Florence Scala: The Joan of Arc of Chicago’s Near West Side

In the early morning hours of October 19, 1962, residents living on the corner of Taylor Street and Miller Street in the Little Italy enclave of the Near West Side of Chicago were roused from their beds by an explosion. A bomb had been detonated behind the home of Florence Scala, destroying the back porch and ripping through the adjoining apartment building, where a piece of glass went flying through the bedroom window of Florence’s nephew, Father Steven Giovangelo, who escaped injury. “It blew our kitchen door off, and it really frightened everybody,” he shares in a phone interview.¹

Just two days earlier, a Chicago Police Department squad car had been deployed to pass the Scala home twice an hour after a smaller bomb went off on the porch of the three-story building where Florence Scala lived with her husband Charles “Chick,” her mother, and her father. Extended family lived in the building to the rear of the Scala home at 1030 West Taylor Street, where Florence was born, and where her father had opened a tailor shop after he arrived in Chicago.

Florence Scala had been organizing and leading a campaign against two powerful foes: Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and the University of Illinois Chicago. Florence’s campaign would find her a plaintiff in a lawsuit, an activist at Chicago City Hall, and the subject of a bomb attack. While her fight with each was not won, she never backed down against systems that were looking to destroy the ways in which her neighborhood was unique and self-sustaining. Florence Scala’s community organizing work—rare in an era when women, particularly the children of first-generation immigrants, were not outspoken about political issues—laid bare the ruthlessness of power and the complicated nature of the annals of urban renewal in Chicago.

The perpetrators of the bomb attack were never caught. “You couldn’t pin that on the mayor, but the family and people in the neighborhood believed it was directly connected to the city in order to scare her,” Father Steven shares. “In classic Chicago fashion, it was never solved.”

Florence Cathrine Giovangelo was born in Chicago in 1918. As immigrants to the United States, her parents Alex and Therese Giovangelo embraced the spirit of mutual aid that was both provided by and accepted by the people in the neighborhood. “People were barely getting by themselves, but my grandmother would make an extra loaf of bread or pasta for one of the neighbors if she knew they needed it,” says Father Steven. Like many other immigrants on Chicago’s Near West Side, the Italian American Giovangelo family, which also included two brothers, Ernest and Mario, benefited from Hull House, a settlement house established by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. For the Giovangelo family, and particularly for Florence and her brothers, Hull House’s influence was profound. By the time Florence was a teenager, Hull House had expanded from the repurposed 1856 mansion of Charles J. Hull to a sprawling complex of brick buildings covering almost a whole city block.

Each week, thousands of people from the neighborhood would visit Hull House to utilize the social, educational, and creative programs available there, which included English and citizenship classes, access to a gymnasium and game rooms, as well as classes in ceramics, woodworking, and instrumental music. There was a Hull House orchestra and a camera club, as well as Hull House theater—the first community theater in the United States. “There was nothing else in the neighborhood during the Depression. Hull House was people’s whole lives,” shares Father Steven. By the mid-twentieth century, Hull House reflected the diversity of the Near West Side, a thriving enclave that was predominantly Italian, but was also Jewish and Greek, and had seen an influx of both Mexican families and African American families since the 1930s. “The neighborhood was never wholly one group,” Florence shared in a 1999 interview with Robert A. Young, housed in the Florence Scala Collection at the Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections Repository at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Black families lived south of Taylor Street on either side of Blue Island. The men of these families were tradesmen for everyone in the neighborhood—carpenters, plumbers, painters, and handymen. The Greeks lived north of Polk Street,” Florence continued. Once he became owner of the buildings at Taylor and Miller Streets, Florence’s father rented an apartment to a Mexican family.²

Hull House was also a place where intellectual life flourished, particularly for the teachers, artists, writers, and activists who resided there. Residents benefited from being in an environment where they could share ideas across disciplines and work together on social improvement. These efforts, which started at Hull House and within the neighborhood around the Halsted and Harrison area on Chicago’s Near West Side, led to reforms at the city and federal level in education, housing, and sanitation. Jessie Binford, who arrived at Hull House and worked closely with Jane Addams before she died in 1935, was one of those remarkable women. Jessie was the founder of the Juvenile Protective Association, a nonprofit agency dedicated to protecting children from neglect and abuse that was headquartered in Hull House. Jessie had been a resident of the settlement house since 1916.

Hull House also provided people in the community with a place where they could gather in solidarity and discuss the challenges of urban life. These interactions happened both informally and formally at Hull House, between people of the same cultural backgrounds, or different ones. Hull House was a place outside of the home, school, or workplace where people could meet and discuss social or labor issues. When the discussion of these issues developed into the need for action, Hull House proved to be a haven for community organizing.

Like many other immigrant families, the Giovangelos were a part of a religious community, and Florence would attend Catholic mass regularly with her mother. Holy Guardian Angel Church was located at 717 Arthington Street, across the street from the school of the same name. The church sanctuary, built in 1899, had ornate stations of the cross with vibrantly colored life size figures. The parish was located just south of Dante Public Elementary School at the corner of Arthington and Des Plaines Streets.

After graduating from McKinley High School, Florence got a job as an actor working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project, a position she secured through the theater program at Hull House in 1936. She was a cast member of See Naples and Die at the Blackstone Theatre in 1937.³ In 1940, Florence began writing for a community newspaper called The New Generation; that same year, the paper wrote an expose on the poor conditions at the Maxwell Street Police Station that developed into a plea to the alderman and the Mayor.⁴ In 1942, she married Charles “Chick” Scala, whom she met through a friend. Chick spent four years in China and Burma during World War II. Once he returned, he and Florence moved to the second-floor apartment of 1030 West Taylor Street, and he got a job bartending at the Torch Club in River North.

Built in 1878, the Giovangelo property was a three-story brick building with a limestone façade and cast-iron cornice. A wood porch connected the Taylor Street building to the one directly north of it on Miller Street. “The common thing with Italians back then is that most families all lived in the same building or next door to each other,” says Father Steven. Like many neighborhoods in Chicago, the area’s homes, schools, and churches had been largely built up in the 1880s and 1890s and were now overcrowded. The area bounded by West Harrison Street, West Roosevelt Road, South Racine Avenue, and South Halsted Street was one of the city’s oldest. While residents and building owners did their best to maintain their properties, many needed a level of renovation that residents and building owners struggled to afford. The neighborhood lacked parks and green space, and some land uses, like vacant lots, were not a benefit to the community. Yet, despite the age and condition of the buildings, the neighborhood’s family-owned small businesses—restaurants, macaroni factories, cheese stores, drug stores, and movie theaters—hummed with activity and commerce, particularly on Taylor Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in the neighborhood. “There is a personal connection that you make when you go to the grocery store and you know the grocer and the butcher that works there,” shared Father Steven. Churches and schools were closely knit communities. Neighborhood residents did the best they could with the resources—political, social, or financial—that they had at their disposal. “People used to get mad when Daley would call it an Italian slum; you could eat off Taylor Street,” Father Steven said.

In October 1948, twenty-two men and one woman—Florence Giovangelo Scala—established the Temporary Organizing Committee for the Redevelopment of the Near West Side. Renamed the Near West Side Planning Board in 1949, the group was aware of efforts locally and nationwide to address both a housing shortage and blight via “slum clearance” as well as the consideration of superhighway systems for increased traffic to and from the Loop and Chicago’s growing suburban regions. After graduating from college and returning to Chicago, Florence’s brother Ernest Giovangelo became the head of the Near West Side Planning Board. The group saw the creation of the planning board as a way that they could use collective power to demand agency as Chicago and the nation worked to modernize cities.

Since the mid-1930s, the City of Chicago had been demolishing dilapidated buildings with the consent of the buildings’ owners using Works Progress Administration labor. In 1938, the New Deal’s Public Works Administration (PWA) funded the construction of the Jane Addams Homes, the city’s first site for public housing, at Taylor Street and Ada Street, just a few blocks west of the Giovangelo home. The Jane Addams Homes, numbering 1,027 units across thirty-two buildings, were modern three- and four-story courtyard apartments with semi-enclosed courtyards.

By 1950, plans for a western and southern superhighway through Chicago were becoming a reality, with the city using eminent domain to acquire land for the construction of each. Florence Scala reflected on these early organizing efforts during her interview with Robert A. Young. “It was not just ‘we don’t want you in our backyards,’ it was ‘we want to be in on this decision and understand what you have in mind.’”⁵

Urban renewal is a concept that refers to public—or in some cases, private—efforts to revitalize the United States’ aging urban areas in the mid-twentieth century through a process that was funded by federal money and supported by local and federal legislation. Cities like Chicago found themselves with an influx of new residents, including immigrants and African Americans, looking for opportunities that would allow them to escape poverty or segregation, get a better education, or resettle in a place where there were more economic and social opportunities. A lack of maintenance and upkeep, particularly through the Great Depression and then World War II, had deteriorated Chicago’s buildings and rendered its infrastructure obsolete. There was a housing shortage, and a need for both public and private vehicular transportation to be modernized and expanded. Chicagoland’s suburbs were growing, decentralizing the city and its neighborhoods, and threatening its tax base.

Urban renewal was also a way in which Chicago could codify existing de facto segregation and discrimination by law. Neighborhoods composed of African Americans, immigrants, or poor Chicagoans could be forced to vacate their neighborhoods, particularly if the elimination of these neighborhoods would mean that white, wealthy Chicagoans would not have to see communities of people of color on their way to work, to school, or to shop. Public housing would segregate, while highways created a dividing line between white neighborhoods and neighborhoods where people of color lived, ensuring that those communities could not encroach upon each other. Educational institutions, both public and private, could utilize urban renewal to transform their campuses but also create a buffer between their students and people of color.

While there were criticisms of many of the processes of urban renewal, for aging cities and their community members, urban renewal, and even “slum clearance,” was seen as having the potential to improve neighborhoods that did not have the resources to solve issues with their infrastructure, land use, or built environments on their own.

For the Near West Side Planning Board, urban renewal had the potential to bring resources to the community in order to make it a better place to live. With the community resources of Hull House, the board established itself as a service agency to develop programs for neighborhood housekeeping and endeavored to collaborate with city agencies on large public improvements in the interest of the people of the community. The group created committees and got to work on determining ways the area’s challenges could be addressed, initially by gathering facts about the needs of residents and business owners and asking them what they would want to see in terms of improvements on their own properties, and the neighborhood as a whole. They began surveying nuisance properties block by block, and provided that information to the Department of Buildings, leading to the demolition of properties that were unfit for rehabilitation.⁶ The group provided resources to building owners on how to hire contractors to improve their properties, and advised business owners on how to store and dispose of trash to prevent unsightly conditions.

Housing was a particular interest of the Near West Side Planning Board, who looked to not only fill vacant lots with new buildings but also to disperse federal loans and grants to building owners to repair and renovate their properties. As additional public housing was planned for the neighborhood, the board organized meetings at the Robert H. Brooks Homes, located at 13th Street and South Throop Street, to inform residents about the new developments, and how they could apply to live there. In 1947, the State of Illinois passed the Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act, creating the Chicago Land Clearance Commission, and in 1949, the United States passed the Housing Act. Both acts allocated financial support for urban renewal projects and slum clearance, with the Federal Housing Act amended in 1954 to add funding for the rehabilitation of existing structures.

The Near West Side Planning Board forged relationships with a number of city agencies, including the Chicago Planning Board, the Chicago Housing Authority, and especially the Chicago Land Clearance Commission. The group organized community conferences on topics like housing. In 1956, the Near West Side Planning Board invited Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at a meeting.⁷ Working with the area alderman in the summer of 1956, the board changed a city ordinance that determined the area “blighted” into one suitable for rehabilitation.⁸ In 1957, several of its members, including Ernest Giovangelo, were appointed by Mayor Richard J. Daley to the Near West Side Conservation Community Council to assist in the administration of urban renewal on the Near West Side.⁹

Hull House continued to serve the community and provided neighborhood residents with resources and information on urban renewal, including meetings on the topic supported by city agencies. In 1958, the Chicago Land Clearance Commission announced that a 23-acre area within the neighborhood would be cleared for 680 new dwelling units and a 5.6-acre park, a plan that the Near West Side Planning Board saw as proof of the success of their work. Hull House trustees assured that the thirteen buildings would remain on the site, and that programs would be broadened to serve the rebuilt neighborhood.¹⁰

Sacrifices would have to be made, however. Holy Guardian Angel was in the designated path of the south expressway [now the Dan Ryan Expressway]. While the sanctuary and school on Arthington Street would be demolished, Father Italo Scola led a campaign to build a new school on Blue Island Avenue that would be the center of the rehabilitated neighborhood. A school would be built first, largely using money coming from people in the neighborhood, along with a convent for the nuns on the second floor. A cornerstone was laid for the new Holy Guardian Angel School in 1958. Mayor Richard J. Daley attended the opening. According to Florence, “the mayor was there, praising us, and telling us how wonderful it was that we were building this school, and it would be the nucleus for a new community. This was the way that Chicago would grow, because its neighborhoods would keep Chicago alive.”¹¹

“The school really stood out because it was so new,” shares Father Steven, who was an altar boy at Holy Guardian Angel when mass was held in the basement of the school. Future plans for the parish included a midcentury modern sanctuary to complement the school.

In December 1959, plans for the Liberty Shopping Center, located on a triangular site at Blue Island and Racine Avenues, south of the newly rebuilt Holy Guardian Angel School, were announced to the public. The shopping center was a private endeavor developed by a druggist that had operated a business on the Near West Side for twenty-five years and was a member of the Near West Side Planning Board, and would include a medical building, grocery store, and cleaners.¹² The board saw the announcement of the shopping center to be a testament to the power of the partnerships they had built.

While Florence Scala and her neighbors of the Near West Side Planning Board embarked on their tenth year of community organizing, Richard J. Daley, who had just been elected to a second term, was brokering a backroom deal with the trustees of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The public research university had operated a two-year college on Navy Pier since 1946, but there was public interest in expanding the school into a four-year university. Real estate consultants for the university had identified four sites based on proximity to transportation and room for growth. The first, Northerly Island, was cost prohibitive. The second, within the Cook County Forest Preserves in Riverside, was opposed by residents and the board of the Cook County Forest Preserve, who refused to cede the land to the university. The third, a railroad terminal south of Congress Street [now Ida B. Wells Drive], was preferred by the city planning department, but rejected when the city was unable to broker a deal with the railroads. The fourth site, in a section of Garfield Park, was actively sought out by the residents there, but Mayor Daley wanted the campus in a central location as a part of the revitalization of Chicago’s downtown.

Early in 1961, the City of Chicago and Mayor Daley offered the University of Illinois Chicago another option, a one-hundred-acre parcel in the Harrison-Halsted area that had been designated as a slum and blighted area redevelopment project in 1956, the same area that the Near West Side Planning Board had been working diligently in since 1949. The university accepted, and planning began immediately.

Florence Scala, her neighbors, and members of the Near West Side Planning Board learned of this information in February the way that the public learned of it—from reports on television and radio. The information was shocking and confusing. How could this be happening? There would be no new residential development and no shopping center, elements of a revitalized neighborhood that the West Side Planning Board had worked hard to develop. Hull House was in the path of the campus, and so was the recently built Holy Guardian Angel School. Buildings that had been carefully renovated—in some cases with private money—would need to be demolished, and businesses, some of which had relocated just a few years earlier, would have to relocate again. The majority of Hull House trustees objected, with the exception of the board’s director, who resigned in order to take a role as a planning consultant to Mayor Daley. There were no public hearings or processes. The objecting trustees at Hull House released a statement: “For decades Hull House has been standing for Democratic processes and endeavoring to teach them to thousands of new Americans who have passed through its doors. In the tradition of Jane Addams, Hull House cannot stand by while a project is undertaken which, however worthy in itself, ignores these processes, and must oppose if governmental action should fail to consider the rights of the people affected.”¹³

“In the end the board of Hull House voted to capitulate to the university. Florence and others felt betrayed by that,” shares Father Steven.

The neighborhood had been double crossed, and Florence was livid. Six months earlier, members of the Near West Planning Board heard rumors that the university was having trouble finding a site, and had met with Daley, who assured them that there was no intention to clear land in the Near West Side for a new campus.¹⁴ Not knowing what to do next, neighbors began gathering at Holy Guardian Angel School. “People just ran there that night,” Florence would later say. On February 14, 500 people marched on city hall, led by Florence Scala, who wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune published the day after, slamming the betrayal. “Can such treachery that has been committed against the people of this community by the public officials really be acclaimed as progress?” Florence questioned.¹⁵

“It was not only a broken promise; it was rotten,” Florence said of Mayor Daley in a 1999 interview.“¹⁶ But it wasn’t long before neighbors, including Jessie Binford, who was then in her eighties, shifted their attention from working with the city to protesting against it. Unable to continue their work, the West Side Planning Board disbanded. Florence then formed the Harrison-Halsted Community Group, an initiative that was born out of “intuition and anger” as Florence said later.¹⁷

On March 20, neighbors gathered at St. Francis Church at 12th and Newberry Streets, marching towards Hull House. Walking behind music provided by a lively mariachi band, demonstrators waved signs in English and Spanish declaring “We Want Our Homes” and “Save This City for the People.” Shouts of “Down with Daley” rung out. At Hull House, the demonstrators regrouped, and residents were asked to attend an upcoming city council meeting.¹⁸

The Housing Committee of the Chicago City Council held a hearing on the protests, where protesters were permitted to make statements, but they did not hear from City and Land Clearance officials, many of whom the West Side Planning Board had been collaborating with for years.

On April 19, 1961, a group of fifty “Angry Women,” the Chicago Tribune reported, sat outside Mayor Daley’s City Hall office demanding that the mayor meet with them. Responding to a Chicago City Council Planning and Housing Committee vote to recommend the area for the University of Illinois Chicago campus, the group overturned desks, scattered council journals on the floor, and furiously yelled insults at Daley, who left his office through a side door. After three hours of disruption, the mayor agreed to meet with Florence Scala, Jessie Binford, and planning consultant Tibord Haring the following day. At the meeting, Mayor Daley claimed that it was the university board of trustees, not the city, that chose the site. Yet, university representatives told Florence Scala later that the site had been suggested by the City and had been under consideration since at least September 1960. Daley was firm that the site selection was final.

Yet, Florence and the rest of the “Angry Women” got under Mayor Daley’s skin. “Some of these politicians called my Aunt Florence an Italian Fishwife. That outraged the Italian moms in the neighborhood. You think of it now as so demeaning, but back then, it was all patriarchy,” shares Father Steven.

Back at Hull House, Florence Scala considered paths forward. One avenue was for the Harrison-Halsted Community Group to take the litigation to the Federal Court of Appeals and the Illinois Supreme Court. This litigation would attempt to invalidate the land transaction from the City of Chicago to the University of Illinois on the grounds that just compensation was not provided to residents slated to lose their property, that appropriate provisions were not made for relocating families, and that the City of Chicago had broken faith with them by switching the use from residential to conversion for a campus.¹⁹ A letter was circulated amongst residents to sign, and then sent to the City of Chicago, articulating that the selection of the campus site would disrupt family life, ruin small businesses and Hull House, and endanger the National Urban Renewal program, which was supported by tax dollars. The letter went unanswered. Early in 1962, the Harrison-Halsted Community Group then decided to sue the Illinois State Housing Board on behalf of 282 individual plaintiffs, including business owners and residents of the area.²⁰ The Housing Board held less than two days of testimony for the suit before it abruptly announced that university site project plans had been approved by the Housing and Home Finance Agency. Further appeals to the board were ignored.

In November 1962, just a month after the Scala home was bombed, the plaintiffs received an opinion from the Federal Court of Appeals. The judge expressed sympathy for the plaintiffs and acknowledged that there had been a breach of faith between them and the City, but ultimately the opinion came down to the fact that the plaintiffs had favored—and even pursued—slum clearance programs themselves. The Illinois Supreme Court ultimately ruled in May 1963 that the rights of a group of residents could not be substituted for the public interest-oriented university. The litigation had failed on all fronts but protests at City Hall and on the Near West Side continued, even as businesses began closing and buildings were torn down outright.

The bombing so angered and frightened Florence’s father, Alex, that he kicked Florence and Chick out of the building, and the two would not talk for the next two years. Chick and Florence found refuge at Hull House, joining Jessie Binford as residents.

In February 1963, Florence entered politics, running as a write-in candidate for alderman. She was beaten by a Democratic organization candidate who later resigned when he was found to have never been a resident of the 1st Ward. For Florence, the defeat was devastating.

Neighbors hoped that Hull House, which had been sold by the Hull House trustees to the university, would be incorporated into the campus, particularly as a part of the college of social work. In 1961, the university trustees voted to demolish all but two of the buildings on the Hull House complex: the dining hall and the original Hull mansion. On April 1, 1963, the last two residents of Hull House, Jessie Binford and Florence Scala, vacated the buildings, and the furniture and items within were auctioned. Demolition equipment arrived the very next day.

The Hull House organization would become the Hull House Association, which moved their headquarters to Broadway and Belmont in Lakeview and opened satellite locations across the city. “Jessie Binford was broken-hearted,” laments Father Steven. “She was an elderly lady from Marshalltown, Iowa. Her whole life had been right there on Taylor and Halsted Streets with Jane Addams. I remember my dad and my aunt helping her pack up to move.” Returning to Iowa, Jessie Binford died two years later.

The demolition of Holy Guardian Angel School, which had hosted mass in the basement since it was completed just four years earlier, would be delayed until the end of the 1963 school year. The Archdiocese of Chicago had fallen behind the city’s decision, against the objections of Holy Guardian Angel pastor Reverend Italo Scola and members of the parish. Father Steven Giovangelo was a student at the school during that last school year, and an altar boy at Holy Guardian Angel’s last mass. The last mass at Holy Guardian Angel was attended by Florence Scala, Jessie Binford, and others from Hull House and the neighborhood. “It was like a funeral,” Father Steven shares. “There was so much sadness at the time, whether it was Holy Guardian Angel or Hull House.”

With the land cleared, the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus, named after the connection to the new west and south expressways [now the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Dan Ryan Expressways, respectively] began to take shape. The design for the new campus was created by architect Walter Netsch of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the Brutalist style. The buildings were laid out in a series of concentric shapes that allowed Netsch to cluster buildings and facilities together and included both three- and four-story libraries and a student center as well as University Hall, a 28-story skyscraper. The campus opened in 1965.

The built environment of the neighborhood had been completely transformed over the course of fifteen years. Between the construction of the University of Illinois Chicago Campus, and the construction of the Eisenhower and Dan Ryan Expressways, 13,000 people and 400 businesses were displaced.²¹ Eminent domain had allowed the City of Chicago to take private property through condemnation and just compensation. Property owners received the benefit of being paid for their properties, but tenants and businesses were not compensated.²²

Florence ran for alderman again in 1966, and lost a second time, but by a much smaller margin. She continued to engage in community organizing on a smaller scale and began working as a liaison between volunteer workers in the State of Illinois Department of Mental Health. In 1967, Chicago writer Studs Terkel included Florence Scala in the prologue to his book Division Street: America. In reflecting on her relationship with Chicago, she wrote, “I love it and hate it every day.”²³ At night, she would walk her dogs Dora and Ringo across the UIC campus, and care for her parents Alex and Teresa, who lived until 1976.

In 1980, at 62, Florence embarked on a surprising pivot. With the first floor of the building at 1030 Taylor Street empty, she opened Florence Restaurant with her husband Chick and her brother Mario. Mario painted a mural and created a stained-glass window to go with the repurposed woodwork salvaged from Hull House. Furniture, dishes, and silverware were purchased from restaurants that had closed. Diners at Florence Restaurant were greeted by a handwritten menu of daily specials, which consisted of whatever ingredients Florence had on hand, and whatever she wished to cook that day. “Florence’s became a center of the community because she was such a good cook,” shares Father Steven. “She learned techniques from her mother but enhanced them on trips to Italy where she studied with Italian chefs.” The restaurant was popular with her neighbors, UIC students, and politicos alike, and it became a favorite of Richard M. Daley. “Daley and my aunt were friends, apart from my aunt’s indemnity for his father,” shared Father Steven.

Florence’s background in community organizing and civic engagement made the restaurant a conduit for political discussions and allowed Florence a continued presence in the neighborhood and the press. Florence’s food was covered almost as extensively as her political opinions. Dishes like linguine with gorgonzola cheese and Il Diplomatico—a flourless chocolate cake with rum—were praised by food critics. “That was her signature dessert,” Father Steven says of the Il Diplomatico. “She couldn’t make them fast enough! My aunt had a mouth on her, and one day she told me ‘I don’t know why I introduced this damn thing. It’s become an effing millstone around my neck!’” laughs Father Steven.

In an article in the Chicago Tribune in 1981, Florence did not hold back on her opinions of elected officials. Of Mayor Jayne Byrne she said, “It's like she’s throwing the people bread, and she’s thanking that by doing that, she’ll take their minds off of the important things.”²⁴ Father Steven reminisces further about the food. “She did a veal chop with white wine and garlic and capers. People didn’t make that stuff back then.” Florence cared deeply for her staff, whom she hired from the neighborhood, and often assisted those who could not speak English with navigating traffic tickets and permits at City Hall. Chick Scala died in 1986, and the restaurant continued for another four years.

In 1990, Florence closed the restaurant and retired. Florence continued life as a rebellious, independent thinker, and retained her interest in neighborhood issues. Her insistence over years that people in the neighborhood had been wronged by the City and the University of Illinois at Chicago became an established doctrine amongst politicians, urban planners, and community organizers alike. Florence continued to be watchful of the university’s actions and carefully read between the lines when it harmed the people of Chicago. When the university purchased a shopping center and grocery store west of campus, she spoke out on the inequity of the decision, as it would have created a food desert for the residents of the Robert H. Brooks Homes, most of whom were African American. When Garibaldi Square, a gated townhome development, was constructed at Harrison Street and Ashland Avenue, Florence criticized the isolated, defensible nature of the design as anti-community, and questioned why existing housing needed to be demolished for the development. When the university began to slowly buy buildings on Maxwell Street, a historic open-air market that had served as a gateway neighborhood for immigrants and the birthplace of the Chicago Blues, Florence was outspoken about the need for it to be retained. “That should be saved in some decent form—not just a token, a chic little shopping area. It should be just the way it is—wild, crummy and gutsy, Florence wrote in 1991.”²⁵ In 1997, three years before the Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) Plan for Transformation was enacted—promising, but not delivering on the promise that public housing conditions in Chicago would improve and new investment would occur—Florence criticized the deliberate deterioration of public housing as an endeavor that would ultimately gentrify parts of the city. Time and again, her words on civic actions proved prophetic for the City of Chicago.

Florence passed away on August 28, 2007, maintaining her residence at 1030 West Taylor until the end of her life. Father Steven, executor of her estate, sold the property soon after, which stands in the shadow of the University of Illinois Chicago campus. Florence’s Restaurant is now Curry on Fire, a northern Indian kitchen that is a testament to the multiculturalism of the area’s residents and students.

Florence’s home on Taylor Street and Miller Streets was never under direct threat, and while Taylor Street east of her home was redeveloped by the University of Illinois Chicago, the area west of the Scala property remains dense, walkable, and full of vintage buildings that were renovated and modernized in the 1950s and 1960s. “Little Italy” is now just a small part of the larger Near West Side neighborhood, yet the area still retains some of that cultural history, primarily through the restaurants and sandwich shops that still serve dishes like Baccàla and homemade pasta.

“My aunt’s work speaks to a sense of personal community, where you know your neighbors and people help each other,” shares Father Steven. Quoting from an interview that Florence Scala gave to the Chicago Tribune in 1997, Father Steven reads his aunt’s words aloud over the phone: “What was so great about Taylor Street was that it was self-contained economically. The plumber lived on Carpenter Street, the tailor shop was here, the seafood store, across the street the butcher, right down there, the guy who made the Italian sausage, down the block. Everyone helped each other live. We all patronized each other’s business. Your kids are going to school together. All of that is what makes a neighborhood hum.”

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Father Steven Giovangelo for agreeing to be interviewed and for providing photos. Thanks to the University of Illinois Chicago Richard J. Daley Library staff for their assistance and images. Thanks to Mare Ralph for sharing their knowledge of the Near West Side and urban renewal.