In 1969, you actually seen grass on the ground, you actually seen flowers, you know they had
a flower bed, Easter came, we had Easter hunts.
In 1969, families, we would always like to see us as family.
If you stayed on the field floor, you was part of the family in 1850.
I always lived in CHL, I was born and raised there and I'm still there, so.
Easter came, lived in Chicago house in 1969, we had seven of us, my mom had seven separate.
So we moved in CHL on our emergency, so when I first seen it, I thought it was like living
in a condo on a lake shore drive, it was nice, grass everywhere, building nice and clean,
but it just had galleries.
So most of my family has moved away, it's only like still me and one cousin that is still
presently an Abla, but we love it, they love it, they come back all the time.
The building was a 15 story building, it had two elevators in it and you were not allowed
to be loitering in the lobby or if you had kids and they went outside, kids were not allowed
to be outside, not little kids, without an adult supervision.
When my mom came from Mississippi, they started finding jobs there and they moved us up here
and that's the first time I've seen a snowflake and I was like, wow, my dad made homemade
ice cream out of snow.
Everybody was family, it was a place where you can leave your doors unlocked at night
and wouldn't worry about anyone coming in on you, kids could go outside and play freely,
very clean and everyone knew everybody, everyone looked out for everybody, it was like a village
raising kids.
It was like a village raising kids.
It was like a village raising kids.
It was like a village raising kids.
I always went back around the building, you know, check on the people, hang out with the
people, but I got so that you couldn't even do that no more because by that time the crack
cocaine had set in real bad and where it was in the past, we wouldn't allow nobody to
sell them drugs in our building but when the crack cocaine came on, it set the younger
guys that didn't have no respect for the older guys and everything started getting wild.
Every time you go to the building, you hear about somebody's son that got killed.
I just moved back, I was out of here from 1980 to actually 2009, so I just moved back.
I miss being here because this was what I called my home and the surrounding is different.
The kids nowadays growing up, they never had a chance to be kids.
When we was growing up, we had a chance to build kids, play baseball, go to the park
with our parents, see life through our parents.
But these kids now, they, parents not teaching them life and they see life through them doing
what they doing, drugs, no education, because they didn't have it.
So the kids is not having a chance to be a kid because they too big to racing up kids.
The parents are the kids now.
That was the last building to be tore down.
I was the last person to leave the building.
When I moved to the annex, it was supposed to be in a temporary mood, but something got
wrong with the pipes or whatever, so they had to move us out.
And they was moving everybody, and I was on the fourth floor, I don't know how I became
the last person, but I was the last one, five o'clock in the morning, being moved out of
the building.
I had a chance to get to know the building better.
I used to ride the red line train, you know, going somewhere, you knew you were on a soft
sand once you saw a state way in Robert Taylor, and now that it's gone, that side of the city
looks so naked without those buildings, just, you know, not just because it was a good place,
it was just, you were so used to seeing that, riding down the expressway or riding the train
that way.
But people need to know that it was good people in public housing, you know, it's still a
lot of good people over there in the history of it, the history of the public housing.
But it was not a bad place, and, you know, good things happened there.
