Bethel Church helped the West Side rise from the ashes

West Garfield Park was a vibrant neighborhood in the ’50s. On and around Madison Street was a shopper’s paradise: specialty stores, movie theaters, a branch library, and the kids’ favorite, the Off-the- Street-Club, where we painted ceramics, wove potholders and made papier-mache puppets.

But we had no idea our lives were built along a fault line of social unrest that would shortly lay waste to this area. Between 1960 and 1965, 30,000 whites left West Garfield Park, and 60,000 blacks moved in.

The effect on my church was dramatic. By 1965, there were sometimes only three members at choir practice, and on Sundays, we sang in a church virtually devoid of worshipers. In March of that year, our retiring pastor, Oscar Kaitschuck, sobbed as his last benediction echoed in the emptiness.

The new pastor, David Nelson, arrived five months later in the August heat with his sister, Mary. “I only came to help David get settled in. I thought of it as temporary,” recalled Mary Nelson. Within three days of their arrival, the first riots exploded along Madison Street when a firetruck raced out of the Pulaski- Wilcox station with no one manning the ladder. It swung out of control on a turn, killing a young black woman. Rioters burned buildings, looted stores and threw bricks through passing car windows.

In 1966, we moved 5 miles north, but my parents didn’t sell their buildings on Washington. Instead, my father returned to his old neighborhood every Saturday to maintain them as rental properties.

After Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, a far more devastating riot ripped apart West Garfield Park, destroying the Madison Street business district. Manufacturing jobs disappeared from the area. Banks closed. Businesses and hundreds of homes were burned out or shuttered.

With vacant lots and hollowed-out buildings on every block, the area drew comparisons to Berlin after World War II. But there was no Marshall Plan.

“By 1979, we knew we had to do something about housing, or there wouldn’t be a community to be church of,” Nelson said.

In 1979, the Nelsons turned to Bethel Church’s members to contribute $10 per week to raise the $5,000 needed to purchase and rehab an abandoned three-flat at 367 N. Karlov Ave. With that bold move, Bethel New Life was born.

Mary Nelson became renowned for her creative approaches to providing low-income housing. In 1983, my parents were in their late 60s when Bethel New Life offered them a way to sell their buildings, which were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. The organization agreed to pay half the appraised value of two of their properties, over time. The other half was treated as a tax-deductible contribution to the organization.

For neighborhood residents wanting to own a home, Bethel used the self-help model: Potential buyers could invest sweat equity to renovate or rebuild housing in lieu of a down payment. One building at a time, Bethel began reclaiming the neighborhood.

“The most important thing about the church,” Nelson said, “is it gives us a chance to be God’s servants in the community. I hope that continues as the promise.”

Now, fourteen years after Mary partially retired, she still lives on Chicago’s West Side, in the community which was devastated after the riots following King’s death and where she has worked for more than fifty years to bring housing and justice.

Listen to her interviewed by Tony Sarabia on this morning’s WBEZ, The Morning Shift, broadcast live from “Out of the Past Records,” at 4407 Madison Street,  about two blocks from where I grew up. Morning Shift Goes to Chicago’s West Side.