HOUSING
Growing Up in the Robert Taylor Homes A former public housing resident shares her experiences in the Projects and watching them fall.
BY JACQUELINE SERRATO
F
or four decades, a row of towers on the South Side competed with Chicago’s famous skyline. The Robert Taylor Homes, encompassing twenty-eight structures, each sixteen stories high, stretched for two miles along South State Street. It was the largest housing project in the city and, at one point, in the country. By 2005, all the Robert Taylor Homes had been vacated, and in 2007, the last building was demolished—the residents dispersed across the city, the south suburbs, and beyond. South Side Weekly sat down with a former Robert Taylor Homes resident, Christine Gayles, who experienced this uprooting as a young girl, along with her family. Now an adult, a Chicago Public Schools teacher, and a new mom, she continues to reflect on what was lost and gained from that pivotal event. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Check southsideweekly.com to listen to the full interview. When I first met you in school in 2006, you would talk about the Robert Taylor Homes all the time. Why was it important to talk about where you were from? Because, for me, it's my home and it's who I am. It's how I've come to be. The things and lessons that I've learned and witnessed and saw in the Robert Taylor Homes have had a lasting impact on my life, so it's like my legacy. To feel that if I could exist in a place like that and—I don't want to say “make it out”— but 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
go beyond that place, and still have this love and appreciation for it, that's what it means to me. [I lived there] from the age of four to the age of fifteen. So I remember the day that I moved into Robert Taylor, and I also remember the last day at Robert Taylor. My mother, who is recently deceased, was the last person out of our building. She just loved the Projects. She loved everything about it, she loved the people, she loved what it represented. Because it was truly a story of survival, so she took that to heart. She didn't want to part from that building because it was more than a building. Like I said, it was home. It was Halloween, I was fifteen years old—that was the last day the demolition crew had come to start stripping the building. My building was the last one of our cluster of three buildings [to come down]. So it was a really special moment in our lives, but my family lived there before me. My grandparents lived in an apartment in 2002 [until 1983], and my mom had lived there before I was born. Before that, they lived in the Stateway Gardens, and before that, they lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes. Anybody who knows anything about Chicago knows that all of those are CHA buildings. So CHA meant a lot for us, because it gave us homes. Then later on, my grandparents were able to save enough money to be able to afford a home in Englewood, and that's how I have the story of being able to grow up between the two places. We called it “the Jets” [or] we called it “the Buildings.” We wouldn't necessarily say Robert Taylor Homes, we would just say, “Oh, we goin’ down to the Projects.” If
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my family came from Minnesota to visit us, that's where they wanted to go. It was a party, it was love. Even at my mom's funeral, we had hundreds of people who were from the Robert Taylor Homes who had come to pay their respects. I don't really share this with a lot of people, but my mom struggled with addiction because she had depression, and she went through a lot of things in her life that led her down that path. But despite all of that, she found a way to shine her light on other people—her nickname was Sunshine. She was like a mother to the gangbangers, you know. We had so many different people who came through our house, living there with us… my mom was like a guardian angel to these people. Everybody was a family, even if there was no blood linking us. It was just like we had this kindred experience, even when it came down to the teachers that served us. I had teachers who grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes, and they came back and they taught us. I'm still in contact with them today…. I had these teachers showing me that “we came from this space, we are successful, we came back, and you guys can be successful, too.” So they instilled in us this love of Black history, they instilled in us this love, or idea, of respect and self respect. Do you know if [old classmates] still come together? Oh, yeah… whole communities come together every year, every summer before we go back to school, before Labor Day. Throughout the months of July and August people have reunions, and these
reunions started about twenty years ago because 3919 S. Federal was the first buildings to come down in like 1998. It's traumatizing. I never lived in 3919, but a lot of my family would live there–so I had nieces and nephews that I would go visit, family and friends. I was about ten years old; you [could] see the wrecking ball just wrecking the building down, and you see all the different paint on the wall, and you see people's lives just crumbling down to the ground. We watched that several times because, like I said, my building was one of the last, maybe the second to last building to come down. A lot of the families ended up moving to another building. I have friends who originally lived in 4022 S. Federal, but their building gets knocked down so they move over to 4037 S. Federal, the building that I live in. And then we had people whose building got knocked down on 43rd Street, they [also] ended up in our building. So in the midst of that, we can still see all the different buildings being torn down, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes dragging it out, and I remember crying. The last day that my [building came down] I just touched the brick, I took pictures on a disposable camera, but I never got them developed and I've lost it since then. But like, that was like all I had left, you know, just that memory, that feeling of touching it. My whole life, everything that I knew up until that point had been in those buildings. On gangs and gun violence in the Robert Taylor Homes: I can vividly remember my mom running to my school basically with her underwear on because she just dropped everything she was doing. She heard gunshots and she knew that I had just been in the playground about to go inside of the school building. I can remember big-time gang leaders, drug dealers, whatever you want to call them, tell us “it's not safe out here for you guys. Go upstairs—women and children go in the house.” And that's not some little cliche statement that I'm making. That actually happened. I can remember playing in the