Signs on the “Cadillac 4-in-1 Food Market” announce it has been “black-owned for 35 years”, but its door is buckled and the building is empty. A main thoroughfare has a row of closed churches and open liquor shops where men congregate. Many streets are notable for empty lots-where property has been demolished-or for dilapidated and boarded-up houses. Elected officials hope these will spur more redevelopment, but that has not come yet. Leave with them and you can spend an afternoon in depopulating Englewood, tracing a loop between the 63rd and 69th stations, seeing a crumbling city that is strikingly different from the prosperous one 20 minutes to the north.Ī few landmark buildings have been built at City Hall’s behest: a large new campus for a high school, a newish mall that includes a Whole Foods and a Starbucks. Their stations are squeezed between a dozen lanes of roaring motorway traffic. In the south passengers step out to exhaust fumes and noise. ![]() Men pace the carriages hawking green-and-white packets of cigarettes. Here the Red line runs outside, giving glimpses of a changing city: brick pagoda-roofs of Chinatown high walls of the White Sox baseball stadium warehouses and ex-factories of a former industrial zone. A pair of young men move to let an elderly passenger sit down. A woman accuses another of being “a crackhead”, provoking shrieks of laughter. He leaves at Roosevelt station, and a boisterous group steps in. He tells his own story of being assaulted when off-duty, and says he would deploy “a guard in every car” if he could.
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