Apparently, you can go home again.
Tom Hogan grew up in Beverly Hills/Morgan Park, a neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side. After getting married, he and his wife-like a lot of newlyweds just starting out-wanted to move. So they bought a two-bedroom condo in Lincoln Park where they lived for six years.
When Hogan’s son was born, things changed.
“I wanted to give my son an opportunity to grow up in a place where he could develop friendships like I did as a kid,” Hogan said.
At first, Hogan and his wife looked for a good house in the rock-solid middle-class suburbs to the west and north of the city. Finally, he realized that the big old houses with generous-sized lots in the Beverly Hills area were better than similarly priced suburban homes.
“There was no choice when it came to the community either,” Hogan said. It was just the kind of friendly place he had pictured for his son, with plenty of families and a tight-knit feel.
So they bought a 115-year-old, 2,500-square-foot Victorian cottage in Beverly-a decision they’ve never regretted.
“It’s a place where people put down roots and stay,” he said.
Somewhat surprisingly, the neighborhood has a fair share of prodigal sons, and daughters, who, like Hogan, end up returning to their roots.
“Half of the new home buyers have lived in the neighborhood before and a good deal of those represent the children who grew up there,” said Mark Testa, associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, who has studied the area and also happens to live there.
“That represents the self-renewal of the neighborhood and is quite important to its stability.”
That steadiness seems to be a big reason why the area continues to thrive, with a strong assist from committed residents who never seem to tire of improving their neighborhood: They plant public gardens. Rehab historic commercial buildings. And patrol the streets at night, keeping an ever-watchful eye on the fringes where the potential for crime is a problem.
Originally, the Beverly Hills/Morgan Park area-bounded by 87th Street on the north, 119th Street on the south, Vincennes/Beverly Avenue on the east and California Avenue on the west-was created as an enclave for mostly Protestant South Side business executives.
In 1886, real estate developer Robert C. Givens built a replica of an Irish castle at 103rd Street and Longwood Drive-still a neighborhood landmark-at a cost of $80,000. The castle was part of his marketing plan to attract the wealthy and sell them land, which they bought and on which they built houses.
Over time, the neighborhood-which had a rich mix of housing styles, not just mansions-became populated by various kinds of people including a number of Catholic families.
As massive resegregation swept Chicago’s South Side in the early 1970s, many residents of Beverly Hills/Morgan Park decided to buck the odds and integrate, rather than move.
“My father was one of the lead people in that effort,” said Larry Stanton, executive director of the Beverly Area Planning Association (BAPA), a group that became active during the 1970s to help integrate the neighborhood and still considers housing its main mission.
“They realized the neighborhood was going to be integrated and they had to make sure that happened successfully.”
By and large, those efforts worked.
The most recent census figures show that about two-thirds of the area’s residents are white, one-third are African-American and just over 1 percent Hispanic. Annual median household income is a little under $45,000.
“The neighborhood is comfortably integrated-culturally and racially,” Testa observed. “It’s a neighborhood that has tried to be more inclusive than exclusive.”
Houses have appreciated nicely, too. Average home prices have doubled over the last 10 years from $80,000 to $160,000, according to BAPA’s annual housing survey.
Local Realtors say the neighborhood’s hold on people comes from its housing stock-primarily turn-of-the-century, single-family residences.
“Most of the houses were built in the early 1900s,” said Joe Thouvenell, president of PRS Associates Inc., whose real estate office is in Beverly. “We have wood floors, ceramic tile, plaster. Just the kinds of things you can’t get in the suburbs.”
Marylee and Frank Sinopoli bought a 4-bedroom home for $183,000 in Beverly last summer. The Prairie-style house, built in 1911, had an open layout, leaded windows and beamed ceilings. It was designed by architect Walter Burley Griffen, a colleague of Frank Lloyd Wright.
As it happens, Chicago’s biggest concentration of Griffen’s designs can be found in the area’s historic district-one of the nation’s largest with 3,000 homes on 212 acres.
“We looked for a house for two years,” said Marylee Sinopoli, who grew up in a Walter Burley Griffin home in the neighborhood and bought her first house there 10 years ago. “We loved it immediately.”
The Sinopolis recently finished renovating the interior of their house, restoring its original design. They now plan to tackle the exterior, changing its present peach color to more authentic earth tones.
That kind of rehabbing-yet another sign of neighborhood renewal-is fairly common in Beverly Hills/Morgan Park. According to BAPA’s housing survey, about 45 percent of new home buyers there spent more than $5,000 on improvements in 1994.
But the children of the neighborhood aren’t just buying houses and fixing them up. Beverly native Denny Robertson is moving his company there, helping to revive a once-forgotten commercial building.
Robertson, chairman of Dock’s Great Fish Inc., a fast-food seafood restaurant chain, had been thinking about moving his company back into Chicago from suburban Willowbrook. He felt the city was becoming more business-friendly and he wanted the company’s headquarters closer to his 14 Chicago restaurants-mostly located on the South Side. (Dock’s has a total of 23 restaurants. Besides Chicago, there are stores in Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Detroit).
Because Robertson had a strong sentimental attachment to the neighborhood, he drove around Morgan Park looking for offices.
“I saw this place boarded up and it happened to be the building where I went to the dentist as a kid,” said Robertson, who noticed a small “for lease” sign in the window.
As it turned out, the 7,700-square-foot building at Longwood and Monterey Avenue was being redeveloped by the Beverly Area Local Development Co., a not-for-profit corporation that takes on the kind of chancy projects often ignored by private developers.
“When we bought the building we thought we would tear it down,” said Ani Nemickas, executive director of the development company. “We had no idea of its history.”
Constructed in 1905 as a bank headquarters, it is the only commercial building in the area’s historic district designated as a significant structure. Currently, a $1 million renovation is underway to restore the original look of its exterior.
Roberston’s company has leased more than half of the building. The remainder will be taken by a security firm, and the Beverly Area Local Development Co. plans to have its offices there, too.
Nemickas says the project is just part of the revitalization of the business strip along Monterey. In 1992, his company also built the Morgan Park Professional Centre at the east end of the street. The 16,000-square-foot building is fully leased, with Roseland Community Hospital’s ambulatory care facility taking the biggest spot. Also, a branch of the Chicago Public Library on Monterey Avenue recently was renovated at a cost of $2 million.
Even though the commercial strip seems to be perking along, community leaders say it’s still hard to maintain the vitality of urban business districts these days.
“We have great housing and schools, but our commercial strips were built in the 1940s and 1950s when parking was not a concern. That’s our only lack,” said 19th Ward Alderman Ginger Rugai, who grew up in the area and has lived there for 22 years.
Rugai has the added challenge of finding funds for a neighborhood that doesn’t qualify for much help.
“We are not eligible for 95 percent of the federal funds for economic development because we are not low and moderate income. We have to be creative,” she said.
As a result, Rugai is seeking a tax increment financing designation for the commercial strip along 95th Street. The TIF money (tax dollars earmarked for infrastructure improvements) will be used to attract retail development, says Rugai, who expects approval of the plan this summer.
“It would help us eliminate some obsolete buildings and create parking,” she said, explaining that there’s plenty of competition from nearby suburbs that can offer developers big sites with ample room for parking.
Neighborhood growth isn’t limited to bricks and mortar, however.
In 1993, the city’s largest community garden opened on a one-acre lot along the Monterey business corridor.
“There are spin-offs. It encourages people to clean up and fix up the neighborhood,” said Elizabeth Tyler, supervisor of Green Chicago, the Chicago Botanic Garden’s urban outreach program, which helped start the garden.
Designed as a series of amoebic-shaped waves sprinkled with walking paths, the flower garden was planted by community volunteers who also maintain it.
“Even the firemen helped with the garden by watering it last summer,” said Kathy Figel, a Morgan Park resident who works amid its greenery and whose husband, Bill, grew up in the neighborhood.
But the lion’s share of credit for the garden goes to Edna White, a longtime community resident, who came up with the idea to turn a forgotten lot into a blooming prairie.
Unfortunately, she didn’t live to see the garden grow. Two weeks before the garden was dedicated, White was slain by the son of a woman she had befriended in the neighborhood. As a tribute, the garden has been named after her, and this spring a stone will be placed there in her memory.
White’s murder, thought to be the result of a robbery to get money for drugs, may be an isolated incident, but it does bring up concerns about crime in an apparently stable urban setting.
“In some underlying sense, the issue for this kind of neighborhood is to keep up the demand for property. One way you do that is through very good and very visible policing,” said Richard P. Taub, professor of social sciences at the University of Chicago, who analyzed the Beverly area in his 1985 book, “Paths of Neighborhood Change.”
Four years ago, area residents started several watch programs. Working in conjunction with police, volunteers take turns driving the streets at night.
“We are not just looking for crimes,” said John Presta, who heads the watch group in East Beverly, which has 70 volunteers. “It gives us a presence in the streets.”
The neighborhood also is participating in the community policing program being tried in some parts of the city. Residents are invited to attend monthly meetings to discuss problems with police officers who regularly patrol the neighborhood.
“In many ways community policing has helped people feel safer and better,” said Sue Connaughton, who heads the local citizens’ advisory committee on community policing, and has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years. “They feel they don’t have to sit back passively.”
Taub says aggressive strategies like community policing help keep Beverly Hills/Morgan Park on an even keel.
But he cautions that external factors-even beyond the control of committed people who have come back home to raise their families-might eventually bring change.
“As the balance of good jobs move out to DuPage and the collar counties, it becomes harder to maintain the neighborhood as an attractive location,” he said. “These are the market forces nobody can control.”
