Saturday, March 17, 2007
At Housing Project, Both Fear and Renewal - N.Y. Times
On a night of freezing temperatures, a bare-chested baby crawled alone along an open ninth-floor gallery at the Cabrini Green housing project [in Chicago], its wails piercing through a nearby apartment’s living room walls.
“Whose child is this?” Mattie Gibson shouted, darting from the apartment and peering into vacant units. “Hello? There’s a baby here!”
From a corner apartment, two little boys from a family of squatters emerged to take the child from Ms. Gibson’s arms.
...
Cabrini Green was the kind of place where a young boy could be killed by sniper fire while holding his mother’s hand on the way to school, as happened in the fall of 1992.
Though life in the project remains hellish — a woman recently fatally overdosed in the stairwell near Ms. Gibson’s door, and drug dealers sometimes take control of the building entrances — there is a feeling that the worst of the bad old days are over for the neighborhood at large. From the gallery outside her apartment, Ms. Gibson can see the gleaming lights of two new Starbucks, a Blockbuster and the shopping carts from a stylish grocery store. ...
On a night of freezing temperatures, a bare-chested baby crawled alone along an open ninth-floor gallery at the Cabrini Green housing project [in Chicago], its wails piercing through a nearby apartment’s living room walls.
“Whose child is this?” Mattie Gibson shouted, darting from the apartment and peering into vacant units. “Hello? There’s a baby here!”
From a corner apartment, two little boys from a family of squatters emerged to take the child from Ms. Gibson’s arms.
...
Cabrini Green was the kind of place where a young boy could be killed by sniper fire while holding his mother’s hand on the way to school, as happened in the fall of 1992.
Though life in the project remains hellish — a woman recently fatally overdosed in the stairwell near Ms. Gibson’s door, and drug dealers sometimes take control of the building entrances — there is a feeling that the worst of the bad old days are over for the neighborhood at large. From the gallery outside her apartment, Ms. Gibson can see the gleaming lights of two new Starbucks, a Blockbuster and the shopping carts from a stylish grocery store. ...
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