When Leah Nelson ran a day-care center in Aurora, one parent, a Loop commuter, was always rushing. The woman dropped her child off at 6 a.m. and was invariably last to pick up at night.”One day I asked her why, instead of rushing, she didn’t just put her child in a downtown facility, and she said, `Leah, I wish there was day care downtown but there’s not.’ “
Flabbergasted, Nelson investigated, and found not a single day-care center existed in downtown Chicago, save for one in a federal building that was only for U.S. employees.
“That’s when I decided to move downtown,” says Nelson, whose Honey Tree Early Learning Center, now at 201 N. Wells St., opened in fall, 1991.
Since then, Nelson, and her partner, Sara Bode, former president of the State Street Council, have had the market to themselves, unless one counts the Crayon Campus north of the Chicago River on Grand Avenue. There’s also the Child Developmental Center in the old State of Illinois Building at 160 N. LaSalle St., opened in 1992, but it’s primarily for state, county and city employees (only a few slots are open to parents outside government and 75 kids are on the waiting list).
But Nelson’s monopoly is ending. One new center has opened and others are planned as entrepreneurs rush to fill the huge demand for Loop day care.
“We decided to come in because the Honey Tree has a two-year waiting list for infant care,” says Bertha Richardson, director of the new Alphabet Campus, 185 N. Wabash Ave. Richardson, a schoolteacher, stresses the advantages of Loop day care.”Being downtown, we enable parents to nurture their kids more. They can visit, or take their kids to lunch or shopping.”
The big bar to downtown day care has been meeting strict building codes for children’s facilities. Thus, no corporations have their own centers, preferring to contract with places like the Honey Tree, as do Arthur Andersen and First Chicago Corp.
Nelson admits there’s a waiting list of 80 kids for her infant and toddler program. That’s one reason she’s planning to open a second Honey Tree this fall in Dearborn Park.
“Right now, your child would become too old for the program by the time a slot opened up,” she says.
