Wentworth Gardens struggles to bridge the gap between neighborhoods, gangs
Beatrice Harris at Wentworth Gardens
Beatrice Harris calls everybody baby.
“How ya doin’, baby?” “Hey, baby.” “Don’t worry about it, baby.”
She’s earned the right. As one of the matriarchs of Chicago’s Wentworth Gardens, she says she’s had a tough job in the last few years, trying to make one community out of a divided complex.
For years, Wentworth, a small housing development directly south of the White Sox stadium, served as a “relocation resource” in the Plan for Transformation. As Chicago tore down the massive high rises that were Wentworth’s neighbors, like Stateway Gardens and the Robert Taylor Homes, Wentworth took in many of those displaced by the demolition.
The low-rise development is a patchwork quilt of families from different parts of the city: Altgeld Gardens, Ida B. Wells, Stateway, LeClaire Courts, Harold Ickes, Deaborn Homes and the list goes on. Like families are living together, Harris says. One whole corner of Wentworth is dedicated to former Ida B. Wells residents, a trend Harris says serves to further divide people.
“Nobody wants to trust nobody,” she says.
Although Wentworth got a complete physical rehab a few years back, Harris says the problems with crime and violence have gotten worse over the last few years.
Routinely, she says, she’ll see a group of teenage boys standing on one corner, looking to start a fight with some other kids who come from another complex. Although petite and in her 60s, Harris is not too timid to step in.
“I say to ‘em, ‘If they live here, if they pay rent, they is Wentworth people, baby, and that’s that.’”
Many families, she says, resent being put here at Wentworth. It’s frustrating, Harris says, to have to leave the neighborhood and community you came from. But it’s not stopping her from trying to create a more cohesive community in Wentworth.
The empty schoolyard at Abott elementary, right across the street from Wentworth Gardens
“We are trying to bridge ourselves together. We are here. Maybe you don’t want to be here,” says Harris. “But we are. And we gotta learn to live together.”
To add to their troubles, last year, Chicago Public Schools closed Abbott Elementary, Wentworth’s neighborhood school. Now, kids are bussed to five different schools.
A school, Harris says, is supposed to bring a community – both kids and parents – together. But without Abbott, there’s no common community meeting ground.
“Kids have no problem. They just run and play together,” says Harris. “But the parents? The parents have no reason to come together.”
She’s tried hosting community celebrations at the Park District, but the progress has been slow. Thirty children showed up to a recent Halloween party, but only two parents. Everyone else just sent their kids along.
I asked Harris what she thought of the violence at Fenger, and the mayor’s resistance to redividing students by gang or neighborhood affiliation, to avoid further violence.
Although Harris is committed to making one community out of Wentworth, some divisions, she says, are just too difficult to bridge. Especially when lives are at stake.
“These are people’s lives we’re talking about,” she says. “They shoot. They kill. They beat kids to death. We can’t fool around with that.”
Wentworth hasn’t seen the kind of violence that Fenger has witnessed, and Harris aims to keep it that way. She’s planning a community Thanksgiving dinner, a Christmas party for parents and kids, and is holding out hope that Abbott school will reopen next year.
“We got to bring people together,” she says. “We don’t have another choice.”
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A vivid picture of Beatrice Harris and Wentworth, Megan. Looking forward to seeing Chicago through your eyes.
Agreed. Thanks so much for all the on-the-ground reporting and perspective. Together with our other contributors in Chicago I look forward to watching one of America’s great cities come alive on T/S.
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Thanks for writing about Wentworth Gardens, Megan. It’s sad to read, because for many years Wentworth was known as one of the safer projects, certainly in comparison to the Stateway Gardens and Robert Taylor Homes when they stood across the Dan Ryan. I live not far from there and pass by occasionally, and I haven’t seen these troubles, but I imagine that’s a function of timing.
I’m really looking forward to your posts. There’s so much more Chicago than usually gets covered in the official press.
Thanks, Jeff. Ms. Harris mentioned to me that Wentworth has always been one of the safer public housing complexes in the city. She says they’ve had more trouble lately than she can remember in the past. I think it’s nowhere near the levels that Stateway and Robert Taylor were at. She told me a story about how her kids used to walk to school and have to go between Stateway and Robert Taylor, and how they eventually had to protest to get buses to bus them to school because that walk was so dangerous. It really seems like Wentworth is a nice place to live. I hope the leadership there can help bridge the gap between different groups of people. They sure are trying.
In response to another comment. See in context »good article.