WBEZ | West Side

Chicago's biggest 'L' rebuild

Wed, 22 May 2013 05:00:00 -0500

The south end of the Red Line is now officially closed for rebuilding. The project is supposed to take five months. Many Chicagoans are reminded of the Green Line renovation of the 1990s, when service was suspended for nearly two years.

However, if we want to talk about the biggest Chicago ‘L’ rebuild, we have to go back to the 1950s.

Sixty years ago, the Garfield Park ‘L’ was one of the city’s major transit carriers. Trains ran west from the Loop along the general line of Van Buren Street to a terminal in Forest Park. The ‘L’ tracks were also used by the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin electric interurban line.

In 1953 the city began clearing land for the new Congress (Eisenhower) Expressway. Plans called for both ‘L’ and interurban trains to operate in the median of the completed highway. In the meantime, part of the Garfield Park ‘L’ was in the way, and would have to be torn down.

The expressway project was going to take years. CTA might have shut down Garfield Park service for the duration and told riders to take the Lake Street ‘L’. Instead, a temporary elevated structure was to be erected along Van Buren Street.

Local aldermen objected. The temporary ‘L’ would be ugly, and probably unsafe. A compromise was reached. Garfield Park trains were rerouted along Van Buren Street—but on the ground.

The Van Buren bypass opened on September 20, 1953. Trains ran at street-level between Aberdeen and Sacramento, about two-and-a-half miles. The tracks were fenced-in, with crossing gates at each intersection, and took up most of the street. Only a single lane was left open for west-bound auto traffic.

Garfield Park trains did not make passenger stops along Van Buren. However, they were forced to halt for red lights like ordinary street traffic. This made the ride slow. Many patrons moved over to the Lake Street line, or simply switched to their cars.

Meanwhile, Chicago, Aurora and Elgin service into the city was cut back. Their trains now operated only as far east as Forest Park, where riders had to change to Garfield Park trains. Patronage fell off rapidly, and the interurban went out of business in 1957.

On June 22, 1958 ‘L’ trains began operating on the expressway median as the new Congress line. The remaining structures of the old Garfield Park line were demolished. And after five years, the automobile reclaimed all of Van Buren Street.

There in Chicago (#22)

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 05:00:00 -0500

How well did you find your way around 1954 Chicago?

The most notable clue to the site is the former Pioneer Bank building, which has anchored the northwest corner of this intersection since the 1920s. Another clue is the trolley bus--it's operating on Pulaski, and the overhead wires show that the other street also has trolley buses. There were very few locations on the West Side where two trolley bus lines crossed.

Also seen in the older picture is one of the Morrie Mages chain of sporting goods stores. And on the far right, an Andes Candies store is partially visible.

Where in Chicago? (#22)

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 05:00:00 -0500

How well could you find your way around the Chicago of the past?

This 1954 photo is from Chicago's West Side. It's somewhere west of Ashland, between Armitage and the Sanitary Canal. Despite the passing of nearly 60 years, many of the buildings are still in place today. There are also a few clues to help you identify the site.

If you think you know the location, send in your guess as a comment. I'll post a contemporary photo tomorrow.

I am [enter neighborhood here]: A city of mistaken identities

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 07:30:00 -0500

We embrace stereotypes of neighborhoods because they sometimes prove to be true. I live near Wicker Park, a neighborhood known for its nightlife and youth culture. Although this identity is not as strong as it once was (gentrification has a way of changing the identity of a neighborhood multiple times), it is still prevalent in the clothing stores, boutiques, high-end coffee shops, and club-like bars that line Milwaukee Avenue. Once we’ve seen our stereotypes to be true, we hold on to them. It is easier to rely on what we know than what we don’t. Seeing once is believing.

But we often stereotype these neighborhoods because our identities are tied into these environments. I had a friend and coworker who moved to Logan Square not because he wanted to, but because he felt it was the thing he was supposed to do.

“I mean, all of my friends are moving there. Everyone my age, like me, has moved or is moving there,” he said while we chatted at a party.

Chicago as a city of neighborhoods can mean a number of different things. This cultural identity can be comforting. People of similar races, ethnicities and classes move to neighborhoods where they can be among their own. We find comfort in the familiar, in what we know and what we’ve always known. But our city of neighborhoods often isolates, creating a series of “Chicagos,” but not one that can represent the city as a whole.

In a recent blog post, my friend and interfaith scholar and activist Hafsa Arain wrote about this same situation. Although she wrote about a town outside of the city, her concerns and observations ring true for inside Chicago as well. She wrote:

If you don’t know how violence works in places you are unfamiliar with, then you have no basis for saying that those places should be kept away from entirely. I worked in Chicago Heights last summer - gang violence and gun violence are on the rise there - but there are also families with children who go to school. There are people getting their groceries, people walking their dogs on the street. When you tell me their lives are nothing but violence, you limit the neighborhood and the people who live there.

I recognize this, both the limitations and the realities. People describe the South Side as if it is one monolithic place with one singular identity: dangerous, foreign, a Chicago “not our own.” Nevermind how far it stretches, the variety of classes, the numerous (and often ignored) racial populations, the beautiful beaches and massive parks. No, people don’t know or don’t want to know these things. To them, it is just violence, thus limiting the neighborhoods (because there are many and not just one) and the people living in them.

My experiences living and playing on the West Side of Chicago in the Austin neighborhood as a child feel different than living in Lincoln Park as a college student or in Ukrainian Village as an adult. This is not just about age. These neighborhoods have completely different identities. I have friends who have told me they could never go to the Austin neighborhood because it is filled with crime, but my experiences growing up and my experiences visiting now tell me different things. It is a neighborhood that is not wealthy, but filled with lots of families. There are large homes that take up wide plots of land. There is a lot of crime, but there are also block organizations. There are block parties. If anything, Austin feels like the part of Chicago I don’t tend to think about as a 25-year-old woman: the working, settled down, normal, “everywhere else” Chicago.

Stereotypes, whether negative or benign, are a way of showing how a neighborhood is not “me.” There is a way of showing who I am and how I live and what I want to be, and living in one neighborhood versus another can signal those things. Likewise, dismissing one neighborhood over another is a way of confirming our “nots.” I am not drunken. I am not fratty. I am not mainstream. Our very essence is not part of this neighborhood or the people within it. It is not therefore I am.

Stereotyping neighborhoods limits what we know about the city. It allows us to miss out on musical venues, restaurants, architecture, and many of the other things that make Chicago such a culturally-rich city.

I was (and still am in many ways) an insecure woman worried about what others think of me. Talking to new friends now about where I lived in college, I was often hesitant to say Lincoln Park or Lakeview and rationalized my time there as just a student going to DePaul. Well, those places are not who I am right now, I used to rationalize. I was not identifying myself as someone from those neighborhoods. My time there was only transient. My identity was and is not Lincoln Park. My own personal weaknesses and immaturity acted as a barrier for others to better know other parts of the city and for myself to understand and appreciate where I was and what I had. I loved the abundance and access to a variety of different food options. Uptown was only minutes away. I still crave the convenience, the numerous methods of public transportation, the facade of safety.

As a college student, I spent long nights dancing and drinking in the back room of aliveOne where my friend Nick spun hip-hop and r&b. The space felt different than everywhere else in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. And when I had friends ask why I didn’t want to go to other parts of the city, I simply explained how perfect a night spent listening to Mary J. Blige and sipping cheap drinks can feel. The experience reminds me of similar venues I find throughout my current Ukrainian Village neighborhood. The music might not be as wonderfully selected by a pro, but it is the simplicity of the experience, the familiar faces, and the settling in one spot that feels just as pleasant. Why malign Lincoln Park when I know, like anywhere else in the city, there is good and bad?

When we stereotype, we limit our scope and participation in what a city actually is. By confining ourselves to the identities of our neighborhoods, we are confining ourselves to these actual physical spaces. The stereotypes and identities then become true. This is what it means to live here. But we are multi-faceted people and likewise, this is a multi-faceted city. To suggest otherwise gives Chicago little credit for its history, its diversity, and what it can become in the future.

Britt Julious blogs about culture in and outside of Chicago. Follow Britt's essays for WBEZ's Tumblr or on Twitter @britticisms.

The Chicago Stadium--big barn on Madison St.

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 05:00:00 -0500

The Chicago Stadium was a direct outgrowth of the Second City Syndrome.

Whenever New York did something fabulous, Chicago had to top it. In 1925 the First City had dedicated the new Madison Square Garden, an indoor sports arena that could accommodate 20,000 spectators. So now the Second City would do better.

The driving force behind the Chicago Stadium project was Paddy Harmon, a West Side promoter who’d made his rep running dance halls. In 1926 he organized a syndicate of investors, and they quietly began buying up property around Madison and Wood streets. They eventually acquired a square block.

When plans for the Stadium became public, many people were skeptical. This whole giant barn was too immense! And once ground was broken and construction got under way, strikes by 17 different craft unions delayed the project. Still, Harmon pressed ahead.

"It'll be a grand thing for Chicago," he told anyone who would listen. "You’ll be seeing fights there, and bike races, and big conventions. People will be coming from all over the country to see the events we’ll be putting on."

Harmon’s syndicate sunk $7 million into the project—close to $100 million in today’s money. On March 28, 1929 the Stadium was ready. Chicago now had the world’s largest sport’s arena, with a total capacity of 25,000.

Opening night featured a boxing card. The main event was the light-heavyweight title bout between Tommy Loughran and Mickey Walker. Fifteen thousand fights fans came out.

And, hey! The joint sure was impressive. The soaring walls towered over the surrounding cottages and tenements. Attached to those walls, two vertical electric signs spelled out “STADIUM” in giant letters.

But it was the inside that knocked your socks off. Three balconies full of bright red chairs circling the room. Twelve huge iron girders holding up the roof–no posts to block your view. And the noise! Fifteen thousand voices echoing up and back and around and through. Yeah, it was gonna be fun coming here!

While Loughran was busy beating Walker, interns at nearby County Hospital spotted flames shooting from the Stadium’s roof. Firemen were called, and they extinguished a burning tar barrel. The spectators inside didn’t learn of the blaze until they opened their papers the next morning.

As Harmon had predicted, the Chicago Stadium became a popular venue for sporting events, concerts, political conventions, pageants, and other large gatherings. It was torn down in 1994, replaced by the United Center across the street.

Paddy Harmon did not witness his arena’s greatest glory. He was killed in an auto accident a little more than a year after the grand opening. In keeping with his last wish, Harmon’s wake was held at the Stadium.

South Lawndale, aka Little Village

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 05:00:00 -0500

Our subject is Community Area 30, the area of the West Side generally centered around 26^th and Central Park. Historically, the neighborhood was known as South Lawndale.

That’s still the official name. But around 1964 community leaders here began referring to their turf as Little Village. North Lawndale was going through some bad times, and the people south the Burlington railroad wanted to emphasize their separate status. To keep the narration simple, I’m calling this area SLLV.

In 1869 the City of Chicago annexed most of the area that would become SLLV. The only hints of civilization then were a few farms and a little settlement near the Burlington tracks. That would soon change.

The Great Fire of 1871 wiped out downtown Chicago. The McCormick Reaper Works on the lakefront was among the properties destroyed. The company rebuilt on the outskirts of the city, at Western and Blue Island avenues. When employees at the new plant began settling nearby, developers began subdividing in SLLV.

Over the next 30 years, the community grew slowly and steadily. Many of the residents were Czechs moving west from Pilsen. There were also some Germans and Poles. In 1889 the city annexed the area west of Crawford Avenue (Pulaski Road), giving SLLV its current boundaries.

The real building boom came with the new century. In 1903 the massive Hawthorne Works opened just to the west, while to the north, the Douglas Park ‘L’ line was being extended. Cottages, two-flats, and distinctive three-decker flats began filling up the 25-foot lots of SLLV. A ribbon commercial strip took hold along 26^th Street.

Meanwhile, other factories and rail yards were being constructed along the community’s eastern and western borders. The Sanitary and Ship Canal was built along the southern periphery, and attracted similar development. SLLV became an island surrounded by a sea of industry.

The population reached 84,000 in 1920, making SLLV was one of the most densely-packed communities in Chicago. The residents were mainly blue collar and Czech. The most prominent was Anton Cermak, businessman and political boss. Cermak’s clout brought the community the Cook County court house and jail complex. In 1931 he became mayor of Chicago.

From Cermak’s time into the 1960s, SLLV didn’t change much. The population steadily declined to about 60,000, which was a blessing. Poles replaced Czechs as the dominant nationality. A few African-Americans lived in the northeast section. There were also a small number of Hispanics.

The last-named group proved to be the future of SLLV. In 1970 about a third of the population was Hispanic, and by 1980 that proportion had become 74 percent. At the same time, the total number of residents began rising. The 1980 census counted 75,000 people living in Community Area 30. Twenty years later the population reached a historic high of 91,000.

Today SLLV is home to about 79,000 people. The 2010 Census identified the population as 84 percent Hispanic, with 12 percent African-American and 4 percent White. The Mexican community is the largest in the Midwest. A highpoint on the calendar is the 26^th Street Mexican Independence Day Parade in September.

Hawthorne Works and most of the other factories are gone, and many SLLV residents work in clerical and service jobs. The 26^th Street strip continues to be one of the city’s busiest outlying shopping districts. In recent years several public schools have been built to serve the area.

SLLV has always suffered from a lack of parks. Though Douglas Park is just to the north, the only facility in the community itself is Piotrowski Park on 31^st Street. Perhaps some of the vacated industrial land can be devoted to recreational facilities.

The mystery of Woodward Drive

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 05:00:00 -0500

Anyone interested in Chicago history should get a copy of Streetwise Chicago. This 1988 book by Don Haymer and Tom McNamee lists the origins of thousands of the city’s street names. They gathered their information mainly from files at City Hall or the Chicago Historical Society.

There are a few gaps. Woodward Drive, a little roadway in Garfield Park, is dismissed with “source unknown.” Obviously the Park District didn’t keep very good records.

I have no way of proving it, but that roadway was probably named for Augustus Brevoort Woodward.

Woodward was quite a character. For one thing, when he was born in 1774, his given name was actually Elias. He later changed it to Augustus, after the first Roman emperor. That fact alone tells you something about the man’s opinion of himself.

He came from a prominent New York City merchant family. After graduating from Columbia Woodward got a job in the Treasury Department, and eventually became a lawyer. Along the way he became friends with Thomas Jefferson.

In 1805 President Jefferson appointed Woodward one of the judges of the Michigan Territory. He arrived in Detroit just after the little settlement had burned down. He immediately went to work rebuilding it.

Woodward put together a grand city plan based on Washington, D.C. Most of it was never realized, though he did name the main street Woodward Avenue, and that stuck. The Judge claimed that the name was merely descriptive of the street’s general direction toward the north woods—“wood-ward.”

He was greatly interested in science and education, and in his spare time developed a prospectus for a school he called the Catholepistemiad. Again, only some of Woodward’s ideas were adopted. His school later became the University of Michigan.

Woodward scheduled court sessions according to his whims. In summer they were held outdoors under a pear tree. “He was known as a two-bottles-a-day man,” one historian wrote. “It was not unusual for him to fall off the kitchen chair he used as a bench and go to sleep on the ground.”

The Judge did draw up most of the territorial laws of Michigan, known as the Woodward Code. Still, he had to be the top dog in whatever he did. He quarreled constantly with his fellow judges and the governor. They finally succeeded in getting rid of him.

In 1824 Woodward was shipped off to Florida as the territorial judge for the new territory. He died there three years later. A bachelor with no family to mourn him, his grave has been lost.

As far as anyone knows, Augustus Brevoort Woodward never visited Chicago. But isn’t he the sort of person who deserves a street in our city?

Cook County Hospital makes history

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 -0500

Cook County Hospital (aka Stroger) sometimes gets a bad rap. It’s often forgotten that the hospital has a distinguished history. One important event in medical treatment took place there in 1937. The subject was blood.

By the turn of the 20th Century, medical science had learned much about working with blood. Transfusions were becoming common. But blood will go stale after a while. If a patient needed blood, a live donor had to give it, directly and immediately.

Could blood be stored for longer than a few hours? Researchers worked on that problem for decades. During the early 1930s, Russia was able to set up a network of blood depots, where patients could have access to preserved blood. This interested Dr. Bernard Fantus.

Fantus was a Hungarian-born physician who had earned his M.D. at the University of Illinois. He became director of therapeutics at Cook County Hospital in 1934. In his new role he began a series of experiments on how to increase the storage time for blood.

Using refrigeration and various additives, Fantus was able to preserve blood for up to ten days. Early in 1937 he made plans to open the Blood Preservation Laboratory at County.

But he didn’t like that name! Sure, it described the work that was going on at the new facility. Trouble was, calling it the “Preservation Laboratory” made it sound like something out of a Dracula movie.

America was in the middle of the Depression. Saving was on everyone’s mind. After some rough times, banks were starting to rebound. With that idea in mind, Fantus decided to call his facility the Cook County Hospital Blood Bank. It opened on this date 76 years ago—March 15, 1937.

A few months later Fantus published an article on the blood bank in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Other hospitals adopted the idea, and it spread world-wide.

Bernard Fantus died in 1940. Today the out-patient clinic at his hospital is named the Fantus Health Center.

Police to business owners: Don't ignore drug dealing

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:11:00 -0500

Chicago police have taken 1,300 guns off the streets so far this year, and they continue to hold weekly press conferences to update the public on that number. Every Monday police have been displaying all the guns seized the previous week.

This week Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy also focused on an investigation that shut down a liquor store on Chicago’s West Side where drugs were being sold. McCarthy says the closure should be a warning to other business owners.

“There’s a big difference between a business owner contacting us and saying, ‘Look, I’m getting overrun by narcotics dealers and I don’t want anything to do with it and I’m scared,’ verses us going and doing an aggressive investigation because those sales are taking place indoors. So if they bring it to us it sheds a whole different light on it,” McCarthy said.

James O’Grady, the commander of the police department’s narcotics division, says undercover officers bought drugs inside the store on five occasions, in front of store employees. O’Grady says drug dealers moved their sales into the store simply because it was cold outside.

Saving greystones with blood, sweat -- and branding

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0600

Greystones are to Chicago what brownstones are to Brooklyn. And while many of these stately, limestone-faceted beauties line the grassy boulevards of wealthy North Side neighborhoods, many others exist in a state of neglect, disrepair or abandonment.

These decrepit greystones are generally located in some South and West Side neighborhoods whose residents were historically deprived of mortgages and subject to redlining. They're struggling now with low rates of home ownership and high rates of vacancy that have only gotten worse thanks to the real estate collapse. Add to that the stigma that comes from poverty, and you have a recipe for neighborhood neglect.

The last few years have thus been quite troubling for preservationists and community developers who want to both help struggling neighborhoods and save an iconic part of Chicago’s native architecture. One affordable housing developer phrased the essential question this way: “How do we start potentially building a market to rebuild interest in greystones and get people into these vacant buildings?”

That developer is Matt Cole, who runs Neighborhood Housing Service’s Historic Chicago Greystone Initiative. The program is aimed at preserving, restoring and modernizing these buildings, and NHS offers both educational and financial resources to owners and potential buyers, whether it’s advice on how to remodel or affordable loans that make it possible to do a full gut rehab on a neglected two-flat.

But in addition to these traditional sorts of community development strategies, Cole and his colleagues have turned to a tactic more common in commercial real estate development: neighborhood branding.

Anyone who’s ever been offered an apartment in “West Bucktown” knows that developers will often rename a gentrifying neighborhood in order to lure a wealthier set of potential buyers. But in this case, Cole and his colleagues focused their efforts on giving stigmatized neighborhoods the kind of narrative that would make existing, long-time residents puff up their chests.

Their test case was K-Town, a 16-block portion of North Lawndale named for a number of streets – Karlov, Kildare, Keeler, Kostner, etc. – that start with the letter "K."

K-Town is traditionally lumped in with the rest of Chicago’s West Side – so often described as poor, downtrodden and crime-ridden.

But this portion of North Lawndale defies that stereotype: It's actually quite stable, according to Cole, and has a striking share of Chicago’s built history.

“It is this incredible microcosm of Chicago architecture that really can’t be found anywhere else in the city,” Cole said. “You have fantastic greystones on one side, then workers’ cottages in the middle. Then also these sort of Dutch gabled buildings on the front – these two-flats and three-flats that were built in the 1930s – then bungalows start coming in.”

Two years ago NHS worked with a number of state and local preservation agencies to get K-Town added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Charles Leeks, NHS’s neighborhood director for North Lawndale, says there have not been measurable financial results – in the form of rising property value or additional homes sold or rehabbed – since K-Town was added to the National Register. But he said he's seen a noticeable uptick in neighborhood pride and cohesion.

“The real tangible benefits from [the National Register] have to do with this question of image – how people began to think about the place and manage it themselves,” Leeks said. “Once there was this historic district designation, once it was clear, people celebrated that and rallied around that.”

K-Town residents formed what Leeks called a Historic District Committee, which has taken a highly active role in promoting the neighborhood. In addition to developing a strategic plan for K-Town’s revitalization, they’ve organized neighborhood walking tours – an unusual feature for an area often cited for its blight.

They’ve also started showing up in housing court. If a vacant building goes on a demolition list, the committee may ask the judge to stay demolition so they can preserve it and work toward finding a buyer.

Leeks said NHS hasn’t brought on any new K-Town buyers in the two years since the neighborhood was added to the National Register (although the organization is currently under contract with two buildings on nearby Douglas Boulevard).

Instead, the Historic District Committee is turning to what it only half-jokingly calls the “K-Town alumni association” – anyone with roots in the neighborhood. “They’re reaching out to try and get former friends and neighbors to look back – and move back,” Leeks said.

It’s not always easy to get people to see their own neighborhood in a different light, especially if they’ve been there – or been away – for decades. But Matt Cole said NHS has already helped more than 200 greystone owners buy, keep or repair their buildings since the program was launched in 2006 – an investment of more than $6 million. And they’re still hoping to use historic narratives to rebrand neighborhoods and encourage reinvestment. That’s why they're taking a similar approach to another stretch of North Lawndale, the 3300 block of West Flournoy Street.

“People are watching this – people in other parts of the neighborhood,” Leeks said. “They’ve seen what’s happening in K-Town and said, ‘Can we do that?’”

You can hear Matt Cole expound more on his group’s neighborhood branding strategy in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Matt Cole spoke at an event presented by the Chicago Architecture Foundation in January. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.