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Authors: Adam Cohen,Elizabeth Taylor

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Downtown business leaders were one key constituency backing Daley in his quest for a campus in or near the Loop. In early 1957, the Central Area Committee sent a high-powered delegation to meet with the chairman of the University’s Physical Plant Planning Committee. The group, which included top-rank executives from Marshall Field, Illinois Bell, and Chicago Title and Trust, proposed several sites in and around the Loop, including Daley’s South Loop railroad site. Daley’s representative underscored that the mayor strongly favored a site within the city limits, and pushed in particular for the railroad site. Prospects for a Chicago campus seemed to improve greatly after the November 1958 election, in which Democrats defeated three Republican members of the university board, including the board chairman. When the changeover occurred the following March, the board would have a 6–3 Democratic majority. Before it left office, however, the lame-duck board selected Riverside Golf Club, a suburban location not far from Miller Meadows. In doing so, the board ignored a last-minute plea from Daley, who urged that the vote be put off until more information was available on alternative sites. Daley responded to the adverse vote by scheduling a meeting with the full board of trustees in February and asking them to delay their decision until April 15, by which time the city would have completed a feasibility study on the railroad site. Not incidentally, by that time the Democrats would have taken control of the board. As an incentive for delay, Daley told the board that the city stood “anxious, ready and willing” to pay the extra costs associated with building the campus in the city. “If the Riverside site costs 2 million dollars and a Chicago site costs 4 million,” Daley assured them, “we’ll pay the difference.” The board agreed to put off a final decision until April 15, 1959.
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In addition to Daley’s Loop railroad site, the university was now considering two other locations in the city: Meigs Field, a commuter airport jutting into Lake Michigan southeast of the Loop, and Garfield Park, a residential area four miles west of State Street. Daley and the CAC opposed the new sites, neither of which would advance their goal of creating an economic anchor and a racial buffer for the Loop. Daley rejected the Meigs Field site out of hand, arguing that transportation to it would be difficult. In May 1959, the trustees voted to make Garfield Park their choice for the new campus. The truth was, Garfield Park was in many ways an ideal site. It was a working-class neighborhood, filled with factory workers and civil servants whose children were precisely the kind of students the campus was intended to serve. The community also badly needed the economic uplift that a major university campus would bring. The Garfield Park–Austin neighborhood was, in the late 1950s, in economic and racial transition. Middle-class whites had been moving out, and they were being replaced by poor blacks squeezed out of the South Side. Placing the university campus in the neighborhood would have anchored it, and perhaps prevented it from becoming an all-black ghetto. The community understood this and, unlike most other areas the university was considering, Garfield Park was eager to be selected. Homeowners groups, elected officials, and the community newspaper all came out in favor of locating the campus in Garfield Park.
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The main opposition to the Garfield Park location came from downtown businesses, which still wanted the campus located near the Loop. These industry leaders had far more resources at their disposal than the working-class residents of Garfield Park. Working through their two development arms, the Central Area Committee and the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, the Loop businessmen lobbied against Garfield Park and in favor of a Loop site. The
Sun-Times,
with its ties to the downtown department store Marshall Field, also promoted a location near the Loop. Individual business leaders lobbied elected officials directly. On December 7, 1959, eighteen civic and business groups urged Daley and Stratton to put the campus in the railroad site. Daley still favored the Loop location, and he had an opportunity to bring his considerable influence to bear. Though the university had already selected the Garfield Park location, there was an obstacle. The campus would be built in part on land owned by the Park District, which had not yet agreed to sell it. The most prominent member of the Park District board was Daley’s old friend Jake Arvey. While the issue of Park District land remained unresolved, downtown businessmen formed the Joint Action Committee of Civic Organizations to push for the railroad site. JACCO threatened to sue if the Park District board transferred any land in Garfield Park to the university, arguing that portions of the land had been deeded to the Park District on the condition that it remain as a park. The Illinois state legislature passed legislation clearing the way for the Park District to transfer the land, but it was becoming increasingly clear that this would not happen. In the end, the university withdrew its plans to site the campus in Garfield Park.
21

Although Daley and the Loop businessmen had succeeded in defeating yet another alternative site, they were still not able to secure the railroad site that was their first choice. The railroad companies were now asking for $140 million for the land and for a new terminal, far more than Daley was prepared to pay. And Daley and the companies could not reach an agreement on a consolidated railroad terminal. With negotiations over the railroad site at an impasse, another possibility emerged: a fifty-five-acre urban renewal site in the Near West Side Harrison-Halsted neighborhood. The Harrison-Halsted site was a few blocks west of the Loop, and just south of the Congress Expressway. It was close enough to serve as the kind of “anchor” for the Loop that downtown business leaders were looking for. And it would also serve as a racial barrier — not between the Loop and the South Side ghetto, but between the Loop and another nearby concentration of poor blacks. The Harrison-Halsted site was just a few blocks east of one of the largest concentrations of public housing in the city — the 1,027 units of the Jane Addams Houses, the forty buildings and 1,200 units of the Grace Abbott Homes, and the 834 units of the Robert Brooks Homes. These projects, originally built for white occupancy, were already well on their way to becoming overwhelmingly black. And the neighborhood in which they were located was, according to one contemporaneous account, “probably the most depressed area in the City.” The Harrison-Halsted site was already owned by the city, so it could be delivered to the university quickly. An added advantage was that, since it was a designated urban redevelopment site, much of the cost of acquiring the land could be charged to the federal government under the Urban Renewal Act.
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Daley formally proposed the Harrison-Halsted site to the university trustees at a September 27, 1960, meeting. It was, he said, the option that would “get the University into Chicago as fast as possible.” As it happened, the Garfield Park site was on a slower track because a Cook County Circuit Court judge who owed his seat on the bench to the Democratic machine had recently struck down as unconstitutional the new state law approving the transfer of Garfield Park park land to the university. That decision would later be reversed by the Illinois Supreme Court, but it succeeded in casting doubt over the Garfield Park site at a crucial point. Daley’s first choice, the railroad site, was still out of reach, since the railroads showed no signs of coming to terms with the city on transfer of the land. But he had orchestrated the process in a way that made the selection of his other choice, Harrison-Halsted, increasingly inevitable. Daley’s presentation to the trustees was well received, and they voted in favor of the Harrison-Halsted campus.
23

The Harrison-Halsted community, unlike Garfield Park, was bitterly opposed to having a University of Illinois campus built in their midst. Where Garfield Park residents had seen the school as a lifeline, Harrison-Halsted residents saw it as a bulldozer that would raze block after block of their vibrant neighborhood. Harrison-Halsted was an old-fashioned, working-class urban community. It was part of the heavily Italian 1st Ward, which sent the syndicate’s favorite alderman, John D’Arco, to the City Council. But the neighborhood was an ethnic mix, including Italians, Greeks, blacks, and Mexicans. Harrison-Halsted was also home to Hull House, the famous settlement house that Jane Addams established in 1889 to serve Chicago’s poor. Plans for the new campus would require Hull House to be moved or destroyed. Also threatened was the Holy Guardian Angel Church and its adjoining parochial school, beloved neighborhood institutions that had just relocated in 1959 when their original building was demolished to build the Dan Ryan Expressway.
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A grassroots movement, largely made up of neighborhood women, formed to save Harrison-Halsted from the bulldozers. A housewife named Florence Scala, who had been active on the New West Side Planning Board, showed up at a February 13, 1961, meeting at Holy Guardian Angel out of curiosity, and was reluctantly drafted to lead the cause. A week later, she presided over a meeting of more than five hundred neighborhood residents at Hull House. Since the local elected officials had decided to sell out the community to Daley and the machine, the residents decided, they would have to take matters into their own hands. A new organization, the Harrison-Halsted Community Group, was formed, and Scala became its leader. The group took their battle for their homes and neighborhood to any political body that would hear them out. The University of Illinois Board of Trustees, the Federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, the state legislature, the Illinois Housing Board, the Planning and Housing Committee of the City Council, and the full City Council all turned down Scala and her followers and endorsed the Harrison-Halsted site. They also appealed to elected officials for help, but Senator Paul Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, and Bill Dawson all refused to take the community’s side against Daley.
25

Turned down by the power structure, neighborhood residents moved on to direct action. On March 20, one thousand supporters of the Harrison-Halsted Community Group followed Scala on a march from Saint Francis of Assisi Church to Hull House to appeal for their neighborhood to be spared. The demonstrators, most of them women from the area, held signs with messages like “Daley Is a Dictator — He Won’t Get Any More Democratic Votes from Us.” As the City Council’s vote on the proposed site drew near, someone tossed a dummy into the street outside Daley’s home. It included a mark that looked like a bullet hole, and a sign that read: “This is Mayor Daley of the future.” But Daley was not deterred. “No one is going to threaten me as mayor of Chicago,” he said. “If I had been there, I would have taken care of them. ...I don’t fear death either.” Daley loudly proclaimed that he would “tak[e] care of the situation” himself, and quietly doubled the police guard outside his home.
26

When the time came for the City Council to vote, Daley appeared personally to speak in support of a bill to designate 155 acres of Harrison-Halsted as the site of the new campus. It was “unfortunate that in the selection of sites for public improvement some must suffer,” Daley told a standing-room-only crowd of four hundred. But he insisted that the debate over the location had overshadowed “the most important issue, that is to give the young people of Chicago and Cook County an accessible university.” Daley invoked the spirit of Jane Addams — whose Hull House was being threatened by bulldozers — and promised that the campus’s new School of Social Work would be named for her. It was Alderman D’Arco, however, who won cheers from the crowd when he protested that the Harrison-Halsted site had been “picked in desperation and was the choice of no one.” The City Council followed Daley’s lead and voted in favor of the site.
27

When the voting was over, two hundred members of the Harrison-Halsted Community Group marched to Daley’s office. When they got inside, they pounded on desks, threw things, and railed bitterly against Daley and the City Council. “The rich always take away from the poor!” one woman shouted. Another threatened, “The first surveyor is going to get it in the head with a crowbar; putting us out on the streets. What do you think we are, animals?” Daley, refusing to confront a group made up largely of mothers fighting to protect their homes, slipped out a side door and left them to his director of special events. The demonstrators agreed to leave after they were promised a meeting with Daley the next day. At that meeting, Daley explained that the responsibility for selecting Harrison-Halsted lay with the university trustees — the same group Daley had spent years talking out of the suburban and Garfield Park sites that they preferred. “This has been misrepresented and twisted as though the city had selected the site,” Daley told the women.
28

Plans for construction were proceeding rapidly. Daley’s urban renewal commissioner announced that the city had been awarded $26.2 million in federal funds to acquire and clear 105.8 acres for the campus. Groundbreaking for the first of thirteen new buildings was scheduled for the fall. Scala announced that the Harrison-Halsted Community Group was filing federal and state lawsuits to block construction, and on August 15, 1962, the group appealed to Daley to stop further condemnation of their neighborhood until their appeals were ruled on. But Daley would not be deterred. “I never heard him second-guess himself,” said his son William. “You make a decision, you don’t second-guess yourself or look back. He did not wring his hands.”
29

The Harrison-Halsted Community Group continued its protests, but defeat seemed increasingly inevitable. One day in October, Scala and some of her followers confronted Daley at a sit-in in his office, and made another appeal for residents to be allowed to stay in their homes until their legal appeals could be ruled on. “What is going to happen to these people?” Scala asked of her neighbors. But to Daley, it all came down to politics. “Why don’t you take care of your candidate?” he asked Scala, implying that Richard Ogilvie, the Republican candidate for Cook County sheriff, was behind the protests. “You can’t even talk to the man,” Scala said afterward. “You start to ask him a question and he keeps talking.” The following day, Daley announced that the families who lived in the area where the first construction was to occur would have to move out immediately, before their appeals were exhausted. The other residents could remain through the appeal process. The impact of the evictions on neighborhood residents was devastating. “I walked around with Florence Scala at the time when they were clearing people out,” says one reporter. “A lot of the people had lived in that neighborhood their whole lives, the old Italian people. A lot of them died — they just couldn’t make the move.”
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