(light music) - [Narrator] Coming up- - [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest political leader in the country, the mayor of Chicago, the honorable Richard J. Daley!

(crowd cheering) - [Narrator] Chicago elected a bold new mayor.

- [Roger] Richard J. Daley was the boss.

He was The Man on Five.

He was Hizzoner.

- [Narrator] He brought with him a vision to rebuild the city.

- I shall have only one goal: to make this city a better and more beautiful place in which to live.

- [Narrator] He'd find himself in a contest with suburbia for the fleeing white middle class.

- It was going out for greener pastures.

- When African Americans tried to follow, they weren't welcome.

- Richard J. Daley has to with almost every stroke reinforce this idea that this is a new city.

- He would say, "We're gonna build this here "and we'll tear down these buildings."

(wrecking ball thudding) - [Narrator] For better and worse, he would dictate the shape of Chicago.

- [Kathy] It was just clean the slate and start over, as if these weren't people.

- [Narrator] "Richard J. Daley: The Boss and the Bulldozer," next on "Chicago Stories."

(light music) (gentle music) The brilliant Chicago skyline.

It's like a shout-out to the world that this is a city of guts and aspiration.

- You watch a movie and if the establishing shot is anywhere downtown, everyone in America knows exactly what that is.

- [Narrator] Yet the buildings downtown signify something more.

They're also the midpoint of a city geographically divided.

- Chicago has a center, a Loop as we call it, and everything radiates from that.

And as a result, the downtown splits the city, North Side, South Side, West Side.

- People boast about who's the best side, but there's a lot of segregation.

Even nationally, the South Side is known as the Black side.

The North Side is known as the white, wealthier, more privileged side.

- [Mary] Chicago is still two cities.

- [Narrator] A symbol of that divide came crashing down in 1997 (wrecking ball thudding) with the end of Robert Taylor Homes, 28 high-rise buildings located on the South Side that housed thousands of Chicago's poorest residents.

(explosives booming) Chicago would eventually demolish more high-rise housing projects than any city in the nation, a billion-dollar attempt to undo its failed policy of urban renewal.

(explosives booming) (crowd cheering) Richard M. Daley, Chicago's mayor at the time, oversaw the demolition.

Ironically, the policies that created them in the first place were enacted by his father, Mayor Richard J. Daley.

- This project represents the future of a great city, and that is a decent home for every family in every great... - (Roger) Richard.

J Daley was "The Boss."

His critics would say something of a bully.

Others would say authoritative.

I guess it depends on sort of how you look at it.

He was extraordinarily powerful and not timid about using his power.

- [Narrator] As mayor of Chicago from 1955 through 1976, Richard J. Daley was a visionary who led the city through an unprecedented building boom.

His idea for reshaping the city relied on urban renewal to clear slums and rebuild.

- We hope to upgrade these people and give them the type of living they're entitled to in Chicago: a decent home.

And no matter who they are, by God, that's the least we can do.

(wrecking ball thudding) - [Narrator] But it was a plan that would end up destroying neighborhoods and playing a key role in preserving racial segregation.

- [Laura] There were a lot of promises made and those promises were broken.

It wasn't the leg up that it was designed to be.

(car whirring) - [Narrator] To understand Richard J. Daley and how his dream of a modern city would shape Chicago for generations, it helps to venture back to Bridgeport and the predominantly Irish neighborhood of Daley's youth.

- You can still go to Bridgeport and find remnants of the old working-class neighborhood in which Daley grew up.

- [Narrator] Back then, Bridgeport sat on the edge of the Union Stockyards, a vast 350-acre parcel of stock pens and meatpacking plants.

- [Roger] It was a gritty, dirty neighborhood.

The water that flowed through Bridgeport was foul.

- [Narrator] Daley grew up here, the studious and only child of his second-generation Irish parents.

His father, Michael, was a union sheet metal worker.

His mother, Lillian, was a homemaker and a suffragette.

Marching alongside his mother, Daley was offered his first taste of politics.

- Daley's mother was a feminist.

She worked for the right for women to vote and was a feminist throughout her life.

- [Narrator] Lillian wanted more for her son than the South Side stockyards.

At the time, Bridgeport was a melting pot of blue-collar Irish, Lithuanian, Polish, and German.

- It was a neighborhood of lots of white ethnic groups, Eastern European groups.

Not Blacks, of course.

- [Narrator] In Bridgeport, heads turned when a stranger walked into a neighborhood tavern.

Blacks sought to avoid the area entirely.

- It was a hard neighborhood, but it was also one of those neighborhoods where the important things were God, family, and work.

In Daley's case, politics too.

And Bridgeport you could consider the birthplace of mayors, for goodness' sakes.

- [Narrator] Bridgeport would eventually grace the city with five mayors.

Two of them would be Daleys.

But Bridgeport's link to politics started much earlier, with the first Irish-Catholic settlers who'd fled famine and years of political conflict with England.

They arrived in the 1840s to find themselves at the bottom of Chicago's social hierarchy.

- The Irish in the South Side are called, I don't know if we can say this, "Pig-(censored) Irish."

And so, the Irish resent this.

Coming out of Ireland, which is the first colony of the United Kingdom, they know how democracy works and they know how it doesn't work for them because they're kept out of the British system.

And they wanna make sure that they're kept in the system here.

- [Narrator] If the Irish had arrived poor, they had one commodity of value: votes.

They joined up with Democrats who campaigned for the needs of the working class and against a surge of anti-Catholic sentiment.

- Politics is the most important game in town in Chicago.

You have to be involved with the political game if you wanna have power, if you wanna succeed.

- [Narrator] During Daley's youth, Chicago was a city full of neighborhoods like Bridgeport.

They were tight-knit enclaves united by class and race and a loyalty to their own kind.

Four miles north, at the edge of the Loop, was Chicago's Near West Side.

Here, bordered on each end by the Jewish and Greek business districts, an array of immigrants fought for a slice of the American dream.

- These were Italians, they were Bohemians, many Russians.

They were moving into that area mainly because that is where, very near where the factory district was.

It was also known for being one of the most impoverished.

- [Narrator] The city's largest enclave of Italian immigrants had settled around Taylor Street.

- There would be a whole apartment building of people from one particular village in Italy.

- This settlement pattern is totally common for every immigrant group.

And for Black folks moving from the South, it would've been everybody from Sunflower County, Mississippi, for example.

- [Narrator] Daley's teen years coincided with a surge in Chicago's Black population, as thousands of Blacks fled racism in the South.

Most settled on the city's South Side within a narrow corridor that spanned State Street.

The so-called Black Belt was separated from Bridgeport by train tracks.

But unlike the ethnic enclaves of Chicago, the borders of the Black Belt were strictly enforced.

- When Black people moved into a neighborhood that was majority white, there were house bombings.

I think it's always important when we think about Black neighborhoods to talk simultaneously about choice and about the lack thereof.

- [Narrator] For the most part in 1915, Black Chicagoans were excluded from white business establishments and they sent their children to predominantly Black schools.

- It was a city of diversity, but yet everybody had their separate neighborhoods.

There were boundaries.

There were, you know, lines drawn.

- (Roger) In Daley's own neighborhood, perhaps as much as any place in Chicago, there was a real tribalism.

There's our kind and then there's the other kind.

Not only because it's a matter of race and religion, but it's an economic matter too.

If other groups come in, then we're gonna lose everything.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] As a teen in Bridgeport, Daley found his friends within a close-knit group called the Hamburg Social and Athletic Club.

The club was also a training camp for Bridgeport's Democratic base.

During campaign seasons, Hamburg boys raised funds and got out the vote.

Hamburg Club members also saw themselves as neighborhood defenders.

- Bridgeport was proud of keeping Blacks out, keeping out any other race that was against their way of thinking.

- [Narrator] As the neighboring Black community competed for jobs and housing, Blacks became the least welcome of all.

- (Roger) For a long time, that growing Black population was kept bottled up in a very small area of the city, and oftentimes white Chicagoans defended those boundaries violently.

Tension had been building and the event that really triggered it came in the summer of 1919.

- [Narrator] That's when a 17-year-old Black youth named Eugene Williams was swimming off the 27th Street beach.

He drifted south, crossing an invisible line that separated the segregated beaches.

When Williams tried to come ashore, white beachgoers pelted him with stones until he drowned.

- [Roger] There were a lot of witnesses to this.

It was a packed beach, but the police who were there didn't do anything about it.

- [Narrator] The murder escalated into a riot, as Blacks and whites clashed in the streets.

African Americans were dragged from streetcars and beaten.

The Hamburg Club joined other white ethnic gangs in beating Blacks who crossed into Bridgeport territory.

The rioting spread across Chicago and became known as the Red Summer.

And the stain would follow Daley.

- His club was intimately involved.

And ever after, Daley's opponents were looking for gold.

They wanted to find evidence that he had been involved personally in that rioting.

They've never found it.

Whether or not he directly threw a punch, he understood what the emotions were like.

He understood his neighbors.

All of that became part of who he was.

- [Narrator] In 1924, Daley became the club's president, a move that would forge his political future.

- He got noticed.

He got noticed because he was organizing, because he was business-like, and because people listened to him.

- He ultimately became the secretary to the most important politician in the 11th Ward, a man named "Big Joe" McDonough.

- [Narrator] Years before, McDonough had helped a mayoral candidate named Anton Cermak to rally the city's ethnic and Black wards into one united voting bloc.

It was the birth of the Chicago political machine Daley would one day control.

- Because Chicago is such a political town, everyone who wanted to compete for public office realized the power of the African American vote, the potential of the African American vote.

- And of course, at this time, African Americans tend to vote Republican.

It's the party of Lincoln.

But there's someone in the White House called Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

- [Narrator] Roosevelt and the Democrats' promise of a new deal convinced many Black Chicagoans to change parties.

The result was an ethnically balanced ticket that won Cermak the mayor's race.

And the machine became an unfailing tool for Chicago Democrats.

- The political machine is, in many ways, like any other political organization.

Its purpose is to win elections.

But the machine is different.

It gives out patronage jobs to precincts who deliver the Democratic party vote in their precinct.

- (Roger) The life's blood of that machine was patronage.

The jobs that made patronage work were in fact distributed like a kind of currency.

So, the political machine removes the snow and cleans the streets.

Why do you remain a loyal Democrat?

Because there's something in it for you.

It's the kind of thing that works for everybody's benefit, as long as you're not bothered by the fact that this isn't the way democracy's supposed to work.

It's fine, right?

(marching band music) - Early on in Daley's time, he was noted for his honesty and there were other politicians who sort of diminished him by saying, "Well, this guy won't even take a nickel."

Daley specifically, I think, was not in it for the money.

He was in it for the power.

- [Narrator] In 1936, Daley was elected to his first political office as a state representative.

For the next two decades, he climbed the ranks of Chicago politics.

- Daley became aware of where the bodies were buried.

He knew how deals were done under the table.

- [Rick] But also, he focused on the nuts and bolts of everything.

He climbed in a very quiet but efficient manner.

- [Narrator] The pivotal moment came in 1953.

Daley took over as chairman of Chicago's Democratic Party, the machine's top position.

It gave him influence over the city's 50 wards, an army of precinct captains, and 40,000 patronage jobs.

- Basically, if you worked for Daley, and it was Daley, whether you went through an alderman or you went through a committeeman.

You did political work for Daley, you got a job.

He took care of you.

You became a soldier.

- [Narrator] Within a year, Daley pitched himself as the Democratic Party nominee for mayor against the Democratic incumbent, Martin Kennelly.

- [Rick] Martin Kennelly was very much a product of the machine, but he was a dull politician.

- [Reporter] Have you announced your intention of running for mayor?

- Well, that would be up to the committee.

- Daley, this incredible organization guy, was the bright-haired boy of the larger Democratic machine.

They knew that he was a student of the system.

- [Announcer] Choose a mayor whose heart's in the neighborhoods.

Richard J. Daley lives with his family in Bridgeport, where he grew up.

Elect Richard J. Daley mayor.

- [Rick] And so, he was chosen to run and to be elected.

To be chosen was to be elected in those days.

- [Announcer] Vote for Chicago, vote Democratic, vote for Daley!

- [Narrator] While Daley and the machine rallied support from blue-collar voters, a South Side congressman named William Dawson became one of Daley's most crucial allies.

- Dawson's a powerful figure 'cause he can deliver the Black vote.

He controls probably five wards on the South Side and Dawson is the Black sub machine on the South Side.

(crowd cheering) - [William] And there'll be no rest, no sleep, no slumber (audience applauding) until Dick Daley makes it in.

(audience cheering) (flash bulb popping) - Richard J. Daley was elected based on Dawson leading the Black community in Chicago behind him in the new coalition between Blacks and the Irish.

- [Narrator] Richard J. Daley became the 48th mayor of Chicago on April 5th, 1955.

- [Reporter] Make your victory statement for us.

- I thank the people of Chicago for their vote of confidence in my public record.

No words can express my heartfelt appreciation.

I shall embrace charity, love mercy, and walk humbly with my God.

(crowd cheering) - Daley came to that office without the endorsement of the "Sun-Times" or the "Tribune," which were big deals in those days.

- [Narrator] Both papers had cried for the reform of machine politics.

What they got instead was 52-year-old Richard J. Daley, perhaps better known to party insiders than to voters.

- I think most people thought, Well, the precinct captain told me to vote for this guy Daley and I voted for this guy Daley.

Let's see.

Let's see.

- [Richard] I have lived in one neighborhood of Chicago all my life.

- [Roger] One of his great assets in Chicago politics is that he maintained those ties to family and neighbors.

He continued to live in a house a few doors down from where his parents lived.

- Kinda rainy, huh?

How are you?

- [Narrator] He was, for many folks, a genuine Chicagoan.

- [Reporter] They say you're tough.

Do you think of yourself as tough?

- I wouldn't say tough, but my mother and father told me never back down from any man if you think you're right.

And I suppose we were taught how to use our fists when we were young.

You had to do that.

- He was not a great orator.

But in that way too, he reflected the way most people in this city spoke.

- Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all.

The policeman isn't there to create disorder.

The policeman is there to preserve disorder.

- He was famous for his malapropisms.

He would (laughing) let his thinking get ahead of his speaking and he would say dumb things sometimes.

- [Richard] What keeps people apart?

The inability of getting together.

- (laughing) I think he operated, especially with the press, on, "Don't write what I say, write what I mean."

- [Narrator] If Daley lost some battles with the English language, he had no trouble communicating his will.

- I'm not an- - I don't care whether you like it or not.

- [Narrator] As mayor and party leader, he consolidated power over City Hall.

- Because as long as I'm mayor, no one will be stepped on.

- I resent- - And no one has to be stepped on.

(audience applauding) And that goes for you too.

- When Daley first was in office, there were 14 opponents in the City Council, 13 of 'em Republicans.

As Daley stayed in power, the Republican Party more and more disappeared.

- If you were an alderman or if you were another elected official, you wanted things done for your ward, you had to go kiss the ring.

You had to go kiss the ring at City Hall, and that was the mayor.

- [Narrator] Now, Daley used that muscle to launch a plan he'd devote the rest of his life to: building the modern city of Chicago.

- As mayor of Chicago, I shall have only one goal: to make this city a better and more beautiful place in which to live.

- [Narrator] Chicago had always been prized for its world-class architecture, but now the city seemed down on its heels.

- Daley comes in in 1955.

That's after the Great Depression when nothing gets built.

Then World War II.

(gun firing) (explosion booming) - When Daley took office, he could stand on the corner of Michigan and Randolph with some pride.

The Loop itself just to the west of where he was standing was kinda crummy.

- [Roger] Daley comes in and there's a real desire to get the city going again.

(lively music) - [Narrator] Across America in 1955, the economy was booming, but Chicago was losing population.

Instead, the American dream was being realized outside the city limits.

- You had all this land outside of cities.

This is where the baby boom happens, right?

And where are people making babies?

In their homes.

And where were those new homes being built?

In the suburbs.

(light whimsical music) - [Announcer] These young adults, shopping with the same determination that led them to the suburbs in the first place, are the going-ist part of a nation on wheels.

- People were heading to suburbia.

People were looking to live in suburbia and shop in suburbia.

- So much pent-up demand.

(soft jazz music) - [Narrator] By the 1950s, the Federal Housing Administration was subsidizing builders who could mass-produce entire subdivisions.

The FHA went a step further by ensuring loans and 30-year mortgages so that middle-class Americans could afford to buy them.

Towns like Park Forest exploded overnight with new schools, shopping malls, and industrial parks.

- [Mary] So, people were moving to the suburbs in droves.

Now, who was moving to the suburbs in droves?

- Those people were mainly white people.

When African Americans tried to follow because they wanted to live a different life in the suburbs, they weren't welcome.

- (Mary) The Federal Housing Administration was an organization of its time.

So, the FHA's rules were as racist as was the country.

They thought that Black people were bad for property values.

They would not insure mortgages if Black people were in neighborhoods nearby or surely not insure mortgages for Black people to buy houses.

- [Narrator] The FHA drew red lines around Chicago's Black and Brown neighborhoods.

Known as redlining, the FHA warned banks not to lend there.

For Daley, it meant his city was losing industry and tax revenue and becoming increasingly less affluent.

- [Roger] The downtown Loop merchants are complaining that their sales are way down.

- [Narrator] And while prosperity was moving toward the suburbs, sections of the city were falling apart.

Thousands of people who'd flocked to Chicago for jobs before World War II were now living in overcrowded and dilapidated neighborhoods.

- [Lee] And these are the questions that begin to dog Chicago in the decade to follow.

"What are we?

"Where are we going?"

- [Narrator] Daley knew he had to entice people back to the city and jumpstart Loop businesses.

He also needed to get investors excited about building in the city again.

His strategy?

Put the city to work.

Within his first term, he added new garbage trucks, sewers, streets, and parking lots and more police and fire personnel.

- What the mayor wants to do is to try to figure this out.

What do we do with downtown so that we don't lose ground to suburbia?

- [Narrator] But Richard J. Daley was not alone.

All this was happening at a time when cities across the US were suffering, plagued by broken-down buildings and crumbling infrastructure.

- There was a general consensus that cities were desperately in need of a kind of renaissance or rebirth.

And so, Daley was part of that national movement.

- [Narrator] The US government's response was urban renewal, designed to pour billions of federal dollars into the rebuilding of cities.

- [Announcer] The city grew without a comprehensive plan.

Inevitably, some of it grew chaotically.

It has not weathered well.

- [Narrator] To save failing neighborhoods, areas that showed decay could be designated as blighted, while eminent domain allowed cities to seize property for the public purpose of slum prevention.

To get traffic in and out of the cities, the federal government would foot up to 90% of the cost for modern highways.

- Getting people in and out from the suburbs to the city and back and forth becomes really critical.

- [Narrator] The building of Chicago's first superhighway had been slogging along for six years.

Under Daley, crews labored around the clock.

And booming construction followed the machine's golden rule: more jobs equals more votes.

- If there was a genius in Richard J. Daley, it was the complete understanding of not just how the patronage system worked but how the city worked.

- The business community thrives and everybody thrives.

All of these construction jobs puts a lotta Chicagoans to work.

Chicago is known under Daley as the city that works.

There are lots of pictures of Daley sitting on big machines with a hard hat on.

You know, this is great stuff.

- [Narrator] When finished, the city's portion of the Eisenhower Expressway was an engineering marvel that whisked motorists between city and suburbs.

- People who were going downtown to work, people who were going downtown to shop, it was much easier for them after Daley had built the Kennedy and the Eisenhower and the Stevenson.

- All of a sudden, the world had opened up.

"Here we go, Chicago."

And I think he really took that to heart.

He would listen to all manner of ideas, most of them coming from people who would benefit by the road of the "Here we go."

- [Narrator] But the new Eisenhower Expressway had also sliced through the Near West Side.

Construction displaced around 13,000 people, mostly the Greek, Jewish, and Black residents who lived there.

It was a sign of more to come.

For Daley, the expressway had shown a way to kill two birds with one stone.

Eminent domain could be used to modernize the city and at the same time clear out the slums.

With state and federal dollars to help grease the way, Daley unveiled a sweeping plan for redeveloping downtown.

- [Rick] It was where anchors had their offices, where all the important lawyers had their offices, where City Hall was.

So it was important to Daley to use the Loop as his base of power.

- [Narrator] Daley had recruited an army of city planners for what he considered to be the future of Chicago.

At the heart of the development plan for the central area, within spitting distance of Daley's fifth-floor office, was a government plaza stretching from City Hall to State Street.

The central plan also sketched out Daley's dream of creating a University of Illinois campus within the heart of the city.

- Daley came from Bridgeport just over down the other side of the Stockyards.

He knew a lotta kids that had no chance to go to college.

There was Loyola, there was Northwestern, places that were out of reach for working-class kids.

- [Narrator] Now as mayor, he had a chance to put an affordable university within reach.

The plan flagged an underused portion of railroad tracks south of the Loop as the site for a new Chicago campus.

But the South Loop location served a double purpose.

- Daley steps in with these great new buildings.

But still close to downtown, almost ringing it like a crescent almost all the way around, are predominantly Black neighborhoods and some Brown neighborhoods as well.

- I think, also in the back of his mind, very important, was protecting the Loop.

And in that regard, downtown businessmen were originally enamored of the idea.

That would be a perfect barrier against the Black Belt to the south.

(pensive music) - Chicagoans saw blocks 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.

- [Narrator] Two miles west of the Loop, the declining neighborhood of the Near West Side had also caught the mayor's attention.

- I'm very happy to announce that the City of Chicago has filed application with the federal government for an urban renewal program on the West Side of Chicago and will be aimed at making the city a better and a finer place in which to live.

- [Narrator] Taylor Street had been bypassed by the city's renewal efforts until now.

It had become home to a growing number of Black and Mexican immigrants.

But Taylor Street's close-knit Italians stayed.

- [Kathy] On Saturday nights, a shopkeeper would put her jukebox out on the street and people would dance.

Everyone I knew was Italian and everything we did was Italian.

There was a famous hair commercial about "Do blondes have more fun?"

♪ Is it true blondes have more fun ♪ - [Announcer] Why not be a blonde and see?

♪ A Lady Clairol blonde ♪ ♪ A silky shining blonde ♪ - I thought, "I don't even know a blonde."

(laughing) - [Narrator] People here were deeply connected to the neighborhood, even if it was worn at the edges.

- They were working-class homes and small family businesses that were maintained pretty well.

Most of the men in the neighborhood all had city jobs.

Everything was, "You look after me, I'll look after you."

So, the neighborhood was heavily Democrat.

- [Narrator] And when Daley and City Hall pitched urban renewal as a blessing, they believed them.

- Federal money available, what a miracle.

Who had ever thought of such a thing?

- [Narrator] At the Our Lady of Pompeii Church, neighbors met to find out how to apply for urban renewal funding.

They formed the Near West Side Planning Board and agreed to have the community designated a slum clearance site.

42-year-old Florence Scala had grown up on Taylor Street and was eager to join.

- My Aunt Florence was appointed, if you're ready for this, she would be "the housewife" represented on the board.

(laughing) That's what they said then.

She was an avid photographer.

Her job was to take pictures of all the parts of the neighborhood that were blighted so that they could justify getting federal money for fixing up these properties.

- [Narrator] Urban renewal would soon come to the Taylor Street community, but not in the way they'd been promised.

Richard J. Daley won his second term by a landslide, but his idea for a University of Illinois campus in the South Loop had stalled.

- Daley's been pushing this for a long time.

The problem, however, was that those pesky railroads wouldn't sell the land at what Daley and others considered to be a reasonable price.

- [Narrator] Other sites were proposed and rejected: Meigs Field, Goose Island, and Garfield Park.

- They finally came up with this idea of putting it on the Near West Side in the largely Italian neighborhood called Little Italy.

And one of the great attractions of that is that that area had already been assigned status for urban renewal.

- [Narrator] As rumors filtered back to Taylor Street, residents were alarmed, but Daley assured neighborhood planners it was on the list just for show.

- Now, my dad worked for the city and the mayor told him, "Oh, don't worry about it.

"There's other discussions going on "about Meigs Field or Garfield Park.

"Don't worry about it."

So, what are they gonna do?

They took the mayor at his word.

- [Narrator] But the bitter truth came for folks on Taylor Street not long after.

- When this decision came down, it dropped like a bomb.

(gloomy music) - [Narrator] 800 homes and about 200 businesses now designated as blight would be bulldozed to make way for the new university.

Eminent domain would speed construction.

And the federal government would foot nearly two-thirds of the bill under the Urban Renewal Housing Act, a boon for Daley.

And the very policies residents in Little Italy thought would improve their neighborhood would now destroy it.

- Daley decided it needed to be near the expressways so people coming into the city would see the university and they would see two new highways and they wouldn't see dilapidated buildings or people of color.

- We would hear references to the area as a slum.

It was resentful because it was not a slum.

I can remember old Italian women (laughing) in the summer and winter getting their broom out and sweeping the sidewalk.

It was such a betrayal.

And that's what started the fight.

- [Narrator] Taylor Street resident Florence Scala organized her neighbors to stage a sit-in at City Hall.

- Florence had never thought she'd become political, and she did.

- About 50 women literally stormed Mayor Daley's office and just take up residence in there.

- The women protesting, they're wearing hats and gloves (laughing) because that's what you did when you went downtown.

- Yesterday, you were in the mayor's office.

This morning, you're out in the hall.

- Yes, we're out in the hall and they're not gonna give us any chairs.

We're gonna stand here and we're gonna send out a call for some cots and sleeping bags.

We'll stay right out here in the hall today.

- So, you're gonna go on with this?

- Yes we are.

- [Narrator] They came armed with thermoses of coffee and picnic lunches... And the guts to take on a powerful mayor.

- Did you see the mayor this morning?

- Briefly, as he walked by.

He said hello.

- Was he pleasant?

- Yes, he was very pleasant.

The newspapermen were here, and of course he's always pleasant when press is around.

- Well, you know I brush no one off in this office, including the press.

We've tried to be courteous and friendly and hospitable.

These people walked in here without any appointment.

It's easy to make charges.

She's been making charges since this thing started.

- Some politicians referred to my aunt and all of these Italian women as "those Italian fish wives."

Honest to God, (laughing) that's what they referred to them as.

"These women, what are they doing?"

- [Narrator] In the end, the power of eminent domain prevailed and ordinary folks like Florence Scala learned Daley's grand plan to rebuild the city didn't necessarily include them.

- It was just clean the slate and start over, as if these people weren't people.

- [Roger] Richard J. Daley was a boss, somebody who sat on the fifth floor of City Hall and would say, "We're gonna build this here "and we're gonna tear down these buildings "and we're gonna move these people here."

So, these were big decisions.

- [Narrator] And Daley deserved praise for many of his choices.

In less than four years, Chicago had become one of the best working cities in the country.

- [Announcer] The mayor of Chicago has helped turn his toddling town into the world capital of modern architecture.

(whimsical music) He has helped build it into the convention capital of the world, with the world's largest airport and the world's busiest train station pouring businessmen into town to make a deal.

- [Roger] Daley came in and was extremely successful, whether that was politics or governance, getting the snow picked up, fixing the streets.

- [Narrator] Richard J. Daley was elected for the third time in April of 1963.

But this time, he defeated his Republican opponent by only a hair.

- [Reporter] Mr. Mayor, you predicted that you would get 65% to 70% of the total vote cast.

Did you, sir?

- I said that I... Of course, I've always been an optimist.

(all laughing) - [Narrator] And without Black voters, Daley couldn't have won.

- If you look back, ladies and gentlemen, at the figures from that election, Daley did not get the majority of the white vote.

Daley was elected on the shoulders of Black Chicago.

That's how he won.

- The desires of my neighbors for a community which will enable them to give their families the best possible environment is shared by all the residents of the neighborhoods of Chicago.

Their needs and their wants have been and will continue to be my guide in the four years to come.

(audience applauding) - [Narrator] If you cast your eyes toward the Loop, Daley's victory speech was on target.

In the heart of the Loop, the Chicago Civic Center was an $87 million wonder.

- Yes, this great Civic Center will always be a reminder to all of us that the courts and government belong to the people.

- (Lee) It's hard to see it with contemporary eyes how revolutionary the Daley Center was at the time.

Government buildings tended to look like, you know, Roman Senate buildings, right?

And this was modernism.

It's really an incredible building.

He's also reinforcing to the business community that this is a new downtown.

- When they unveiled the Picasso statue, what a scene that was for TV!

- I am very happy you have come today to participate in dedicating "Chicago Picasso."

- [Narrator] Architects had convinced Daley that it would take a modern artist to match the Civic Center's audacious design.

- As mayor, I dedicate this gift, confident that it will have an abiding and happy place in the city's heart.

- [Rick] And they pulled the sheet off the thing and people gasped!

(audience applauding) - [Reporter] What do you think of "Picasso"?

- Like I says, I'd donate to have it removed.

- (laughing) It's just a beautiful thing, man.

I don't know what it is.

So, you know... Whatever it is, it's nice.

- [Narrator] 50 feet tall and 162 tons.

Daley said it looked like "the wings of justice."

But the rest of the 1960s would bring changes for Richard J. Daley.

As Martin Luther King fought for civil rights in the South, the demand for equal housing and schools would grow in Chicago too.

♪ We shall overcome ♪ ♪ We shall overcome ♪ - [Mary] The political winds in the country begin to change in the mid- to late-1960s.

And the kind of support that Black folks have been giving Daley starts to look a little strange in that era.

Black people start wanting a greater political say.

- [Roger] At the grassroots, Blacks were getting very unhappy with Daley, and that was beginning to bubble up by the early 1960s.

- My father and many others felt that the government was really not there for them.

It was just there to keep them down.

- (Roger) Daley, of course, in many respects, was walking a fine line with regard to Black voters.

I mean, he had to be able to show a certain amount of attention there, but he couldn't show too much because that would anger his white constituency.

- [Reporter] In Chicago, we talked with a group of whites who call themselves lower middle class.

They are worried about Negroes moving into their neighborhood.

- And they are not responsible citizens.

Until they live like we are, we don't want 'em.

- I don't want 'em living with me, to tell you the truth.

Whether they take care of it or not, I don't wanna live with 'em 'cause I ran away from 'em.

If I wanted to live with 'em, I wouldn't be paying high taxes like I am.

I woulda stayed where I was.

(ceremonial music) - [Narrator] With the opening of Robert Taylor Homes in 1962, Daley hoped to appease whites who were worried about living with Blacks and also end the growing dissatisfaction among African Americans.

- An environment such as this also is the finest investment we can make.

- (Mary) These were new buildings, brand new buildings, with new appliances and new walls and new elevators.

And people had been living in really dilapidated conditions, especially poor African Americans, that they might not have had good running water.

The early days of public housing, we had this statement actually, "Public housing is paradise."

- [Narrator] Ambitious in both scale and public policy, Robert Taylor Homes would grow to be one of the largest public housing sites in the world and one of the city's worst failures.

- The utopian dream of high-rise public housing is not bad, but no one could have anticipated what it would become.

- [Narrator] The buildings, which were built to house 11,000 tenants, peaked at 27,000 residents, 20,000 of whom were children.

They were in a constant state of disrepair, with broken elevators, faulty heating, and poorly enforced building codes.

- What made them a failure wasn't purely the design.

What made them a failure is building them that way and then treating them the same way the city treated the slums they replaced.

- [Narrator] Civil rights leaders accused the city of locking Blacks into the lower rungs of the social and economic ladder, segregating them from the mainstream of American life.

- I think Daley drew a line in the sand because that's what his white constituents wanted.

This is the line, I'll give you this, this, and this, but I'm not gonna give you integrated neighborhoods.

- We have to remember that housing is a built environment and a social environment.

But how we label places as ripe for urban renewal and how we decide how to treat the people who live there is the social part of housing development.

- [Narrator] By the late-1960s, as many as 22,000 families had been displaced by urban renewal projects in Chicago.

Nearly all of the city's public housing units were confined to Black or racially changing areas.

Rather than solve the urban crisis, urban renewal had fostered poverty and segregation.

- One of the things about post-World War II American history is there are so many well-intentioned reforms that really don't turn out quite so well, public housing being a classic example of that.

The same thing was true, I think, with urban renewal.

- [Narrator] In all, Richard J. Daley would be elected mayor of Chicago six times.

- See ya, now.

(bright bagpipe music) - [Rick] There were a lot of myths that surrounded this man, the myth of The Builder, the myth of this City That Works.

There was a real love-hate relationship that people felt about the mayor when he was in office, but also after he died.

(faint siren wailing) - [Narrator] Mayor Richard J. Daley died while in office on a Monday before Christmas in 1976.

He was on his way to lunch after dedicating a new South Side gymnasium.

He was 74 years old.

The wake was held at the parish church in Bridgeport, the same church Daley had been christened in.

(gentle music) Seven days after the mayor's death, the Civic Center and its adjoining plaza were renamed in his honor.

A walk through the Little Italy neighborhood today offers only the barest hint of the community once here.

- You have to admire Florence and you have to admire anybody who is fighting to keep the character of a neighborhood.

We look at this city, Chicago now, and there are once great neighborhoods that have lost their character and their characters.

(lively singing) - (Lee) All this comes at a cost and one that we grapple with even to this day, which is the neighborhoods, particularly the Black and Brown neighborhoods, were not invested in nearly at the rate of downtown.

- I always judge city leaders by how they are serving the people who need serving the most.

And so, if we're wanting to start righting the wrongs, I think we need to change our mindset about, not equal investment but greater investment where there is greater need in order to start remedying some of the, really, ghosts of our past.