Reverend Richard L. Tolliver fights the midday traffic on the Eisenhower Expressway on this deep-blue-sky, mid-May afternoon in Chicago. He also fights the clock on his way to yet another appointment. Always on the clock. Always robbing Peter to pay Paul, or so it seems for this driven man of faith who shifts between his many roles and responsibilities with Protean zeal.       

Tolliver left downtown a little after 1 p.m. after an enjoyable lunch at the Union League Club with Time magazine’s dapper Midwest bureau chief, Ron Stodghill II. Stodghill met Tolliver four years ago when he was writing for Business Week. In a feature on urban rehab and the role of investment tax credits, he praised the Episcopalian minister as a hope giver who spearheaded the “miracle of Washington Park.”       

Reverend Tolliver’s success story centers on the impressive decade-long housing revitalization he has led on Chicago’s South Side. Some say he is erecting his legacy brick by brick, block by block. Much has been written about the dynamic preacher who helped rebuild his aging church and reclaim the neighborhood while serving as president of an aggressive redevelopment corporation.       

“You’re relentless but not overbearing,” a prospective donor said to him recently.      Admirers call him a visionary, a prophet of blueprints and master plans, a builder, more Solomon than Moses. He believes he is serving his people by providing new homes and new hope in a community that had been lost decades ago. He believes in living his faith through social activism.       

Proud as he is of the positive press his efforts have received, Tolliver becomes prickly when something negative appears in print — even something seemingly minor. He frowns when he recalls being called portly by one writer. Shortly after the story appeared, Tolliver began a diet and exercise regimen, dropping twenty pounds. Now on the cusp of his fifty-fourth birthday, Tolliver resembles a streamlined, five-foot-six-inch version of (ex-Chicago Bears linebacker) Mike Singletary.       

Tolliver says he is in excellent shape. He had better be with the exhausting schedule he must maintain as pastor, scholar, executive, and community leader. Like a perfectionist head coach who drives himself and others too hard, Tolliver says he is a prime candidate for burnout. He has a two-month leave of absence coming — if and when he takes it.       

“God gives me my marching orders,” he says, explaining his energy and tenacity.        The traffic eases a bit, and Tolliver pulls his gleaming maple-colored Infinity Q-45 onto the exit ramp. A Marvin Gaye song plays on his car radio, tuned to 102.7 FM. The car heads south on Michigan Avenue until it reaches 61st Street. He drives past the boarded-up buildings, but his emotions don’t betray him.       

His small dark eyes take in everything as he reviews his to-do list. He’ll talk to the mayor’s office and again ask officials to “brick up” the abandoned public housing units across from his church at 6105 S. Michigan Avenue. He’s tired of seeing squatters, drug dealers, and gang members near his holy turf.     Tolliver won’t return to the church until late in the day. First he has to address the senior citizen’s group at the recently opened St. Edmund’s Towers, a sixty-unit multi-story residential dwelling for folks who once lived in the twelve-block Washington Park neighborhood. They lived here when it was a successful black middle-class enclave.

They lived here years before the population plummeted, from 90,000 to 19,000 in two decades, before businesses closed, buildings were ransacked, and a host of social problems descended on this community. About 60 percent of the area’s residents still live below the poverty line, and once impressive brick and stone buildings are hollow, haunting reminders of another era.