With the echo of African drums, Fairfield Avenue comes alive.
Men, women and children, drawn to their front porches by the pulsing beat, witness an impromptu parade led by 60-year-old Hasan Smith. A long line of well-wishers follows him to the home that he helped rebuild โ the first home he has ever owned.
โHello, neighbors!โ his wife, Mary, shouts.
They all wave, and celebrate another chapter in the rebirth of a neighborhood.
Today, the area known as Chicago Lawn is a place where kids ride bikes, where revelers gather for block parties and street dances, where shoppers frequent a farmers market and a resale shop in a once-vacant storefront and where neighborhood teens find work at a screen-printing business.
Though still a work in progress, this is not the South Side of Chicago of violent repute โ shootings, gangs, forgotten main streets and residential blocks plagued with boarded-up houses and apartment buildings.
Chicago Lawn was once all that; its streets were littered with abandoned homes, especially after the 2008 mortgage crisis took hold. โIn some blocks, it looked like a war zone,โ said the Rev. Anthony Pizzo, then a priest at St. Rita of Cascia Catholic church, a rare neighborhood mainstay.
But then, a feisty core of residents, the Smiths included, banded together to save this place.
They are doing so with an unexpected mix of people in an often-segregated city, with neighbors who donโt always speak the same language, practice the same religion or trust one another. They are African Americans, Hispanic immigrants, Muslims, Catholics, Jews โ and โreturning citizens,โ men fresh from prison, like Hasan Smith, a former gang member who served nearly three decades for shooting and killing a man in a drug-related crime. He was just 19 at the time.
โI told myself when I get there, Iโm going to be running, moving forward,โ said Smith, who came to Chicago Lawn in 2006 in search of a second chance. Many others are doing the same, moving into rehabbed bungalows and apartments.
And sparking nothing short of a Chicago Lawn renaissance.
The comeback is a particularly stunning feat when you consider the neighborhoodโs history.
Decades earlier, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marched into what was then an ethnic-white neighborhood, lined with quaint Chicago-style brick bungalows and small apartment buildings. Many who lived in the neighborhood worked at the National Biscuit Co. bakery, now Nabisco. King arrived with his own small but determined coalition. They came to demand fair access to housing for African Americans whoโd been limited to slums by redlining. Met by angry white protesters, King was struck with a rock and temporarily deterred.
โI have never seen โ even in Mississippi and Alabama โ mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as Iโve seen here in Chicago,โ he would say.
The racial makeup of the neighborhood began to shift as many whites left the South Side. By the 1990s, Chicago Lawn was tipping to majority African American with a Hispanic contingent that also steadily grew. Many who came here were first-time homebuyers.
Jose and Maria Mena bought a three-unit brick apartment building in 1990 to share with their extended family, including Menaโs mom and a disabled sister. Jose, now 60, came from Mexico as a teen to pick strawberries in California, then made his way to Chicago to work in a factory that produced ice cube trays and other plastic goods. He met wife Maria there. Both learned English, earned their GEDs and became citizens after being granted amnesty by the Reagan administration.
The neighborhood was rough back then, known for its drug houses and Friday night gang fights on a local school lot. But that also made it affordable. As the housing market boomed in the early to mid-2000s, it seemed like anyone could buy a home, Mena said.
But because of language barriers or confusion over loan terms, such as adjustable rates, many were perched precariously on the edge of the housing bubble when it burst in 2008. Some with lower credit scores also had received subprime loans with high interest rates. Before the collapse, block after block of storefronts were filled with mortgage lenders and real estate offices that mostly disappeared after.
โThey trick the people. They just told whatโs convenient for them,โ said Jose, who had neighbors and extended family members who were losing their homes. He and Maria went through their own tough financial times, though never faced foreclosure.
Theyโd also never been very politically active. But when Pizzo and organizers from a neighborhood organization known as the Southwest Organizing Project, or SWOP, called for bank protests in 2009, the Menas were among those who stepped forward. Because they were citizens, they felt a duty to represent those who were not.
A few weeks later, the group scheduled a meeting with Bank of America officials at St. Ritaโs โ some inside, asking the bank to work with those in danger of foreclosure, while others prayed outside on the church steps.
โIt was the first time people came out with no shame to share testimonies,โ said Imelda Salazar, a Guatemalan immigrant who became a neighborhood organizer with SWOP.
Ultimately, they worked with the banks through repayment, credit counseling and refinancing to save more than 500 individuals and families from foreclosure.
When Hasan Smith first arrived in Chicago Lawn, he moved into a halfway house apartment above the neighborhood business district, 63rd Street. Until the hot water was fixed, his first few showers were ice cold. He watched his first roommate, another young man fresh from prison, come and go. โHe didnโt last one day.โ
Still, after spending โ27 years, three months and six daysโ locked away, it was a strange and wonderful feeling to walk into this three-bedroom apartment that belonged to the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, or IMAN.
Smith had become Muslim in prison. He was drawn to the teachings of the Quran and the routine and still finds peace in daily prayers. The man known as Nathaniel to his family and โSlickโ on the streets of Chicago โ โI did what I had to do and I got out the wayโ โ took on the name Hasan, meaning handsome and good.
Growing up in the Stateway Gardens projects, he had chosen gang life because he felt he had few options. He became, by his own regretful admission, a tyrant. But at home, he was still the baby-faced boy who dutifully did his chores and homework, even as a teen. His parents were strict but powerless against the outside forces. โAll this stuff youโre doing in the streets, you canโt bring it in here,โ he remembers them saying. โIf you get money, we donโt want it.โ
Rafi Peterson could relate. Now a well-known figure in Chicago Lawn who works both with SWOP and IMAN, he was what he called a โcriminalโs criminalโ as a young man, stealing from drug dealers and pimps. He too grew up in the projects and converted to Islam in prison. The two men, who would become lifelong friends, met when a physician Smith was working for introduced them.
โCome on. Bring your stuff,โ Peterson told Smith, who went on to become the first graduate of IMANโs reentry program, which teaches former prisoners work and life skills.
Smith got a job at a printing company and worked with Peterson as a violence interrupter, using their knowledge as former gang members to diffuse conflict.
It wasnโt easy. As more homes vacated, crime in Chicago Lawn grew rampant. At one point, IMAN went to court to go after gang members who were squatting in an abandoned apartment building, Peterson said. A young woman whoโd been raped was found next to the building.
One year before the housing crash, Peterson purchased his own brick bungalow a couple blocks away. He resisted painting over gang graffiti inside a bedroom closet. More than a decade later, the initials were still there โ S.D. for Satan Disciples, one of a few gangs that had splintered and persisted, even when their leaders were taken down.
โI wanted to remember what we came from,โ he explained.
As they took a stand, neighbors started coming to Peterson, Smith and the growing cadre of โbrothersโ when there was trouble โ often before they called police. They knew they could count on them.
By 2012, there were at least 665 abandoned homes and apartment buildings in Chicago Lawn, counted by staff and volunteers at SWOP. The boarded-up homes were most obvious. Others were given away by their stuffed mailboxes, overgrown lawns and no signs of life for days on end, except perhaps the odd feral cat and other critters that squeezed in through broken windows.
Neighbors and SWOP came together to form a plan. They also called upon outside supporters such as United Power, a large coalition of Chicago neighborhood organizations and churches, and recruited volunteer attorneys, a property developer and one large early funder, the MacArthur Foundation, also based in the city.
They would, they decided, raise funds and buy up corner properties to spark redevelopment. They would, as they put it, โreclaimโ the neighborhood.
They knew this was not the South Side story people expected, and that only fueled their fire.
They started with a rally, passing the hat as attendees threw in $5, $10, maybe $20. MacArthur pledged $500,000.
Eventually, Lisa Madigan, then Illinois attorney general, agreed to tour the neighborhood. She added $3 million from funds that Illinois, other states and the federal government received from five of the nationโs largest banks โ Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Ally Bank and Bank of America โ accused of fraudulent foreclosure-processing tactics in Chicago and elsewhere.