When America made half the steel in the world, half the steel
in America was made here.
Now the smokestack industries aren't even scrap yards because nobody wants the scrap.
They're just piles of junk, heaps of jaw-breaking toffee for giants.
The abstract, formless forms of former glory.
You would expect a city that had lost so much to be ready for the scrapheap itself.
But this is Chicago.
The world's most famous unknown city looks even taller than it should
because the surroundings are so flat.
The lake is flat and goes right on out of sight like an inland sea.
The land is flat north into Canada, south into the deep middle west,
and west, all the way to the Rockies.
Launched from this infinity of flatness, the buildings look taller
than anywhere else in the world and some of them
are the tallest in the world anyway.
Chicago was where skyscrapers were invented and they still look
better here than anywhere else.
With nothing to hem them in,
they don't look as if they went up because they couldn't spread out.
They look as if they went up because they felt like it.
Hardly anybody who doesn't live in Chicago knows what it's got.
Certainly I didn't.
I knew about the elevated railway and the famous downtown loop it runs
around, but I didn't know that the stuttering contraption
rattled through a business district so new, so clear,
so classy, so glassy.
The old Chicago burned down in 1870.
It wasn't very old to start with, and there wasn't much of it then.
So really the whole place, history included, has been around
for not much more than a century.
The visitor can be forgiven for assuming that the few things
he has heard about were all that ever happened.
Trains in the sky, stockyards and steel mills, Italian gangsters
and Irish politicians.
The first sustained nuclear chain reaction and the last gasp
of youthful innocence when Mayor Daley's police hit flower power
on the head at the Democratic Convention in 1968.
When Al Capone was running Chicago, he had people killed.
When Mayor Daley was running Chicago, he didn't need to.
Corruption was king, or so the story went.
So, how did that sleazy Chicago turn into this sleek one?
With stunning new buildings going up between stunning new buildings,
as if the city were racing itself skywards.
Chicago has the tallest building in the world, but like Everest,
it doesn't stand out because the buildings around it are tall too.
Chicago is the architect's adventure playground.
The skyscrapers have become cloud punchers.
They draw down the stratosphere like syringes.
Some of them look ready to take off like crystal spaceships
with a cargo of conditioned air.
Even the one new building that just sits there
looks like a lost Martian flying saucer that has run out of fuel.
It's the Illinois Center, which, although it doesn't look like a skyscraper,
actually is a skyscraper taken to a new evolutionary stage.
A lattice bubble in which the visitor wanders bewildered,
vainly looking for the building.
The original idea of the skyscraper was that the steel frame would take the load and leave the curtain walls
free to do nothing except keep out the weather.
In the Illinois Center, the steel frame has become the curtain walls
and there is almost nothing inside except space.
In its first summer, the building's workforce was microwaved when the air conditioning didn't work,
but there was only one suicide from the top of the atrium.
Though he hit the bull's-eye with tactful accuracy,
he failed to set a trend because despair just doesn't fit the mood of downtown Chicago.
The tall buildings might look like science fiction,
but the people aren't robots.
At ground level, the city is on the human scale.
Spick and span like Disneyland, it makes you think twice
about the standard idea of private affluence and public squalor.
It's got streets you could eat your dinner off.
May I try the grapes? Sure, how do you like them...
MAN ON LOUD-HAILER: Be righteous.
Everybody ought to want to be righteous...
There was a man announcing the end of civilisation,
but I couldn't believe he'd pick the right spot for it to happen.
MAN CONTINUES MUSIC PLAYS
MAN SINGS
If this was urban anguish, it looked like subsidised theatre.
HE BEATBOXES
If these were the poor, they looked prosperous.
Where does the money come from?
It comes from money.
Chicago used to get rich from making things.
Now, it gets richer by making deals.
The Board of Trade is where the real action is now.
The big money isn't in livestock, it's in stocks and shares.
All the grain and gold that will never come to Chicago,
that will change hands far away on the basis of agreements reached here.
As a trading floor, Chicago is up there with London and Tokyo.
The world's stock market crisis of October 1987 must have looked
like a riot here because this was just a quiet working day.
How the working day works, however, is impossible to figure out without a guide.
Tom Shouf made things less obscure.
So what happens? The order comes in and then you trade in here, right?
This is a price-seeking function. Oh, a price-seeking function?
A price-seeking function - an order may come in to buy 100,000 or a million.
An order could come in to sell 100,000 or a million bushels.
And the price is established by open outcry.
Open outcry - it sounds like it!
We have... TOM CHUCKLES
We have many people bidding, many people offering.
You'll notice that we use our hands.
If I want to sell something, I turn my palms out.
All right. If I want to buy something, I'd turn my palms in.
Right - selling, buying.
The deal having been struck by open outcry,
I was not surprised to see it written down.
I was surprised to see it thrown away.
The order is generally dropped on the steps of the pit, believe it or not.
And our runners will go around and look, as you can see over here,
there are orders laying there that have been executed.
I'll show you one.
This is an order here.
It's a spread order - buying 10 November, selling 10 January beans.
This is the price.
This is who the other side of the trade was made with.
Again, that's the price and that's the executing broker.
Now, this order will be left there.
And a runner from this clearing house, which happens to be Refco,
will come around, pick up the order, take it back to the phone,
call the customer, give him the endorsement,
and then this is punched up on a computer.
What happens if it gets cleared away with the rubbish?
That's called an error!
What's the most you've ever lost in a day?
Close to several million dollars. Really? Yes.
It's a privilege to be standing next to you!
In fact, I later learned,
a lot of the people I was looking at were multi-millionaires.
They didn't really need to be down here.
They could have sent someone else, but they were enjoying themselves.
And that's what makes Chicago hard to beat - in this field, as in many others.
JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS
After winning or losing a few billion dollars in open outcry,
the wheeler dealers repair to Andy's and listened to mainstream jazz while they blend undetectably
among ordinary citizens who scarcely have 1 million each.
A clear instance of Chicago's democratic spirit.
New money shines.
The old money stank.
The smell of how it got made still lingers in the stockyards.
Empty now, they haven't had time to fall down.
Within living memory, they were a scandal.
Killing was killing work.
But at least the human beings were allowed to go home
at the end of the day.
The animals came in by train, ran up the ramp,
got hit between the eyes, slung on hooks, cut up, packed,
and went out again on a train going the other way.
Later on they went by truck,
and eventually the refrigerated truck changed everything.
Slaughtering got done locally and the Chicago meat packing business
shrank to a lean version of its former self.
Lean, mean, and clean.
It's still cattle that get cut up, but otherwise the only thing
that hasn't changed is the foreignness of the workers.
This is still the way into America for immigrants who don't speak English.
This is where the American dream is at its most intense
because the dreaming is done in a foreign language.
At the moment, most of the meat-packers are Poles
who checked out of their home country after they got sick of queuing
all day for the kind of scraps that get thrown in a bin here
to be fed to the pigs.
Karl Marx got it all wrong about alienation in capitalist society.
These downtrodden workers are so closely identified with their work
that they can almost taste it.
I had to admit, though, that one young man's job looked short
on laughs even if it was long on protein.
He must have replaced a machine that broke down from boredom.
Having been transformed into hamburgers, the meat embarks
on the next stage of its journey at a chain of fast food restaurants
which work on the theme park principle.
Hi, there! Nice tie!
This is a Chicago innovation.
Instead of eating first and going to the theatre afterwards,
the actual eating is transformed into a theatrical event.
At Ed Debevic's, waiters and waitresses are professional actors
who dedicate themselves in the evenings to the kind of fringe theatre groups
whose audience can fit into one taxi.
In the daytime, they earn a crust serving the customers hamburgers, French fries and prepared insults.
You ready to order or what?
Well, I've got an idea. Yeah?
Do you have a chilli hamburger or...? Yeah.
A hamburger with a chilli on it? Uh-huh, you want that?
Yeah. How do you like your burger done?
Erm, medium.
Onions? No onions.
You got big plans later? Exactly. Yeah, big plans...
I'll eat them if you've been eating them too.
You want fries? Yeah, if you mean chips...
Can you have gravy on the fries?
You want wets? Wet? Wet.
Does that mean gravy on the fries? Uh-huh.
Soaked in the techniques of method acting and high on the hopes of a Hollywood break,
the staff work to standard scripts around which they improvise
so that if the customer turns out to be an own-up baldy,
they will not waste any cute lines about wigs.
All right, Curly.
Green River float, there you go.
Right, are you going to stare at it or are you going to drink it?
All right, I'm not ready for it yet. What does it do?!
Each waiter and waitress act out a separate character,
enabling the customer to be verbally roughed up in the manner of his choice.
OK, uh... Wet.
Velveeta bacon burger.
That was Dave. Dave, there you go.
Dave, and barbecued chicken, grilled onions, chilli burger.
Yeah, for Curly.
A Bette Midler-type brings you a cheeseburger,
and a Walter Matthau-type sneers when you ask for the sauce.
Stick around long enough and you'll get a lap full of hot refried beans from Marlon Brando.
Cover that bald spot, big guy.
It's gonna have to be a big hat!
Like all performers, I constantly have my eye out
for alternative employment in case of need.
But I'm not sure I would have the lightning reflexes necessary to work between the tables at Ed's.
I would dry while serving the wet.
We don't want to ruin that rented suit. A rented suit!
You're right...
My waitress revealed that in real life she was the director
of a well-known erotic theatre company.
I wasn't actively seeking this information,
but she supplied it anyway.
Americans are upfront to start off with,
but in Chicago they're so upfront, they're out THERE.
A few more meals like this,
and I'd be even further out there than I was already.
In Chicago, it's not a new thing for a service industry to turn into an art form.
In 1879, the first Marshall Field built a beautiful department store
and it built him one of the biggest of the old family fortunes
that used to run Chicago, and still help to enrich its artistic life.
The old families endowed all the museums and the galleries,
and if the tax advantages never hurt, there was a real urge
to beautify the city, which is probably why the present store looks
like a corridor in The Vatican.
There were four Marshall Field's before the current one.
Marshall Field V was educated expensively in the east,
and for a while he stayed there.
But Chicago brought him back.
And now he's happy to call Chicago home.
Although that doesn't mean he's uncritically happy about Chicago.
What happened to Chicago's first families?
Do they still run things in this town? No, no more.
There are a few, but most of the first families of the old days
have dissipated and gone away.
And I say that...
It's really new families that have come in and leaders
of major corporations who are the big names now.
But in the old days, it was an oligarchy.
Yeah, you could call up half a dozen people in town and do
whatever you wanted in the old days.
And that's not true, obviously, any more.
Who runs Chicago now?
I think one of the great tragedies just with Chicago today
is that nobody's running it.
There isn't even a group of groups, if you will, who've gotten together.
Everybody's so busy fighting between themselves.
But in my judgment, Chicago simply isn't being run.
I think in this country, we really have to be hit in the face
with a board before we do anything.
And I think Chicago has to lose more jobs and get in worse shape
before the black community and the white community
and the powers that are and aren't are really going to be willing
to talk and each give up something to work together.
I don't think we're there yet.
Let's talk about race as an issue.
Is it alive now?
Yes. I consider it, maybe the number one issue still in Chicago
and Chicago's always been a city of ethnic groups.
But where there used to be 15 ethnic groups that all had a little say,
now ther are really three major groups.
The whites, the blacks, and the Latino groups.
And...
..so that they are all a lot louder and the agendas may be quite different.
And I think until we get through a period of all of us trying
to carry out just our agenda, we got to keep...
Race will continue to be an issue. I don't think I am...
To me, it isn't race - it's economics, but it's easier to yell race.
So, that's what we're all doing.
When you say things have to get worse before they get better, what do you envisage, riots?
No, I think that the economy will get worse in this city
and that the few jobs for less skilled people
that are left will begin to shrink even more.
And that will hurt the whole city,
because then the few companies that are left will have to pick up more
and more of the tab.
And I think when it really gets to be a strain, people sit down, say,
"Oh, my God, what can we do about this?"
We're not quite there yet, it's not tough enough yet.
So, what's going to be the stockyard of the future for Chicago?
I don't have an answer.
I mean, the one thing we have is a large labour pool.
A lot of whom are unskilled.
And I really think the critical question for this country
in metropolitan areas is what are we going to do
with a large pool of unskilled people?
I don't think it's that difficult if you think about it.
My favourite example is if the city simply mandated that any building
over five floors had to have an operator in the elevator,
you could create 50,000 jobs overnight.
And so it isn't impossible if we want to do it,
and it isn't that expensive to do.
Putting somebody on welfare is pretty expensive
because you've got to pay that person and the person who keeps tab of how you pay him.
And I have real problems with an endless growth in welfare rolls,
not only for that, but for the humanistic side of what it does
to people's pride and destroying families and blah, blah, blah.
At the very least, it guarantees we'll have a major drug industry
in this country for the next 25 years no matter what we do.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome from West Memphis, Arkansas,
Mr Junior Wells!
BLUES ROCK PLAYS
# Woo
# Come on
# Yeah
# Love
# Baby that's the way I feel
# Love
# Baby that's the way I feel
# Say what
# Love
# Wait a minute, listen
# Started tailing you last night baby in my car... #
Jazz came up the river from New Orleans with the shining trumpets
of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong.
They didn't stay in Chicago.
The blues did - as the music of urban deprivation.
But it's easy to forget that when you hear them pumping
the stuff out in the clubs.
Give me something, whoo!
The music works like strong drink, and so does the strong drink.
But next day's hangover soon melts in the brilliant open air.
The fountain is Chicago's pride, although they keep quiet
about the fact that it's controlled by a computer in Atlanta, Georgia.
The whole city is on the water wagon.
As well as the lake, there's the Chicago River flowing right through the middle of town.
The river makes a handy thoroughfare for the well-heeled
who can park there runabouts in front of midtown apartment blocks
with names like Marina City.
The river used to flow into the lake bringing pollution.
So, the city fathers rejigged it to flow in the other direction,
sending the pollution to somebody else.
They were men of decision.
The wives of the men of decision hang out at Cricket's
where they have a regular lunch club.
Weighed down by the responsibilities of either possessing or being married to many millions of dollars,
they gather to dig the dirt in a time-honoured manner,
which is by now dishonoured in almost any other city in the Western world.
But feminism isn't very much in favour here yet.
While the men make the money, the women get together and decide
how it should be either spent or given away.
The hairstyles, the couture clothes, and the solid gold personal adornments
were therefore merely a surface distraction.
I was being let in on a planning conference.
Then, we get to find out if we don't see each other all the time what one's doing,
what charity event somebody else is doing, what you're involved in. We criticise each other...
We don't discuss charity events. We discuss sex, and life...
We discuss sex and other people - we don't discuss charity!
We discuss who's ripping off the other charities.
The ladies go down to the river to wash the sheets
on the rocks 300 years ago, and they talk to one another - about sex...
They already decided that it would break my nails.
Now, we're talking about rocks.
That's what you're really doing here - is you're beating the laundry against the rock?
Well, we're not doing it. It's being done somewhere else.
It's the concept that women... I've never done a load of laundry. ..whether they loved each other,
liked each other, knew each other.
And if they're living in the same community, women traditionally... Did laundry?
No, get together. Is it a man's town?
Yes. Absolutely.
It is a city of power.
And I think it's a powerful city that works because men make it work.
You ask if it's a man's city.
Indeed it is a man's city.
But you don't mind?
I love it.
Look where we're dining.
We're around leather banquettes.
This looks like a man's club, doesn't it?
Doesn't it look like an English man's club?
It didn't look like any English men's club that I'd ever been in, but it certainly smelled nicer.
I was breathing oxygen, nitrogen, and Chanel No 5.
Tell me about husbands.
How many have you had altogether?
Can I guess? One, two, three, four, five... Does anybody have one of those little computers?
Oh, well, Bonnie's here.
That'll certainly up it! WOMAN LAUGHS
16. Sugar...
And Americans have marriages instead of love affairs.
How many have you had? Three.
That's not so bad...
12.
Well, that's not a lot. No.
Eight women, 12 husbands?
That's below the national average. I think so...
Actually, the girls were juggling the statistics.
They left out the poor husbands and only counted the rich ones.
It was a price-seeking function.
I enjoyed the champagne, but couldn't dispel the suspicion
that the well-groomed ladies pouring it down my throat were not a fully
representative sample of the population of Chicago.
ORGAN MUSIC PLAYS
A more typical cross section can be found on a weekday afternoon
at Wrigley Field, home of the Cubs,
one of Chicago's two Major League Baseball teams.
Wrigley Field is a small, friendly park that a lucky hitter can sock
the ball clean out of when the wind is in the right direction.
When it is, and the sun is out,
and the Cubs are doing well in the league, or even badly,
a large sample of the Chicago workforce makes lying phone calls
to the office and the factory and turns up here hoping
that the boss won't be goofing off, too.
He probably will be, but he'll be in the stand and not the bleachers,
where wittily-howling plebeians join in open outcry
to make life miserable for the opposing outfielders.
Here we go, Cubbies, here we go...
The people of Chicago are so keen on sport that they don't see
why their team should ever lose.
Their football team, the Bears, usually doesn't.
Mainly because it is full of specially-designed men
with nicknames like The Refrigerator or The Armoured Personnel Carrier.
How many did they get home then?
The Cubs, however, disturbingly persist in being only human.
Their performance is variable.
They trail the other team until the ninth inning,
and then stage a dramatic recovery.
Or they don't, which is even more dramatic.
Whole families of fans spend the entire game anxiously biting
pieces out of the printed programme.
CHEERING
What happened then? Why wasn't the guy out?
Third baseman caught it with his bare hand and whipped it to second base,
for a force out but he got there in time so, he's safe.
The Cubs staged a dramatic recovery when pop fly to a loaded base
walked a triple play line drive spitball bunt into the dugout.
Chicago had come through.
Everyone went home happy.
They went home happy and they went home slowly,
pausing to enjoy a pick-up band of improbably high standard
for a few guys meeting on a street corner to jam for pennies.
Where was all this music coming from?
Seemingly from out of the ground.
It was a constant reminder that the straight-up-and-down city
was built on a bubbling and heaving racial and ethnic lava field.
The blacks could be said to have arrived.
Asian boat people are still arriving.
Their children are star students.
A village burns down somewhere in Southeast Asia,
and a generation later, a Nobel Prize winner grows up here.
And always arriving in numbers beyond counting are the Hispanics.
At the moment, they're the third biggest population group in Chicago behind the whites and blacks.
In the opinion of many besides themselves, they're getting the heaviest deal of the lot.
But life would have to be much worse than it is
before it was anything like as bad as it was where they came from.
Working their way north until they get to where they can go no further,
they come to Chicago.
Where did you come from originally?
I come from the state of Guanajuato in Mexico.
I was born in a town that's called Salvatierra.
And I came to the United States in 1926.
I've been here in Chicago ever since 1929.
Cos I first went to Omaha, Nebraska.
Tell me about this area, is it all Spanish-speaking in this area?
18th street...
HE CLEARS THROAT ..about four or five blocks
one way or the other, they're all Spanish.
And they're all Spanish speakers.
But where are they from mainly, Mexico?
The majority.
I'll say about 90% of the Spanish-speaking
in the neighbourhood, they're all Mexican.
Poor people or...any rich people?
No!
Very few rich people come this way.
No, it's mostly...
..labour people.
You know, people that come here to work
to try and make a dollar or two and all that.
It wasn't the most prosperous looking barbershop I'd ever seen,
but that might have been because young Hispanic men nowadays spend
much less time at the hairdresser than in the garage where they build
their own cars or rerig old cars to do new tricks.
Hey, that is really something that car.
A car like this is called a low rider and is basically designed
to stun the opposite sex into hopeless submission.
It's a work of art. What's it for to get the girls?
No, it's just to show what you got here in Chicago.
That's about it.
How do you control the thing to make it go up and down, where are the buttons?
The buttons - this is the button right here.
Just push it up, it'll go up. Push it down, it'll go down.
Now to open doors, I have the locks over there by where the radio usually goes.
But I don't have no radio - I have it, like, on the floor.
Can you show me what it will do?
Well, sure I can... Hop in.
MUSIC ON RADIO: Uptown Girl by Billy Joel
All that engineering skill is going to waste at the moment,
but the armed services are bound to want it sooner or later,
if only to turn all cruise missiles into canoes.
After that, he'll be upwardly mobile, part of one more ethnic epic
using Chicago as a location.
The Irish were the first to do it because they arrived able
to speak English, and they made Chicago their town.
In Mayor Daley's day, practically every name on the city's payroll started with O.
The impertinent reporter who pointed out this coincidence
is now the star columnist of the Chicago Tribune.
His name is Mike Royko.
I know a police captain who came here, came to this country,
as a young man, got off the boat in New York, took a train to Chicago,
was met by relatives in Chicago.
They didn't take him home - they took him directly to a police station
where he was sworn in, given a uniform, and sent out to direct traffic at an intersection.
I mean, his first day in this city.
So, it was simply a matter of the language advantage.
He had virtues, didn't he, Daley?
Oh, yeah, yeah. He believed husbands should be faithful to their wives
and you should go home at night to have dinner with your family
and pay your bills on time.
And don't swear in public.
Open the doors for ladies.
And, uh...
Don't lose elections.
So, what were the drawbacks?
Well, he inherited a corrupt system.
He didn't change anything unless public disclosure forced him to.
For example, he did reform the police department.
He took credit for reforming the police department.
Well, that's because while he was mayor, it was discovered
that a group of his policemen were also operating as burglars.
They would ride around in their police cars and burglarise.
They had a professional burglar as their accomplice,
and they would break into businesses and steal things.
And that was just an example of what was going on.
We had police commanders travelling
with mafia big shots.
The department was totally corrupt.
Does it feel a fundamentally different city to you now
than it was when you were young?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
We've had tremendous changes in this city.
When I was a young man working downtown,
for example, you'd never see a black face downtown.
Blacks knew the downtown area was off limits to them.
And, uh, is...
For all its reputation of being racially polarised city,
over the last 20 years, there've been enormous changes in Chicago.
The blacks.
We still have essentially two black ghettos in the South Side
and the West Side but...
..blacks are now living in parts of the city
that would've been unheard of 20, 25 years ago.
You can find the black middle class living anywhere.
But to get to the ghettos, you have to follow the music.
At the Maxwell Street Market, the music still sounds sweet.
Maxwell Street is the kind of market that sells things you don't really want.
Miami Vice, photo albums, old batteries, things that used
to be household appliances - warps shoes, non-operative ashtrays.
It would have taken me all day to spend 10, but I was ready to hang
around and buy dud merchandise indefinitely as long
as I could listen to those lyrical guitars.
MUSIC PLAYS
Can a way of life that produces a sound like that be all bad?
Well, yes, it can.
The tougher Chicago ghettos at Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes.
Low-cost high-rise housing the city put up and then forgot,
they have an average of one husband at home for every hundred people,
partly because the rent bill is too high if a family stays together.
The city's black administration says it needs federal funds to fix things.
The people who exist in these vertical detention centres say
that the buildings are being run down
so that the land can be sold off.
They say that when they talk at all.
Trapped by broken elevators,
many of them make life bearable by the most portable available means.
Drugs are currency, and the gang warfare might as well be real warfare
for the cops up against it.
An ex-Marine who thought he saw bad things in Korea,
the man in charge is Captain Woods.
The history of Chicago would reveal that we've had Irish gangs
and English gangs and Polish gangs, and gangs as we call them.
But these gangs now are beginning with colours.
And before it was all ethnic.
Now we're gone by colour lines -
brown people, Oriental people, black people.
In our past, it's always been ethnic type - Irish, Polish, whatever.
Is it difficult for a young kid to resist becoming a member of one of these gangs?
Very difficult.
I'm talking nine, ten, 11-year-olds.
They're first recruited at that age.
Because of their young age, they can move around,
not be seen by police officers.
Police officers usually don't pay attention to them.
12-year-old kids, they figure they're good kids, they haven't got in any trouble yet.
These are the kids that become the runners for the gangbangers.
"Gangbangers"? We call them gangbangers.
Gang members, gangbangers
For reasons, banger's shooting - gangbangers. Ah.
These young kids, they can recruit them
to do their dirty work for them.
Would you be able to work more effectively against the gangs
if the handgun laws were changed in the US?
Well, I'm an American. I believe in guns, and actually I'm a policeman.
I spent a lot of time in the military where I handled weapons,
but I'm not one for everybody carrying a gun
or allowed to have guns - I don't believe in it.
Unless a person is a decent person,
it can be shown that he's a working person, he should be allowed
to have a gun in his home by all means.
But anybody just going to be able to buy a gun any place he so chooses
and carrying it around with them, I don't believe in this.
So what weapons do they...? He is carrying sophisticated handguns,
machine guns, automatic weapons, and better handguns than we're carrying.
Kids with machine guns? Machine guns.
Uzis and this sort of thing. You know what an Uzi is, you've seen the Jewish people over in Israel
and these places carrying these small automatic weapons.
They've got a huge rate.
A large rate of fire. So, what do you do when you're up
against a kid with one of those things?
Get out of the way.
Even closer to the front line than Captain Woods,
plain-clothed detective Tom McMahon goes out on regular car patrol
into Robert Taylor Homes.
These drive-by shootings are becoming popular again in Chicago.
Where they just drive by and they'll fire into a crowd,
standing around a basketball court, hit somebody.
Nobody in particular - they just want to shoot another gang member.
And they're finding out that the 14 to 15-year-old, the juvenile,
the kid who when he goes to court, doesn't get sentenced to life imprisonment
as a result of his involvement.
He's probably a first-time offender.
In some instances, it's the code.
It's your initiation into the gang.
A lot of these gangs require an initiation process.
It has to involve something criminal to become part of the gang.
You either go into a store, you shoplift, or you go into a school
and spray paint the name of the gang all over the school.
There's something criminal - that's on the lower end.
On the bigger end to escalate yourself up the ladder in the gang,
to achieve some status in a gang, you have to shoot someone.
You have to be known as a shooter.
Can you spot the difference between civilians and gang members
just by looking at them, the way they dress and everything?
Yeah, sure. There's a real significance to the whole scenario of the gangs.
Right versus left.
The right hand versus the left hand is basically how it goes.
It is also Folks versus People.
Again, there's gang graffiti all along the walls here.
The Folks are all the Disciple Nation.
The People are the El Rukns, the Cobra Stones, the Mickey Cobras, the Vice Lords.
And that is basically if you were to compare this to LA,
that's their colours.
Here, it's Folks versus People.
There, it's the Bloods versus the Crips.
And we can break it down. We can break the entire gang structure down into two folds.
Folks on one side, People on the other, and they clash.
That's what all the violence is about - control of territory,
control of narcotics, control of the buildings, control of schools.
All of it stems from the Folks versus People.
CAR HORN HONKS
To anyone who, like me, spent a lot of his own childhood hanging around street corners,
all this hanging around street corners might look reasonably
harmless, but in my day we had cap pistols and bubble gum.
There wasn't a crack pusher working the corridor or an arms dealer
waiting up the alley to sell me a rocket launcher on hire purchase.
Is he in the gang? Oh, yeah.
What would you say of the little one's chances, with the ball?
Well look at him, here he is standing down here.
He's probably...
One of the big brothers here, he's probably a younger brother
to somebody standing on this corner of this group.
This is what he has to look up to.
These are his role models.
RADIO CHATTER
Get her with the forks up.
She's doing the pitchfork sign, did you see that? Uh-huh.
What does that mean? That's forks, the pitchforks are the sign
of the Gangster Disciples.
She's throwing pitchforks up. That's the gang sign, how they do that...
They signify to each other, telling each other that they're Folks.
KIDS YELL
Hey, what's going on?
What y'all doing? Hi, fellas.
What is this for?
You're on British television today.
Straight up? Straight up.
What channel this on?
What's the earring in the ear for?
What's this for? We on TV, man.
What's this for? British Broadcasting system. What channel?
What channel? It's going to be filmed over there,
you won't see it here. You know, you won't be a star in your own neighbourhood, pal.
ALL SPEAK What y'all trying to make them see
what it look like in the ghetto or something? No, you know how those gangsters are with their hats
to the left and the right, and all of that, you know?
His hat's straight. Why is his hat straight?
Why are you filming us?
Why is his hat straight?
Cos he ain't no gang brother. He ain't no gang member.
What happens if he puts his hat to the right? Nothing.
Nothing? He'd be Folks. Then he'd be Folks, right? Yeah.
And what happens if he puts the hat to the left?
Well, then he'd be a Brother!
OK, Folks and them duke it up, don't they - Folks and People?
No, they don't do that. They help make money together.
How they make money?
They go work in Jewels and Amoco and stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah. Tell me another fable, pal.
RADIO CHATTER
But hanging around hopelessly isn't the whole story of the ghettos.
Young people play at other things besides a human target practice.
Athletes and gymnasts come out of here.
And though it's sad for the ghettos that they don't often go back,
the urge to get on is no bad thing just because it's based
on the urge to get out.
Upward mobility helps to civilise the city, even if it leaves
the place where it came from, short of leaders.
And a lot of the music born here stays here.
Black blues made big money for white musicians, but some of the black
musicians make at least a living, and the music they make
is the authentic sound of Chicago.
It's a city that sounds black.
# If I can't find my woman
# People I just won't be satisfied
# I'm going to California
# I'm gonna stop in New York too
# Then I'm going next to Atlanta, Georgia
# Stop in Mississippi too
# I've got to leave here baby
# Gonna catch a gold-tailed butterfly
# If I can't find my woman
# People I just won't be satisfied
# Let me hear you move
# That's what I'm talking about... #
Mike Royko was right.
Jim Crow still lives in Chicago, but he doesn't rule, nor does Uncle Tom.
From the same beach where a black boy was stoned to death in 1919,
you see black children swimming in the same part
of the same lake as the white children.
You see the black middle class in the classiest places.
And by now, it would look wrong if they weren't there.
No white strut, no black cringe.
You see self-assurance.
There are black people outside City Hall confident
and powerful enough to wonder why the black people inside City Hall
can't get their act together.
One of the most relentlessly dynamic big businessmen in the city
is the founder of Ebony Magazine and all-around empire builder John Johnson.
Chicago is probably the best city for blacks in this nation,
and it's the best city for blacks because we have the numbers,
and we were segregated and we were together and we worked
with each other and we were encouraged by each other.
The problem that any minority has,
you have to have symbols of success.
You have persons that you can emulate.
You have to say, "That is a person like me and I can be like them."
And I think that's what we have in Chicago.
I know it's the thing. When I came here, I wanted to be a lawyer.
And I went to work for an insurance company, and I saw black people
making decisions and conducting commerce.
And I was inspired.
And I thought, "Gee, if these guys can do it,
"these guys are the same colour as I am - I can do it!"
And it gave me the feeling to go forward.
And I think that that's what we have here in Chicago.
It's a vitality.
It's dynamic.
It's contagious.
People want to succeed because they see persons
like themselves succeeding.
Are you surprised by how far black people have come since you were young?
Look, I often say in speeches, it's another world.
It's a new world.
From the time I came to Chicago, when you couldn't eat
in restaurants, you couldn't drive buses, you couldn't work
on the police force...
It's just another world.
It's almost unbelievable.
Have you come as far as you should since 1954?
No, no. I don't think anyone ever thinks
they've come as far as they should.
For example, I'm still editing black magazines.
I think I could edit any magazines for anyone.
You know, years ago when integration came,
people kept saying to me, now that integration is here,
and Life is a picture magazine, and Look is a picture magazine,
when is Ebony going out of business?
And I said, "Ebony is not going out of business."
Why can't Life and Look go out of business?
I never thought they would, but they did.
And I said the end and I say, now,
if race is not a factor and if we're going to measure people
by ability and service, then I would be more successful
than they are because I've had more experience giving service
to white people than they have given service to me.
I understand them.
I've been FORCED to understand them, but they don't understand me
because they haven't had to.
It took more than just one city to make a man like that.
It took all the brave people of a generation and a free nation
for them to be brave in.
But if Chicago inspired John Johnson,
it ought to inspire us.
Writers, some of them great writers,
enjoy making Chicago sound like the end of the world.
A gleaming core rimmed around with decay and corruption,
like a boil set to burst.
If you were stuck in some parts of Chicago,
it would probably feel like that.
But if you're visiting the rest of it,
it feels more like the start of something.
There's a lot more to Chicago than just the ghost of Al Capone,
whom the city would prefer to forget.
Although he won't be forgotten by the lady who used
to play his requests, Miss Eve.
The man is beautiful.
For someone who risked being cut in half by a hail of lead
if she failed to remember a mobster's favourite song,
Miss Eve looks strangely ageless until you remember
that it all happened only yesterday.
# You fall
# And I'm thinking
# I wouldn't mind at all... #
Eat your heart out!
Submachine guns no longer chatter in the street outside.
The heavy weapons are in the housing developments.
Downtown, the violent past is part of the decor now.
The voice of Chicago, Studs Terkel, put me straight
about the city's unsavoury reputation.
No, it's not deserved!
You see, it is more theatrically correct.
You see, Chicago loves...
Chicago IS theatre.
Everything is exaggerated.
Theatre is larger than life.
So is Chicago.
It's larger. There may be bigger populations,
but not larger in its extravagances than Chicago is.
And so it is not...
Most cities, many cities are corrupt,
but Chicago delights in its corruption.
And it was the first, that makes it the big daddy of the corrupt cities.
See Chicago may be corrupt, but the respectables
of the town secretly like that idea.
It gives a kick and juice to their life.
And so when they say... When someone visits another country,
and they say, "Chicago - boom, boom, boom!"
The other person says, "Oh, no, it's not that way,"
but deep, deep down likes the idea very much.
So, people are really thrilled by Capone and all that stuff, huh?
Of course. Deep down? Sure.
What made Capone?
Acceptance, really.
What made Capone? The wink is what made Capone.
After all, it was Prohibition that set him up.
But after Prohibition, houses of prostitution, brutishness
more or less fulfilling, as he would say, "a public need".
Funny about Capone.
He's still remembered fondly by some.
The same Al Capone had a bread line.
If you remember him for the bread line, forgetting of all the brutishness and all the...
If not, he knocked off but the complete debasement of the human spirit.
And so there's a fondness.
There's a perversity here too in Chicago.
There's kind of a fondness for him, at least for the memory of him.
They go, tsk, tsk, tsk...
However, really...
Chicago is theatre but it's real theatre.
In the old days when New York and Los Angeles were joined by rail,
silver trains brought the Hollywood stars to pose for the flashbulbs
as they stepped between sleeping cars,
caught for one bedazzled moment in the middle of the country
whose dreams they embodied.
Now, the silver planes take them overhead.
But Chicago is still there.
Exciting if you can take the tension,
taller every time you look,
and full of light during the night.
# Tailing you last night baby in my car
# Scared I might see what I was looking for
# Little by little
# I'm losing you I can see
# Bit by bit
# Your love slips away from me...
I say here, would y'all help me?
# Little
# Ow
# Oh
# Oh... #
Hey!
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE