Angela Piazza Turley, social worker and activist who fought for fair housing in Uptown, dies at 97

Angela Piazza Turley's backbone and willpower fueled positive change in Chicago for decades.

In the '70s and '80s, when she was the president of the board of the Uptown Center Hull House, which was part of the storied Chicago social services organization that has since shuttered, Mrs. Turley helped establish a program for abused women and made it her mission to confront slumlords.

She'd regularly have a child in tow, including her young son, Jonathan.

He once watched his mom go toe-to-toe with an intimidating slumlord who raised the rent on a family that lived in a top-floor apartment so dilapidated they could see blue sky and clouds through holes in the ceiling.

"This woman couldn't leave because she didn't want to be on the street with her children," says Jonathan Turley, who's now a political pundit and columnist, as well as a law professor at George Washington University. "It was a unique experience being raised by Angela Turley. I only learned later this was not a standard for a boy to go into tenements and confront slum landlords. I was convinced we wouldn't make it out of half of these places. But she never flinched."

In 1979, Mrs. Turley ran for alderperson of the 46th Ward — which largely consists of Uptown — and lost to Helen Shiller.

Describing the ward, the incumbent candidate in the race, Ralph H. Axelrod, said at the time: "We've been a dumping ground for every kind of socially dependent person that no one else will take — the elderly, alcoholics, drug users, battered women, you name it."

Mrs. Turley saw people who needed help.

Many in the racially diverse neighborhood had one thing in common, they were poor.

And Mrs. Turley knew what that was like. She grew up in a coal mining town in Ohio, the daughter of immigrants from Sicily.

From her home, she could see crosses set ablaze by the Ku Klux Klan meant to intimidate Italian newcomers, Jonathan Turley said.

"It forged an iron core that would not yield and would not rest in the face of prejudice or corruption," he said.

Mrs. Turley died July 12 from natural causes in her longtime home near West Montrose Avenue and North Broadway. She was 97.

Mrs. Turley was an early supporter of the Independent Precinct Organization, which was founded in 1969 to slate independent reform candidates and break the stranglehold that then-Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Democratic machine had on city politics.

"We were enormously successful," said Dick Simpson, a founder of the group who later served as an alderman and is a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago.

"Not every candidate we backed won but the machine was weakened, and over time independents and reformers essentially took over the lakefront," he said. "Members gave monthly contributions and door knocked for candidates; it wasn't just a cocktail party group like liberals had tended to be before this era."

The group later merged with Independent Voters of Illinois and became known as the IVI/IPO.

Mrs. Turley also helped found the North Side Federal Credit Union, which offered loans to families who could not get them from conventional banks.

"She did it all with a wicked sense of humor, sarcastic and quick, a comedian's wit," said her son Dominick Turley.

She also helped found Tri-Faith, a non-profit job training and placement organization.

"She had so much respect for poor people," said her daughter, who is also named Angela Turley.

Mrs. Turley would regularly drive nuns from her parish, St. Mary’s of the Lake, around town. And she'd pull over whenever she saw people in trouble, regularly shuttling people to hospitals or police stations.

In about 1969, Mrs. Turley came across an abandoned baby at an Uptown laundromat and quickly made about two dozen calls from a pay phone and found the mother.

"That's how well she knew the community," her daughter said.

Mrs. Turley was born July 27, 1927, in Yorkville, Ohio, to Dominick and Josephine Piazza.

Her family later moved to Florida in hopes the weather would offer health benefits for her father, who suffered from black lung, a respiratory ailment caused by inhaling coal dust. Her family opened a grocery store. It's where Mrs. Turley met her future husband, Jack Turley, a World War II veteran who found that doing crossword puzzles with Mrs. Turley by the store's front window was something her parents couldn't object to.

The pair moved to Chicago with little to their name and lived in public housing on the South Side.

Mrs. Turley got a job as a waitress at the first place the couple went for coffee.

Her husband, intent on becoming an architect, attended the Illinois Institute of Technology on the GI Bill and later trained under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He later became a partner at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, where he worked on many of the skyscrapers that Chicago is known for.

Mrs. Turley got her start in social work with a Catholic organization that worked with special needs students and low income families.

Mrs. Turley's husband died in 2005.

The couple regularly shared their home with people who were struggling financially and with international students who needed housing.

"My mother measured success one person at a time," Jonathan Turley said.

Mrs. Turley is survived by her sons Dominic Turley, Christopher Turley and Jonathan Turley, her daughters, Angela Turley and Jennifer Dziepak, and 13 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

A visitation will be held Aug. 1 from 4 to 8 p.m. at Drake and Sons, 5303 N. Western Ave. A funeral mass will be held Aug. 2 at 10 a.m. at St. Mary of the Lake, 4220 Sheridan Road.