Items related to Going Public
“The inside story of an extraordinary politics you probably didn’t know existed—ordinary Americans getting together and acquiring real power for themselves.” —William Greider, national correspondent, The Nation
A New York city neighborhood once called “the beginning of the end of civilization” is where Michael Gecan starts. Hired by residents to help them save their community, he and local leaders spend more than a decade wrestling New York politicians in an impassioned effort against all odds that brings in five thousand new homes.
From bad behavior by Ed Koch to complicated negotiations with Rudy Giuliani, Gecan tells the inside story of how the city really works, and how any organized group of citizens can wield power in seemingly unmovable bureaucracies.
Gecan’s unwavering vision of the value of public action has roots in a rough childhood in Chicago, where he witnessed extortion by the mob and a tragic fire in his Catholic grade school that left ninety-two children and three nuns dead.
In his inspiring story of the will to claim the full benefits of citizenship, Gecan offers unforgettable lessons that every American should know: What is the best way to talk to politicians? What resources do all communities need to create change? What kinds of public actions really work?
“If you want to know how ordinary Americans accomplished extraordinary things—built affordable homes, created effective schools, won living wages—then the story and the strategy reside in this remarkable book. Going Public is at once pragmatic and profound.” —Samuel G. Freedman, author of Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church
Michael Gecan has been an organizer for twenty years. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
A New York city neighborhood once called “the beginning of the end of civilization” is where Michael Gecan starts. Hired by residents to help them save their community, he and local leaders spend more than a decade wrestling New York politicians in an impassioned effort against all odds that brings in five thousand new homes.
From bad behavior by Ed Koch to complicated negotiations with Rudy Giuliani, Gecan tells the inside story of how the city really works, and how any organized group of citizens can wield power in seemingly unmovable bureaucracies.
Gecan’s unwavering vision of the value of public action has roots in a rough childhood in Chicago, where he witnessed extortion by the mob and a tragic fire in his Catholic grade school that left ninety-two children and three nuns dead.
In his inspiring story of the will to claim the full benefits of citizenship, Gecan offers unforgettable lessons that every American should know: What is the best way to talk to politicians? What resources do all communities need to create change? What kinds of public actions really work?
“If you want to know how ordinary Americans accomplished extraordinary things—built affordable homes, created effective schools, won living wages—then the story and the strategy reside in this remarkable book. Going Public is at once pragmatic and profound.” —Samuel G. Freedman, author of Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church
Michael Gecan has been an organizer for twenty years. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Michael Gecan has been an organizer for twenty years. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Preface
Why Organize?
I am an organizer. It"s a strange word—"organizer"—a word from the past, a
black-and-white photo of a person passing out fliers to workers leaving an
auto plant.
But it"s 2002, and I am an organizer. Not a consultant to so-called
faith-based programs. Not a facilitator. Not an adviser. Not a service provider
or do-gooder. Not an ideologue. Not a political operative. Not a pundit. Not a
progressive. Not an activist.
I"m clearly not a lot of things. In my organizing, I use other old-
fashioned words
like "leader"and "follower," "power"and "action," "confrontation"
and "negotiation," "relationships" and "institutions." These words still form the
phonics of the larger language of politics.
With these basic tools, the plots and subplots of public life, no
matter how intricate, begin to make sense. Characters come to life.
Motivations emerge. Relationships reveal themselves. Themes and story
lines become clear. The reader can begin to talk back to the teller of the tale,
can begin to judge, or can pick up a pen and create a different world. In the
public arena, participation and action and change can take place.
But I won"t begin to make sense unless I follow the advice of my
former college professor and poet laureate, the late Robert Penn Warren, and
tell some stories. We took a walk one day on the Connecticut roads near his
Fairfield home. It was a brisk winter afternoon, and his dog was yanking him
along. As we walked, he provided a gentle but thorough critique of a novel I
was working on at the time. He kept coming back to a simple theme: "Just
tell the story. Forget everything else and tell your story." He was repeating
what he had already written in his wonderful book-length poem, Audubon: A
Vision, "Tell me a story. / In this century, and moment, of mania, / Tell me a
story / . . . Tell me a story of deep delight." So, many years later, I will follow
the advice of this wise teacher and tell you some stories from my life, the
beginnings of my life as an organizer.
I grew up on the west side of Chicago in the fifties and learned
that we live in a world of power—raw power—long before I knew the word. My
mother and father bought a tavern when my sister and I were quite young. As
a six-year-old, I served shots and beers to the men who sat along "my"
section of the bar. My customers were Italians, Irish, and fellow Croatians.
They walked down the hill a block away from the Chicago and Northwestern
Railroad yard at noon—for a couple of shots, a couple of beers, and
sandwiches and soup made by my mother in the kitchen. My father built a
small platform behind the bar so that I could serve my crowd.
I remember this as a glorious time in my life—a time when I was
admitted to an adult world of strength and laughter and toughness. (My
parents remember this as a period of unremitting pressure and endless
work.) The time ended on a sunny afternoon. The young man from the mob
came in to pick up his monthly payment. My father explained to him that,
because by mother had taken ill, we were short. As my father and the young
man talked, all the other men at the bar became silent, looked down at their
drinks, or stared straight ahead. The young man told my father that he knew
what he had to do. My father nodded. Then the man turned around and
walked out. Slowly, conversation picked back up. Someone ordered a shot of
vo and a Schlitz. That night, my father closed the bar—Gus"s Tavern—for
good.
When he sold the tavern to a Polish immigrant, my father
explained to him that there were three "expenses" that did not appear on the
books—the payoff to the police (otherwise, they would not come if there was
trouble), the payoff to the fire department (otherwise, they may not come, or
come promptly, if there was a fire), and the payoff to the mob. The Polish
fellow was indignant. This was America, not his home country. He would not
make these payments, he shouted. My father argued with him, but to no avail.
Some months later, after the new owner had made improvements
to the tavern, reopened it, and begun to rebuild the business, the word spread
through the neighborhood that the tavern would be firebombed that night. No
one went into the tavern that night, so the man had sense enough to shut it
early. Kids from the neighborhood, myself included, were stationed across
the street, sitting on the curb, sipping sodas, watching the darkened bar. A
car pulled up to the tavern. A door opened. A man stepped out and heaved
two Molotov cocktails through the window. The man was in no hurry and wore
no mask. The car pulled slowly away as the building erupted in flames. In
seconds, the street turned from night to noon. It seemed like a long time
before the police or fire department arrived. And, when they did, the building
was gutted, and the owner was wailing on the sidewalk outside.
No matter where you turned, you ran smack into people with
power. The power of the mob. The power of the police. The power of the Cook
County Democratic Party—which demanded three hundred dollars from every
working man in our neighborhood who sought a city job. Three hundred
dollars was a lot of money in those days. And all that it bought was a
place "on the list." No one knew for sure, but the sense was that a small
percentage of people eventually got jobs. The rest paid off, sat silently, and
had nowhere to go and no one to complain to when their payoff didn"t work.
Life on the street was no different. As a white, working-class boy,
I grew up fighting black, working-class boys. We jumped them. They jumped
us. We feared them. And we wanted them to fear us. Our lives were strictly
circumscribed—divided by el lines, railroad tracks, and major thoroughfares.
Cross any border and you had to be prepared to pay the price. Every aspect
of our upbringing taught us either to avoid or to confront one another.
Our lives were a series of serious and sudden skirmishes. One
afternoon, two friends and I were sitting on a curb. In the distance, three
blacks, about our age, walked along Ferdinand Street, toward us. They
ambled, it seemed to me then and in memory, incredibly slowly and
casually. As they approached, the toughest of our three, Mike Stepkovicz,
now dead, pulled out his knife, opened it behind his back, and waited. No one
moved until they were right in front of us. Then Stecks, short and stocky but
quick as a snake, grabbed the lead boy, put the knife to his neck, and asked
him where the fuck he thought he was going. The boy"s eyes were wide,
unblinking. No words came out of his mouth, although his lips moved. The
rest of us just froze. As quickly as he struck, Stecks let the kid go and told
him to head back the same way he came. We watched them walk away,
faster now, back toward Pulaski Road, south toward Lake Street, out of our
turf, out of our sight.
And there was the much more complicated power of large
institutions—particularly the Roman Catholic Church. Our parish, Our Lady of
the Angels, anchored our lives. It"s where we prayed, socialized, played
bingo, went to school. This same parish—and scores like it—often turned a
blind eye to the needs of the working-class whites who packed its schools
and sanctuaries.
I watched as my mother tried to convince our local pastor to do
something about the real estate hustlers who were panicking white families
to leave the neighborhood by warning of the impending flood of black buyers.
These hustlers spoke every language we spoke—Croatian, Italian, German,
and Czechoslovakian. They called every day, many times a day, and then
into the evening, and then all through the night. They roused bone-tired
factory workers from their beds to alert them to how much their home had
lost in value that week, to make them one last offer. Exhaustion and fear
grew. Neighbors moved suddenly, without a word of warning. Then panic
spread. The real estate agents bought low from our families and sold high to
black families eager for a better and safer life for their children. They ravaged
entire sections of a once great city—several times over. They drove families
like mine from neighborhood to neighborhood, two, three, and four times,
further west and northwest and southwest toward the suburbs, losing more
equity, hope, and faith each time. Then they bankrupted black and Hispanic
buyers and steered them into new ghettoes.
My mother went to the pastor and described all this. He nodded
and said he would get back to her. He never did. We found out later that he
essentially redrew the lines of the parish to exclude our four square blocks,
which turned from nearly entirely white to nearly entirely black in one
traumatic and violent summer in the late sixties. We didn"t move for three
more years because my Croatian grandmother, who owned our house, and
who would have survived the bombing of Vukovar, refused to leave.
My mother"s actions introduced me to a different kind of power—
an attempt by someone to defend herself and her family, to enlist other
families in the effort, to research an issue and understand it well, to take that
research and analysis to a place where she thought her work would be
welcome. She did all this with a positive spirit. She related as openly to our
new black neighbors as to our fleeing white friends. Deeply disappointed by
the inaction of the pastor, she didn"t use that disappointment as a reason to
retreat from all public matters or to reject her local parish or her larger church.
It would have been understandable if she had rejected them. She
had already survived one tragedy. On the first day of December in 1958, the
parish school, packed with sixteen hundred kids, caught fire. Ninety-five
people died that day—ninety-two children and three nuns.
I recall the sights and sounds of that first of December nearly
every day of my life. A siren, a news story, a charred building in Brooklyn,
schoolchildren waiting on line or racing around an asphalt playground,
inanities from the mouth of a public official trying to avoid responsibility—it
doesn"t take much to jog my memory.
Once again, I am one of fifty or so fourth graders sitting in a
crowded classroom copying the perfect script of Sr. Mary
Edgar . . . "Geography. Read page fifty-eight. . . ." She is tall and thin and
strictly upright, just like the tall and elegant letters on the board. Then, the
fire alarm rings, late in the afternoon, just before dismissal, which makes us
all groan and grumble quietly. We will have to walk outside without our coats
and wait until the entire school empties and then go back in and dress for the
end of the day. In other words, we will leave later than usual.
But today there will be no going back for coats and books and
backpacks. As we file into the hallway, we look up the wide stairwell leading
to the second floor. Midway down, smoke, thick as muscle, blocks our view.
The groaning and grumbling stop. We hurry out to the sidewalk in front of the
school and follow our leader along Iowa Street toward the church. As we
walk, we glance back, see smoke pouring from windows.
In the church, we are commanded to kneel and pray—600, 800,
1,000, 1,200, and more frightened kids, more packed in every minute. We
can hear windows breaking, muffled screams, and thuds from the school fifty
yards away. Someone in my group of friends says, "Let"s get out of here, see
if we can help." So we slip out of the pew. We rush, crouching, down the
aisle—a small pack of ten-year-old boys sneaking through the crush of
arriving children.
A moment later, we find that we have hurried into a holocaust.
Sirens wail from every direction, as if the whole city is keening. The next hour
is a blur. We are wandering among the bodies beginning to crowd the
sidewalk in front of the school. We are sent into a nearby house. Later, we
are running, coatless, bookless, home, running six blocks against a rising
tide of parents and brothers and sisters and neighbors, who are pouring
toward the school.
The crush of fire trucks and ambulance snarled traffic right into the
rush hour. My father, like hundreds of other parents, heard this terrible news
about the school but could not get home because of the tie-ups. Finally,
when he rushed into the house, hours late, covered with lime dust from his
day as a plasterer, he looked like a ghost, as did my younger sister and I. He
had seen so much death and near-death, from Omaha Beach to the Battle of
the Bulge, but nothing had left him feeling so desolate and helpless, he said,
as the endless hours of that afternoon.
Out on the street, in front of the school, a young priest named
Jack Egan performed last rites and comforted the barely living and consoled
the parents who were already beyond consolation, and would remain that
way, some of them, haunted for the rest of their lives.
When ninety-two children die in one neighborhood, along with
three religious women who taught them, the entire community mourns. In this
case, the "community" extended beyond the streets and avenues of the west
side, beyond Springfield and Avers and Harding and Thomas, beyond
Augusta and Iowa and Erie, beyond the modest row houses and crowded
bungalows and gray two-flats, beyond the decade and the century in which it
occurred. In this case, the community included the rest of the city, Catholic
schools everywhere, and people of all cities and states. The children of the
city were dead—the kind of kids who lived in every American city at the time.
Their photos filled the entire front page of one of the city"s newspapers a few
days later. The event had the impact of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire—another
instance of tragic loss among working-class women in a New York City
knitting mill. Fire safety rose to the top of the national agenda. Dioceses and
schools districts campaigned for sprinkler systems and other fire safety
solutions.
But there was a terrible twist to this tragedy. The ola fire wasn"t
caused by an abusive employer showing disregard for his workers. In the city
of Chicago, in 1958, Roman Catholic schoolchildren, in their local parish
school, in a Roman Catholic city, led by a mayor who attended Mass each
and every morning, died unnecessarily. The institution that sometimes gave
life, through adoption services; saved life, through their health care and
hospitals; supported and enriched life, through their schools and seminaries—
this same institution exposed its most faithful followers to firetrap conditions
and the possibility of injury and death.
When the west side of Chicago—and scores of neighborhoods
like it in many American cities—began to burn again, in the mid-sixties, just
ten years after the ola fire, when parish after parish experienced a near-total
turnover in a matter of months, when hundreds of thousands of hardworking
ethnic Catholics were driven from their homes and hundreds of thousands of
hardworking blacks and Hispanics were steered in, I saw the same kind of
deadly disregard—only this time a little less dramatic, less stunning to the
senses. This time, it was politicians benefiting from the profiteering of real
estate hustlers. This time it was arsonists work...
Why Organize?
I am an organizer. It"s a strange word—"organizer"—a word from the past, a
black-and-white photo of a person passing out fliers to workers leaving an
auto plant.
But it"s 2002, and I am an organizer. Not a consultant to so-called
faith-based programs. Not a facilitator. Not an adviser. Not a service provider
or do-gooder. Not an ideologue. Not a political operative. Not a pundit. Not a
progressive. Not an activist.
I"m clearly not a lot of things. In my organizing, I use other old-
fashioned words
like "leader"and "follower," "power"and "action," "confrontation"
and "negotiation," "relationships" and "institutions." These words still form the
phonics of the larger language of politics.
With these basic tools, the plots and subplots of public life, no
matter how intricate, begin to make sense. Characters come to life.
Motivations emerge. Relationships reveal themselves. Themes and story
lines become clear. The reader can begin to talk back to the teller of the tale,
can begin to judge, or can pick up a pen and create a different world. In the
public arena, participation and action and change can take place.
But I won"t begin to make sense unless I follow the advice of my
former college professor and poet laureate, the late Robert Penn Warren, and
tell some stories. We took a walk one day on the Connecticut roads near his
Fairfield home. It was a brisk winter afternoon, and his dog was yanking him
along. As we walked, he provided a gentle but thorough critique of a novel I
was working on at the time. He kept coming back to a simple theme: "Just
tell the story. Forget everything else and tell your story." He was repeating
what he had already written in his wonderful book-length poem, Audubon: A
Vision, "Tell me a story. / In this century, and moment, of mania, / Tell me a
story / . . . Tell me a story of deep delight." So, many years later, I will follow
the advice of this wise teacher and tell you some stories from my life, the
beginnings of my life as an organizer.
I grew up on the west side of Chicago in the fifties and learned
that we live in a world of power—raw power—long before I knew the word. My
mother and father bought a tavern when my sister and I were quite young. As
a six-year-old, I served shots and beers to the men who sat along "my"
section of the bar. My customers were Italians, Irish, and fellow Croatians.
They walked down the hill a block away from the Chicago and Northwestern
Railroad yard at noon—for a couple of shots, a couple of beers, and
sandwiches and soup made by my mother in the kitchen. My father built a
small platform behind the bar so that I could serve my crowd.
I remember this as a glorious time in my life—a time when I was
admitted to an adult world of strength and laughter and toughness. (My
parents remember this as a period of unremitting pressure and endless
work.) The time ended on a sunny afternoon. The young man from the mob
came in to pick up his monthly payment. My father explained to him that,
because by mother had taken ill, we were short. As my father and the young
man talked, all the other men at the bar became silent, looked down at their
drinks, or stared straight ahead. The young man told my father that he knew
what he had to do. My father nodded. Then the man turned around and
walked out. Slowly, conversation picked back up. Someone ordered a shot of
vo and a Schlitz. That night, my father closed the bar—Gus"s Tavern—for
good.
When he sold the tavern to a Polish immigrant, my father
explained to him that there were three "expenses" that did not appear on the
books—the payoff to the police (otherwise, they would not come if there was
trouble), the payoff to the fire department (otherwise, they may not come, or
come promptly, if there was a fire), and the payoff to the mob. The Polish
fellow was indignant. This was America, not his home country. He would not
make these payments, he shouted. My father argued with him, but to no avail.
Some months later, after the new owner had made improvements
to the tavern, reopened it, and begun to rebuild the business, the word spread
through the neighborhood that the tavern would be firebombed that night. No
one went into the tavern that night, so the man had sense enough to shut it
early. Kids from the neighborhood, myself included, were stationed across
the street, sitting on the curb, sipping sodas, watching the darkened bar. A
car pulled up to the tavern. A door opened. A man stepped out and heaved
two Molotov cocktails through the window. The man was in no hurry and wore
no mask. The car pulled slowly away as the building erupted in flames. In
seconds, the street turned from night to noon. It seemed like a long time
before the police or fire department arrived. And, when they did, the building
was gutted, and the owner was wailing on the sidewalk outside.
No matter where you turned, you ran smack into people with
power. The power of the mob. The power of the police. The power of the Cook
County Democratic Party—which demanded three hundred dollars from every
working man in our neighborhood who sought a city job. Three hundred
dollars was a lot of money in those days. And all that it bought was a
place "on the list." No one knew for sure, but the sense was that a small
percentage of people eventually got jobs. The rest paid off, sat silently, and
had nowhere to go and no one to complain to when their payoff didn"t work.
Life on the street was no different. As a white, working-class boy,
I grew up fighting black, working-class boys. We jumped them. They jumped
us. We feared them. And we wanted them to fear us. Our lives were strictly
circumscribed—divided by el lines, railroad tracks, and major thoroughfares.
Cross any border and you had to be prepared to pay the price. Every aspect
of our upbringing taught us either to avoid or to confront one another.
Our lives were a series of serious and sudden skirmishes. One
afternoon, two friends and I were sitting on a curb. In the distance, three
blacks, about our age, walked along Ferdinand Street, toward us. They
ambled, it seemed to me then and in memory, incredibly slowly and
casually. As they approached, the toughest of our three, Mike Stepkovicz,
now dead, pulled out his knife, opened it behind his back, and waited. No one
moved until they were right in front of us. Then Stecks, short and stocky but
quick as a snake, grabbed the lead boy, put the knife to his neck, and asked
him where the fuck he thought he was going. The boy"s eyes were wide,
unblinking. No words came out of his mouth, although his lips moved. The
rest of us just froze. As quickly as he struck, Stecks let the kid go and told
him to head back the same way he came. We watched them walk away,
faster now, back toward Pulaski Road, south toward Lake Street, out of our
turf, out of our sight.
And there was the much more complicated power of large
institutions—particularly the Roman Catholic Church. Our parish, Our Lady of
the Angels, anchored our lives. It"s where we prayed, socialized, played
bingo, went to school. This same parish—and scores like it—often turned a
blind eye to the needs of the working-class whites who packed its schools
and sanctuaries.
I watched as my mother tried to convince our local pastor to do
something about the real estate hustlers who were panicking white families
to leave the neighborhood by warning of the impending flood of black buyers.
These hustlers spoke every language we spoke—Croatian, Italian, German,
and Czechoslovakian. They called every day, many times a day, and then
into the evening, and then all through the night. They roused bone-tired
factory workers from their beds to alert them to how much their home had
lost in value that week, to make them one last offer. Exhaustion and fear
grew. Neighbors moved suddenly, without a word of warning. Then panic
spread. The real estate agents bought low from our families and sold high to
black families eager for a better and safer life for their children. They ravaged
entire sections of a once great city—several times over. They drove families
like mine from neighborhood to neighborhood, two, three, and four times,
further west and northwest and southwest toward the suburbs, losing more
equity, hope, and faith each time. Then they bankrupted black and Hispanic
buyers and steered them into new ghettoes.
My mother went to the pastor and described all this. He nodded
and said he would get back to her. He never did. We found out later that he
essentially redrew the lines of the parish to exclude our four square blocks,
which turned from nearly entirely white to nearly entirely black in one
traumatic and violent summer in the late sixties. We didn"t move for three
more years because my Croatian grandmother, who owned our house, and
who would have survived the bombing of Vukovar, refused to leave.
My mother"s actions introduced me to a different kind of power—
an attempt by someone to defend herself and her family, to enlist other
families in the effort, to research an issue and understand it well, to take that
research and analysis to a place where she thought her work would be
welcome. She did all this with a positive spirit. She related as openly to our
new black neighbors as to our fleeing white friends. Deeply disappointed by
the inaction of the pastor, she didn"t use that disappointment as a reason to
retreat from all public matters or to reject her local parish or her larger church.
It would have been understandable if she had rejected them. She
had already survived one tragedy. On the first day of December in 1958, the
parish school, packed with sixteen hundred kids, caught fire. Ninety-five
people died that day—ninety-two children and three nuns.
I recall the sights and sounds of that first of December nearly
every day of my life. A siren, a news story, a charred building in Brooklyn,
schoolchildren waiting on line or racing around an asphalt playground,
inanities from the mouth of a public official trying to avoid responsibility—it
doesn"t take much to jog my memory.
Once again, I am one of fifty or so fourth graders sitting in a
crowded classroom copying the perfect script of Sr. Mary
Edgar . . . "Geography. Read page fifty-eight. . . ." She is tall and thin and
strictly upright, just like the tall and elegant letters on the board. Then, the
fire alarm rings, late in the afternoon, just before dismissal, which makes us
all groan and grumble quietly. We will have to walk outside without our coats
and wait until the entire school empties and then go back in and dress for the
end of the day. In other words, we will leave later than usual.
But today there will be no going back for coats and books and
backpacks. As we file into the hallway, we look up the wide stairwell leading
to the second floor. Midway down, smoke, thick as muscle, blocks our view.
The groaning and grumbling stop. We hurry out to the sidewalk in front of the
school and follow our leader along Iowa Street toward the church. As we
walk, we glance back, see smoke pouring from windows.
In the church, we are commanded to kneel and pray—600, 800,
1,000, 1,200, and more frightened kids, more packed in every minute. We
can hear windows breaking, muffled screams, and thuds from the school fifty
yards away. Someone in my group of friends says, "Let"s get out of here, see
if we can help." So we slip out of the pew. We rush, crouching, down the
aisle—a small pack of ten-year-old boys sneaking through the crush of
arriving children.
A moment later, we find that we have hurried into a holocaust.
Sirens wail from every direction, as if the whole city is keening. The next hour
is a blur. We are wandering among the bodies beginning to crowd the
sidewalk in front of the school. We are sent into a nearby house. Later, we
are running, coatless, bookless, home, running six blocks against a rising
tide of parents and brothers and sisters and neighbors, who are pouring
toward the school.
The crush of fire trucks and ambulance snarled traffic right into the
rush hour. My father, like hundreds of other parents, heard this terrible news
about the school but could not get home because of the tie-ups. Finally,
when he rushed into the house, hours late, covered with lime dust from his
day as a plasterer, he looked like a ghost, as did my younger sister and I. He
had seen so much death and near-death, from Omaha Beach to the Battle of
the Bulge, but nothing had left him feeling so desolate and helpless, he said,
as the endless hours of that afternoon.
Out on the street, in front of the school, a young priest named
Jack Egan performed last rites and comforted the barely living and consoled
the parents who were already beyond consolation, and would remain that
way, some of them, haunted for the rest of their lives.
When ninety-two children die in one neighborhood, along with
three religious women who taught them, the entire community mourns. In this
case, the "community" extended beyond the streets and avenues of the west
side, beyond Springfield and Avers and Harding and Thomas, beyond
Augusta and Iowa and Erie, beyond the modest row houses and crowded
bungalows and gray two-flats, beyond the decade and the century in which it
occurred. In this case, the community included the rest of the city, Catholic
schools everywhere, and people of all cities and states. The children of the
city were dead—the kind of kids who lived in every American city at the time.
Their photos filled the entire front page of one of the city"s newspapers a few
days later. The event had the impact of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire—another
instance of tragic loss among working-class women in a New York City
knitting mill. Fire safety rose to the top of the national agenda. Dioceses and
schools districts campaigned for sprinkler systems and other fire safety
solutions.
But there was a terrible twist to this tragedy. The ola fire wasn"t
caused by an abusive employer showing disregard for his workers. In the city
of Chicago, in 1958, Roman Catholic schoolchildren, in their local parish
school, in a Roman Catholic city, led by a mayor who attended Mass each
and every morning, died unnecessarily. The institution that sometimes gave
life, through adoption services; saved life, through their health care and
hospitals; supported and enriched life, through their schools and seminaries—
this same institution exposed its most faithful followers to firetrap conditions
and the possibility of injury and death.
When the west side of Chicago—and scores of neighborhoods
like it in many American cities—began to burn again, in the mid-sixties, just
ten years after the ola fire, when parish after parish experienced a near-total
turnover in a matter of months, when hundreds of thousands of hardworking
ethnic Catholics were driven from their homes and hundreds of thousands of
hardworking blacks and Hispanics were steered in, I saw the same kind of
deadly disregard—only this time a little less dramatic, less stunning to the
senses. This time, it was politicians benefiting from the profiteering of real
estate hustlers. This time it was arsonists work...
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- PublisherBeacon Pr
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0807043370
- ISBN 13 9780807043370
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages240
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