Word: boulevards
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...time, between World War I and World War II, segregation concentrated all levels of black society in Grand Boulevard, and a thriving nightclub scene attracted both blacks and whites to hear Duke Ellington, the Mills Brothers and Cab Galloway. Growing up in Pennsylvania, Alfred L. Bishop, now a funeral director on 47th Street, used to listen on his radio to Earl ("Fatha") Hines broadcasting "from the beautiful Grand Terrace theater in Chicago, Illinois." A dreamy, romantic-sounding place...
White urbanites began moving there at about the time of the Great Fire of 1871, when the area, four miles south of the Loop, was still a prairie. The main street, then called Grand Boulevard, became a popular carriage route. It is still lined with great stone houses--most now disused or broken up into grimy cubicles--characterized by bow fronts, Greek columns, turreted towers, bay windows with pilasters, and beveled-glass fanlights. "The potential is so wonderful," a social worker remarks, driving down the boulevard, now called Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. She is talking about the architecture...
...Grand Boulevard now houses 54,000 people, almost all of them black and poor. Most are in high-rise projects on the western edge of the neighborhood. A four-year-old living on the dismal eleventh floor of one such building recently set fire to his brother's bed. "He wanted to move," his mother explains, "and he thought that if he burned the place down, we'd move." The fire was put out quickly; there is no money to move...
What kills the babies, most people agree, is Grand Boulevard itself, a problem that is not likely to be solved by technological heroism in the intensive-care nursery. It is easiest to blame the mothers. They are often teenagers who have got pregnant through carelessness and gone through the pregnancy in secret, with no prenatal care and little social pressure to eat right, say, or give up smoking. Some of the mothers are alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes...
Others see Grand Boulevard as en forcing a destructive life-style on its residents, if the word life-style can be applied to living with few jobs, a poor education, little money or food, no network of family or social support, no cultural emphasis on child rearing, and a resulting world view that is abjectly fatalistic...