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weary and in despair. The wrecking ball had just yesterday done away with Hull House and most of the neighborhood. Even the beloved elm beneath her window had been uprooted and removed.
    The boys downtown tried to buy off Jessie Binford. You can live at the Blackstone as our guest for the rest of your life, they told her. Anything to keep her quiet. She and a young neighborhood housewife, Florence Scala, were making a big deal out of this. Sshhh. But they wouldn’t shush, these two.
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    THESE TWO.
    Florence Scala, first-generation Italian-American. Her father, a tailor, was a romantic from Tuscany. He was a lover of opera, of course, especially Caruso records, even the scratchy ones. He had astronomy fever, too, though his longing to visit the Grand Canyon transcended his yen to visit the moon. He was to make neither voyage. The neighborhood was his world and that was enough.

    For Florence, her father’s daughter, the neighborhood reflected the universe, with its multicolors, its varied immigrant life, its cir-cumambient passions.
    Jessie Binford, of early Quaker-American stock. Her father, a merchant, trudging from Ohio to Iowa in the mid–nineteenth century, found what he was looking for. The house he built in 1874 “still stands as fundamentally strong as the day it was built,” his daughter observed. At the turn of the century, she found what she was looking for: a mission, Hull House, and a place, Harrison-Halsted. She found the neighborhood.
    For Florence Scala and Jessie Binford, Harrison-Halsted was Blake’s little grain of sand.
    They passed each other on early-morning strolls along these streets, not yet mean. They came to know each other and value each other, as they clasped hands to save these streets. They lost, of course. Betrayed right down the line. By our city’s Most Respectable.
    â€œI’m talking about the boards of trustees, the people who control the money. Downtown bankers, factory owners, architects, people in the stock market.” Florence speaks softly, and that, if anything, accentuates the bitterness.
    The jet set, too. The young people, grandchildren of the old-timers on the board, who were not like elders, if you know what I mean. They were not with us. There were also some very good people, those from the old days. But they didn’t count any more.
    This new crowd, these new tough kind of board members, who didn’t mind being on the board for the prestige it gave them, dominated. These were the people closely aligned to the city government, in real estate and planning. And some very fine old Chicago families.
    As Florence describes the antecedents of today’s yuppies, she laughs ever so gently. “The nicest people in Chicago.”

    MISS BINFORD is leaving Chicago forever. She had come to Hull House in 1906. She is going home to die. Marshalltown, Iowa. The town her father helped found.
    The blue of her eyes is dimmed through her spectacles. Her passion, undimmed. “Miss Addams understood why each person had become what he was. She didn’t condemn because she understood what life does to people, to those of us who have everything and those of us who have nothing.” It’s been a rough day and her words, clearly offered, become somewhat slurry now. “Today we’re getting further and further away from this eternal foundation on which community life must rest. I feel most sorry for our young people that are growing up at this time . . .” It’s dusk and time to let her go. I press the STOP button of my Uher.
    Our double-vision, double-standard, double-value, and double-cross have been patent ever since—at least, ever since the earliest of our city fathers took the Potawatomis for all they had. Poetically, these dispossessed natives dubbed this piece of turf “Chikagou.” Some say it is Indian lingo for “City of the Wild Onion;” some say it really means “City of the Big Smell.”