History

History | Hyde Park | Kenwood | Politics | Woodlawn

The Past and Future of the SECC

Looking back on the South East Chicago Commission’s past as it enters a new era
by 1 month ago

The University of Chicago announced on January 26 that over the course of this year, the nonprofit South East Chicago Commission (SECC) will gain considerable independence from the university. Much of the SECC’s university funding will be cut, and the university will no longer be able to appoint or approve the organization’s board members. According to both parties, the move reflects the SECC’s need to reevaluate its direction as an organization.

History | Music

The World’s Most Musical Hardware Store

After a century, Meyers Ace Hardware will vacate its historic building
by 3 months ago

Robert O'Connor

Everybody wants to hear my story,” said Dave Meyers, the owner of Meyers Ace Hardware on 35th and Calumet. Meyers put up “CLOSING” signs on the front of the store last month, telling DNAInfo he couldn’t afford the space anymore.

History | Housing | Music

Home Histories: Mahalia Jackson’s Home

by 4 months ago

Natalie Gonzalez

Mahalia Jackson, the New Orleans-born gospel singer and civil rights activist, spent the later part of her life living in Chatham, in a spacious 1950s brick ranch house complete with seven rooms, a garage, a large chimney, and green lawns, located at 8358 South Indiana Avenue. When she moved to Chicago in 1927 at just sixteen, she lived with family and in various flats while she sang in churches up and down the South and West Sides of Chicago. After her 1947 hit, “Move On Up a Little Higher,” she gained international fame. With profits from her recordings and tours, she began investing in real estate on the South Side and looking for a home of her own. But when she began inquiring at homes with “For Sale” signs in Chatham, which was a majority-white suburb at the time, she was turned away by many homeowners—that is, until she stumbled across a white surgeon who had heard Jackson sing and was glad to sell his house to her. She bought the house in 1956 for $40,000 and was the second African-American homeowner on the block, after her neighbors, the Grants, who had moved in two years earlier.

History | Housing | Woodlawn

Home Histories: The Strand

by 4 months ago

Natalie Gonzalez

Last November, when William and Jacqueline Lynch moved their art gallery into the recently reopened Strand Apartments on 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, they were unaware of their new building’s historical import. “I did know about the Grand Ballroom down the street,” said William. “I didn’t know anything about this building.”

Essays | History | Housing

Chiasmus

A Narrative of Ascent
by 4 months ago 1 Comment

Turtel Onli

It’s 1986 and I’m born on the South Side of Chicago. My mother Sharon’s a Chicagoan too—born in 1964…six years into her parents’ northern life. My grandma Pearlie Mae is born in 1942 in a Mississippi Delta town founded by formerly enslaved people. My great-grandmother Wyona’s the first of us to be born in the twentieth century and would be eleven when white women got the vote, forty-five when segregation fell on paper, and fifty-nine when Dr. King was shot. Her mother Trudy was born in 1887 just up the road in the town where WC Handy first heard the Blues. Her mother Lucinda was born in 1862, one year into a war that’d color the conscience and collective memory of a nation. Her mother Martha was born in 1820, part of the generation begging for that slouch toward justice and would be forty-one years old when it began.

History | Housing | Lit

Home Histories: Lorraine Hansberry Home

by 4 months ago

Natalie Gonzalez

The Lorraine Hansberry House in northwest Woodlawn is unremarkable in appearance. Its brown brick walls and minimal adornments mimic thousands of other brick three-flats built in Chicago throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its outward appearance is transformed, however, when one learns that many of Hansberry’s experiences growing up in this house served as the inspiration behind her canonical play A Raisin in the Sun—a fictionalized reflection of her parent’s fight against housing discrimination in this very home.

History | Housing

Home at the Hotel

Excerpts from the Tribune’s writing on hotels during and after the 1893 World’s Fair
by 4 months ago

Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune

The following are excerpts of articles from the Tribune that cover the city’s hotels during and after the 1893 World’s Fair. The news reflects changing opinions about living in hotels and how hotel buildings should be used, or not used, as public spaces.

Architecture | History | Housing

The South Side’s Most Endangered

Standout structures in peril
by 4 months ago

St. Adalbert's Church (Robert Harris)

Every year, nonprofit advocacy group Preservation Chicago releases its list of the city’s most endangered buildings. The 2016 version featured three buildings on the South Side: the Lakeside Center, the Washington Park National Bank, and St. Adalbert’s Church in Pilsen. The Weekly photographed each building, and wrote a short history of the former two buildings. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a longer feature on St. Adalbert’s.

Bronzeville | History | Housing

Home Histories: Elam Home

by 4 months ago 1 Comment

Natalie Gonzalez

The wide boulevard where the Elam Home sits in Bronzeville has had many names, and the mansion, in place since 1903, has known all of them. The ornately carved windows—these days shuttered by gray boards—have peered out at over a century of history in an ever-changing city, watching as Grand Boulevard become South Park Way in 1923 and then Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in 1968. As the neighborhood became majority Jewish and then quickly became majority black; as the surrounding area earned a new moniker, Bronzeville, and a new reputation as a thriving black cultural center.