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Austen demonstrates the centrality of Cabrini-Green to Chicago’s sense of
itself. At first the development was a symbol of the city’s devotion to
alleviating poverty and blight, then its drive to keep low-income black
residents out of its neighborhoods, then its crime and corruption problem,
and finally Cabrini-Green became the justification of the fiscal,
political, and physical transformations that brought Chicago from a
20th-century machine town to today’s “world-class” city. “Defining
Cabrini-Green as the big civic problem also meant it couldn’t be ignored,”
Austen writes; “it needed to be dealt with, solved.”
By Ben Austen (Harper). Release party 2/6, 7 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park, 312-801-2100, eventbrite.com. F
