Cabrini-Green: The Housing Project That Defined a Generation of Urban Failure

From the 1940s through the 1990s, Cabrini-Green was the most notorious public housing project in America — a cluster of high-rise towers on Chicago's Near North Side, within sight of the Gold Coast, that housed up to 15,000 people in conditions of concentrated poverty, gang violence, and institutional neglect. The project was built in waves: low-rises in 1942, then towers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, following the federal "towers in the park" philosophy that isolated residents from street life and services. Elevators broke down for months. Hallways went unlit. Gangs controlled floors and stairwells. In 1981, Mayor Jane Byrne briefly moved into the project as a public safety gesture; she left after three weeks. In 1992, a seven-year-old named Dantrell Davis was shot and killed walking to school, and the national conversation finally shifted. The towers were demolished beginning in 1995 under the federal HOPE VI program. The last Cabrini-Green tower came down in 2011. The land has been redeveloped into Parkside of Old Town and other mixed-income developments. Apart from some of the original low-rise rowhouses, little remains to mark the site of a community that housed tens of thousands for half a century.