Word: bridgeporter
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Reggie Miller, 15, has been studying the rules ever since his family became one of the few black families to move to Bridgeport in 1994. Even so, he has been spit upon, chased, beaten up "dozens of times," called "nigger" and had a beer bottle broken over his head. "I feel like we don't belong in our own home," he says. Which seems fine by those whites in Bridgeport whose greatest fear is encroachment from the Stateway projects, part of a stretch of high-rise ghettos on Chicago's South Side where the porches are caged in steel mesh...
...those who live there, Bridgeport is a close-knit working-class neighborhood redolent of the 1950s. Plaster madonnas adorn people's front lawns, plastic Easter bunnies perch in picture windows at this time of year, and on Sundays families attend Mass at the Irish, Italian and Croatian churches where their grandparents were married. Bridgeport is a place where one can still see precinct captains and aldermen of the 11th Ward drinking at Schaller's Pump, and where sauerkraut soup is still served at a diner not far from the home of Chicago's legendary Boss, Richard J. Daley...
This is nothing new for a neighborhood where Irish and German gangs fought pitched battles in the streets during the 1850s. But the intolerance has roots in the present as well as the past. Since 1980, when low real estate prices began drawing Chinese and Mexicans into Bridgeport, the ethnic texture of the place has changed dramatically. Today Halsted Street, Bridgeport's commercial artery, is a bustling carnival of whites, Mexicans, Asians and blacks who mingle in the bakeries, the grocery stores and the luncheonettes...
...Bridgeport whites began to feel abandoned when Mayor Daley departed the family seat in 1993 and purchased a new home on the city's tony South Loop. "You can feel a lot of fear going through the neighborhood," says Dominic A. Pacyga, a historian at Columbia College who grew up near Bridgeport. "People say to themselves, 'Is this another nail in the coffin?' They feel that it's not home anymore...
...steely glares, selective ticketing of cars, storekeepers who follow shoppers from aisle to aisle--and in more brutal fashion: racial epithets, trash thrown on lawns, windows shattered and beatings of the sort administered to Lenard Clark. "Here the No. 1 issue is color," says Curly Cohen, director of the Bridgeport Volunteer Center. "If you don't learn the rules fast, you could be dead...