By Ann Keating.
Note by the author: Rima Lunin Schultz and I have been working for six years on a manuscript entitled: In the Shadow of Jane Addams: Planning in a Working-Class Neighborhood, 1889-1963. We have encountered many interesting characters, including Florence Scala. Scala is famous for leading the unsuccessful fight against construction of the University of Illinois in the early 1960s (she was in favor of a Chicago campus but not the Near West Side location). Less well known was her strong connection to Hull-House and neighborhood planning efforts.
Florence Giovangelo Scala was born on September 17, 1918, to Italian immigrants Alex and Teresa (Scardepane) Giovangelo. She grew up with her younger brothers in an apartment above her parents’ tailor shop at 1030 W. Taylor on Chicago’s Near West Side. The Giovangelo children attended local public schools but also participated in programs at nearby Holy Guardian Angel Catholic Church and at Hull-House both before and after the 1935 death of Jane Addams. The settlement offered the siblings a place to go for sports, recreation, arts, and crafts activities. They particularly enjoyed theater productions under the direction of Edith de Nancrede and Eri Hulbert. In the early 1930s, Florence and her brother Ernie developed a close relationship with Hulbert, the grandnephew of Jane Addams. Scala remembered that they were “his kids,” and took many adventures with him.
On her high school graduation, Scala worked for the Federal Theater Project (WPA) at Hull-House, contributed to a local newspaper, and worked for the draft board. She took college classes, got married, and lived in the same building as her parents on Taylor Street just west of Hull-House. During and after World War II, Scala, her brother Ernie (after attending the University of Illinois), and a group of their neighbors saw the threats to their neighborhood from plans for major expressways and slum clearance. They found a staunch ally in Eri Hulbert who worked tirelessly to create the Near West Side Planning Board with the support of Hull-House. Scala remembered that Hulbert “torpedoed me into a big world of ideas—the search for knowledge and understanding of people. To me he was a teacher and a persistent pioneer in this new idea that the people themselves must participate in the planning of their own communities.”[1] [2]
While her brother took a paid position with the Near West Side Planning Board, Scala volunteered as secretary and treasurer of the group between 1949 and 1958. An inveterate dog walker, Scala often had a camera in hand, taking photographs of her changing neighborhood. Scala’s photographs became a critical part of the reframing of the neighborhood not as a slum, but as a vibrant working-class district that needed rehabilitation and improvements.[3] The Planning Board undertook a survey of the Near West Side. Anita Villarreal, a thirty-six-year-old mother of six and active voice in the local Mexican community, created a seven-foot map of the area, while Scala continued to take photographs “of the neighborhood, so that when we ha[d] our meetings, we could show these slides.” Driving the area streets in her large car, she took candid color shots of everyday life that showed a working-class neighborhood with manageable problems. She developed and framed fifty of these images to create an illustrated lecture about the Near West Side, which she delivered to dozens of groups around the neighborhood with her brother. The siblings were central to creating an alternative to the idea that the neighborhood was blighted.[4]
Scala’s photographs, Villareal’s map, and the raw survey data created a narrative to combat the idea that the whole neighborhood should be cleared. Instead, the Planning Board identified areas to be conserved, as well as some areas that would require slum clearance and redevelopment. That redevelopment could take several forms—private housing, public housing, industrial renewal, and commercial revitalization. Their ideas came together in the groundbreaking 1950 NWSPB plan where, for the first time, a working-class community had developed its own plan for rehabilitation and renewal.
What followed was nearly a decade of delays and disappointments with little forward movement on the 1950 Plan. Eri Hulbert died in 1955, the same year that Mayor Richard J. Daley began his long tenure at City Hall. Downtown interests had the ear of the new mayor, and they wanted new middle-class redevelopment to ring the central business district. They advocated the mass clearance of the working-class neighborhood around Hull-House. When the University of Illinois went looking for a Chicago location, Mayor Daley and those downtown interests endorsed a Near West Side location.
It is at this juncture, in 1961, that Florence Scala became a household name in Chicago. Her long years with the Planning Board and at Hull-House prepared her for the challenge ahead. Well-known in the Near West Side for her unswerving support of planning initiatives, her neighbors pressed her to become their spokesperson. Scala quickly helped organize the Harrison-Halsted Community Group (HHCG) to protest the proposed campus site.[5] She targeted the City Council and Mayor Daley in marches and sit-ins at City Hall that were well covered in local newspapers, radio, and emerging TV news. In 1963, she ran as an independent campaign for alderman; she criticized Chicago’s political “machine” and hoped to defend the interests of ordinary voters in her district. Scala endured ridicule, threats, and several bombing attempts, but remained outspoken. But her campaign was not successfully and on March 5, 1963, the Hull-House trustees accepted $875,000.00 from the City of Chicago for their Near West Side properties.
Scala, who had for long years been a part of the Hull-House community, was bitter when the settlement turned its back on its neighbors. With the closure of Hull-House and the opening of the University of Illinois campus, the Near West Side was irrevocably changed. It was no longer a working-class neighborhood centered on industrial sites, religious institutions, local parks, and Hull-House. The university now shaped who lived and worked there. Scala lived in the same building at 1030 W. Taylor Street until her death in 2007, but her working-class neighborhood was gone.
Dr. Ann Keating is the Dr. C. Frederick Toenniges Professor of History at North Central College. She is a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Chicago, and author of several books on Chicago’s buildings and development.
[1] Remarks by Florence Giovangelo Scala,” Eri Hulbert Memorial Meeting, Hull House Garden, May 19, 1955, pgs. 19-20, Eri Baker Hulbert III Papers, Box 1, Folder 39
[2]Sandro Corso, “Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Leader,” Italian Americana, 37, 2 (Summer 2019), 100-101; Eastwood, Near West Side Stories, 140–141; and Florence Scala interview transcript, 4, Folder 69, Box 4, Hull-House Oral History Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago. See also “More Unpublished Reminiscences Steven Giovangelo,” January 29, 2014, in possession of Rima Schultz.
[3]“Florence Scala, 47” in Studs Terkel, Division Street: America (Pantheon Books, 1967), 5.
[4]Florence Scala quoted in Eastwood, Near West Side Stories, 154; NWSPB executive committee meeting, January 26, 1950, Box 39, Hull House Collection. See also Sandro Corso, “Florence Scala: A Disowned Community Leader,” Italian Americana, 37, 2 (Summer 2019), 99-118.
[5]Scala in Eastman, Near West Side Stories, 154.
Cathy Moran Hajo is the Editor and Director of the Jane Addams Papers Project at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She is an experienced scholarly editor, having previously worked for over 25 years as Associate Editor at the Margaret Sanger Papers at New York University. Dr. Hajo received her Ph.D. in history from New York University in 2006, and is addition to her work on the Sanger Papers, published “Birth Control on Main Street, Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916-1940,” in 2010.
Her teaching interests include scholarly editing and digital history, and she currently teaches for the Institute for Editing Historical Documents, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. She teaches a digital history course at Ramapo College.