surrounding City Hall transform and a new crop of skyscrapers went up, filling out the city's skyline.

For people thinking of fleeing to the suburbs, Daley offered a thrilling alternative: a three-acre complex known as Marina City.

- [Announcer] On the very site where Chicago began, a city within a city has been built.

- [Narrator] Tubular towers rising over the river with 900 apartments and its own marina.

- [Lee] This self-contained city again had an answer to people leaving the city for suburbia, and Marina City is an answer.

- [Narrator] For businesses eyeing the suburbs, the answer was the newly opened McCormick Place, the nation's biggest convention hall.

But in most respects, Daley's vision focused on the Loop business district.

- The mayor was known as a builder.

The skyscrapers, the parks, the trees, everything that the mayor was doing was about downtown.

And that's white downtown.

That's wealthy downtown.

- This sort of sounds like trickle-down economics in some ways, right?

You put all the resources here and then it's gonna trickle down to the neighborhoods.

Well, how much trickles down?

Are they just gonna collect the scraps that fall off the table?

- [Narrator] But Daley couldn't just ignore the outlying neighborhoods.

That spring, within a stone's throw of the Loop, he focused on the Frances Cabrini Homes.

The cluster of public housing units was home to a melting pot of cultures, but it was now overflowing.

- (Rick) You could look at these outlying areas that were very, very blighted within a mile of Lake Shore Drive.

People did not have indoor plumbing.

So, you're gonna build a tall tower with bathrooms and all brand new paint and brand new things for these people who live here?

"God bless you, Mayor Daley," is what most people probably thought.

- [Narrator] Cabrini would eventually include 15 high-rise public housing apartment buildings.

But as the city's Black population doubled in number, more would soon migrate to Cabrini and more whites would flee.

- It was very racist when I came up.

You were taught, "You let one move in, the whole neighborhood goes."

So, that was under Old Man Daley.

- [Narrator] As the city looked to public housing as the answer, the racial balancing act would become more complicated for the mayor.

- One of the really important themes, I think, that Daley had to deal with was this racial tension.

A huge and growing Black population running outta space and where are they gonna go?

And the neighboring white population said, "Well, you're not coming here."

- [Mary] Chicago's Black population would have been moving into an ever-more-restricted geographic area.

- [Narrator] The densest overcrowding within the Black Belt on the city's South Side was a six-mile stretch of land cynically dubbed the Federal Street Slums.

- Outsiders are looking at it as a ghetto, as a slum.

They look at it as a place with lots of trash or overcrowded.

Of course, that overcrowded-ness is completely manufactured by the inability of people to move out because of mob violence or realtors' pacts not to sell to Black people.

- (Richard J. Daley) We must provide the opportunity for every citizen to have decent housing.

We must have slum clearance.

We must prevent the spread of blight into the other neighborhoods.

(debris crashing) - [Narrator] The wrecking balls struck along Federal Street in 1959 to make way for Robert Taylor Homes.

- A lot of older housing stock demolished to build shiny new high-rises.

The supposed manifestation of modernity, of being a modern post-World War II society.

- [Narrator] The plan called for 28 16-story towers.

Replacing a two-mile stretch of slum housing, city leaders promised sleek geometry.

Housing advocates weren't swayed, saying the buildings were concentrated in already racially segregated neighborhoods.

- Give them these high-rise buildings and contain them there.

And the message got heard all the way on the South Side.

We don't want you downtown.

The downtown is for the wealthy.

The downtown is for the privileged.