The Sutherland Hotel, once a hothouse of jazz entertainment in the Kenwood-Oakland community on the city`s South Side, is being tuned up for a new run at the big time as a unique low-income housing development.
In a collaboration that the participants hope will be copied, Oakwood Development Co. and the social service agency Travelers & Immigrants Aid have banded to transform the deteriorated Sutherland into 157 units of low- and moderate-income housing and restore some measure of the hotel`s past acclaim. ”This is the best thing that has happened to 47th (Street) and Drexel
(Boulevard),” said Marge Dyer, owner of the currency exchange in the Sutherland`s commercial space on the northeast corner of the intersection.
”In its heyday, the Sutherland was nice,” said Dyer, who has been in business there for 31 years. ”The big bands used to play. But it went to pieces when the hotel went to apartments. It went down, down, down and out.” The Sutherland Hotel was once a showplace on the South Side, its cuisine renowned around the city.
Private parties were held in the New York Room, while celebrities would gather in the Ebony Club. The 7-story, 154-room hotel had a barber and beauty shop, tailor, travel agency, delicatessen and medical offices.
The hotel gained most of its fame from the Sutherland Show Lounge, which attracted nationally known jazz musicians. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Stitt, Bill Evans and Nancy Wilson were among the better-known jazz artists to play the lounge.
The Sutherland remained popular among a cross-section of the city`s population after the surrounding neighborhood began to change from white to black in the 1950s, according to news stories of the day, and owners continued to invest in the hotel to maintain its reputation.
But the hotel suffered along with the surrounding neighborhood during the 1960s and `70s. At least 4,000 housing units in the area immediately north of the hotel were lost to abandonment and demolition during those 20 years as the community deteriorated.
By 1982 the last residents of what had become a decrepit transient hotel were gone, many simply dumping their belongings in the halls on their way out. ”One of the things I find extremely attractive about the building is its history,” said Matthew Roddy, Oakwood`s partner in charge of construction.
”It`s a cultural monument to the black community, and it would have been a tragedy to lose it.”
Roddy was drawn to the Sutherland because of his own roots in the neighborhood. He attended grade school at St. Ambrose School, about a block away from the Sutherland, before his family moved to the North Side 25 years ago.
”As a young adult I came back once and was shocked at the transformation of the neighborhood-for the worse,” he said. ”It had been a middle-income, working-class neighborhood, but I found it had suffered distress and deterioration.”
Roddy recalled a day eight years ago when he stood on the corner of 47th and Drexel, shaking his head over the condition of the dilapidated Sutherland. He vowed that if he got the chance he would come back.
”I filed it away in my mind,” he said. ”I knew at the time I wasn`t ready to tackle something on the South Side.”
Roddy and Peter Holsten, Oakwood`s president, have been North Side rehabbers since they started in business in Albany Park in 1975. They have made a commitment to redeveloping low-income housing, a commitment that has won praise for work such as that done to rehab the Norman Hotel in Uptown.
But high prices of North Side property are thwarting Oakwood`s efforts. Buildings there either cannot be purchased inexpensively enough to produce low-income housing or are in such bad shape that they cannot be renovated economically.
So earlier this year, with the Norman Hotel project behind them, Roddy remembered the Sutherland and told Holsten about it. They took a look and decided the project was the challenge they were looking for.
”This neighborhood has potential,” Holsten said. ”It`s a distressed area that can use some help in both housing and employment, yet for all the bleakness there are a lot of positive things to be found here.
”You have the proximity to the lake and to Hyde Park and a ready market because of the shortage of affordable housing. There are stable business operations with people who were telling us the neighborhood had bottomed out.”
Holsten had worked with Travelers & Immigrants Aid before, with the agency`s referring potential tenants to Oakwood`s previous low-income renovation projects, particularly the 154-unit Norman Hotel. He knew that Travelers was interested in a challenge as well.
”We recognize that one of the leading causes of homelessness is the lack of affordable housing,” said Rev. Sid Mohn, chief executive officer of Travelers & Immigrants Aid.
”In Chicago, particularly, the loss of SRO (single-room occupancy) units is adding to that. In the last 10 years we`ve lost 1,000 of those units annually. We want to reverse that decline and begin to build up those units.
”But we have a commitment to look at units that provided for more dignity than a typical SRO with one bath down the hall. We wanted units more like efficiency apartments, and additionally we wanted a diversified rental mix where couples and small families as well as singles could live.”
The agency never had entered housing development before, but Holsten, Roddy and Mohn agreed that the Sutherland provided an opportunity for all three.
”This is all financed without federal funds,” Mohn said, ”and we believe it demonstrates a new model of financing affordable housing. It`s an ideal partnership, and we really will push it as model city and countywide to begin addressing the affordable housing crisis.”
Travelers is putting $800,000 equity into the project, a contribution that Mohn said is part of the agency`s upcoming centennial celebration. The large investment will help hold rents down since developers will have to borrow less money and pay less interest.
Holsten went to First National Bank of Chicago and its neighborhood lending program, a source he had tapped for other projects and a source that has backed his hybrid SRO concept, for a $1.8 million conventional rehab loan. The Chicago Equity Fund, a financing scheme that funnels corporate money to low-income housing projects by syndicating low-income tax credit benefits, provided $1.2 million for the project. The Illinois Housing Development Authority loaned $500,000 in a second mortgage, and Oakwood put up $300,000 in equity to complete the package.
Of the $4.6 million, about $2.5 million is available for direct construction costs, a level of funding that is higher than similar low-income rehabs, Holsten said.
The 87 one-bedroom apartments will rent from $275 to $400 a month. The 46 studios will go for $200 to $300, and the 24 sleeping rooms, which include a private bath, will rent from $100 to $225 a month.
The $100 sleeping rooms could be considered affordable to someone on the lowest level of general assistance who receives $154 a month plus food stamps, Mohn said.
To achieve the low rents, the project in effect must subsidize itself, Holsten said. Half of the units will be rented at the upper end of the range, near market rents, while the other half of the units will rent on the lower end.
”We surveyed the existing flophouses and SROs, and the cheapest of those is still coming in at about $120 per month,” Mohn said. ”We wanted to be able to beat those rents and provide quality housing as well.”
Construction began at the Sutherland in early June. The renovation will produce 157 apartments, half of which will be reserved for low-income tenants. Eight commercial spaces along 47th Street also are being restored.
The developers are renovating the hotel`s former ballroom and intend to use it as a senior citizens center during the day and a community rental hall at night.
”The building was pretty filthy when we got in here,” said Roosevelt Wright, president of J & R Roofing, the general contractor. ”The rubbish was about 2 feet high. It was all groceries and clothes and furniture that people just threw out in the hall and left.”
But the structure itself is sound, Wright said. Once the renovation began in June, workers moved quickly to seal the building, concentrating on a leaky roof and broken windows.
Holsten hopes to hold a grand reopening for the Sutherland next spring. And he hopes to bring as many of the old jazz greats back for the affair as he can find.
That will make a gala evening for Dyer, a fitting reward for her perserverance.
”It isn`t easy to pick up a currency exchange and move, and it isn`t easy to open one new. So I decided to stick it out. For six years I`ve been the only tenant here. I`ll stay until they tear it down: That was the attitude I had.”
Now Dyer is helping spearhead the Sutherland`s revival. As a neighborhood clearinghouse she has gathered more than 50 names of former residents who have inquired about returning to the Sutherland when it is renovated. And she has a list of at least 20 businesses interested in returning to the shops.
”I`ve had many happy moments here, and now it looks like I`ll have some more,” Dyer said. ”It`ll be the Sutherland Strip, instead of the Sunset Strip.”
