The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood

by Carlo Rotella

An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day—and unmakes itself, too. Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it’s also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood?

 

In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents’ deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there.

 

Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.

 

Genres: Nonfiction

296 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 26, 2019

Reviews

[Paris Bezanis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered this book in essay form, as an excerpt on walking a neighborhood extracted for some literary non fic publication. I feel as if that format (and length) is a more useful mode for the ideas of this book, which flow between personal recollection/reflection and broader step backs of sociological analysis attempting to pull apart the complexities of race and class—based pressures in American urban neighborhoods. I found the characters of South Shore interesting and highly illustrative of the concepts touched on in the text—ideas about complicated neighborliness, middle class respectability, the relationship between race and class, etc. i was also engrossed by the analytical portions of a particular few chapters including Limited Liability, and Lost Cities. I would recommend those as chunks that can be read stand alone and communicate a lot of the broad strokes of the book.

I was less motivated by some of the lengthy sections of personal recollection and reflection. I understand the purpose of such sections in the structure of the book to help illustrate how neighborhood in time and place has shaped an individual, but they often felt too much like a memoir I didn’t sign up to read. Or the musings of an individual thinking through for the first time their own past (of course valid and interesting, but not what I was looking for in this book). The memories often featured long lists of references I also simply didn’t quite understand as a child of a much later era. This meant some of the implications of such references undoubtedly went missed or were flattened to a categorical level (ie music from the 70s).

Overall, I enjoyed this book and think it is a worthwhile read, especially if you have an interest in the place of Chicago or South Shore. Rotella has lovely prose and he takes pains in this book to make crafty and elegant sentences, which makes reading this book fun from a writerly point of view.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book is actually a series of essays, and although Rotella "pulls out" the personal reflections from most of sociology in the first half in order to try and write two overlapping stories, in the second half they start to blend, especially in the final chapter about "Lost Cities", which is really the section that made me think perhaps the book would feel more coherent if it weren't trying to be coherent. I could easily edit this into series of essays on the meaning of neighborhood to different people, past and present, influenced by race and class, efficacy of engagement, approaches to safety, relationships to physical space. Of course these things are all emeshed together, and Rotella is trying to pull them gently apart, which still leaves me a bit tangled.

My bottom line sense of conclusions from this work is that class trumps race and is a highly conservative force, which idealistic leftist organizers with hipster taste cannot mobilize because the middle class does not share their upper-class vision of neighborhood boutiques and cafes with $10 coffees, and who wants to walk around when you can drive to the mall? In the next change over the black middle class will move to the suburbs for the privacy and security they seek but are embattled to achieve in South Shore, and the upper class suburban raised kids who are bored and want to be back in the city with boutiques and a night life and a street life will gentrify these areas again, probably back to mostly white, although Rotello's last scene with the black family who has fixed up the house he grew up in gives some hope for integration. I see this re-gentrification of the city happening along the waterfront neighborhoods and those with nice victorian housing stock in Baltimore. This city is "coming back" in select neighborhoods with better shops and improved safety. But for who? Not those who lived there when it was worse. None of it solves the problems of poverty and un-employment which overwhelmed the working class with the closure of the steel mills and the end of the industrial age, and which just gets displaced again into some other neighborhood, ever more concentrated and entrapping.

[Carla Williams-Namboodiri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Talk of crime and gangsters is nothing new on Chicago’s South Side. Yet author Carlo Rotella touches on a broad range of aspects within the community and its future in The World is Always Coming to an End. His long essays detail the impact on a community where we both came of age. Sad turmoil has spilled into the brilliant homes designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Charles Eliot and Calvert Vaux. Some spots remain shuttered after deaths of longtime neighbors. Others face routine break-ins. Nonetheless, community engagement and problem solving steer an engaging narrative.
The Jackson Highlands, the South Shore neighborhood of middle class splendor, shares aspects of lives both safe and wild. Threats of unfettered drug dealers and gangs hound the neighborhood's virtue. Families lock their children in at home rather than allowing play until the street lights come on. My aunt and family friends still live this story along Cregier Street, Jeffrey Boulevard and elsewhere. They, too, share routine concerns about misfits, thieves and gangs. Many hope housing for well-to-do scholars and strivers will soon mix well with urban renewal tied to Barack Obama’s Presidential library.

In part, Rotella debunks critics who see a community in decline. He draws on the possibility of doing and being better off, perhaps with the footprint of Obama's vision and Arnie Duncan’s hands on the wheel. Key developments in South Shore include renewed Section 8 housing and community organizations such as South Shore Rising and Annie B. Jones Community Services. Even so, smaller voices point out the entrenched impact of an “element” of the impoverished unable to flourish. While things sometimes do fall apart, much can be remade with fine housing, quality schools and teamwork.

This book reminded me of the tensions found in There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America by William Julius Wilson and Richard Taub during the early 2000s. Although less direct in its engagement with community reformers, the attention to class differentiation and race is a valuable one.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Its hard to know where to start. This is a highly personalized ethnography of a Chicago neighborhood that has experienced some major challenges. At the same time, the author integrates a highly personal perspective -- he basically grew up in this neighborhood. He is not an anthropologist but a professor of Engish, American Studies and Journalism. He integrates a variety of literary references and personal memories into this study.

He had an interesting personal story. His white parents moved into the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago at the same time that white were fleeing in massive numbers. But as he explains -- his parents saw worse in Europe and they mostly just focused on building their lives.

In some respects the author sees what happened to South Shore as a reflection to what is happening in the broader society as the middle class becomes hollowed out and the haves create the agenda while the have nots feel ignored and believe that they are being screwed. In South Shore the haves and have nots live in closer proximity to one another than they do in many other places. The author asks is the source of problems -- race or class. He sees rampant individualism as the middle class retreats to their well protected homes. But he also sees race as impacting the course of events.

[Thomas Radigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book tells of Chicago's South Shore neighborhood and how it has changed over the decades, with it being Irish, then Jewish, then black, then potentially becoming gentrified again. The book explains why this particular neighborhood changed the way it did, but also says the truth about race-namely that there are not only economic but generational differences between blacks, and how a lot of neighborhoods end up with people in their homes essentially sealing themself off from neighbors and having their lives elsewhere. A lot of myths about race are also exploded, namely the fact that blacks' major gripe against the police is less brutality than the fact that they are not doing enough to protect them. Also that street gangs themselves have changed over generations, from being self-protective organizations to drug dealers to mere irritating troublemakers. Except a few surprises here.

[Juli!~ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part memoir, part sociographic and ethnographic. I thought this was touching and thought provoking. I thought the chapter on the community of limited liability was really interesting - if the neighborhood wasn't providing then people shift focus to other voluntary associations. "A neighborhood is a cause for which you can feel great passion but will almost sell out if you're pushed hard enough at the right time" and how that aligns with the successes and failures south shore community organizers have had.

[Colin Asher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have long been a fan of Rotella's work, and this new title is a reminder why. It's both academically rigorous and deeply felt--a blend of journalism, memoir, and sociological investigation that reads smoothly all the way through and manages to add nuance to current discussions about gentrification and displacement without getting bogged down by its source material or sounding pedantic.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and consistently interesting, The World Is Always Coming to an End illuminates not only the history and present day of a fascinating neighborhood in Chicago, but makes the reader reflect on notions of neighborhood, home, social change, and the way we grow into our lives through where we live.

[Thomas P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this book (I bought it at the Printers' Row Book Fair in Chicago last September) seemed to ramble off topic at times, it was still a well-written and researched first-hand account about the evolvement, environment, and people of Chicago's South Shore neighborhood....the map of the South Shore area at the beginning of the book was a nice touch

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was both informational and full of personal perspective from the author. I didn't know anything about the South Shore neighborhood in Chicago and now I feel like I know A LOT more. It's interesting that the author focused more on class divides instead of racial divides, and I appreciated his perspective on how there is no sense of community from the people living in the South shore now.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a slow read because it was so dense - nothing in here was filler. It was both a personal narrative about place and home and a story of a neighborhood.

[Christian Belanger]

The big scoop from the acknowledgments section: Beryl Satter is writing a book about the South Shore Bank.