My mother’s family moved to Chicago from the South circa 1955; she came to Chicago for the first time that fall when she was on leave. Her family was living out on the west side, which was still predominantly working-class white then, but change was on the move.
The two things her parents quickly told her:
1.) The parks weren’t safe, especially Garfield Park. It was big, beautiful and tempting, but it wasn’t safe.
2.) The black neighborhood of the near west side (the old Maxwell Street/Near West Side) was slowly but steadily spreading west at about 3-4 blocks per summer. When she came to town the “color line” was at California Avenue (2800 west); from there west to Kedzie Avenue (3200 west) was a sort of no-mans land. Her parents told her that if she was on a CTA bus on Madison or Washington that broke down east of Kedzie, not to get off for ANYTHING until the replacement bus showed up.
When her parent’s neighborhood began to change (around 1961-2) things unraveled quickly. Street crime, noisy neighbors, vandalism, harassment etc. all shot up like a rocket. The owner of the upscale Graemere residence hotel overlooking Garfield Park was literally chased out of the park by a mob of black youths in the summer of 1962; he sold the hotel that fall. People felt threatened and got out of Dodge as fast as they could. A friend who grew up a few blocks west and south of there remembered much the same sequence of events; his area flipped within the summer of 1965.
A further thought...my father attended Illinois Institute of Technology in the early 1950s. IIT then consisted of two buildings surrounded by the Oakland neighborhood, which had been middle-upper class at the time IIT opened as the Armour Institute, but had since degraded into the heart of the south side “Black Belt”. His take was that he felt safe on campus, but it wasn’t a good idea to go wandering more than a block or two away from it. There was a large apartment complex (the Mecca Flats) nearby that was a known haven for drugs, prostitution and other problem types; everybody stayed well clear of it.
He also recalled that there was a remote entrance to the 35th Street “L” station from 33rd Street, employing a poorly-lit walkway that ran below the “L” structure at about the level of the garage rooftops or back porches. He said that, to use it safely after dark, you waited outside the entrance for several others to come along and then you all went over as a group, or you had to RUN the length of the walkway and watch for the hands that reached out from the rooftops to trip you.
Around 1958, my family temporarily moved out of the city and to a suburb of Chicago. Ten years later, our former neighborhood was a dangerous ghetto. The black residents were complaining that there was no swimming pool in their neighborhood for their kids to escape the heat. Also, there were rats in their apartments and they demanded that something be done about it. They claimed that the presence of the rats, and the lack of “something being done about it,” was “racism.” My mother wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper saying that her own kids had no swimming pool, and by the way, there were no rats in that neighborhood ten years prior, before the blacks moved in. The paper printed her letter, with her name, and I lived in fear for a while that angry blacks would look us up, come to our house and beat us up! Thankfully, that didn’t happen.