What The West Side Lost

Brach’s candy corn. Whoppers' Malted Milk Balls. Lincoln Logs. Pinball machines. Electric organs. Televisions and radios. Rock-Ola jukeboxes. Schwinn bicycles. It wasn’t so long ago that Chicago was the premier supplier of these goods to the world.

In fact, many residents in Chicago’s West Side neighborhoods could proudly boast that theirs were the hands that made them. And in return, the trades provided well for them.

“The time that I spent at Brach’s, it was a good place to work,” said Charles Miller, who worked 13 years at the candy manufacturing complex where the Austin, Humboldt Park and West Garfield Park neighborhoods meet. “[There were] plenty of jobs, neighborhood jobs. I think I made more money there than any other place I ever worked since I’ve been in the city.”

But in 2003, after years of staffing cuts, Brach’s closed its sprawling complex at 401 N. Cicero Ave., where about 3,500 worked in the late 1980s. Brach’s was a holdout in a cascade of West Side manufacturing losses that started decades earlier.

In 1985, toy manufacturer Hasbro closed its Playskool factory on Augusta Boulevard, which made Lincoln Logs, to move production to Massachusetts. In 1983, Schwinn closed its Kildare Avenue bicycle factory in favor of labor in other parts of the U.S. and abroad. In 1993, Leaf Brands candy company shuttered its Cicero Avenue branch, which had been churning out Whoppers. There were many others, including Zenith and Helene Curtis.

No single factor explains why large-scale manufacturing faded in Chicago. But the lasting effect on neighborhoods that once closely identified with those companies can still be felt decades after the equipment was removed and the doors were locked. In these West Side neighborhoods, many of them now majority-black, residents today talk about issues that may not seem directly related to the loss of manufacturing jobs: crime; poor housing; the lack of educational opportunities to prepare children for real-world jobs.

But when asked where recovery may begin for some of these neighborhoods, the answer often turns back to what manufacturing once provided here: jobs.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

Malcolm Crawford grew up in a public housing development on Chicago’s Near West Side. But he spent a lot of time in neighborhoods like Austin, where nearly all his extended family lived. Crawford said several of his uncles worked in factories that made everything from candy to cameras, and he was amazed when he visited their homes.

“They all had houses, and they all had two-flat buildings where family members stayed,” Crawford said. “And it was just a really easy time, because people had money and people were buying property.”

Crawford said the neighborhood was stable. Families knew each other and looked out for each other’s children. And there was a sense of upward mobility.

“I always heard that jobs was plentiful, and that you could quit a job on this side of the street and go across the street and get hired,” he said. “For a lot of African American men, it was an opportunity for them to take care of their families.”

In 1960, manufacturing employed more than half a million workers in Chicago and accounted for more than one third of jobs held by city residents. In several communities, including the far southeast ones of Hegewisch and East Side that were home to steel mills, the sector employed more than half of all working residents. But by 2017, fewer than 9 percent of Chicagoans were working in manufacturing. 

The sector’s decline hit nearly every corner of Chicago, but areas that were majority African American in 1960 suffered the worst blow. Thirteen of the 15 community areas that were majority black in 1960 have experienced greater percentage losses of manufacturing jobs than the city has overall.

Jacqueline Reed watched as stability eroded in neighborhoods like North Lawndale and East Garfield Park, which were majority black in 1960. Her young family moved into the nearby Austin neighborhood in 1967, where she briefly worked at Leaf Brands candy company and her husband took a well-paying job in construction. 

“In the ’60s you had real stability on these blocks. … You had the Lighthalls, you had the McGarys, you had different Smiths, the Williams, the Johnsons and the Dixons,” Reed said. “All of these were stable families on these blocks.”

But by 1988, when she established the Westside Health Authority, a nonprofit community development agency, Reed said things had changed. The once-plentiful jobs had evaporated, and many middle-class, black families had fled to suburbs like Oak Park, Evanston and Skokie. Reed said that in the place of families, many households were now led by single moms caring for their children while struggling to make ends meet.

“I think that you have a lot more hopelessness on the blocks,” she said. “You don’t have the Smiths, the Johnsons, the Williams.”

The future

When West Side residents reflect on what they’d like to see in their communities, the number and scale of the issues might sound overwhelming. Reed said people often talk about better housing, lower crime and more quality schools. But often, they come to the same conclusion about where to start: bringing more well-paying jobs into their neighborhoods.

Teresa Cordova, director of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said manufacturing still presents the greatest opportunity for job growth.

“The kind of manufacturing that was here probably isn’t coming back,” Cordova said. “But there’s new kinds of manufacturing that’s occurring. There’s something that we now refer to as precision manufacturing, or advanced manufacturing.”

Research from Cordova’s institute and The Century Foundation, a think tank based in New York City, has upended the notion that manufacturing is dead in the Chicago region. They found a 2:1 ratio of job postings to hires. Additionally, they estimated as many as 16,000 front-line manufacturing positions, requiring no more than a high school diploma, were unfilled. Cordova said that if an employer were to locate in a neighborhood with such an available workforce, the overall economic boon to the community could extend far beyond just those who are directly hired.

“Manufacturing jobs [are] a big multiplier,” Cordova said. “What it means is that for every job that you generate, it generates that many more jobs.”

According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, every manufacturing job can spur up to seven additional jobs. It’s among the highest multipliers of any industry, including health care, retail and transportation and warehousing.

But Cordova said wooing those manufacturers into disinvested neighborhoods is not enough. She said there needs to be new thinking about the social contract they have with the communities where they locate.

“This is an opportunity, in some ways, to do it differently,” Cordova said.

She said many of the plants on the West and South sides left behind brownfields, contaminated by toxic materials, with which residents have had to live. In several cases, steel mills on the South Side defaulted on their pension obligations, leaving longtime workers with just a fraction of the financial security they had expected. 

“There was no accountability that they had towards not only their workers but also towards the public as a whole,” Cordova said.

This time around, Cordova said, local communities and governments can work with employers who are desperate to fill manufacturing positions to create better, more sustainable outcomes. She said they can set standards for environmental impact, local hiring expectations and even cooperative ownership structures.

Cordova points overseas to the Basque country, a region in Spain, where the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation employs tens of thousands of worker-owners and has helped that region remain relatively stable even as Spain’s economy has faltered.

“It’s happening anyway,” Cordova said. “The only real question here is, does Chicago want to be part of it?”

For Reed, jobs are the first ingredient in restoring the stability and social cohesion that she remembers on the West Side. But it is not the sole ingredient.

“People need to have a vision and see a vision — even if it’s not theirs — that they can buy into, and people need to have a sense of power,” Reed said. “Something that they feel like they can contribute to building in their own community.”

Odette Yousef is a WBEZ reporter on the Race, Class and Communities desk. Follow her @oyousef.