One of Chicago’s most determined civic activists passed away this week. Florence Scala was 88 years old. The cause of her death was colon cancer. The daughter of Italian immigrants, Scala led the fight to keep the city from bulldozing her neighborhood—Chicago’s Little Italy. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley wanted to make way for the University of Illinois campus. The campus was built, but Scala remained a fierce advocate for social justice.

Chicago Public Radio’s Diantha Parker reports.

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Florence Giovangelo Scala said the Little Italy of her childhood was “dominated by gangsters and hoodlums.” She said it to author Studs Turkel, whose interview with Scala opens his 1967 oral history of Chicago—called Division Street America. By then, more than half of her neighborhood was gone. But in 1961, Scala led a delegation of women to Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s office to talk him out of the UIC plan. 44 years later, Scala told me how Daley tried to charm them.

SCALA: He said to us, “now ladies,” you know he was real gracious, real sweet Irish guy, smiling, and he said “now, I’m gonna build homes for you , I know that this is going to be upsetting for you but you’re gonna have new homes, and you’re all going to be happy that this happened, finally.”

As you can probably tell, Scala didn’t buy it for a second.

SCALA: One of his comments that that he’d make whenever — he loved neighborhoods, and he wanted to keep the city together through its neighborhoods. He really didn’t give a damn about the neighborhoods when push came to shove—if somehow or other you were in the way of his future plans, the neighborhood didn’t matter that much.

Scala’s social conscience actually went back to her childhood—and to Jane Addams’ Hull House, where her mother enrolled her in free classes. There she met people from all different backgrounds. Her father was a tailor, and they didn’t have much money. Her studies paid off—at one point, she got an invitation to the White House from First lady Eleanor Roosevelt. As she took on Daley, she also faced up to the mobsters who’d run the neighborhood since she was a girl. In 1963 she ran as an Independent for First Ward alderman. She lost. But not before someone firebombed the back of her father’s tailor shop—which was still the family’s home. Everyone was okay, but they left the area for awhile.

SCALA: I sometimes see the inevitability of the whole thing when I look back on it. It couldn’t have happened any other way—just that we would have to lose it all.

But Scala continued fighting to preserve what was left of Little Italy for the rest of her life. She and her husband eventually returned to her father’s shop on Taylor Street, now at the western edge of the UIC campus. She turned it into a beloved neighborhood restaurant, named Florence. That closed in 1990. More than 15 years later, paintings of the Italian city that shared her name still decorated the walls, and a sign in the front window announced her latest fight: “Social Security for People, Not Wall Street.” She continued to live in the 2-bedroom apartment upstairs, which is where she died early Tuesday morning.

I’m Diantha Parker, Chicago Public Radio.