Most mornings, you can find 85-year-old Bobby Woods having breakfast at his regular table at the New Pine Valley Restaurant in North Lawndale.
Though the small Black-owned diner moved across the street a few years ago, little has changed since Woods started going there in the 1960s — except that a fried egg sandwich and a cup of coffee used to cost $2.25. Now it’s $3.
The restaurant thrived as the community around it crumbled.
Before the 1968 riots pushed North Lawndale into irreparable decline, the 16th Street corridor was the Black business mecca of the West Side. The diner is one of only a handful of the original Black-owned establishments remaining.
“We used to be able to get everything we wanted here,” Woods said. “We never had to leave the neighborhood. Now there’s hardly anything left.”
Longtime residents like Woods, a retired Cook County sheriff’s deputy and former precinct captain, have seen North Lawndale at its best — and its worst. They have waited a half-century for a revitalization that they are not sure will ever come.
Now the COVID-19 pandemic and recent looting have caused another setback, and once again the chronically neglected neighborhood has been jolted at the core.
It’s not the newly boarded-up buildings and shuttered businesses that have hit North Lawndale residents hardest. They are used to adversity, having lived for decades in a commercial desert with few options for shopping, entertainment or meeting their basic needs.
This time, the economic ruin was paired with a tenacious virus that roared through struggling African American neighborhoods such as North Lawndale like a freight train, threatening the lives of everyone who came into its path.
In this neighborhood of 34,000 people, COVID-19 hit particularly hard. The three ZIP codes that fall within North Lawndale and parts of South Lawndale — 60608, 60623 and 60624 — represent only 7% of Chicago’s population. Yet the area has charted 11% of the coronavirus cases and 9% of the deaths, according to recent data compiled by Sinai Urban Health Institute.
Like other illnesses that disproportionally affect African Americans, COVID-19 is fueled by poverty and long-standing health disparities that make poor populations more susceptible to the virus than their white counterparts in more affluent areas.
Before the pandemic, North Lawndale was at the bottom of nearly every economic indicator. The poverty rate was 48%, nearly double that of Chicago as a whole, according to 2018 census data, the most recent available. Unemployment was about 18%, also nearly double the city’s rate.
So when COVID-19 came knocking, the doors of North Lawndale flung open.
Beset with preexisting conditions such as food insecurity, violence and inadequate housing, North Lawndale was ill equipped to fend off the virus’s assault. But at the height of it, many in the community came together to do what they could.
Professional Black men handed out masks from a barbershop on 16th Street. A community outreach group distributed food and diapers. Another group provided money to help out-of-work residents pay overdue rent.
And when the looting was over, teenagers, violence interrupters and other residents gathered at Lawndale Plaza to clean up broken glass and debris from the only major grocery store in the area, a beauty supply store, an auto parts store and the movie theater that closed two years ago.
“It’s like we’ve been living in a pandemic all along,” said Debra Wesley, president of Sinai Community Institute, the health and human services arm of Sinai Health System.
“When there are high racial health disparities going on and you ask people to quarantine themselves and they are staying in homes with multiple people, how do they do that? There are lots of challenges,” she said.
“When you need to stock up on toilet paper and you live in a food desert and don’t have resources, what are you supposed to do?”
To understand the devastation of the last six months, take a drive along West Roosevelt Road. The 31/2-mile stretch paints a vivid picture of a deprived neighborhood struggling against the odds to return to normalcy.
If you have seen the boarded-up buildings on the Magnificent Mile, imagine it doubled. Then picture vacant lots, decaying homes and abandoned buildings. But it was not the looting or the prolonged pandemic shutdown that caused it all. Much of the devastation in North Lawndale is the result of decades of government neglect.
It is not the fault of the residents. The city abandoned this neighborhood a long time ago. Even in the best of times for the rest of Chicago, North Lawndale was suffering. The hardworking people who live there deserve better.
When the social unrest occurred in the aftermath of the George Floyd police killing, North Lawndale wasn’t hit nearly as hard as other neighborhoods because there wasn’t much there to loot. But the community was not immune to the fallout.
Leamington Foods, the full-service grocery store, has reopened behind a wall of plywood. But many of the small corner stores have not. The relationship between Blacks and the Middle Eastern store owners has long been tense, but many residents shop there anyway because they have nowhere else to go.
Even with the higher prices and lower-quality foods, the stores are a lifeline for residents who don’t have cars to drive across the border to Cicero. Now they fear that some of the corner stores won’t come back at all.
There is good reason to be afraid.
The riots that broke out on the West Side after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination transformed North Lawndale from a thriving epicenter of African American life to a barren wasteland.
Residents watched the exodus of the mostly Jewish-owned businesses after rioters destroyed their property along Roosevelt Road. And the community’s dream of prosperity left with them.
Over the course of a few days, Jeraldine Bowen, 93, saw the landscape of her vibrant neighborhood turn into an expansive stretch of burned-out buildings that eventually became vacant lots.
Bowen, who worked as a presser at a neighborhood dry cleaner, said she doesn’t understand the recent looting any more than she understood the riots 52 years ago.
“It’s stupid to destroy where you’re living,” said Bowen, who now lives in Austin. “I said to myself at the time, ‘They’re not rioting because of King getting killed. They don’t even know what the man stood for. He never would have approved of this type of behavior.’
“That’s the same way I look at it now. You looted the stores and cleaned everything out … and you don’t have one penny to build anything back.”
She was right in 1968. And the same is true today.
Large clothing and furniture stores, supermarket chains and banks were gradually replaced with wig shops, discount cellphone stores and nail salons, owned mostly by people who have no stake in the community.
Those businesses were targeted during the recent looting, while the few Black-owned establishments mostly were spared.
Rioters avoided Black-owned businesses in 1968, too, but they suffered just the same. The economic base of the community was gone, and everyone paid the price.
That’s true today as well.
Businesses that could spark revitalization in North Lawndale remain reluctant to go into a struggling low-income community. Many small business owners who would like to invest can’t get commercial bank loans or other financial backing.
But there have been attempts to revitalize. In 1998, the development of Homan Square began at the former Sears headquarters site. The buildings had been vacant since the retailer moved to the Loop in 1973, taking jobs away from the community and sending North Lawndale into deeper decline.
Mixed-income housing was built in Homan Square. Office space was available. Retail stores opened nearby. A Dominick’s grocery store opened in Lawndale Plaza and a Starbucks came. Cineplex Odeon Corp. invested millions in a multiplex movie theater, the first on the West Side in decades.
The Great Recession brought things to a halt in 2008. The Starbucks eventually closed. The movie theater is just a huge empty building now. When Dominick’s left Chicago in 2014, Leamington Foods moved into the space, but residents said it is not the same.
Hopes of a rebirth faded again.
Prior to the pandemic, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced plans to combat poverty in the city with an unprecedented $750 million investment in North Lawndale and nine other chronically neglected neighborhoods on the South and West sides.
But many residents are wary of political promises. They know that when the city begins to rebuild from the pandemic and looting, North Lawndale could end up last in line as it always has.
Lightfoot hasn’t gained the trust that Harold Washington, the first African American mayor, had from the Black community. But even after years of disappointment, many North Lawndale residents remain hopeful that renewal is on the horizon.
“We’re not going to get another Harold Washington. If he’d had a chance, the West Side would have been popping,” said Woods.
“(Lightfoot) might live up to her word, I don’t know. I’m willing to give her a chance like we gave everybody else a chance.”
Still, most North Lawndale residents have learned that it’s best to pay attention with their eyes, not their ears.
Twitter @dahleeng
