Gentrifying the Curse

I often call Chicago the combustion engine of capitalism. The city has served as a cesspool and trying ground for the material backbone of American market society from its settlement, perfectly orchestrating commodities trading, transportation and industry, machine party politics, and Ward Boss nepotism, while efficiently churning out hardcore discrimination through mortgage insurance redlining and lending segregation, gang-driven informal economies and police-driven violence (for at least 120 years), and parallel ideological and cultural movements from the origins of the skyscraper to the origins of social work. In some way, shape, or form these norms or institutions permeate life in the city to this day, so of course finance capitalism and neoliberalism have thrived in the city (perfectly sliding into pre-existing nepotistic structures), of course the mortgage crisis particularly devastated neighborhoods throughout the city, and obviously the drug war and militarization of policing would easily fit into the frameworks of violence forged between the Depression and the Great Society. Given the hard material circumstances that define the city, making it a force for American market society in a way that other large cities are not, it’s impossibly absurd to believe that one goat held sway over Lakeview for 70 years; in another sense, the goat curse was the perfect revenge of the working class, and those of us among the working class should mourn the loss of the goat much more thoroughly than the toss-aside the goat has received.

What often goes unstated about the racism inherent in mortgage redlining is that many ethnic groups were placed into property assessors’ professional books as unworthy of property investments. In Chicago, the predominant professional device that drove Federal mortgage insurance redlining indeed judged African-American borrowers more harshly than other ethnic groups, but they were also one of five total groups lumped together on the bottom-end of the “lending desirability” scale. Along with African-American discrimination, which fit readily into pre-existing patterns of brutal housing discrimination and slumming practices, Russian Jews, Southern Italians, Mexicans, and Greeks were viewed as groups that were fit for discrimination from Federal mortgage protections. What this practice essentially boiled down to was a mechanism that made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for many people among these groups to obtain mortgages for their homes (or to purchase new houses), therefore feeding a vicious cycle where people could not invest in their own neighborhoods and disrepair piled on top of itself (for generations, in some cases).

The institutional tool was so effective at discriminating against residents because realtors, mortgage lenders, and appraisers could always pass the blame on to someone else: realtors could say that they were just following the trends of lenders, lenders could say that they were just following appraisers’ judgment, and appraisers could just say that they were following realtors; but this works every way ’round, too, as realtors could blame appraising practices, appraisers could place the blame on lending practices, and lenders could say that realtors were the ones actually enacting discrimination on the ground. Chicago’s wicked history of segregation worked because a group of professional classes systematically discriminated against groups of people on racial and ethnic myths, and created a feedback loop where blame would circulate without interrupting extremely lucrative gains for these dreadful segregationist practices. In this environment, the audacity of an unprofessional business owner placing a curse on a professional baseball team is at once a quaint and a powerful image for the power of Chicago’s working class.

Let’s check back in on the #Cubs World Series odds: pic.twitter.com/5nZMMcwOug

— DeathToFlyingThings (@SpectiveWax) August 13, 2016

In this background, legend has it that the great founder of the Billy Goat Tavern, a Greek man named William “Billy Goat” Sianis that traveled Chicago with his Billy Goat, was denied entrance to a Cubs World Series game against the Detroit Tigers. Allegedly, Mr. Wrigley himself denied entrance to the goat, and when this official judgment came from the Cubs ownership, a curse was placed on the Cubs: the Cubs were never to win again, so long as the goat was denied entry to Wrigley Field.

Whether or not this story is real, it is the perfect type of myth to gain steam, for it places so many tensions within our society in one locale.

• We have the gritty Greek entrepreneur, undoubtedly representing the bootstrapping mentality of Chicago immigrants that simultaneously built much of the city’s infrastructure while facing and fostering immense ethnic strife amidst conditions of unprecedented immigration and diversity;
• We have the aloof club owner, representing a class of well-minded professionals who proceed only in the name of hygiene or cleanliness or good taste, and never in the way of (“direct”) discrimination, in order to ensure favorable grounds for profit;
• We have the national pastime, itself a microcosm of social fights that are difficult to play out in the political stage, and so can be represented within the cutthroat bounds of the foul lines (this is not simply a throwaway line, as fights about integration, immigration, Black Nationalism, professionalism, and labor organization (just to name a few) have all found an audience at the ballpark);
• and, We have magical thinking, in the form of a curse, which is an extremely effective locale for connecting incommensurable fears, unknown realities, hopes for immortality or salvation, and other inexplicable phenomena.

So it went: the Billy Goat was barred from entry at Wrigley Field, and the Cubs simultaneously failed to produce a World Series winner for decades. These lines are often seen as coincidental, but it should be noted that the curse has been systematically dismantled for at least 50 years as Chicago developed into an entirely different city than the locale in which the curse was initially placed.

Gentrification is a buzzword, which means that it is often used in ways that completely voids its explanatory power. In its most proper sense, gentrification is a phenomenon of class displacement, whereby capital investment and property value cycles / mechanisms displace poorer or working class people in favor of middle class or upper class development. The difficult of applying the term in the USA — for it was originally a British term — is that race and ethnicity are so thoroughly mixed with class that it is difficult to describe the co-extension of discrimination across (or within) those axes. Many people also mistakenly discuss gentrification as a contemporary phenomenon, ignoring previous cycles of capital investment that gentrified neighborhoods long ago (the Lower East Side in early 1980s New York, many Urban Renewal programs in the 1960s and 1970s, and Chicago’s own Lakeview neighborhood in the 1970s). The Chicago Cubs make their home in one of the city’s longest tenured gentrified Community Areas.

In this regard, Wrigley Field itself is a monument within one of Chicago’s most thoroughly gentrified neighborhoods, as it was previously home to one instantiation of the city’s Latinx neighborhood migration, transient populations, punk scene, and (depending on your definition), not far from the city’s hippie high street. By the time lights were installed at Wrigley Field in the 1980s, the neighborhood arguably represented entirely different class interests than the previous generation of Cubs fans. In this sense, the alleged 1984 and 1969 “chokes” by the Cubs are common only through the uniform and basic stadium, and not the neighborhood, the direct means for a fanbase at Wrigley Field. The development continues through the new Cubs investment in the area, arguably destroying any semblance that Lakeview is a city neighborhood and not a consumerism destination, a city Civic Center, hotel locale, and big box shopping center. Ironically, aspects of the Wrigleyville bar scene that were the very focal point of cheering Cubs fans during the FOX World Series broadcast may be displaced to accommodate the new development in the neighborhood, proving that capital has neither nostalgia nor tact when it comes to property. Given $250 cover charges alongside thousands-of-dollars secondary market for game tickets, of course, generations of Cubs fans — and Chicago working class baseball diehards in general — were automatically priced out of the proceedings.

There is no better team to kick off this destruction of Wrigleyville than the Theo Epstein Cubs. Epstein himself is arguably the poster boy of the “hire from the Ivy League” explosion that now defines MLB analytical practices (and, incidentally, the league’s executive diversity problems, too). The Cubs were one of arguably two teams (the Astros being the other) to perfect the austerity/scorched-earth rebuild model, where as many MLB contracts as possible are shed or played out on noncompetitive skeleton rosters. This austerity practice necessitates a shift toward low-cost acquisitions, be they through trade or draft, although the big market Cubs are in quite a different position than many other clubs (like the Brewers, for example) because they can truncate this stage of the rebuild by spending obscene amounts of revenue once they are close to contending. From 2015-present, the Cubs signed at least $460 million in guaranteed free agency contracts to assemble their World Series club, which is obviously quite a different path than a club such as Tampa, Pittsburgh, or, again, Milwaukee can take.

If front office diversity is lacking, the Cubs exemplify on-field diversity with these signings and their amateur draft picks or organizational trades, making this combination of wealth, austerity, and real estate development a perfect match for the current neoliberal politics that play in Chicago. Diversity here is itself a buzzword, devoid from class interests or the hard work that is required for workforce development (the type of development that, for example, would repopulate MLB’s executive ranks with something other than white males from elite educational institutes). The rooftops are gone, ending a particularly brilliant form of bootstrapping that only Chicago could create; some of the bars will be gone; when one steps off the L at Addison in five years, while “the dynasty Cubs” stomp their competition, one might reasonably question whether they are in Rosemont or Chicago — a homogeneous outcome that only economic development could create.

The economic development alone at Addison and Clark did not kill the curse; the steady influx of capital into Lakeview, forcing out lower or middle class residents, did not kill the curse; not even the destruction of Greektown, or Pilsen, or the West Loop, or Cabrini Green killed the curse on their own. Rather, a steady march across the city developed the class displacement that rendered magical thinking highly unnecessary: professional classes, upscale residents, rising property values, and ethnically homogenous neighborhoods now immediately adjacent to (and supporting) the Cubs have no need for a curse. Only a working class person would curse a professional endeavor: why would anyone from the professional class believe in a curse against their neighborhood’s developing force? Even by the 1990s, one could argue that the curse had no hold over the Cubs; the alleged 2003 “choke” was nothing more than an inconvenient fact. Rather, these development actions in concert killed the curse, insofar as they killed the classic Cubs fan, and the chance at a Chicago working class resident to steer the destiny of one of their professional industries.

I have no doubt in my mind that the curse was real in 1945. A businessman dreamt a brilliant promotional scheme, what one might today call an “innovation” in tech language, and when that scheme was thwarted by the Cubs ownership class, the working fanbase had their revenge (in some way, I imagine the rooftop owners can relate). For we are the lovable losers, not the Cubs: facing informal and formal housing discrimination, facing government-backed lending discrimination, facing ethnic and racial discrimination and strife, fighting a never-ending battle against a political machine, trying to squeeze whatever equitable gains we can find out of the Ward Boss, all while trying to find a reasonably priced apartment that’s close enough to the L that we don’t need to find a new job along with it.

We are the lovable losers, the working class of Chicago, and it is not difficult to believe that at one point in time, around the end of the second World War, that we would have had the power to steer the course of a professional baseball team. But those times have passed: labor organization and professionalization within the MLB have corresponded with skyrocketing revenue; new ballparks use ideological design to harken back to those magical curse-laden days while the material finance is held on the backs of taxpayers; and ownership groups themselves migrated to new financial backgrounds that deeply respected and understood the power of Ivy League analytics, creating a new professional orthodoxy among the game’s executive ranks.

So too, in Chicago, mortgage segregation, Urban Renewal “slum clearance,” and the gentrification of Lakeview assembled to slowly but surely end the curse. Any power for a working class businessman to curse a professional sports team at their stadium was displaced. There was no curse. The redevelopment of Addison and Clark perfectly corresponds to this new Cubs team, their front office, and arguably with many of the affluent fans who follow the team (for, when the working class no longer lives adjacent to your stadium, you no longer need establishments to serve them). Yet the need for magical thinking is not entirely erased, but bounced back once more to those resilient Chicago workers who now must use it to imagine a better future in the city. The Cubs won, they are an elite, top market MLB team; but now we must ask whether there is room in Chicago for lovable losers.

Background Reading:

Ronald F. Ferguson and William T. Dickens (Ed.), Urban Problems and Community Development. (Brookings Institution Press, 1999).

Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. (Wiley-Blackwell, many editions [Third, 2002]).

Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America. (Picador, 2010).

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. (Routledge, 1996).

Nathalie P. Voorhees Center. Gentrification Index and Report. http://www.voorheescenter.com/gentrification-index