Wentworth Gardens
Wentworth Gardens is a 344-unit housing project operated by the Chicago Housing Authority. It lies just south of Rate Field in Bronzeville on Chicago's south side.
History
The site had originally been home to South Side Park, a baseball stadium for the Chicago White Sox and then the Chicago American Giants of the Negro Baseball League. In 1944, the CHA purchased the site to build a 422-unit apartment complex of low-rise buildings and row houses. Wentworth Gardens opened in 1947 for returning World War II veterans and later thousands of low-income African American families in a tight-knit community. During the 1950s it was once labeled as “The best housing community in the city," until street gangs took over the buildings. By the 1970s, the project had become more unsettling and less tended to by CHA, resulting in the project declining overtime. Like all the other housing projects, Wentworth experienced a sharp increase in crime, mainly due to drugs and violent street gangs. The Gangster Disciples dominated all of the buildings in Wentworth in the early 1990s.The project was one of many CHA developments that was regularly swept by Chicago Housing Authority Police Department, as it was a part of "Operation Clean Sweep."In October 1996, police arrested 13 drug dealers in a drug sweep.
Wentworth was nicknamed "Murdertown", due to high number of homicides that frequently occurred in the project. Residents blamed CHA for displacing families from the High-rises to Wentworth. The homicides was the end results of displacing some said.