west of Western, Part 1

This is kind of a remembrance of the racial situation growing up as a white kid in Gage Park. I was thinking of your strange use of the term taking over, and I do remember that this was a phrase we used west of Western, referring to them, we were always afraid of them taking over. I was hoping to finish it up this morning, but now I see that I will need at least one more entry. Maybe you could give an account of your growing up in Gage Park, preferably with the way you felt then rather than with the way you feel now.

I used to go to Gage Park, the park, a bit, just to hang around, and for a little while I used to go to a chess club in the field house. But it was a bit like a frontier, you never went any further east, certainly not east of the viaduct, because that was where they lived. They being the black people. If you crossed under it, you could well be robbed, or maybe killed just because you were white, as could well happen to them if they crossed into our neighborhood. Just the way it was.

Before we discovered the swift modern Archer bus, we used to take the 55th street bus downtown. We would catch it at Kedzie and roll east to California and then a glimpse down the block to Gage Park High School, then the park, then across Western and under the viaduct into their neighborhood. At first it didn’t look that different, but the further east you got, the shabbier it became, and by Halsted it was pretty bad, and then you were turning east around State Street and going right through the ghetto. We didn’t call it the ghetto then, I don’t think it got that term until sometime in the sixties. Probably we just called it the nigger neighborhood.

And it was pretty bad. The buildings were all run down, and the lawns were just patches of dirt, and they had been getting on the bus since sometime past Western and now it was mostly them on the bus, so you better be careful. My mother had told me that they all carried knives and they would slice you up if you called any of them a nigger. I didn’t really believe that, but I was careful.

Some of the buildings looked like they had once been pretty fancy, and I knew that this had once been a white neighborhood, and now look at it. They had moved in, and they had run it down.

Just like what would happen if they moved into our neighborhood. The neighborhood was full of people who had formerly lived east and south of us, and everything had been just fine, like it was around Gage Park, and then they moved in. So it was best if we could stop them at the viaduct.

Outside of those bus trips and when we were downtown we never saw them. I don’t remember ever seeing them walking in our neighborhood, or even waiting at a bus stop. They knew that we wouldn’t like it.

When I was a teenager I used to play golf at Marquette Park. It had that golf course and a big lagoon where people could fish, and hills that were probably artificial and trees and all that stuff. Sometimes you’d get to talking to some people who lived nearby about what a pretty park it was, and sometimes their faces would darken and they’d look east and say, “We’re never going to let them have it.”