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Chicago River, they entered one of the most storied neighborhoods in Chicago, two square miles of tenements, brick flats, and light industrial warehouses known as Bridgeport.
    Chicago’s tough-town reputation rests on neighborhoods like Bridgeport, a place that both forges the flinty myth and keeps it from expiring. From its very beginnings as an American city, Chicago was based on a grand, connective dream: to link Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. To do that, a canal had to be dug from the South Fork of the Chicago River to the headwaters of the Illinois River, ninety-six miles away. It was a distance twice as long as that of the Panama Canal, and when work began in 1836, there were no steam shovels or bulldozers—just thousands of Irishmen with shovels.
    The canal’s starting point was Bridgeport, which was originally named Hardscrabble after a local farm, then later Cabbage Patch because of the crops the Irish planted. The name later changed to Bridgeport after a span was erected across the South Fork of the Chicago River, but that didn’t alter the fact that it was Chicago’s first slum. Once the canal work began the Irish flooded in, and that was where they lived. Many of them had just finished digging the Erie Canal, and they labored for whiskey and a dollar a day. No one knows how many died building the canal, but when it was completed twelve years later, those who remained weren’t so much workers as survivors. Many stayed in Bridgeport, where they built churches, schools, and—as the economic promise of the great conduit came true—the city itself.
    But even as the Irish gained a foothold, Bridgeport remained an edgy place, as new waves of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, and Italians all settled into the neighborhood, most of them drawn by work in the nearby Union Stockyards. The groups eyed each other dis trustfully and segregated themselves to specific blocks. Ethnic strife was an almost daily occurrence, as gangs enforced the georacial boundaries and often battled each other in the streets. Carter Harri son Jr., Chicago’s first native mayor, grew up in Bridgeport, and famously described it as “a place where men were men, and boys were either hellions or early candidates for the last rites of the Church.”
    The Bridgeport gangs were the city’s most ruthless racial en forcers, and largely responsible for the 1919 race riots, which erupted when a black boy drowned in Lake Michigan after white youths threw stones at him because he was swimming off a white beach. As blacks began protesting, hordes of white Bridgeporters bent on “protecting” their community began roaming the South Side in a seven-day-long spree of violence that resulted in the deaths of fifteen whites and twenty-three blacks.
    Despite all the tensions between its residents, for the first half of the twentieth century the neighborhood flourished. Five Bridgeporters went on to control City Hall—a mayoral legacy unmatched by any other Chicago neighborhood. But once the meatpacking houses started closing down in the 1950s, the fragile economic and social alliances that had held the neighborhood together collapsed. The more prosperous population moved out, low-income housing developments went up, and one of Chicago’s most intransigent criminal cultures took hold. By the time the Williamses moved in, Bridgeport was as tough and as racially charged as it had ever been, with gangs composed of a hodgepodge mix of impoverished whites, Latinos, Italians, and Chinese fighting each other and the blacks for control of blocks, corners, drugs, and honor—a battle for the bottom that hit home with newcomers the moment they or a loved one were attacked by somebody who had been there first. Skin color, address, and income determined where you stood in the battle, and who your allies were, regardless of the fact that nobody liked or even comprehended it. You either played by the rules or, if you were willing to resort to violence, you made your