Since 1994, when 36 houses began going up in North Kenwood for the city’s second Parade of Homes, a modest but steady stream of upscale home buyers has filtered into the South Side neighborhood long known for disinvestment rather than new investment.
“I don’t think there is anywhere else in the city where you can build a brand new home, on the lake, 10 minutes from downtown, at these prices,” says Bill Lowry, who, along with wife Cheryl, have commissioned John Schiess of Metropolis Builders in Oak Park to build their five-bedroom house on Lake Park Avenue this summer.
Currently the Lowrys live in a townhouse in the Gap area, which they bought as newlyweds in 1990. Now with three children, they say this home is the dream home where they’ll raise their family.
The young couple–he’s an attorney, she’s a dentist–typify the home buyers who are infusing North Kenwood’s northeasternmost pocket. They are young professionals, making very conscious choices to remain South Siders–and paying prices well beyond $300,000 for new homes in a neighborhood where the 1990 census recorded a median family income of not quite $12,000.
Some call them urban pioneers, those who’ll surely paint a new demographic picture come the 2000 census. They believe in North Kenwood/Oakland’s future and so they continue to invest in homes and the neighborhood.
“In the 1980s, people bought occupied houses in the area for $30,000 to $40,000–$10,000 to $15,000 for boarded-up houses,” says Winston Kennedy, who for 30 years has sold North Kenwood’s housing from his Ryan and Monigul office on Lake Park. “They were urban pioneers and it paid off. Now, recently, home buyers are paying $200,000 and $300,000–very pricey for that neighborhood.”
While most agree that the ’94 Parade of Homes (the first was in 1992 in the Gap neighborhood) infused middle-class home buyers into North Kenwood/Oakland’s rebuilding pot, long-time residents and rehabbers have created considerable construction activity in the area for years.
In 1993, the city’s Department of Buildings issued 151 building permits for rehabs in the 4th Ward, of which North Kenwood/Oakland is a part, compared to 28 building permits for new construction. Those figures have since escalated: Rehab permits totaled 150 in 1996 and 234 last year. New-construction permits reached 119 in ’96 and 70 last year.
Ten years ago, when their family and friends were buying homes in south suburbs like Tinley Park, they strongly discouraged Gloria and Milton Misenburg from moving to Oakland. But the couple say that their Oakland home, on 41st Place, which cost $30,000 back then, just called to them. Both noticed when they moved in that most houses around theirs kept shades closed, eyes off the street.
Almost as soon as they moved in Milton gutted the four-story building and began rehabbing on weekends and evenings. He opened the first floor to expose a spacious stairway and rebuilt its rail with his own artistic interpretation. While he rebuilt his new home he tended to the decay outside his house as well.
“I had a dream to make this my community,” Milton recalls. “I started sweeping the street in front of my house and neighbors would ask what I was doing. I hoped they would join in, but for a long time they didn’t.
“Then, just when I was getting discouraged, they started to come out and help clean the area. I started building wood sculptures on the vacant lots around my house.
“Gang members asked what I was doing and I told them I was creating something. They promised to leave the sculptings untouched, and to this day they have,” says Misenburg. “But the best thing is now my neighbors open their windows and shades.”
The change in attitude is being reflected in more than the new and rehabilitated houses going up in the neighbrohood.
One particularly anticipated project is construction of Lake Park Pointe, a shopping center to bring a Hyde Park Co-op Grocery Store, a Walgreen’s drugstore and other long-awaited retail outlets.
Cliff DiLorenzo, of co-developer Terkl, Pettigrew and Payne, says the foundation for that project will be in the ground by the end of June.
Construction of the Pershing/Oakwood Connector at the north end of the area is set to begin this summer. Reconfiguration of the streetscape at the area’s northernmost end will see a fountain built between two legs of Drexel Boulevard–one connecting southbound traffic to Cottage Grove and the other connecting northbound Drexel to a realigned Oakwood Boulevard. Eventually the Chicago Park District is expected to build a park area around the connector site.
Among many changes underway at King High School is a $2 million Board of Education investment to build a campus that unites the high school to Price Elementary School. The campus will include playing fields and will close 44th Street at Drexel.
And at long-abandoned Shakespeare School, a rehab project will eventually bring to the neighborhood two experimental schools–the Ariel School, a small public school currently operating out of Kennicott Park’s field house; and the North Kenwood Charter School, sponsored in partnership between the University of Chicago and St. James United Methodist Church.
This fall that charter school will offer its first classes in the basement at St. James at 46th Street and Ellis Avenue, but Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th) says it will relocate to the rehabbed Shakespeare School in fall 1999.
Still, housing remains center stage in the area’s revitalization. Among the developments under way or on the boards:
– Among the biggest projects is construction of 105 townhouses at 46th and Woodlawn Avenue. George Thrush anticipates that his Thrush Co. will begin construction in late June.
He says his masonry townhouses, which will look more like those built in Lincoln Park over recent years than anything built on the South Side to date, are introducing a novel housing product to the neighborhood. The 1,324- to 2,384-square-foot townhouses, to sell for $140,000 to $250,000, will be built around a park area with benches and space for recreation.
Thrush will sell four buildings in his gated community to the Chicago Housing Authority, which will lease its 12 units to subsidized tenants.
– In partnership with the Fund for Community Development and Revitalization, Rezmar is completing rehab of 95 units between two buildings, 400 E. Ellis and 822 E. 46th St.
Those are rented as mixed-income buildings, with 20 to 40 percent of the apartments reserved for subsidized tenants.
Dan Mahru, president of Rezmar, says he is preparing to build 60 to 70 houses on lots he owns throughout the community, most on Woodlawn. He says those houses will sell to moderate-income families, for prices between $129,000 and $169,000. He expects to start building those houses in the fall.
– The New Kenwood LLC, a division of Allison Davis’ Davis Ditton Co., begins construction of four townhouses on city lots this summer. Davis says he also anticipates building near the Shakespeare School.
On the city lots he’ll build 2,200-square-foot townhouses that will sell for $300,000. Each townhouse will have an additional 800-square-foot unit on its first floor that can serve as family living space or as an income-earning rental unit. Plans for his units near Shakespeare at 46th and Lake Park, to be built in partnership with Tony Rezko, are in development.
– Pope Place will begin building four detached 2,700-square-foot, three-level units on Drexel Boulevard. Ultimately Sharon and Otis Pope expect to sell 10 units for $249,000 to $278,000 at a site next door to a multi-unit rental building they bought and rehabbed in the 1970s.
Besides the Parade of Homes, another event that has shaped the neighborhood’s future was the 1990 designation of North Kenwood and Oakland as the last of six city conservation districts, more or less joining the two communities at the hip. That designation simultaneously triggered aggressive razing of buildings deemed unsalvageable while tempering destruction of those historically important enough to save.
The neighborhood’s lost history is much on the minds of residents, builders and planners as rebuilding momentum grows. Any builder proposing a project to be built on city-owned lots, now about a third of the lots that remain vacant, must first win approval from the Department of Planning’s advisory group of 13 Oakland and five North Kenwood residents called the North Kenwood/Oakland Community Conservation Council, or CCC.
And much of what these council members look for, aside from equal say in all matters developmental, is compliance with historic details in the area’s housing stock.
Long before the Lowrys approached builder Schiess, he participated in the ’94 Parade of Homes. He’s built custom homes for families moving into the area ever since and gets all of his business by word of mouth.
When Deborah and Willie Garrett commissioned Schiess to build their new home in 1995, he was able to anticipate the historic guideline compliances that CCC members would look for. And because the Garretts’ home went up on a landmark block, he also understood what architectural details he’d need to provide to get approval from the city’s Landmark Committee.
In the end, Schiess and the Garretts chose several features that enhanced the historic charm of the 2,600-square-foot house, including two gables and a wooden porch across the entire front of the structure.
“We decided to take the cost because especially the porch added a sense of community to the house; it linked the house to the street and by doing that linked it to the community. It’s a big public gesture that says, `Here’s a place where I will sit and watch my kids play.’ “
Local builder Robert Blackwell began his construction career soon after buying his home in North Kenwood four years ago, but he, too, quickly cultivated a certain esteem for the neighborhood’s historic character.
After mastering the art of the construction business, Blackwell took on several projects in the neighborhood. Now his projects reflect his esteem for the area and its historic buildings.
For instance, Blackwell has opted to name his homes after African-American heroes.
His “Robeson House,” named after singer/actor/athletic hero Paul Robeson, contains many of the upscale features that Blackwell built into his own home, plus others, including interactive PBX telephone hookup, interactive computer hookup, and built-in stereo speakers in all rooms.
He recently sold that detached single-family “smart house” for $260,000. One of two attached single-family houses, with similar upscale appointments, recently sold for $325,000 and he is nearing completion of the second of those 3,700-square-foot homes.
Now Blackwell is converting a nine-unit building, built in the late 1800s, into seven condo units. Those 1,300- to 2,700-square-foot condos will sell from $140,000 to $240,000. He’s also finishing the second of two townhouses on 44th Street.
While most of the area’s high-end real estate has gone up along its eastern lakefront border, builders are accessing lakefront views for their home buyers on streets west of the lakefront, like Lake Park Avenue, Woodlawn and Ellis.
As he plans the Lowrys’ home, to be built on Lake Park, Schiess will build exterior decks off second- and third-floor rooms. Similar lake views are part of Blackwell’s strategy to market a penthouse condo in a building he has converted at 4100 S. Ellis.
What does the future hold? With a quarter of the land in North Kenwood/Oakland still vacant, the amount of public housing to be built in the neighborhood remains one bone of contention for local residents and some builders.
Some developers and real estate brokers say that North Kenwood/Oakland’s prosperity hangs on the redevelopment of lakefront land owned by the Chicago Housing Authority, which holds four public housing high-rises, two of them vacant since 1985.
While the site is targeted for development of scattered-site housing, many in the community are hopeful that the CHA will include market-rate development on the land and scatter 241 units of replacement public housing for displaced families throughout the neighborhood.
“I don’t think the full impact (of the neighborhood’s redevelopment) will take place until that abandoned public housing is torn down,” says Realtor Winston Kennedy, “assuming the economic climate continues to be healthy.”
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More on the Internet
Find profiles of the Kenwood/North Kenwood and Oakland neighborhoods, with statistics and more photos, at: chicago.tribune.com/go/kenwood
