An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day--and unmakes itself, too.
Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it's also
people--the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others
grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors
move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and
burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of
sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust
outdoors, is it still a neighborhood?
In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago's South
Shore neighborhood--a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate
commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the
decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents
confronting--or avoiding--each other across an expanding gap that makes
it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella
tells the stories that reveal how that happened--stories of
deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with
vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the
poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and
reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger
waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban
neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking
carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change,
Rotella explores the tension between residents' deep investment of
feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their
hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors
living there.
Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always
Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to
challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think
anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to
the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.
