Luster Returning to Chicago’s Bronzeville

CHICAGO —  At age 19, after running away from Georgia and hoboing around the country, Ernest James had seen enough of the wide world to consider where he wanted to settle.

Bride in tow, he boarded the Louisville & Nashville Railroad--buying tickets this time--and headed resolutely to Bronzeville.

In 1943, he was sure, there was no better place in America for a black man to build a life. “Everybody knew about Bronzeville, in Chicago,” he remembers.

New York City’s Harlem Renaissance may have gained more lasting fame, but in the words of artist Margaret Burroughs, “Chicago had a renaissance too” on its African American South Side. Born of the great migrations of blacks from South to North, from farm to factory, Bronzeville nurtured a grittier, more politically radical, more aggressively working-class school of commerce, literature, art and music: Chicago’s electric blues to Manhattan’s urbane big-band jazz.

Fenced in by racism, great tycoons, artists and entertainers mingled with neighbors like James, who was quickly hired as night washroom attendant at the Drake Hotel. When he arrived, Bronzeville resident Muddy Waters was regularly wailing at Smitty’s Corner. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who would win a Pulitzer Prize, jammed 100 guests into her two-room apartment to honor Langston Hughes. Richard Wright had just shaped the classic “Native Son,” influenced by labor organizers he met there.

Quickly Forgotten

Bronzeville’s heyday, from the 1920s through the 1940s, was chronicled in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, the American Monthly and Holiday magazine. Modern gospel music, Ebony magazine and Black History Month all got their start there. Yet the neighborhood died of a more open citywide housing market, a western wall of public housing projects and an overdose of drugs.

Its history was quickly and quite thoroughly forgotten. “I don’t know why,” said Peter Cunningham, executive assistant to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. “Maybe because it hasn’t had a champion.”

Champions are now rising. As scholars turn their attention to historic centers of black culture outside New York, a combination of community groups, entrepreneurs and returning black professionals are hoping to revive proud memories of Bronzeville by rebuilding it today.

They are attempting to preserve some of the remaining important buildings--to rekindle pride and perhaps lure tourists there. They also are pushing further, trying to re-create a populace that mixes affluent and poor, providing the role models that show urban youth an alternative to the underclass.

“It should be a living community, not just a museum,” said Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.), who owns a house there.

Much has been lost. The population in Bronzeville--an area 7 miles long and 1 1/2 miles wide-- numbers fewer than 100,000, about one-third of the total in 1940. Most of the residents earn very little money or are unemployed.

From the number of vacant lots, it almost seems as though the buildings have fled as well. The eight-story National Pythian Temple was Bronzeville’s skyscraper, promoted during the 1920s as “the largest structure in the world owned, constructed and financed by Negroes.” It was abandoned during the 1970s, demolished in the 1980s.

The Jordan Building, an office block constructed by ragtime composer Joseph Jordan, collapsed on the day in 1985 that it was named to the National Register of Historic Places. Scavengers had stolen so many bricks the building fell down.

Fearful that other storied properties will meet similar fates, backers of New Bronzeville are bringing matters to a head. Rush, among others, is pushing for the city to designate a Black Metropolis Historic District that would grant protection against demolition in the heart of the old African American downtown.

“The timing is perfect now,” said Peter McCauley, a physician who commissioned a masonry three-story, three-bedroom house in Bronzeville three years ago.

He is part of a small but unmistakable wave of building that has brought Bronzeville its first new housing construction in nearly 50 years. The black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha and an African American studies professor from Northwestern University are among those breaking ground on small developments aimed at the bourgeois market.

Singer Lou Rawls has donated $100,000 for a nearby music theater that will bear his name. A nonprofit organization is scheduled to start construction at the end of this year.

These projects follow an influx of so-called buppies--black upwardly mobile professionals--who in the past five years have been buying decaying graystones and Victorians at an increasing pace and restoring them to their former splendor.

Since 1982, $42 million has been invested in one half-square-mile section alone. And since 1992, 68 building permits have been issued in that slice of the district.

One of the earliest pioneers was Tom Gray. He was a computer systems designer in his 30s in 1978, when he moved from a lakefront high-rise into a crumbling South Side mansion because he wanted to help improve the area around his church.

“No one talked about Bronzeville at that time,” Gray said. “No one used the name and nothing was happening.”

Showplace Home

The house was designed by famed architect Louis Sullivan and built in 1887 and 1888. When Gray bought it, the interior brass doorknobs had been stripped. The home had been carved into 13 apartments, only one of which was occupied. But an iron frieze, a Sullivan trademark, adorned the front; the birch and oak moldings could be reclaimed. Within three years, Gray’s family was living in a showplace.

At the same time, four blocks away, Ernest James embarked on a similar mission. He had worked in electronics and as a handyman, and had never left Bronzeville--although many of his friends had moved and as many more had died.

He had saved enough to buy the once-grand home of the deceased physician John McDowell, whose daughter, Minnie, was a show dancer during the 1920s. Minnie married Freddie Guy, who played guitar and banjo in Duke Ellington’s orchestra.

James remembered them well, having talked with them often.

He and his wife (before they separated) and their four children had a three-room flat, sharing a kitchen and bath with other families in the building.

Life was not easy in Bronzeville’s “kitchenettes”--”Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now/We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it,” one Brooks poem ends. But the apartments of the lower classes were interspersed with the more sumptuous residences, not corralled away.

Seeing the successful folks--black folks--daily gave James a silent satisfaction. “Always liked it,” he said. “Real nice people.”

He could aspire to join them--and even, finally, own McDowell’s house. In the basement of his purchase, James found photos of Ellington’s group posing in the alley behind Bronzeville’s Regal Theater. He found a Christmas card from “Duke and Mil” and a portrait of Ellington inscribed, “To old Banjo Sheik Fred.” The nickname’s origin was evidenced by yet another artifact, a colored-pencil drawing of Guy sporting a narrow mustache and slick Valentino hair.

Eighteen years after buying the house, his hair and beard grown white, no longer smoking but clenching an unlit cigar between his teeth, James soldiers on. He continues replastering walls and stripping antique furniture so he can bring the place back to life.

He has invested too much memory to get discouraged. In the early 1960s, he lived down the street. He and his friends watched actor Sidney Poitier come and go from the McDowell house as a crew filmed “A Raisin in the Sun.” The movie was based on Lorraine Hansberry’s play about the struggles of a Bronzeville family.

Now James stands outside, keeping a wary eye out for crack dealers, and points to a nearby plot of grass and weeds.

Once that land was graced by another stately house, the abode of a maker of mouthpieces for trumpets and trombones. James frequently spied a well-known visitor, trumpeter Louis Armstrong.

Would-be saviors are working to keep other, more significant structures standing. The most endangered is the 8th Regiment Armory, which its owner has threatened to tear down. The all-black regiment was forced to drill in a stable until citizens of Bronzeville collected coins in milk cans so the state would build the blocklong structure.

YMCA Restoration

A group of churches is restoring the Wabash Avenue YMCA, which usually was the first stop for arrivals from the South. They came straight from the train station for a cheap room and enrollment in a class to prepare them for urban jobs such as auto repair.

Although construction is underway, the churches are fighting a city demolition order. If they are successful, the Y will become a single-room occupancy hotel--new housing for the poor.

Where Harlem boasted of Madame C.J. Walker, who made a fortune from her hair preparations business, Bronzeville had Anthony Overton. He financed the Overton Hygienic Building to house his cosmetics manufacturing company (High-Brown Face Powder was one of its products). The Mid-South Planning Council, a community group, is applying for federal funds to renovate the Overton for office space.

In the campaign for Bronzeville, the city government is perceived as both friend and foe. In April, a new branch of the Chicago Public Library opened in the refurbished Art Deco offices of the Chicago Bee, a black newspaper that first used the term “Bronzeville.” The city spent $3.5 million to repaint the exterior and construct a modern interior. But, complained Harold Lucas, executive director of the Black Metropolis Convention and Tourism Council, “we had to work for four years to get the city to do this. We had to struggle to get them to spend money.”

Another $1.5 million will be spent on a Walk of Fame from the city’s exposition hall at McCormick Place south to Bronzeville, with a map of the community at its entrance.

Daley has appointed two Bronzeville panels, one to study appropriate development for the area and another to explore private financing for various projects. Lucas noted that the city spent $300,000 three years ago for an ambitious preservation-centered plan. “Big development companies are planning to take the South Side back,” Burroughs said. “Fifty years or 100 years, it will all be condos. That’s my theory.”

Countered Cunningham: “The city can’t do it all. We have to choose the projects that have the most impact. And we have to find out if that tourism market is really there.”

Certainly, academic appreciation is growing for black cultural history outside of the legend that was Harlem. “A lot of people are starting to use the term ‘new Negro renaissance.’ It doesn’t have to begin and end in Harlem,” said UCLA English professor Richard Yarborough. The legacy of black communities that flowered in Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Memphis, Tenn., New Orleans and Detroit all must be given their due, he said.

Bronzeville, however, is Harlem’s closest competitor. “The Harlem Renaissance ended with the stock market crash [in 1929], but Chicago was coming of age intellectually in the ‘30s,” Yarborough said. “It was less entrenched in terms of class, a site of literary experimentation, the writers working directly with the vernacular.”

Seeking Mementos

Even without advertising, some visitors already are seeking out mementos of Bronzeville’s past.

David Meyers, the third-generation owner of a Bronzeville hardware store, can testify to that. During the 1920s, the building was the Sunset Cafe, a jazz club where Armstrong played trumpet and Earl “Fatha” Hines was the pianist. Still visible inside are remnants of the old stage murals and a Prohibition-era sign advertising bourbon and vodka for a quarter a shot.

About a month ago, eight German tourists wandered into the store. One man hastened to a concrete pillar and threw his arms around it.

“What’s he doing?” Meyers asked.

“He’s feeling the jazz,” the tour guide replied.

Then the group found the plungers in Aisle Four, and everybody bought one. Meyers thought the purchase strange until the guide explained that musicians used plungers as mutes during the Jazz Age.

Upon the travelers’ return to their homeland, the guide predicted, they would never mention plungers or Meyers Ace Hardware. They would simply show off the mutes they acquired at the Sunset Cafe.