Further “urban renewal” projects and redlining displaced many other city dwellers and forced them into public housing a 1955 study found that such projects served the interests of wealthy businessmen and institutions to keep public housing out of their wards.Ĭabrini-Green, however, was supposed to be different from the others: an integrated, utopian community with affordable rent prices in the heart of the city, not far from Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. They would soon embark on an ambitious public housing development project that mostly consisted of extremely segregated high rises, pushing Black families-many recent migrants from the South-into a “Black belt” on the city’s South Side. In 1937, the Chicago Housing Authority was founded to reform these sorts of slums while also combating a severe housing crisis precipitated by the Great Depression. “There was a mythical quality and almost a Candyman-like aspect of the ways the violence and gangs were described in that time,” Ben Austen, a Chicago journalist who wrote the book High Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, says. The neighborhood soon became known as “Little Hell,” with frequent reports of mafia activity. In the 19th century, the neighborhood on the north fork of the Chicago River sat next to billowing, stinking gas refineries and factories, and became the landing place for waves of European immigrants searching for cheap housing in the city. When the Cabrini-Green housing projects started being built in the 1940s, the area’s reputation for violence was long established. In anticipation of the film’s release on August 27, TIME talked to filmmakers, historians and community members about the history of Cabrini-Green and Candyman’s role in its lore. “I didn’t want to do this approach of, ‘Oh, god, this terrible place where terrible things are happening, because these brutes are living here.’ This is a community that was chronically underserved for a very long time.” “The original film definitely fed into a fear of the Black community, and the Black man in particular,” DaCosta tells TIME. And when filmmaker Nia DaCosta was given a chance to create a sequel to Candyman, she strove to show a different side of the maligned projects to preserve the scariness of the original film while separating the monster from the community itself. For decades, local and national media told stories of murders, rapes, gangs, drugs and poverty run rampant, making it one of the most feared places in America.īut many of the residents who actually lived there felt differently: to them, Cabrini-Green wasn’t just a cesspool of immorality but also a tight-knit, family-oriented community that supported each other in the face of neglect, governmental corruption and police violence. Long before a man with a bloody hook tormented the alleys of Cabrini-Green in the 1992 film Candyman, the Chicago housing projects were understood by many to be a place of horror.
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