Cabrini-Green: Study in ethnic cleansing

Sharon Cohen, writing about the demise of the Cabrini-Green housing project, produced a masterpiece of misdirection. She wrote about the nostalgia that former residents felt about the project rather than its much more interesting role in Chicago’s ethnic politics. No, Cabrini-Green was not an urban policy failure, as she indicated; it was a rousing success. It had achieved its purpose and now can succumb to the wrecking balls to make room for something else.

While Cohen remarked that the housing project stood in proximity to the “exclusive” Gold Coast on the west, about a mile away, she missed the significance of the Catholic Church which today stands just a few blocks to the east of Cabrini-Green: St. John Cantius. The church served as the center of Polish religious life since the end of the 19th Century until the arrival of Cabrini-Green and the Kennedy Expressway, both of which tore the community apart and drove the residents into the suburbs.

St. John Cantius, Holy Trinity, St. Stanislaus Kostka, St. Mary of the Angels, St. Hedwig’s and other churches along the Kennedy Expressway, for more than a hundred years, served the spiritual and cultural needs of the growing Polish population in Chicago. And they met the same fate — ethnic cleansing at the hands of the federal government and high-powered political players.

Chicago was a Catholic city. In 1960, Chicago was widely represented by Catholics in Congress. That presented the non-Catholic elites with a huge political challenge. So, they devised a solution involving social engineering and psychological warfare.

They used urban renewal and the power of eminent domain to destroy the housing in the ethnic neighborhoods, replace it with high-rises and expressways, and move in massive numbers of Protestants.

Today, the Irish Catholic mayor, Richie Daley, is gone. The universe makes sense, again.

George Kocan

Warrenville