Overlooking the north annex of McCormick Place and sandwiched between an office-warehouse and a weedy parking lot on the 2000 block of South Calumet Avenue is an unlikely place for a bed and breakfast.
But the plan by a Chicago couple to transform a dilapidated, pre-Chicago Fire mansion into an upscale inn is just the latest–if peculiar–example of the Near South Side’s rapid transformation from a desolate, no-man’s land to a neighborhood of trendy lofts and middle-class townhouses.
Since 1993, nearly 6,000 new residents, including Mayor Richard Daley, have moved to the area bounded by Jackson and 16th Streets and the south branch of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.
The neighborhood has undergone one of the most successful but least trumpeted urban residential redevelopments in the country.
That this transformation has moved along without displacing families unable to afford higher rents and property taxes is considered its greatest strength.
A booming economy, an insatiable appetite for new construction and loft conversions near the Loop, and a development community happy to create 2,440 new units in the area, have boosted the population by nearly 50 percent from just less than 12,000 in 1993.
In the last year alone, construction has begun on 30 different loft and townhouse developments.
In fact, just down the street from the mansion on Calumet near Cermak Road, plans are underway to convert R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co.’s sprawling Lakeside Press complex into an office, retail and 480-unit apartment complex. At the same intersection, an 800-room Hyatt Hotel is under construction.
The owners of the Calumet Avenue mansion, Debra and Scott Seger, who used to live on North Lake Shore Drive, moved to Central Station recently, in part so they can be closer to their new project. They just closed on the house two months ago but have already shopped for antiques in six European countries and hope to open the inn, geared mainly for business travelers, by next summer.
But despite its dramatic transformation, the area remains an enigma to most outsiders.
“Chicago has this reputation for broadcasting, even exaggerating, its achievements, but it hasn’t been shouting about this,” said Lois Wille, a prize-winning journalist who recently wrote a history of the area, “At Home in the Loop: How Clout and Community Built Chicago’s Dearborn Park.”
Residents suspect an ingrained bias against the South Side is at play. Even today, suburban and North Side friends are still reluctant to park there for rock concerts and Bears games at Soldier Field because of its old reputation. Or perhaps those who know of the area are put off by the absence of good public schools.
Critics, though, would argue that this boom town remains largely unknown because its new townhouse and condo complexes were designed to insulate residents behind gates and suburban-style cul-de-sacs.
And even diehard fans of the area concede that its treeless and eerily quiet thoroughfares– devoid of shops and restaurants–are hardly inviting.
“I used to live in the Gold Coast,” said Jennifer Larson, who moved into her fiance’s loft at 16th and Indiana Streets in April after they got married. “I was like, `Where am I moving to?’ I once lived in Printers Row but I didn’t know there was anyplace to live south of there.”
Eventually, she and once-confirmed North Siders also living in lofts south of Madison Street learn to adjust to the hassle of finding a place to buy milk– though such inconveniences should be abated when a Dominick’s supermarket opens at Roosevelt Road and Clinton Street.
Part of the neighborhood’s appeal is that it tends to attract open-minded urbanites willing to overlook its shortcomings, said Barbara Lynne, president of the Near South Planning Board.
After all, this is where, more than 20 years ago, when central cities were being written off and the middle class was leaving in droves, Chicago’s business titans dreamed up the idea of building an integrated, middle-income community on abandoned rail yards and calling it Dearborn Park.
Just how different the Near South Side is from other city neighborhoods becomes obvious in the way residents themselves struggle to define it.
“I don’t want to say `suburb in the city’ but it’s a nice community right on the edge of the financial district,” said Larry Young, a futures broker who lives in Dearborn Park.
Many say it’s closer to a small town–a tradition that goes back to 1979 when the first homes in Dearborn opened. Fifteen years ago, only a handful of Printers Row buildings had turned residential and the northern section of Dearborn Park was bounded by vacant land, bars and flop houses.
“There weren’t a lot of families there so there was a certain huddling together to create a social structure,” said Kimbal Goluska, an urban planner involved in the early stages of Dearborn and who moved there in 1981.
So families worked out arrangements for snow removal, better police protection, and transportation for schoolchildren. They made sure the leafy paths and four parks were well-maintained and encouraged garden-growing, creating a tranquil island just yards from the noise of State Street.
Its reputation for being walled-off from the city’s urban ills comes largely from the fact that there are only two street traffic entrances to Dearborn Park, at 9th and 14th Streets from State Street.
Probably nothing irks Dearborn and other South Loop residents more than suggestions that it’s an urban community in name only–an attractive pocket for well-educated professionals who like to walk to work.
“We’re not cut off from urban problems at all,” said Bonnie McGrath, a lawyer whose front stoop in the newer Dearborn Park II is right on State Street. “If anyone has a handle on urban problems, it’s people who live here.”
The comparison to other gentrified neighborhoods on the North Side is unfair on several counts, they say. For one, it’s integrated, not only in Dearborn Park, but in newer loft conversions and Central Station.
According to Lynne, the area is 51 percent white, 39 percent African-American, 6 percent Asian-American, 3 percent Hispanic and 1 percent other.
While developers have built homes costing as much as $600,000, condos, lofts and townhouses in the $50,000 to $250,000 range are the norm.
Even so, advocates for the underclass, like James W. Compton, president of the Chicago Urban League, see a disturbing trend.
“The South Loop appears to be developing in a manner that, I suppose, was predictable,” Compton is quoted in Wille’s book. “There is no appreciable mix along economic and class lines. . . . It’s a form of apartheid.”
Spurred by the loss of single-room-occupancy hotels in the neighborhood, activists have pushed for more affordable housing. Last month the first newly constructed SRO in the neighborhood in 50 years opened at 18th Street and Wabash Avenue. Most residents welcomed the new SRO because it includes various social service and substance-abuse programs.
Now, one of the major dilemmas facing the neighborhood is agreeing on a name. Technically, the area from Jackson to 16th Street is called Burnham Park, but now that residents have more confidence in the area, more are using the dreaded “South” word, Lynne said, and calling it the Near South Side or South Loop.
One new neighborhood association has taken it a step further in a poster campaign aimed at potential members: “Did you say you live in SoHo? No, you misunderstood. I said SoLo.”
