2 Brs, Inexp, W/Vu of Roaches

Chicago's mayor takes an apartment in a crime-plagued slum

On a tour of Cabrini-Green, a violence-torn public housing project on Chicago's Near North Side, Mayor Jane Byrne noticed a 16-year-old girl sitting in a police cruiser. The mayor asked what the youngster was doing there. She had just been raped, was the answer. The mayor returned home and a few hours later announced that she and her husband Jay McMullen would move into a two-bedroom apartment at Cabrini-Green. Said Byrne: "I asked myself what the difference was between this and other neighborhoods. In most, they get the troublemakers out. That is what we are going to do here."

The announcement drew some jeers from skeptical opponents, especially when it was later disclosed that Byrne and her husband would not give up their apartment on the 43rd floor of a Gold Coast highrise and would spend only an occasional night at their Cabrini-Green digs. Yet the move also won wide praise. "This takes a lot of guts," said Chicago Housing Authority Board Member Renault Robinson, who is black. "If this works, the mayor's political stock in the black community will rise 100%." Claims Byrne: "I'm not doing this for votes. Whoever says that should take the next apartment." Many residents of the Cabrini-Green project seem pleased. Says Annie Olden, a 59-year-old grandmother: "She is giving everyone here somebody to look up to. And that's real good." Byrne promises to live in the complex with her 13,545 co-tenants "for as long as it takes to clean it up."

She ought to prepare for a long stay. Since early this year, 37 residents have been wounded by gunfire, and ten others killed. Fifty guns were recently confiscated, but Jesse White, the area's state representative, says 2,000 more are stashed away.

Cabrini-Green consists of 23 high-rise buildings and 55 row houses, all packed onto a 70-acre wedge of Chicago just south of the trendy Old Town neighborhood. Even when the project opened 39 years ago, the neighborhood was a high-crime pocket. Today the median income is $4,575 a year, and almost eight out of ten famines are headed by one parent. The TV comedy Good Times--about a loving, industrious black mother and children--is centered on a family at Cabrini-Green, but the project may be more like the gang-war surrealism of The Warriors. The rat-infested buildings are ravaged: graffiti-scarred stairwells, bashed-in doors, broken elevators, roaches everywhere. And the streets and hallways are ruled by marauding youth gangs that police say number 100 in all. Squads of Cobra Stones live at Cabrini-Green, and they are in an almost constant state of war with the resident members of the Black Gangster Disciples. Most of the shootings stem from gang struggles over control of drug sales, prostitution and extortion.

The gangs also rob, assault and occasionally kill nonmembers, almost at will. Clifford Smiley, 14, who was once attacked and beaten by four gang members for no apparent reason, is resigned to life in a battle zone. Like most residents, he does not venture outside after dark, even to visit someone in a neighboring building. Says he: "If you can't talk to your friend on the telephone, you can't talk to him at all." Last summer during a card game in an open-air hallway, Terri Burch, 17, was shot in the leg by a sniper. "I'd like to move," says Burch, who is unmarried with one child and another on the way. "But I'm on welfare like everyone else, and they give me $207 a month. Where can you live on that?"

Exactly what does Byrne expect to accomplish? She is disarmingly frank about her immediate effect. Says Byrne: "Wherever a mayor goes there seem to be city services galore." In the apartment next door will be a contingent of police bodyguards. The city has assigned a special 28-member police platoon to the complex, and a nearby police court will be reopened soon. Last week seven area liquor stores were ordered closed, and the first of 800 eviction notices sent out to Cabrini-Green residents designated as "troublemakers." Airport-style metal detectors, intended to stop the importation of guns, may be installed soon.

Already, say residents, some gang members have gone looking for quieter havens. But one 16-year-old at Cabrini-Green is not hopeful. Says the girl: "They're going to stop shooting until the mayor moves out. Then they're going to start shooting again."

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