A cursory review of Chicago crime stories will lead you to believe that Englewood in Chicago's most violent neighborhood. But as my friend Victor Maggio winds down his Top Ten Most Violent Neighborhood series on his Bloody Chicago YouTube channel, we learn that Englewood, which is on the South Side, is only at Number 4.
The West Side is coming.
In a masterful look at Englewood, Maggio's latest video is his best piece yet. Once a prosperous suburb, Englewood's first brush with notoriety was that it was where Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as H.H. Holmes, operated his "murder hotel." Holmes was America's first documented serial killer, his crimes are laid out in the best-selling book Devil In The White City.
Englewood's onetime shopping district, centered at 63rd and Halsted, was the busiest in Chicago outside of downtown. A short walk from that corner on nearly every Sunday my mother watched movies at the luxurious Southtown Theatre. When it closed in 1991 it was serving as a flea market.
I've visited Englewood too, Maggio rightly calls it "the most rundown neighborhood in Chicago." It's a mini-Detroit. While redlining and overt racism have contributed to Englewood's descent, most of the responsibility for its present pathetic state belongs to Larry Hoover, the longtime leader of the Black Gangster Disciples street gang. He is now incarcerated at the Supermax prison in Colorado.
Maggio also discusses anti-police flash mob protests and he notices something I have also seen in Chicago's most dangerous neighborhoods, the many young men wandering the streets in wheelchairs, whom he calls "the forgotten ones." Most of them likely are victims of the city's wanton violence.
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