On a warm Friday afternoon in Seward Park, a group of boys fought for position in front of the table where Patrick Steward was handing out colored team shirts. The boys, mostly middle school-aged, were on deck to play in the next basketball game, set to start in a few minutes.

“For a long time this park was clear, no one was in it,” said Steward, a former gang member who grew up in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood and now lives on the South Side. “The guys on that end of Division were scared to come down, and the guys on the other side were afraid, too.”

That image of an empty park was hard to imagine on this day. Parents, neighbors and players lined the perimeter of the court, watching game after game played to the narration of an announcer sitting in the shadow of the fieldhouse. Players enjoyed hot dogs and drinks after their games, while children jumped rope and rode their bikes in the adjoining courts.

The games are part of the Bridging the Gap basketball series, a seven-week program that brings together youth from throughout the Near North Side. To an outsider it may look like any other game, but the aims of this program run deeper.

Seward Park sits on the southern side of the aptly titled Division Street. Many of the neighborhood kids that come out to play are too young to know that the street once served as a gang boundary.

Steward, who is an organizer and a coach for the basketball program, wants to keep it that way. And for older players who have begun to adopt the rules of the street, he is working to make Cabrini’s old conventions a thing of the past by mixing up the players and putting kids from different areas on the same team.

But getting the kids to socialize is the easy part, he said.

“The kids aren’t the problem, the kids can play with each other,” said Steward. “It’s the adults who we need to be challenged.”

The physical and cultural changes that have taken place in Cabrini over the past few years have been nothing if not radical.

The public housing high-rises that once made up the residential bulk of the neighborhood have been removed by the Chicago Housing Authority over the past decade to make way for a series of developments that place residents of varying economic shades side by side. A few “pure” public housing developments still exist in the partially renovated Frances Cabrini Rowhouses southwest of the park.

While the falling buildings took with them much of the gang violence and drug activity that plagued the developments, lingering criminal activity in the area seems to have dampened sales of market-rate units from some of Cabrini’s first mixed-income developments.

Conversely, Cabrini’s public housing leadership has at times shown animosity toward further development of these residences, as tenants await the completion of the some 700 CHA-owned units that are required to return to the area.

Sharon Wheeler and her family have lived in the neighborhood just east of the high-rises for 15 years. Her sons play in the Seward Park basketball league, and Wheeler has long been involved as a community organizer in Cabrini.

For her, the reconfiguration of the neighborhood has been bittersweet.

“It’s good that the community is being cleaned up, but it’s also been about seeing some of the residents displaced,” she said. “Change is hard.”

The challenge that promises to define the next chapter of Cabrini is two-fold: the old rivalries that still linger along the dividing lines of the neighborhood must be dissolved, and relations need to be normalized between Cabrini’s indigenous population and those that have settled there in recent years.

With the help of a number of religious and community organizations in the neighborhood, Ald. Walter Burnett (27th) has begun efforts to make a connection in Cabrini.

“We have new buildings, we have a mixed-income community, but we don’t have people communicating with each other,” said Burnett, who grew up in Cabrini-Green.

Dubbed the Near North Unity Program, the alderman’s initiative is being facilitated by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, with funding coming from the MacArthur Foundation.

In addition to the basketball tournament, the NNUP has recently begun hosting a jazz concert series in Seward Park, a neighborhood clean-up program and baking classes for residents at a local church.

Burnett said that monthly meetings are being held to discuss additional opportunities for social events in the neighborhood. Among other projects, organizers for the program hope to hold a trial farmer’s market in the park sometime this summer.

The NNUP project may be a good start to building a new community, but closing the gap between new and old residents promises to be no day in the park.

Stanley Merriwether, the project manager for NNUP, said that, among other needs, the demand for safer living conditions has remained a constant in the neighborhood, especially for new neighbors.

She said that another big obstacle for market-rate residents is the cultural divide.

“I think there are a lot of people who are very angry because they are dealing with things that are outside of their cultural norms and they don’t know how to do anything about it,” said Merriwether.

Habits such as congregating on the stoops of buildings can often drive a wedge between neighbors, she said — but these aren’t necessarily things that need to be changed, just understood.

“At the end of the day, if you know who I am then it will matter more to you what I do or don’t do around you,” she said.

Other initiatives of the NNUP, which was launched about three months ago, include running summer camp programs at Seward Park, hosting a back to school fair in cooperation with CHA in September and setting a community website.

Burnett said that he will be on the lookout for community-based organizations to eventually take the lead on the programming, stating that he was optimistic that he would find a large portion of his volunteer base among the market-rate residents who now inhabit the neighborhood.

“It’s time to make it a new community,” he said. “It’s not Cabrini-Green anymore; this is the Near North Side.”

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By Dave A from Lincoln Park
Posted: 08/09/2011 1:55 PM

The Cabrini Green property was never owned by the City of Chicago. It is owned by the federal government through HUD. The CHA is a quasi-federal agency who Baord members are selected by the Mayor. CHA has all municipal powers except to levy taxes.

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By Boyee from Mid-North in Lincoln Park
Posted: 08/05/2011 9:01 PM

If the City of Chicago was financially shrewd at all they would be wise to build the new public housing elsewhere and sell off the land that the high rises once stood on for top dollar, thereby benefiting all. The CHA residents would have new housing elsewhere and the City could pay some of its debt with the money earned from selling the prime real estate.