The Press: Chicago's Shame

Buried on an inside page, the Chicago Daily News three months ago ran a short, shocking story. "Rats chewed to death a nine-months-old girl," said the 90-word item, "as she lay in her crib in her West Side home [last night]." Few readers felt the impact of the story more than the News's Managing Editor Everett Norlander. Months before, he had planned a series on Chicago's 23 square miles of crawling, crumbling slums, abandoned the idea because he thought it was too big a job. "But I couldn't get that rat-bite case out of my head," said Norlander, "and we decided we couldn't hold off." Last week, after two months of intensive work by an eleven-man News task force led by Reporter Roy ("Mac") Fisher, 34, the News began a notable ten-part series on slums ("The City's Shame") that shocked Chicago.

Newsmen found that Chicago, long notorious for its slums, deserves its notoriety. As many as 1,000 people are crowded into buildings intended for 200. One landlord's monthly income from an apartment, which he had split up into living quarters for three families, had quintupled since 1942. On file with the city housing commission were 10,000 complaints about rats, bugs and other unhealthy conditions which "the city is doing nothing about"; 57 rat-bite cases were treated in the last six months alone. In rare cases where landlords were haled into court, three out of five got off free, at worst paid an average fine of $20.23.

"Pig Face." Reporter Fisher, a News staffer for the past seven years, found a family of four paying $52 a month for two rooms which he thought at first were unused coalbins. Amid the sagging stairways, falling ceilings and overflowing toilets, reporters discovered one child who had been nicknamed "Pig Face," after a rat bit off his nose. (Most families left the lights on all night in a vain effort to discourage rats.) Side by side, the News ran pictures of a building wrecked by the recent tornado and a Chicago tenement. Asked the caption: "Which was in the path of the tornado . . . which was in the path of slum blight in Chicago?"

The News task force sifted through thousands of titles to ferret out the own ers of the buildings, many hidden behind elaborate corporate dodges, and listed the names of "20 of Chicago's biggest slum-makers." One reporter, posing as a real-estate buyer looking for a building to buy, was promised that his investment would be doubled within four years because "practically nothing is ever spent to make repairs."

Fisher and his staff went after the city offices charged with enforcing housing regulations, found them loaded with do-nothing political appointees. "We don't hire them," said Building Commissioner Roy T. Christiansen. "They [i.e., the Democratic machine] send them to us." The city building officials, said Reporter Fisher, "walked to the gallows with smiles on their faces. Apparently it never occurred to them that we actually would go out to the slums to compare conditions with what the inspection reports represented them to be."