by Ben Winters
There's gentrification, and then there's ultra gentrification.
It's one thing to watch the insidious encroachment of Starbucks and Home Depot, and quite another to see one of the city's most infamous low-income public housing neighborhoods reduced to rubble simply to make way for luxurious, upscale real estate.
From the look of recent development near Cabrini Green, the now city-run Chicago Housing Authority's plans to "revitalize" the neighborhood are in full gear; large sections have been torn down, fenced off, while bulldozers hang around, seemingly waiting to finish the job. The nice, new businesses are already in place, awaiting their nice, new, upwardly mobile, probably white clientele, or so goes the talk in Cabrini.
Among longtime residents, many of whom have had to pack up and move to the far West or South Sides, this move is little more than an anti-Robin Hood maneuver: Take the land (a public housing site since the 1940s) from Cabrini residents and turn it over to greedy land developers, who stand to make a pretty penny by expanding the western boundaries of the lucrative Gold Coast. Midway through "Voices of Cabrini," a half-hour documentary about the residents of Cabrini Green, filmmaker Ronit Bezalel takes her camera to a 1997 CHA meeting concerning the fate of the North Side housing project. A large delegation of residents turn up, uninvited, in search of straight answers, and the result is a tense confrontation between community activist John Stevens and a city official named Adrianne Bryant.
"You should have come to this community before you broke one ground," hollers Stevens into a microphone, his impassioned voice echoed by a chorus of "All right!" from other residents in attendance. "Before you knocked down one brick!" Under protest is the demolition project that began in 1995, part of a long-term CHA plan to turn the dilapidated high-rises that define the Green into "low-rises in a new, mixed-income community," to quote the film's opening caption. Bryant vainly attempts to reclaim the floor. "You interrupted me while I was in the middle of what I was talking about," she says. "You won't hear what I've said."
"You interrupted a way of life over here, lady," counters Stevens. The crowd erupts; Bryant lets her mic droop to the side, blows out her cheeks, captured by Bezalel's camera in the very portrait of frustration. What would make for a captivating piece of film fiction is unfortunately a chapter from an all-too-real story, and one that isn't over yet. As the Green continues to disappear,
piece-by-piece, from the Near North landscape, it's still unclear what the city intends to do with the land that remains, not to mention its residents.
With "Voices of Cabrini" - which world premieres this week at the Chicago Cultural Center, before heading over to the Near North Branch Library for two showings to the community it depicts - Bezalel gives the residents who were so ignored during the city's demolition planning an opportunity to speak. "I've always been interested in social change more than filmmaking," says Bezalel, a transplant from Montreal, where she worked for the Canadian Film Board.
As a newcomer to Chicago, Bezalel, who did the film partly as a senior thesis for her film studies at Columbia College, was quickly rewarded with pearls of wisdom on where not to go.
"People would tell me to avoid Cabrini, and that was unusual to me, because in Montreal you could basically go wherever you want," she says. "And I saw Cabrini on the train every day on the way to school, and then suddenly I saw Cabrini coming down. So I thought, 'I've got to find out: What is Cabrini? Who lives there?' It all seemed very mysterious in a way."
Thus, "Voices of Cabrini" is primarily a document of the residents themselves, an account of Bezalel's journey to discover the sense of community in a place that is being systematically torn down. And Bezalel says that for all the warnings, she found residents to be fairly open and appreciative of the chance to share the stories of being ousted from their lifelong homes.
Charged with capturing the legacy of Cabrini Green, Bezalel's film strips away the middle-class imaginings of Cabrini, giving us eloquent counter-images: Gospel music and barbecues, children at play, the local barber giving buzz cuts and gossip.
"There's always the legacy of what you hear in the media, that it was bad, that there were gangs and shootings. I think that the film, while it acknowledges that all that exists, also shows the community - the side of it that gets erased," she says. "Just because people who don't live there don't understand the community, it shouldn't be labeled as altogether negative. There's problems in the community, but there's also good things." Ultimately, though, Bezalel's film is more than just an act of cultural preservation, and, if the story is one of the City of Chicago vs. Cabrini Green, there's no mistaking which side she supports. "I definitely went in with a pro-resident slant," she says unapologetically. "I do think I went in with a fairly neutral agenda towards the city and the CHA, but the more reading I did on the history of the CHA and the city and the treatment towards African Americans... The more I did that, I guess my biases grew."
Hence the scenes from planning meetings, where we're invited to share the skepticism of Cabrini residents presented with watercolor representations of a transformed Green, where handsome white brick low-rises surround a lush public park. "This is what you may have in the future," says David Tkac from the Mayor's office, answered from off-camera by a voice of Cabrini: "Hey, we can't afford that."
This pessimism, it seems, was well warranted. The idea behind the Mohawk North townhouses, just north of Cabrini Green, was to in part provide a mixed-income environment where some displaced Green residents, aided by city-issued vouchers, might end up. But so far, of the thousands who populated Cabrini in 1995, fewer than twenty families have made it there. Most who've lost their Cabrini addresses have ended up much further away, like Mark Pratt, one of Bezalel's primary subjects, who now lives on the far South Side - away from family and friends - and must commute to Cabrini for work.
Considering the often-harsh view the film takes of the city, it's interesting that "Voices of Cabrini" is premiering at the Chicago Cultural Center. Though a Department of Cultural Affairs spokeswoman is quick to disassociate the piece from the center ("They've just rented the space, is my understanding of it"), Bezalel is pleased. "I think it's pretty progressive of the Cultural Center," she says, adding that the film "also got a grant from the City of Chicago. It's kind of a paradox. But the city is pretty large. The people who are doing housing are not going to make the decision about what films can be shown."
Bezalel's film may well turn out to be a useful tool for those battling to save public housing. There has already been interest from activists in San Francisco who would like to show the documentary in support of their cause, though Bezalel says she's not sure where the film will end up. In the meantime she's onto another project, producing a film about Cypress, and says she doesn't think she'll do another on Cabrini.
"It's important to document Cabrini Green, because history is so valuable," she says. "I wanted to preserve a community that's not going to exist, to preserve it on film so its legacy will remain."
The fate of Cabrini Green remains to be seen. The CHA, only recently returned to autonomy after a three-year stint under the purvey of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is currently in "an assessment mode," says CHA spokeswoman Karen Bates. "Everything has to be looked at. We've got a mandate from the mayor, and that is to improve quality of life for residents of the City of Chicago, and to bring residents into the planning process."
In the meantime, the "Voices of Cabrini" are here to give their perspective.
"Voices of Cabrini" premieres July 8 in the Claudia Cassidy Theater at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 East Randolph. Reception 6pm, film 6:30pm. It will also be screened July 9-10, 3pm, at the Near North Branch Library, 310 West Division.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.