Audrey Petty's High Rise Stories

Gangs. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Those were my lingering images of Chicago’s housing projects after they were torn down a decade or so ago. I know a lot more about the history of those projects and the people who lived in them now, though, thanks to my friend Audrey Petty, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois.

That’s Audrey with Alex Kotlowitz during her presentation in Oak Park. (Photo: Janet Smith)

You might remember Audrey from blog posts I’ve written about her before. She started thinking about doing an oral history of people who’d lived in high rise public housing back in 2008. Robert Taylor Homes had already been completely demolished by then, and Stateway Gardens, Rockwell Gardens and Cabrini-Green were next. “I grew up on the South Side,” she said in an interview with McSweeney’s.  “And so I was stunned by the sudden erasure of all these structures that had been such a familiar part of the city.” She’d read and heard about the Chicago Housing Authority’s plans, but said it was something else to experience those enormous gaps in the landscape. “The first thing I wanted to know was where people were going. The next question—the bigger question that felt urgent—was what had those places been like for those who called them home?”

Audrey spent most of the past three years tracking down former residents of Chicago’s housing projects and interviewing them for High Rise Stories: Voices From Chicago Public Housing, published by McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series just a few weeks ago.

Alex Kotlowitz wrote the foreword, and last Monday he was on stage with Audrey at the book’s “coming out” party at Frank Lloyd Wright’s historic Unity Temple. My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I took a train to Oak park to be there. The event was well-attended,  and we’d learn during the Q & A session afterwards that a fair number of people in the audience had grown up in Chicago’s public housing. The line to have Audrey sign a book was so long that we only had time for a quick hug.

During the talk I was sandwiched on a pew between my friends Linda Downing Miller and Janet Smith — Mike met us there later. Linda is a writer and lives in Oak park, so she met Whitney and me at the train station. Janet is the Co-Director of the Urban Planning and Policy Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a true scholar. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear her swoon over the appendix to Audrey’s book. A review of High Rise Stories in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune confirmed that “The timeline regarding public housing history and other materials in the book’s six appendices will become essential historical resources.”

My favorite part of the evening was listening to Audrey sweet sincere voice reading “On Plans and Transformations,” the introduction she wrote for the book. She did a beautiful job weaving her own story with the history of public housing, and then went right to reading a story from one of the High Rise Stories narrators. Again, from the Chicago Tribune review:

But the book’s primary value comes from the narratives of former CHA tenants. The range of speakers exemplifies the diversity of people who formerly lived in the projects, from ex-cons trying to straighten out their lives to youthful idealists.

After Audrey finished her readings, Alex Kotlowitz talked with her about how she tracked down the residents and managed the difficult but necessary task of paring down hundreds of hours of interviews into a 250-page oral history. It was exciting to have my friend up there with the author of the award-winning book There are No Children Here, and now I’m hooked. Tonight Whitney and I are heading to Audrey’s next event, and this time two of the narrators she interviewed will be on stage with her. Care to join us? Here’s the info :

Sept. 24th, 2013: Audrey Petty in conversation with Natalie Moore from WBEZ moderating and narrators Ms. Wilson & Sabrina Nixon at Hull-House
800 S Halsted Street
Chicago, IL 60607</blockquote