The West Side Before the Bulldozers

As per my previous example, the neighborhoods on Chicago's West Side have been torn apart by poor and short-sighted public policy. There is so much devastation at this point that there is little that is left to save South of West Town and North of Pilsen, which is a huge area.

There's a block (I believe perhaps Jackson?) just East of Ashland that stands out as a short stretch which has not met the wrecking ball. It's now a landmarked area. The stretch of Ashland due West of downtown was previously lined with upper class residences and churches. There was an opulent commercial highrise at the intersection of Ashland, Madison, and Ogden. Ogden and Blue Island were previously important commercial thoroughfares in the same vein as Milwaukee. No more.

UIC's campus demolished the neighborhood and truncated Blue Island short of its climax at it's previously vital intersection with Halsted and Harrison. The Dan Ryan was positioned particularly to destroy Maxwell Street's old neighborhood because it housed the poor. The circle change and the highways it connects have severed the neighborhood instead of giving it its focal point as the civic square would have done. The dividing power of highways is clearly shown in the separation of the neighborhood revolving around Canal, 18th, and Canalport from the rest of the lower west side.

UIC was not satisfied with their original campus, and so set about acquiring land to their south for athletic fields and dormitories, ripping down the original buildings and neighborhood while the poor renters living there were left unable to stop them. This area of indifferent expansion was documented by Charles Cushman in the 1940s

Witness the destruction here.

But the cherry has to be the threatening of eminent domain used to acquire the land around Maxwell Street Market and along Halsted to 15th. The university then proceeded to sell this land to politically connected developer friends of Daley, who erected posh (and cheaply built) new condos and dorms, destroying all of what was left of the neighborhood of old, the neighborhood where thousands upon thousands of new Americans found their first new world homes.

Unfortunately this is the story of much of the West side. UIC continues to creep in to Taylor Street. Vacant lots or conspicuously cheaply built new section 8 housing occupies CHA properties, which were often acquired using eminent domain or the threat to us it.

The old transient hotels which occupied the West loop were ripped down for the very corrupt Presidential towers development and for the stretch of the Kennedy near Greek Town.

The city's way of dealing with the aftermath of race riot destruction on the West Side was to subsidize and aid a developer in finishing the job and destroying all the remaining buildings, including an extant stadium, to simply replace it with a new stadium and fields of parking lots which take up over 12 city blocks. More public housing property occupies land to the parking lots' North and their Southwest.

With the parking lots to its East and huge expanses of public housing property to its West near Western, it is no surprise that the neighborhood between Western and Damen is vacant and struggling. Pockmarked with urban renewal within the area as well both near the Ike and along Lake St, it is hard to maintain neighborhood community when it is separated to the North by rail, the South by expressway, and to the East and West with vast parking lots and with vacant public housing fields, respectively. The neighborhood was doomed with a critical mass of failed public housing and now vacant lots and by massive public policy failures on the East and West which created vast troublesome and vacant property stretches on both sides.
The troubles in the area can be seen by the fact that demolition continues on the most intact stretches of Washington and Warren.

There is a map, by Scott Newman, which shows much, though not all, of the area I just spoke about in the years before 1910. It is instructive since the area has changed so much. A look at the neighborhood before eminent domain gone amok and before the planning era gives both a better understanding the change wrought and clearer context to what little remains. For a building and neighborhood is defined by how it speaks to that which surrounds it. The buildings which remain were not designed for the environment in which they now struggle to endure. Without further adieu (click on the pdf link at this page):

The West Side Before the Bulldozers.

This post is to be continued...