Like a lot of mothers in Chicago, Cathy Vates was worried about gang activity in her Northwest Side neighborhood. Two years ago, when she decided to relocate, she moved to . . . Winthrop-Kenmore.
Vates laughs when she talks about the looks she gets when people learn that she and two teenage sons moved to the Winthrop-Kenmore Corridor, a long stretch of what historically have been two very mean streets on Chicago’s North Side.
On one hand, moving there went hand-in-hand with Vates’ job as community relations director at Loyola University. She had been in daily contact with the organizations that have been hip-deep in combating the deterioration that had become synonymous with Winthrop-Kenmore.
On the other hand, that familiarity didn’t scare her away. “Yes, the neighborhood has problems, but they are more and more isolated,” Vates says. “There has been a huge change.”
A huge change, considering Winthrop-Kenmore’s past.
Decrepit, unsavory, crime-riddled, run-down, fearsome, overcrowded, a warehouse for society’s needy and neglected . . . all of these terms show up in newspaper stories from the 1970s and 1980s, chronicling an area whose time had come and gone.
Over the years, optimistic pronouncements of a “turnaround”-in the form of government programs and partnerships with private developers and statements from neighborhood groups and brokers-poured forth, though every beacon seemed to be followed by a fizzle, followed by another beacon.
But there are signs the turnaround is for real this time.
Last fall, a grand opening was held for a co-op in a formerly derelict apartment building in the 5500 block of Winthrop that had been rehabbed under the direction of Habitat for Humanity. It was the last of about two dozen severely derelict buildings targeted by a neighborhood redevelopment effort to be renovated.
Its completion prompted the Edgewater Community Council, a group that made the revival of Winthrop-Kenmore one of its primary goals, this spring to announce it was satisfied enough with the progress that it would turn its revitalization efforts to another corridor in the neighborhood.
There is additional evidence of the upswing:
– Unlike in other neighborhoods, the boarded-up buildings weren’t demolished. Instead, neighborhood groups, particularly the Edgewater Community Council, courted rehab. ECC reported about a year ago that in a 12-year period more than $72 million had been invested in Winthrop and Kenmore rehabs of 172 deteriorated buildings, preserving 5,550 units of housing, primarily for low- or moderate-income renters.
– The Edgewater Development Corp., in conjunction with Combined Property Management and the Chicago Transit Authority, has renovated and is finding tenants for retail stores at four CTA train stops along the spine of Winthrop Avenue. Some of the space at the Berwyn stop was carved out of an unused exit for train passengers that had become literally knee-deep in garbage.
– Police say that they don’t have crime and fire statistics for the two streets specifically, but say that they no longer consider them a problem.
– “Condo for Sale” signs dot the area. Brokers cite prices of $80,000 to $150,000 for two-bedroom units in the Edgewater corridor and say flatly that redlining no longer occurs in the area. There are no more boarded-up buildings, though one vacant building remains, they say.
Cynthia Perry, who works at a Loop bank, bought a condo on Kenmore Avenue about two years ago, moving from the far Northwest Side. In what may mark a sea change in neighborhood perceptions, she said only one person has expressed surprise that she would choose Winthrop-Kenmore.
“I know that, as with all neighborhoods, there’s crime,” Perry explained. “But I have never seen any crime, myself. I work late at night sometimes and have to walk from the L. I have never had any problems.”
Police in the 20th District, one of the two that patrol the Edgewater stretch of the corridor, say that “huge change” is not an overstatement, although neither they nor the ECC has broken down crime statistics for the two streets alone.
“Neighborhoods take 25 years to turn around, and people forget that,” says real estate broker Paul Boyd. “It took Lincoln Park 25 years. In the middle 1970s, you didn’t want to go around some areas of Halsted Street. The younger brokers in my office don’t believe me when I tell them that.”
But in most quarters, word of the turnaround is not out. As Vates will testify, Winthrop-Kenmore doesn’t carry cachet, carrying instead a hefty load of skepticism, couched in those cliches about leopards and spots, and silk purses and sows’ ears.
There are a number of reasons, say community activists who talk about the neighborhood’s image problem in the same tones that a parent uses to assure a child that even though his ears stick out now, he’ll grow into them.
“It’s becoming easier, certainly,” explains Boyd, an associate broker for Kahn Realty, who has long been involved with the ECC and who says he has sold more than 70 condominiums in the Edgewater portion of the corridor.
“Five years ago if people called about a blind ad (for real estate), nine out of 10 would hang up” once they heard the address, he said. “Now only four or five will.” Such is the measure of urban progress.
“In a neighborhood, the reputation lags five years behind the reality,” Boyd says. “It’s been good for seven or eight years now, so we’re starting to see some effects.”
Another reason for ambivalence about the corridor’s recovery lies in geography. Edgewater is Edgewater. Uptown is Uptown. But Winthrop-Kenmore, for better and for worse, is both.
The corridor runs generally along the Howard elevated line from Irving Park Road (4000 north) to Devon Avenue (6400 north). On those blocks are shoulder-to-shoulder three-flats, courtyard buildings and latecomer four-plus-one apartment buildings.
Foster Avenue (5200 north) bisects it and designates where Uptown ends and Edgewater begins. Therein lies a distinction, in the eyes of residents who say they wish people wouldn’t think of it as one long neighborhood.
The two have been entwined in the public perception for decades, largely because Edgewater was included as part of Uptown on the city’s official map until it was designated as a separate community area in 1980.
Uptown began a decline in the 1930s, pummeled first by the Great Depression and then by changing migration patterns. A post-World War influx of job-seekers to Chicago inspired landlords in both neighborhoods to cut up the area’s grand old apartments. Aggressive neglect followed.
In the 1960s, faced with mental health funding difficulties, Illinois began a policy that released thousands of mental health patients from state-operated asylums into communities. Uptown, with its sea of inexpensive apartments, was a prime landing zone, and Winthrop-Kenmore was the bull’s-eye.
“We heard astronomical numbers, 25,000 (residing in and around) Edgewater and Uptown,” recalls Marge Britton, an early ECC member who now directs public relations for the Chicago Association of Realtors’ Multiple Listings Service and is also a landlord on Winthrop Avenue.
“Some were in halfway houses, some in apartments, on their own,” she said. “We became a receiving neighborhood for a great many people who needed special help. People were on the streets, sometimes confused and disoriented. They weren’t a crime problem. They became victims of crime.”
“There were also-not absentee landlords, that’s not accurate,” Britton says, reaching for a description. “They were distant landlords. They didn’t pay particular attention. The neglect was followed by a number of arsons, some of them resulting in a tremendous loss of life.”
And so, by the 1970s, Winthrop-Kenmore had gotten a new name, and it was not an improvement: Arson Alley.
Redlining, the practice of lenders and insurers to refuse to grant mortgages and insurance in neighborhoods that are deemed bad risks (to use a polite term) also was the rule of the day.
In 1981, the Edgewater Community Council started Operation Winthrop-Kenmore. Its purpose was to drag development into the area, according to Boyd, who was ECC president in 1983. The group repeatedly mobilized neighbors to show up at housing court hearings regarding burned-out and abandoned buildings.
ECC wasn’t alone: Other groups were stirring. Charles Gatz was part of one of them. Looking for a neighborhood with investment potential and a sense of community, Getz moved from suburban Westchester to the 5300 block of Winthrop 20 years ago, and shortly thereafter helped form the Edgewater Beach Association.
“Our goal was to clean up, from Foster to Bryn Mawr. Later we joined with the ECC. We talked to every single janitor on the street, every owner on the eight blocks. We were constantly in housing court. It took a year.”
But when one of the desired effects, appreciating real estate prices, occurred, Gatz got a surprise. “Everyone who professed to wanting a neighborhood sold for the price and left,” he said. “That was 15 years ago. Finally the group just became defunct.”
Gatz himself sold his three-flat two years ago to a commodities trader, though he still lives in the building.
Residents are lightning quick to point out that having commodities traders in residence is about as far as you can get from the old Winthrop-Kenmore without falling off the edge of the Earth.
In the next breath, they insist that although the gentry, as in “gentrification,” may be coming in, it’s not dominant. “It’s not Lincoln Park,” they repeatedly assure.
But the area has come far enough that the ECC has shifted its redevelopment focus to another corridor-Ridge Avenue between Broadway and Clark Street-though Mary Jane Haggerty of ECC assures that the group isn’t abandoning Winthrop-Kenmore.
Nonetheless, Mimi Harris, for one, says she is disappointed with the change. A social worker in Uptown who long has been involved with the Organization of the North East, an activist group that is widely regarded as an ECC competitor, Harris is in the process of buying the three-flat on the 5600 block of Kenmore Avenue where she has rented for nine years.
She’s skeptical of ECC’s claims of maintaining diversity. Her measure of gentrification is that rents have inched up beyond the means of many residents, pushing them out.
“In Winthrop and Kenmore, which had this reputation of being a poor people’s haven, the rents are rather hefty,” she said. “Next door to me, the one-bedrooms are $500.” She also said that developers’ restrictions on the numbers of persons residing in subsidized units have forced families to look elsewhere.
Eighty percent of the housing stock is one bedroom or less on the two streets, according to Boyd. “It is more adapted for a modest income group, but that doesn’t have to mean poor and transient,” he said.
Michael Chioros is senior vice president at Vranas & Associates, which owns or manages about 1,300 rental units in Winthrop-Kenmore and the adjoining (and more upscale) Sheridan Road areas of Edgewater. He sees the current condition not as gentrification but as a return to the area’s original role-modest housing for young adults and senior citizens.
“The neighborhood was renovated for the same purposes it was designed for, for people starting out their lives or ending up there,” Chioros said.
Chioros, who has been in the area for about 20 years, saw it at its worst and also during one of its anticipated resurrections.
“Around 1979 and 1980, there were buildings (a landlord) could virtually get for free, say $500 per unit,” he recalls. Then, as rehabbing began and the first wave of condominium conversion hit in the 1980s, “things just continued to get more and more positive. But we had a couple of setbacks in the 1980s where syndicators overheated the area.”
“The bargains are gone. Now you’re seeing $20,000 a unit in the four-plus-ones,” he explained.
Those higher per-unit costs translate to higher rents. Winthrop-Kenmore studios in Edgewater now rent from $300 to $350, several real estate brokers said. “In Belmont Harbor, add $100 to $150 per apartment,” Chioros said.
Chioros says that when he goes shopping he has company these days. “Any building that comes up, I’m going to think about buying,” he said, “(and) there are half a dozen people who would compete with me.”
“And there are going to be half-million-dollar townhouses,” he added.
There are already $250,000 ones, such as the strand of seven that were built a couple of years ago at Berwyn and Kenmore. Around the corner on vacant lots at 5314 N. Kenmore Ave., the Richland Group and Renaissance Properties have begun development on the new Seville Towne Homes. The 20 two- and three-bedroom units will cost $179,900 to $209,000, according to the Stratford Realty Group, which will market them.
That’s at the high end for the neighborhood. Two-bedroom units usually sell for $80,000 to $150,000 in the Edgewater corridor, according to Jim Prange, Stratford president.
