Yes, the Chicago Police Department has a blog. “Checkerboard Chat: Of the Police…By the Police…For the Police” makes for addictive reading, especially if you happen to be obsessed with cop-speak and police procedural dramas. We scrolled through entries on “Decoy mannequins rigged to explode” and a “Wolfpack mission” and found this snippet on a drug bust at the Ida B. Wells Homes in the 500 block of East Browning Avenue.
We can’t say we know the whole story on life inside the Wells Homes these days, but this report squares with our snapshot impression of the blocks just northeast of King Drive and Pershing Road, where a few battered low-rises at the Wells Homes are still occupied. On a recent weekday afternoon, a disheveled man stumbled through one of the trash-strewn yards towards our car, shouting incoherently, and a clutch of young men stood in an alley, passing a bottle in a paper bag. “We didn’t do it!” one of them called out again and again.
It seems like another world just a few blocks east along Pershing Road at The Arches at Oakwood Shores, the massive mixed-income development replacing the Ida B. Wells, Madden Park and Clarence Darrow Homes as part of the CHA’s Plan for Transformation. We saw two well-dressed women stroll down a sidewalk past pristine new apartment buildings with landscaped yards, a well-scrubbed child wearing a pink and purple backpack in tow. One of the women pulled out a set of keys from a green leather handbag and opened a door, smiling and beckoning the others inside.