When an “L” train on Chicago's Red Line emerges from beneath the Loop heading south, it rumbles above the streets for a distance, then slips between the northbound and southbound lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway, just south and east of the enclave of Chinatown. For the rest of its journey, the passengers have a view of the mighty expanse of South Chicago on both sides of them. Taking this train on my morning journeys to teach, I would read the Chicago Tribune, using the journey to keep up with the news. As we traveled south, around the time we reached US Cellular Field, where the White Sox baseball team plays, I would often put down my paper and marvel at the scenes to the east, across the northbound traffic lanes.Hulking over the expressway were the scarred and burned structures of Stateway Gardens, part of the massive expanse of public housing known as the “State Street Corridor” stretching along State Street from north to south.2 In the collective American imagination, these projects were the epitome of public housing – decrepit, large, dangerous, Black. They stood right along the expressway so that people traveling to the North Side of the city, where most white people were probably going, could not help but see them. The projects had scars of fire coming out some of the windows, like permanent black eyes. The buildings seemed larger than they actually were – perhaps just because they were so ominous – and seemed closer than they actually were, looming over the freeway, probably reflecting the subtle fear they invoked in those passing by.