A breeze slid off the lake, stroked the maples and flowering crab apples of South Plymouth Court and fluttered over a courtyard swimming pool. Young mothers with baby carriages idled on the sidewalk while their terriers and Labrador retrievers convened near a townhouse patio.
It was a fine, sunny morning in Chicago’s Dearborn Park neighborhood, a half-dozen blocks south of the Loop. It all looked particularly good to Lois Wille.
Never mind that the next day turned dim and windy. This was Chicago and she loves the place in all its moods.
Lois Wille is a star journalist with two Pulitzer Prizes and a retirement dream home in a valley in Radford, Va. She and her husband, Wayne, enjoy a 50-mile view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They like to weigh the day’s news over a leisurely breakfast.
During her years as Editorial Page editor of the Chicago Tribune, she worried over Chicago and prodded it to do better; she scolded it when it didn’t and patted it on its knobby head when it did. She retired in 1991 at age 59, but you don’t turn away from a town like Chicago that readily.
“She loves the city,” says her husband. And she has kept it in her sights.
And as a retiree’s gift, she has written an urban adventure book about Chicago–one that’s all the more gracious because it’s a true story with a heartening theme.
The title gets right down to cases: “At Home in the Loop: How Clout and Community Built Chicago’s Dearborn Park” (Southern Illinois University Press, $29.95). “At Home in the Loop” is a tale of city building where, for once, nobody was uprooted. Instead, a sort of urban village of 3,500 people was born mellow– “one of the nicest places to live in any American city,” she writes.
Leafy and laid-back, Dearborn Park occupies 51 acres between Clark and State Streets, Polk Street (800 south) and 15th Street.
For anyone who remembers the Chicago that was, the neighborhood is astonishing. It came into being out of the blue, like Venus on a half shell. But its row houses and cloistered green spaces rose not from waters and woodland but from soot and mud and cinders and railroad wasteland. Nobody lived there and nobody could be sure anyone would, until it happened.
The clout that helped to build Dearborn Park, as Wille makes clear, sprang from a downtown civic alliance of corporate VIPs organized in the limited-profit Dearborn Park Corp. More than good works was involved.
The 32 investors were “worried about their own real estate as well as the impact on the city if the central core crumbled,” Wille writes. They assembled $14 million in seed money in the 1970s to get Dearborn Park going.
The funding came from such companies as Commonwealth Edison, Peoples Gas, First National Bank, Sears and Inland Steel, although the goal of a $30 million nest egg never was achieved. Eight of the contributors put in $1 million apiece. Dearborn Park is nearly all privately financed, apart from streets, sewers and the like.
Over the long haul
Fortunately, enough of the funding fathers (and a few mothers) have survived and stayed with the program despite trauma and drama. They have babied their project through financial pitfalls and pratfalls, corporate takeovers and mergers in which some of their companies vanished, red tape and power shifts in City Hall, and the sheer passage of time.
Along the way, the organizers had to deal with an array of mayors that included the evasive but helpful Richard J. Daley and the elusive but helpful Harold Washington.
Several times the project almost collapsed. “We went through the Perils of Pauline,” ComEd’s Thomas G. Ayers, 82, told Wille. And they admittedly tired of the hassles. When the time came to develop Phase II of Dearborn Park, south of Roosevelt Road, they let individual developers do it.
The original backers didn’t make a dime. Wille figures they got back about 41 percent of their nut, but nobody seems to be upset. Their $14 million seeded $250 million in housing, she says, and was essential to the blossoming, billion-dollar growth of the South Loop.
One of the book’s unlikely heroes is real estate developer Ferd Kramer, unlikely because at age 95 he still walks to his Loop office from his Dearborn Park home.
Three years ago, Kramer got in touch with Wille in Virginia. He remembered that in 1972 she had written a definitive book about Chicago’s lakefront, “Forever Open, Clear and Free.” Ever since, the book has been a virtual bible for lakefront defenders.
Would she do something similar for Dearborn Park? Its first condos had gone up in 1979 and now the project was close to completion. Its sponsors were proud of it.
Kramer offered her $35,000 from the Dearborn Park Corp. in lieu of a publisher’s advance. Royalties are to be shared.
She had a free hand. “Write it as you see it,” Kramer told her. “If you think we messed up, that’s your opinion.”
Wille was intrigued. It wasn’t the money. “I had lived in the city for 37 years and nearly always in the central city,” she says. “I was very interested in what was happening. This small group had spent 20 years on the project, while they were running their own businesses. Pretty remarkable.”
Kramer, also remarkably, took the wheel in Loop traffic at age 92 and drove her around so she could see for herself. Then he showed her cartons of records and documents. “It’s all there,” he assured her.
It wasn’t, of course, although a lot of it was. There would have to be many hours of interviews, research and old-fashioned reporting. To say nothing of commuting from Virginia.
Help from an old friend
Luckily, she chanced on John Madigan, chairman of Tribune Co. He asked her what she was doing in town. When she explained, he offered her the use of a Tribune-owned studio apartment in Dearborn Park. The Tribune had been one of the Dearborn Park Corp. investors.
“That offer made it work,” she says. “I could be on the scene whenever I needed.”
The private papers of Philip M. Klutznick were opened to her. Klutznick, now 90, was a major developer of housing, and is the former U.S. Secretary of Commerce. He was a key figure in the project and a prolific memo writer about it–“a memo a day,” she says.
All told, she put in two years of work and found a publisher. She says she showed an early draft to Ayers and Kramer, but it’s her book–to all appearances, clear, balanced, polished. The book was edited by her husband, a retired editor for World Book Publishing.
Dearborn Park, to be sure, isn’t the whole story. The rest of the South Loop comes into it: the reclaimed lofts of Printers Row on Dearborn Street, the Central Station project where Mayor Richard M. Daley lives, new and rehabbed housing. Nearly 15,000 people now live in the South Loop area, a major downtown bulwark.
Dearborn Park is basically middle-class housing, with little room for poor people, and has not escaped criticism. Wille notes that it is urban renewal from the top down, a leftover from the Chicago Inc. era. That kind of deal, she says, wouldn’t fly in these days of community input and of fierce profit pressures on corporations.
Middle-class haven
The neighborhood is turned in on itself in gated courtyards and traffic cul-de-sacs. Its calculated design emphasizes safety and security and was the key to making it work, she says. It mixes skin colors but not social classes, and has stayed with a marketing goal of a middle-class core living in the heart of the city.
Wille quotes a cutting critique by James W. Compton, president of the Chicago Urban League.
“Dearborn Park has certainly been an asset to the city,” he told her. “But the South Loop appears to be developing in a manner that, I suppose, was predictable. There is no appreciable mix along economic and class lines. . . . Dearborn Park continues the existing patterns of cordoning off poor and low income people. It’s a form of apartheid.”
Dearborn Park has had its share of discord. Its residents, black and white, wrangled with public-housing dwellers for control of the South Loop elementary school at 1212 S. Plymouth Ct. In the bitter aftermath, few Dearborn Park youngsters attend their own neighborhood school. Families often move out when their children reach school age.
These and other gnawing problems are chronicled in “At Home in the Loop.” It is no booster book, but rather a sensitive appraisal of urban decision-making by someone who knows the territory.
Now that “At Home in the Loop” is in bookstores, Wille has kept busy speaking and signing autographs. She took a turn at the Printers Row Book Fair and even helped to conduct a tour of the area.
Last year she and her husband bought a small condominium in Dearborn Park, a pied-a-terre for their frequent visits to the city.
The apartment has a stirring view of Chicago’s own cliffs and peaks, the downtown skyscrapers.
It’s not the Blue Ridge Mountains, but it’s home in the South Loop, says Wille.
