During the month of September I attempted to complete the filming about the Housing Center and to begin shooting for the second film about Helena McCullough and her family. I am beginning to see a potential set of themes emerging for the Housing Center film. One of them is the constant need of the Housing Center staff to convince white clients that certain parts of Oak Park are safe for them or to use their phrase maintain white demand. This has been a consistent problem since the inception of the center in the early 1970s. The area of most concern is Austin Blvd - the east edge of Oak Park that borders on the Austin section of Chicago. It is the resegregation of Austin in the '60s and '70s that served as a strong motivation for Oak Parkers to develop a way of managing integration so that Oak Park would not become like Austin. While many white clients express their fear of living on Austin Blvd. none will actually come out as say what I believe is behind their anxiety - Austin is close to being a 100% black community. The irony is that the best apartments are located on Austin Blvd. I have filmed a number of clients being shown these apartments - some decide to rent and other do not. In follow-up interviews they discuss their feelings and thoughts. As Austin Blvd is the linchpin of Oak Park's attempts to keep the community from resegregating, I plan to spend some time exploring how clients and staff deal with the apartments in that locale. In addition, I plan to spend time exploring the difficulties that some lower income people, primarily African-Americans, have in locating affordable housing in Oak Park. While the community strives to be economically diverse, the marketplace drives the rents up and make converting the larger apartments into condos a profitable business. While these two themes are not the only things I plan to cover in the film, they appear to me at this point to be important enough to focus on.
The film about Helena McCullough and
her family will allow me to explore continuity and change in Oak
Park through the lives of people who have lived in the community
for five generations. Helena, 91 years old, leads an incredibly
active life of weekly bridge games with one son and women she
has know all of her life, a Bible study group, programs at the
19th Century Club, weekly beauty salon appointments and services
at Grace Episcopal Church. She regularly attends performances
in Chicago, with season tickets to both the Goodman Theater and
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I have already filmed some of
these excursions. Helena has a son who married to an African-American
woman in the early 1960s and a daughter married to a gay-identified
man who was a founding
member of the Oak Park Area Lesbian and Gay Association. Helena's
daughter-in-law is currently the head of the Village Managers
Association, an non-partisan organization that slates candidates
for the village board. Helena is at once the embodiment of Oak
Park's most traditional values and an example of how some Oak
Parkers were able to rise to the occasion and accept a new diverse
world.
I am also beginning to shoot scenes to be use in the introductory film in which I will introduce the community and the project. Ideally this "video book" will be something that can be viewed piecemeal, so that the Housing Center film will be able to be viewed alone or as a part of the larger set. To date I have failed to locate any examples of this sort of multipart video. Series like PBS' An American Family concentrated on the lives of the Loud family over a one year period. Series like Ken Burns' The Civil War was an analysis of a major historical event. I will be producing something that might be titled "Some Oak Park Stories" with the various sections more loosely related.
Ethnicity, Class and Housing Preferences in Oak Park - A Hunch
I have an idea about how cultural and class preferences in housing might have an influence on where African-Americans live in Oak Park. While African-Americans have a long and complex history of distinctive styles in music, art, and literature, they do not have a similar history in domestic architecture and home furnishings. There are a number of African-American interior designers and house designers who have in recent years attempted to develop an African-American domestic identity, but it is a relatively recent idea and seems to be primarily concerned with incorporating African themes and objects as well as the work of contemporary African-American artists. So the question becomes what set of values do African-Americans employ when they select a house to purchase and how do they furnish it? I can find no research that explores this question, so I will offer a hunch based upon my observations and some conversations with a few people in Oak Park. I think that one can partially explain the dispersal of people in both the rental units and home buying in terms of these cultural and class preferences. Or at least the idea is worth considering. My remarks are focused on Oak Park and do not apply to other middle-class African American communities.
Oak Park has two basic apartment types - vintage and modern. Vintage apartment buildings were built prior to 1920 and are often courtyard style. They tend to be three story high and in multiples of six units so that the larger buildings have multiple entrances and lack the long hallways common is more recently built places. They are large with hardwood floors and sometimes have built-in bookcases and fireplaces. A one bedroom will have four rooms - bedroom, living room, kitchen and full sized dining room. They never have central air-conditioning. "Modern" apartments (Those built in the '50s and '60s. Oak Park lacks more recently built bulidings.) are smaller - a one bedroom has living room, eat-in kitchen and living room with wall to wall carpets, central air and no interior embellishments. The counselors from the Housing Center report that African-Americans (also Asians and Indians) almost never ask for vintage listings nor do they rent them. The preference is overwhelmingly upper middleclass Euro-American.
Valuing older houses - Victorians and earlier and in Oak Park, the houses known to have been designed by well regarded architects such as Wright and Gunderson - appears to me to be a post World War II development. Even Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio was allowed for a time to be divided up into apartments and was not well-maintained. As a child in Oak Park in the 1940s and 1950s, I recall people saying that living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house was unpleasant. An even more recent addition to the "older house" aesthetic is the "handyman's special" - an older house in need to serious rehabilitation but not so poorly maintained as to be considered a wreck or the limited choice of the poor. These are often "starter" home with first-time buyers who have modest but clearly middleclass means. Owning an older house, handyman's special or not, requires a certain commitment to house repairs and some willingness to undertake some manual labor in the process. You can never hire people to do everything necessary to rehab and maintain an older house.
My impression is that African-American buyers looking at Oak Park are more often interested in a newer house or at least one that requires little rehabilitation. Perhaps they associate the need for manual labor with the working or even poverty classes. They wish to assert their economic prosperity with a new house. It has been suggested that such an attitude is characteristic of the recently affluent.
I think one can extend that "new house" aesthetic into home furnishings. It has been my experience that few African-Americans are interested in antiques, like those one would furnish a Victorian with. They prefer "new" furniture in their "new" houses.
I realize that these are assertions without any real empirical data for support. The statements are based on very causal observation and discussion with only a few people.
If there is some substance to these ideas,
it could explain the distribution of African-Americans in Oak
Park, now and in the future. One could ask the following question,
as more African-Americans grow up in solidly upper-middle class
families in Oak Park, will they acquire a upper-middle-class taste
for Victorians, old houses and antiques to furnish them? How do
the values espoused among African-American living in older and
more well established communities like New Orleans or Harlem compare?