Memories of Cabrini-Green and Halsted St. in the 1950s
By Don DeBat
Cabrini-Green has created lasting memories for many long-time Old Town residents.
Back in the early 1950s, the corner of North and Halsted was a melting pot of ethnic groups, predominantly Germans and Italians, but plenty of Irish, Hungarians, African-Americans, Southern whites, American Indians and Roma (“Gypsies”) to add to the stew.
In 1949, long before Cabrini-Green was fully developed, Siebens Brewery on Larrabee St. was selling cool steins of German beer for 10 cents.
The bustling corner at North and Halsted supported such neighborhood business establishments as the United Cigar Store, Schneider’s Meat Market, Newman’s Shoes and the Greek’s Soda Fountain, where five-cent Coke and penny candy were sold.
A German language movie house, the Kino Theater, was at North Avenue and Orchard. But most neighborhood kids flocked to the Plaza Theater at North and North Park to view shoot’em-up Westerns like “Red River,” starring John Wayne. Later, The Plaza was razed to make way for new affordable high-rise apartments.
In 1956, the Community Conservation Board and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) designated virtually the entire area for urban renewal to preserve Old Town from Cabrini-Green’s inevitable encroachment.
This writer grew up at 1649 N. Halsted in the early 1950s, attended the nearby public Newberry School and later, Lane Tech College Prep. I personally witnessed the destruction of West Old Town by the negative impact of urban renewal and construction of Cabrini-Green, which consisted of 23 high-rises built for more than 15,000 low-income residents.
When my parents purchased Halsted St. for $4,500 in 1948, the post Chicago Fire three-flat frame building was still regulated by rent control. Monthly rents were $18.
The primitive one-bedroom apartments were still heated with pot-belly coal stoves and only had half-baths. One renter made her own soap. Her son, Wayne, collected bicycle parts, which filled the front room. The back yard was a virtual prairie filled with three-foot-tall weeds.
When my 17-year-old brother, Alfred, first saw the building he said it looked haunted. Then, he cried. Nevertheless, housing was hard to find in Old Town after World War II.
Two years after the initial purchase, in 1950, we moved into the first vacant apartment that became available. Over the next 25 years, my cab-driver father, Chester Louis DeBat, renovated the building. He added new gas space heat, a room addition with three full bathrooms, fresh siding, storm doors, a new roof and gutters. My brother did a gut rehab of the third floor and turned it into a bachelor pad.
My father, who had a green thumb and hailed from New Orleans, built new picket side-yard fences and transformed the weed-filled back yard into a beautiful Southern Garden filled with flowers.
Following are some of my childhood and teen memories, along with recollections of other members of my family, who later resided in Old Town and Lincoln Park:
• 1954: During a Newberry schoolyard fight with a white kid, an African-American girl, who I didn’t know, kicked gravel in my face when I was down. I was nine years old.
• 1955: Thieves broke down our front door and stole my father’s vintage 1940s record player, along with his Tony Martin and Frank Sinatra records and console radio.
• 1956: While biking in Lincoln Park, three teens jumped out of the bushes and stole my best friend’s bicycle. Later that year, my friend, Dan Herald and I decided to make an adventuresome journey to the Museum of Science and Industry to view the U-505, a captured German World War II submarine. We rode the CTA elevated train to 63rd St., where the line ended, then walked to the museum. On the way back home to Old Town, we were chased by young Bronzeville lads who didn’t want whites in their neighborhood. Turning age 11, I was propositioned by an attractive African American hooker on the corner of North and Halsted.
• 1957: My father was assaulted by three gang-bangers in the alley east of Halsted St. One thug broke my father’s nose with a steel pipe. After my Dad got mugged, he went into defense mode. He kept a baseball bat by our apartment’s front door and carried a snub-nose .38 caliber revolver.
• 1958: I was playing in a friendly interracial basketball game on Clyborne Ave. just south of Sheffield Ave. One player from Cabrini-Green accused me of stealing $10 out of his jacket. He followed me home, and said: “Better pay up! Have you ever felt the cold steel of a zip gun?” Despite the threat, I refused to pay.
• 1959: It’s 11p.m. on a Saturday night. After hanging out with my teen buddies on a side-street corner west of Halsted, I was accosted by a gang while walking home. “Got any cigarettes? Got any cash? They asked.
I imagined the worst. Amid a sea of angry faces, I saw Eddie, a basketball buddy. “Let him go. He is okay,” said Eddie. Later that year, a 17-year-old drunk was strangled with a belt under the next-door porch.
Also in 1959, the Chicago White Sox were winning the American League pennant. My brother Al DeBat, a professional photographer, writer and editor, purchased four box seat tickets to a doubleheader Sox game verses the Baltimore Orioles. On 35th St., Comiskey Park was just west of the infamous Robert Taylor Homes, a massive CHA project. Although I was a Chicago Cubs fan, I was thrilled to watch the first-place Sox and future Hall of Fame player Brooks Robinson.
Unfortunately, my brother and his girlfriend left after the first game, while Dan and I stayed for game two. On the exit ramp after the game, a kid from the projects grabbed Dan and ripped off his wrist watch. Simultaneously, we witnessed a white man being assaulted by a teen from Robert Taylor Homes. The white guy was punched so hard in the face that his cigarette went bouncing down the ramp.
• 1961: A gang war—like a scene from the 1961 movie “West Side Story,”—was viewed from our third-floor front porch on Halsted St. It erupted between a Puerto Rican gang and blacks over a woman. A guy playing poker with friends in a first-floor apartment next door wasn’t happy that a Puerto Rican whistled at his girl who was sitting on the front porch. So, he cracked him on the head with an empty whiskey bottle. Then, a gang banger tore a 2-by-4 leg off of our front deck bench to use as a club in the battle.
Another Puerto Rican was stabbed that night and bled out on the hood of my 1954 Buick. Traffic on busy Halsted St. stopped as five Puerto Ricans jumped into a four-door 1954 Ford and sped off with the car-doors flapping.
• 1966: During summer vacation, my University of Missouri college roommate, Don (Garbo) Garbarino, and I enjoyed a game of fast-pitch with a white-rubber ball and a chalk-marked box on a wall at Newberry School.
One day, Booker and his buddy “Slim,” two Cabrini-Green dwellers, showed up and challenged us to a game of fast pitch at $2 per match. Booker, who looked like Hall-of-Fame baseball player Willie McCovey’s baby brother, hit the first ball 450 feet over a tall tree on Burling St. The ball landed in a back yard on Halsted.
Later, we stopped throwing Booker fast balls. Once we tossed sinkers, curves, knuckle-balls and screw-balls, we eventually learned Booker couldn’t hit a breaking ball. In one game, Booker and Slim struck out 19 times. They were friendly, competitive guys.
• 1977: At age 17, my future wife, attended college while living in the Gold Coast. She was taking a cab to O’Hare Airport to visit her family for the holidays.
Unfortunately, the cab stopped for a red light at the corner of Division and Larrabee, right in front of Cabrini-Green. A man opened the cab door., while brandishing a knife, he reached inside and grabbed her purse, which contained her airline tickets, jewelry, wallet and identification.
Because she was new to the neighborhood, and from the rural South, she jumped out of cab and chased the thief to the front door of a gang-infested, burned-out Cabrini-Green high-rise.
Luckily, the cab driver saved her life by screaming: “Lady! You’ll die if step through that door!”
• 1998: After grammar-school classes at LaSalle Language Academy, at Sedgewick and North Park, our young son was followed home by a harem of a nearly a dozen young African-American girls. Apparently, our son had invited them to our home for soft drinks on a hot summer day. Waving a broom, Dorothy, our black caregiver, chased the girls away.
Earlier that year, two of our boys’ bikes were stolen out of our back yard grotto along with three cast-stone angel garden sculptures from our deck on Lincoln Park West. Luckily, our Weber grill was chained down. However, the thieves came back to steal our 1870s vintage wrought-iron gate, which cost $2,000 to replace.
• 2001: While residing in a gated townhome on Larabee, north of North Ave., our sons parked two new bikes inside a locked glass security gate. Both bikes were stolen when thieves scaled the wall.
• 2002: Our youngest son, also attended LaSalle elementary school. He experienced a bike theft in the schoolyard at LaSalle. His older brother was peddling ahead of him and didn’t notice he was jumped by three neighborhood bike thieves.
The lasting impact of Cabrini-Green’s original construction created a crime wave in Old Town and Lincoln Park that started in 1954 and continued for more than five decades until the projects were razed.
Despite the overall failure of Cabrini-Green, and the eventual razing of the property, in 2025, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) appears to be determined to repeat its mistake.
The CHA wants to build 4,080 new affordable units on the vacant Cabrini-Green land south of North Ave., and the units are not all proposed as low-rise buildings and row houses. The notorious high-rises and mid-rises are part of the plan. Most are affordable residences, and likely will include hundreds of Section-8 public-housing units.
On February 11th , the City Hall Committee on Finance approved $14 million in tax-increment financing (TIF) to launch a planned 78-unit affordable housing project near the site of the long-razed Cabrini-Green.
The $52.9 million mixed-income housing development is targeted for construction at 547 W. Oak St., a vacant lot owned by the CHA. Demolition of Cabrini-Green started in 2000 and was completed in 2011. Although city officials approved the new low-income housing project in 2021, it still needs the City Council’s approval. The TIF funding now heads to the full City Council for a final decision.
It's de-ja-vu all over again!
Don DeBat is co-author of Escaping Condo Jail, the ultimate survival guide for condominium living. Visit escapingcondojail.com. For more housing news, visit www.dondebat.biz. Don also is writing Chicago’s Game, a book on 16-inch softball.
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