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A writer comes home to ever-changing South Shore to find the middle class disappearing

Carlo Rotella returned to his old neighborhood the other day, another silent Saturday morning in South Shore, the kind of day when the clang of a passing train is the only clamor. The occasion for the visit was his latest book, a portrait of South Shore, “The World is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.” He was in town for readings and interviews; he grew up here but moved away in 1982. Since then, Rotella had become a well-known magazine writer and an American Studies professor at Boston College. But he was mostly a stranger here now.

He sat in front of his childhood home on Oglesby Avenue, in a rental car that stood out for two reasons: It had Texas plates, and was just generic enough to appear suspicious.

Darryl Ingram, who has lived in Rotella’s childhood home for 26 years, noticed the car. And his wife, Tonia, noticed, too. “Who’s that?” she asked. “I’m watching …” Darryl said.

“It’s probably Carlo,” Tonia said.

“No way it’s Carlo,” Darryl said. He went to the basement, and when he returned, Rotella and I were standing on the sidewalk, talking. Darryl called to his wife: “It’s Carlo.”

Darryl opened a window and boomed: “Hey! I hope you got my book with you!”

“Are you on a loud speaker?” Rotella asked.

“No, I’m just loud,” Darryl said. “Come inside.”

Inside was appointed, paintings on walls, more than one chaise lounge, a trinket hanging from a door reading, “It’s Not a Home without a Schnauzer” — a well-maintained upper-middle class home where everything has its place and rarely strays. Which, to some extent, sounds like South Shore, too: Little changes, for better and worse.

“So your South Shore book is finally done,” Darryl said.

“Got a copy for you in the car,” Rotella said, then turning to me and explaining their easy rapport: “I think that I started checking in with Darryl, like … what? Maybe 20 years ago?”

“My wife and I were just talking about that,” Darryl said.

“Actually,” Rotella said, “my first notes for this book, our first conversation, that was 1997. I didn’t work on the book that whole time, but I had it in my mind.” Then to me: “My family sold this home to a couple, who then sold it to Darryl. The other house we lived in, on Euclid, the people my parents sold to still live there. Lots of stability here!”

We sat. Rotella, 54, wore a bomber jacket and round tiny eyeglasses, Darryl, 57, wore gray Saturday morning sweats. “My parents paid $22,000 for this in 1967,” Rotella said.

“We paid, I think, $45,000 in 1993,” Darryl said. “Now a lot of places around here are going for around $300,000. So that’s a bump. No new people here, though. Not many.”

He pointed out the window, in different directions: Those people, they’ve been here five years, and those people, they’ve been here 20, and those people have been here longer. “People don’t give up bungalows here,” Darryl said. “Even as the neighborhood changed for the worst, they didn’t. School system sucks — they like their homes just too much, and so they send their children to private schools outside of South Shore. And they’re city workers, they’re federal workers, they’re cops, they’re college professors.”

Rotella nodded.

“When the middle class got big,” he said, “they bought their first home here.”

“And that’s this block,” Darryl said, “but gentrification … A white couple moved in the next block over. There’s three white people living over there. Gentrification is happening. I don’t know where you get your numbers, but watch: It’s happening. They get off the train, they head east, to South Shore. And then … they just don’t come outside much.”

Rotella nodded, but he was unsure about gentrification.

That uncertainty provides the backbone of “The World is Always Coming to an End,” which reads partly as history, partly as memoir, and partly as an account of what Rotella describes as the “long slow tug of powerful forces” shaping this lakefront enclave, from the decades-old community efforts at preserving (and abolishing) institutions to its often overblown reputation for crime. The book is a study of what had been an aspirational Chicago neighborhood, and whether that aspiration can survive into the future.

But Rotella said that when he returns to his old neighborhood today, he doesn’t just see a steadfast, reliable South Shore. He sees the future of the United States. Specifically, what it looks like without a middle class, with the have-not’s living alongside the have’s.

“Today being middle class means holding three jobs and no investments, hustling to make it work,” he said to Darryl. “But think of the older generations who settled here and worked for one company that gave them a pension, which enabled them to become middle class and buy a house here.” Darryl nodded. He is a classic have, a classic South Shore resident. He has a solid federal government job.

His parents came in the 1960s, from only a few miles west.

“And before the black families came, that was the story of Irish and Jewish families,” Rotella said to Darryl. “They were also moving up to South Shore from Englewood, Woodlawn and Washington Park — that’s the story of how Michelle Obama’s family ended up here, too.”

“I went to school with Michelle,” Darryl said. “Bryn Mawr Elementary.”

“And then she went to Whitney Young (High School),” Rotella said. “The path to Princeton is smoother from Whitney Young (on the Near West Side) than South Shore.”

“Whole lot smoother,” Darryl agreed. He said that when he was a kid, “the schools around here were still basically white, until it changed” — he snapped — “just like that.”

“Which is when my parents came,” Rotella said. “But they were (European) immigrants, they didn’t pay attention to (racial strife). They had grown up in war-torn countries and their idea of trouble was bombers. And the first black families to come in here, they had a little more money and education than the white families they were replacing. I actually talked to a lot of those people (for the book) — they’re in their 70s now, they never left.”

He looked around. “It’s nicer than when I lived here.”

“Stop it,” Darryl said.

“No, no, a lot of the old houses here are really maintained.”

“This one is 1913.”

“But I checked with the Chicago Bungalow Association, and it’s not technically historic. Which has to do with the floor and a half. Bungalow purists put (Darryl’s bungalow with its full second story) in an ‘other’ category. Still, these bungalows are machines for producing a middle-classness.”

They walked around the house.

“Sometimes,” Rotella said, “I have a dream set here.”

“That’s a long time to dream about a place,” Darryl said.

It’s late April and snow is threatening, so Rotella and Darryl shake hands and make plans to meet later at his book signing. We set out from Rotella’s first childhood home to his second, a short 20-minute walk he did often while researching the book. His internal map of the neighborhood is seared: Not far from Oglesby, there are the train tracks and haphazardly angled streets that flood together into a mash at East 71st and South Shore Boulevard; there’s the silent commercial strip on 71st; the U-shaped path he traces as he walks west toward Euclid, then back again. Before this new book, Rotella wrote about boxers and educators and country singers (including Kacey Musgraves) for the New York Times; he profiled the former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan for the New Yorker.

Yet explaining his old neighborhood took decades.

“I knew the feeling you get from a block of South Shore, the buzz of forces beneath the surface, but it look a while to unlock, and I knew when I was ready to write, I wanted to have years of interviews with lots of people under my belt. I needed to figure out the characters, and to learn from sociologists, and from the key leaders, from aldermen, and business people — but also, just lots and lots of neighbors.

“And in the end, not everyone will love everything in this book, and in some cases the thing they don’t love will be said by a neighbor. And yet, that’s what a neighborhood is.”

At the end of Oglesby, he said, “Do you feel that click? We have entered an airlock, where one atmosphere rushes out.”

We had come to East 71st.

He described the passage between socioeconomic realities here as a kind of “transition point from one atmosphere into another.” He turned back to the placid, comfortable setting of Oglesby: “It’s green, fortified, well-kept, vigilant. We turn again, and here is a street nobody can figure out.”

We headed west on 71st.

It was battered, faded, with clusters of people waiting at bus stops, insurance agencies boarded up, daycare centers and convenience stores and abandoned buildings that were once notable, colorful signs draped across dark storefronts promising change, and the caw-caw-cawing of seagulls.

“This street was on its way to where it is now when I was a kid,” Rotella said as we walked. “But I would ride the bus, I walked everywhere. There were supermarkets. You could get pizza, go to a hardware store. I played my first game of Asteroids on 71st. I saw ‘Car Wash’ at the Jeffery (movie theater) here.” He describes it in the book as a “more pedestrian, less magnet- and charter-schooled city where childhood featured a lot of unsupervised free play in the street and the bounds of neighborhood had more authority in dictating who your friends would be, where you went to school and worked, who you might fall in love with, what you knew and liked.” Now, he said, staring forward, “It’s a good example of what a desolate public space looks like.”

We passed over the patch of sidewalk where Chicago police shot and killed Harith Augustus, 37, last summer.

We approached Jeffery Boulevard.

“I got better at seeing the layers of the neighborhood while doing this book.” He pointed towards the intersection of 71st and Jeffrey. “A dense overlay of communities were once here. The first headquarters of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League was here, the headquarters of the South Shore Commission — which tried to stop the advent of blacks into South Shore — was here. The old South Shore Bank was here, and Dominick’s (grocery store) over there.”

We passed beneath “Distinctly South Shore” street banners that promised a fantasy of tacking sail boats and lakefront tranquility. A block past Jeffrey, at Euclid, we turned south.

This is the Jackson Park Highlands.

We walked in the street. There were no cars to sidestep. Or people. We passed castles with flowerbed signs: “Future Neighbor of the Obama Presidential Library.” As Rotella writes, “It feels as if there’s more oxygen in the air here.”

“You sense that click,” he said.

The Highlands, which has been the home of Jesse Jackson, David Mamet, Bo Diddley, Gale Sayers and Enrico Fermi, is 16 square blocks of residential stasis. Rotella pointed to a lack of power lines (everything is underground), to the absence of alleyways, and to the use of culs-de-sac (“created to isolate the Highlands from the rest of South Shore”). Rotella’s parents — his father (Salvatore, a former chancelor of City Colleges of Chicago) was from Sicily; his mother was from Spain and a professor of comparative literature at St. Xavier University — moved here in 1973.

We came to their modest brick home, which was once covered in ivy. “These homes, in the grand scheme of things, they were affordable. (When we lived here) there were still people who worked on cars for a living who lived here. There’s a public defender here now who has a 8,600 square-foot home. It was very stable (in the Highlands). It had been integrated the longest (of the South Shore area), people knew their neighbors here — and it still has the most active and collective advocacy in this neighborhood.”

He said the Highlands, as grand and financially imposing as it looks, make a strong, continuing argument that the best way to understand South Shore is through class. He writes: “The packs of boys who came into the Highlands looking to mess with some rich kids when I was young never made much distinction between white and black targets of opportunity. There are times when I think theirs was the most sophisticated analysis of the neighborhood.”

A few blocks later, at the outskirts of the Highlands, we reached a quaint, smartly detailed, almost hip two-story home at the end of a street. Beside it was an iron fence. And just outside that fence, a grim and stony block of Section 8 housing. “Going into the next presidential election, we’re going to hear a lot about the hollowing-out of the middle class. It’ll be an abstraction for many people. But not here.”

Snow started.

We walked back to Oglesby and his rental car.

Before he left, I asked about the book’s title, “The World is Always Coming to an End.” Rotella said it’s a quote from Allan Hamilton, a real-state broker who owned South Shore property. He was speaking to the Chicago Daily News in 1969, about white flight from South Shore. He was noting that the English panicked when the Irish arrived in South Shore, then the Irish panicked when the Jews came. He was trying to assure white residents that the settlement of African-American families was not the end of South Shore. “Which sounded enlightened,” Rotella said. Then Hamilton sold all of his properties on 71st Street and never returned.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @borrelli