old Man, prepared to run for mayor. Young Daley recognized that Latinos were the swing vote in Chicago. They had joined a black-and-brown coalition to elect Washington, but if Daley could entice them into a white-and-brown coalition, he could take over the city. In the back room of a South Chicago tavern, one of Daley’s henchmen made a promise.

  “We need you guys,” he said. “We’re glad you left Vrdolyak. We’re going to take you. And we’re going to give jobs, jobs, jobs … Jobs for you and all the Latinos you can bring with us. We want you guys to be our minority, because we’re already sick of that other minority. We don’t want that other minority.”

  “We don’t care how you use us,” Sanchez told the official. “Our guys are starving. We need the jobs.”

  That declaration of reality was the birth of the Hispanic Democratic Organization—HDO, for short—the toughest political mob in Chicago. With the mills gone, only the city offered well-paying blue-collar jobs for joes with a high school education—or less. And only Sanchez, who had been promoted to assistant superintendent of streets and sanitation, could distribute those. He reached beyond laid-off steelworkers to members of the Latin Kings, Latin Counts, and Maniac Latin Satan’s Disciples—loyal, ruthless gangbangers who would pull any dirty trick in exchange for a spot on a garbage truck.

  “That’s how Al Sanchez rose to power,” Navarro said. “He took every thug that was starving and gave ’em a city job. They’d kill for you. He collected more kickback money, you wouldn’t believe. They were so grateful.”

  The last piece of steel rolled out of South Works in 1992. Within four years, the soil had been scoured of lead, cobalt, and all the other toxins necessary to forge steel. The 573-acre outcropping of slag was now the largest plot of lakefront property in Chicago. The new Mayor Daley wanted to control its development, so his friends, allies, and campaign contributors would get the contracts. In 1999, Daley told the 10th Ward alderman, a sexagenarian time-server, that it was time to retire. Then he ordered Al Sanchez to elect a young man named John Pope, a thirty-year-old city hall aide who had grown up in the neighborhood but never been involved in the community’s affairs.

  “The mayor had to have a man in place,” said Neil Bosanko, who ran for alderman himself that year. “He wanted to make sure whoever was alderman, he had a controlling interest over what happened to South Works. Al Sanchez asked for a meeting with me. Al said, ‘The mayor wants John Pope in.’”

  Bosanko declined to withdraw from the race. So a lock shop owner who displayed a Bosanko sign was served with a $200 ticket for overflowing garbage—from Al Sanchez’s Department of Streets and Sanitation.

  That was how Sanchez campaigned. Streets and Sanitation repaired a si
dewalk outside a bungalow with four voters living inside. The city’s asphalt plant opened early that year so Streets and Sanitation could repave Avenue A—even the Indiana side of the street, because Chicagoans drove on that, too. A rival candidate’s campaign volunteers defected after Sanchez promised them a city paycheck.

  John Pope won the election. (“They bought votes,” Neal Bosanko said. “People were afraid. Those HDO people who were gangbangers standing in front of churches. It was intimidating.”) As a reward, Al Sanchez was promoted to commissioner of the Department of Streets and Sanitation. Over the next six years, sixty-three HDO members from Sanchez’s neighborhood got city jobs.

  “Al put every drug dealer, thug, and arsonist from the Tenth Ward to work,” Tony Navarro said. “Anybody today that’s got a decent job in the Tenth Ward is working for the police department, the fire department, the Chicago Park District, or the county. Anybody outside of that doesn’t have a job.”

  In exchange for their jobs, Sanchez’s employees washed his windows and mowed his lawn. This was revealed at Sanchez’s federal corruption trial, during which he was also accused of hiring a garbage truck driver whose only previous experience was behind the wheel of a U-Haul. The woman submitted her application in a biker bar that functioned as an HDO clubhouse. Once on the job, she backed the truck into a co-worker, pinning her against a telephone pole and fracturing her pelvis. Sanchez got two and a half in the federal pen for handing out jobs to political cronies. His mentor, Ed Vrdolyak, also ended up in prison, on a mail fraud charge connected to a real estate kickback scheme. Fast Eddie slowed down in his old age, and the feds caught up with him.