Florence Scala and the fight to save the Little Italy neighborhood
Florence Scala.
One day, once all the houses were gone on Morgan Street, from my back porch on Miller Street I began to see the University Hall building rise among the ruins of my neighborhood. This was the neighborhood where I rode my bicycle on, the neighborhood where we bought groceries at Morgan and Taylor and where I went to school.
I was a 12-year-old immigrant from Michoacán, Mexico, trying to adjust to a new land, a new culture. I remember in class I was the new kid. The English speaking teachers would take pity on me and ask other classmates to explain things to me.
I was a new arrival in a neighborhood that within a couple of years was almost all gone except for the strip from Taylor to Vernon Park Place and from Miller to Racine Avenue. This area survived the onslaught of bulldozers and the politics of Machine Boss Richard J. Daley.
But I was a greenhorn then and I knew little of what was going on at the time. It would be years before I understood the long standing fight that a brave woman from the neighborhood named Florence Scala had waged, almost single-handedly, against all odds.
Florence Scala lived on Taylor Street, just around the corner from Miller Street where I lived with my Mom, my sister and my brother. I use to see her all the time when she walked her dogs down Miller Street.
She lost the fight but she left an imprint of struggle and of standing up to the big money guys and the way of doing things in Chicago.
Little Italy was a bustling neighborhood then when my sister Aurora and my brother Ricardo and I got there in 1959 from Mexico. My mom, Victoria Magaña and my Uncle Manuel Magaña had lived there since 1950.
My Mom and my Uncle Manuel had grown up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in the late 1920s when their Dad, my maternal grandfather, Cristobal Magaña had ventured north escaping from political repression in Mexico.
In fact Manuel and one of my aunts, Angelina, had been born in Chicago. My Mom had gone to school at Seward Elementary in the Back of the Yards and knew English. After Cristobal died in 1932, the family was repatriated back to Mexico during the Great Depression when all the voices of despair had said the Mexicans were draining the city of its meager resources for providing social services to others.
Anyway, three generations later here we were back in Chicago, city of air-conditioned movie theaters, Maxwell Street, Skid Row on Madison Avenue, bustling downtown State Street, the Great Street, and occasional Mob hits.
In Little Italy we lived next door to the Italian Americans and their stores, businesses and culture. We rented apartments from them and they collected the rent from us. But it was an uneasy peace. They tolerated us, meaning all the rest of the Mexicans that lived in the neighborhood, because they knew we were all immigrants—us from Mexico and many of them from Italy, a place they called “The Old Country.”
They were bakers, shoemakers, tailors and food store owners just like the Mexicans were and everyone lived in the same neighborhood. Each group spoke their own language out in the open.
We could see each other face to face because we all knew that we were facing the same odds: prejudice and intolerance from the rest of white America. The rest of the city called Italian Americans “Dagos” and it called us “Mex” or worst, “Spics.”
But here inside Little Italy we knew Anglo Americans didn’t have anything on us that would make us feel unappreciated or even inferior. Italians and Mexicans had a language, a culture and we both had our own food, so white America, to us at least, was the real outsider.
Against this backdrop had come Florence Scala to fight back. Unable to marshal more forces than she needed at the time, the fight to save Little Italy was lost and the future university tore down 800 houses, many with apartments, and some 620 businesses, including many Mexican stores and restaurants along Halsted Street, precisely near Polk Street where today not a trace anywhere indicates that this was once a vibrant immigrant neighborhood of Italians, Mexicans and blacks.
Victoria Perez, an activist featured in the book Chicanas of 18th Street, recalls the abundance of Mexican stores in Little Italy. Her father was Mexican and her mother was Italian.
“My mother would go shopping in the area because at that time the grocery stores on Taylor and Halsted streets were primarily Mexican and Italian,” said Perez. “My mother would go to one store and speak Italian and enter another one and speak Spanish.”
At least 8,000 people were displaced and forced to move elsewhere, including Mexican residents who moved south to nearby Pilsen to start all over again. Some 4,800 residents, who were displaced by the University of Illinois “Circle Campus”, as it first was called, were Mexican immigrants.
Some Mexican immigrants moved further west near Our Lady of Pompeii Church, on the other side of Racine Avenue, and still many others moved further west along Harrison near Oakley where they were forced to live near smoke-spewing factories.
But the majority of the displaced Mexican immigrants would eventually find their way to Pilsen, an old Bohemian neighborhood, and a few years later they would continue on in a southwest direction to integrate Little Village, a mostly Polish American neighborhood, until it, too, one day would become 90 percent Mexican.
Florence Scala’s entire world was Little Italy. She was born there on September 17, 1918 to Italian immigrant parents. Her father was Alex Giovangelo, a neighborhood tailor. Her mother was Theresa Scardepane, a housewife.
Trying to assist all immigrants in the area at the time was Hull House, a social center with thirteen buildings for English and citizenship classes, art workshops and theater and literature events that was founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. It was a place where the new immigrants could escape their sordid existence as elevator operators, dish washers and meat cutters for the rest of the city.
“My father was a tailor, and we were just getting along in a very poor neighborhood. He never had any money to send us to school. When one of the teachers suggested that our mother send us to Hull House, life began to open up,” Scala later told Studs Terkel, Chicago’s raconteur.
Hull House through the years had become the only light amidst the squalor and neglect that all immigrants had to face in this part of the city.
Florence Scala became a volunteer at Hull House from 1934 to 1954, often working with Jessie Binford who had taken charge after Jane Addams, the founder of the settlement, had died in 1935. Hull House gave Scala exposure to the outside world.
She recalled later that at home the food was typically Italian such as ravioli and spaghetti but at Hull House the food included roast beef, an American food.
Along the way Scala also took courses in urban planning at Northeastern University and at the University of Chicago. Taking up the fight of the poor and downtrodden was partly a direct result of her work at Hull House.
One cold day in February of 1961 Scala and the rest of the Near West Side, as the neighborhood is called on city maps, received a pronouncement from on high that shocked them. The city was planning to build a new campus for the University of Illinois in their neighborhood and City Hall said some 105 acres of land would be needed near Halsted and Harrison.
I, the future writer, remember that a large number of Mexican-Americans from Texas, who had fled north to escape low wages and racial prejudice, lived precisely on Harrison near Morgan where the future university would rise.
“It was a bombshell,” Scala later told Studs Terkel in his book Division Street America. “What shocked us was the amount of land they decided to take; they were out to demolish our entire community.”
Two days later Scala organized a delegation of 150 women and who went to City Hall to protest the campus project. Richard J. Daley tried to charm them so they would give in. He promised them he would build new homes.
Despite the empty promises, Scala continued to organize protests and sit-ins after the area residents formed the Harrison-Halsted Community Group in order to fight back.
But in the much fabled city of neighborhoods, one ethnic-immigrant neighborhood such as Little Italy was not worth preserving, according to the powers that be who wanted it for their campus.
The city and the board of trustees of the university had rejected 54 acres of vacant land in the Garfield Park neighborhood where no one would be displaced. The Boss and the university big-wigs wanted what was known then as ‘the Hull House neighborhood’, the center of gravity for people who made demands of aldermen, the rich merchant class and the institutions that ignored or stepped on the poor.
“One of his (Richard J. Daley’s) comments that that hed make whenever (was that) he loved neighborhoods, and he wanted to keep the city together through its neighborhoods. He really didnt give a damn about the neighborhoods when push came to shove,” Scala told Chicago Public Radio years later. “If somehow or other you were in the way of his future plans, the neighborhood didnt matter that much.”
The Italian American community had already lost Holy Guardian Angel Church, built in 1892 by Italian immigrants, to the new Dan Ryan Expressway to the east of the neighborhood. Now they had relocated and rebuilt their historic church at 860 West Cabrini, just off Racine Avenue, and now it, too, would have to be shut. It was not fair, they said.
The protests continued, including protests by Mexican immigrants and letters to the Hispanic newspapers, but the city had its sights set on Little Italy. And Florence Scala was becoming a threat to the new campus project.
One day in October of 1962 someone threw a bomb at Florence Scala’s home on Taylor Street. No one was injured but for a time she and her family were forced to live elsewhere.
Despite the bombing, Scala continued to lead the opposition against the University of Illinois campus until March 28, 1963 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city.
Under pressure from the bulldozers that would soon advance over Little Italy, including the historic Hull House complex — a center of social consciousness for many — Scala and Binford were only able to save the original Hull House mansion from being razed. The board of trustees of Hull House accepted $875,000 for the other buildings, a decision Scala was firmly against.
Artists and writers called on the city to not destroy the Hull House settlement. Among those voices was Senator Paul Douglas, of Illinois, who called the demolition of Hull House “historic vandalism”.
Later in 1964 Florence Scala ran for alderman of the 1st Ward but was defeated by the Daley Machine of that time. It was evident as the fabled saying goes, that Chicago wasn’t ready for reform.
Towards the end of her life the only regret that Florence Scala had was that she and the Harrison-Halsted Community Group had not tried to protest even more. Some of the residents had urged her to do so, including protesting against the Catholic Archdioceses, but she held back.
She had feared that the establishment would have thought that she and the other protesters were rabble-rousers, discontents and ignorant immigrants who did not appreciate higher education.
“As I think back on it now, the instinctive responses of the people, who are thought of as uneducated, were better than my own, I was very anxious that we should not be looked upon as people from the slums, many of us Italians and Mexicans,” she later told Terkel.
Florence Scala continued to live in the same neighborhood where she had lived all of her life. Her home was in the Little Italy strip that was spared by the bulldozers. She eventually opened a trendy restaurant in 1980 called Florence, named after the Italian city, until she closed it down for good in 1990.
When University Village was being considered just south of Roosevelt Road and the long-standing Maxwell Street Market was in its way, Florence Scala came out in the open against the University of Illinois moving south and destroying this old and historic market.
This courageous neighborhood fighter passed away on August 28, 2007 at the age of 88. Her life was over but her struggle to save a neighborhood for working class Italian and Mexican immigrants and poor blacks would never be forgotten. It is now a part of the history and folklore of the city.
In an ironic twist of fate Scala’s personal papers are now housed in a special collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the same university she opposed. And yet, in another strange twist of corporate logic, the huge library at the campus was named after Mayor Richard J. Daley, a mayor whose dislike of writers and intellectuals was widely known.
In the aftermath Miller Street, from Taylor to Vernon Park Place, was spared by the bulldozers so I would remain in Little Italy until 1968 when I went away to attend the University of Iowa. It was during one of those years that I was away that I got a letter from my Mother Victoria saying that they, too, had moved away to Little Village, bypassing Pilsen altogether.
With parking lots where my friends had lived and steel and concrete university buildings going up where stores I had visited as a child had stood, Little Italy had changed forever.
Florence Scala.
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Antonio Zavala is a freelance writer who lives in Chicago and writes about the people and neighborhoods of Chicago.
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