With a little luck, East Chicago officials will break ground this year for a new community center in Marktown, the neighborhood designed by architect Howard Van Doren Shaw.
The 12,000-square-foot facility will be the first new construction in the neighborhood in nearly 85 years. A basketball court, dining room, kitchen and computer lab are part of the grand plan.
That plan would no doubt appease Shaw, who never saw his dream for Marktown carried out. The little company town he designed was supposed to contain schools and shops. That never happened.
The new community center especially pleases Shaw aficionado Paul Myers, director of cultural affairs and historic preservation for the City of East Chicago and Marktown’s unofficial historian. “I’m happy with it,” he says. “If all the children in the neighborhood use it, it’ll be packed. More importantly, it’s the reinvestment of city dollars in our neighborhood.”
Marktown has needed reinvestment for years. The 40-acre, 200-home company town has languished in the shadow of its better known and larger Chicago counterpart, built and named by railroad entrepreneur George Pullman in the early 1880s on the South Side.
This northwest Indiana neighborhood is different from Pullman. For starters, residents can easily spot an out-of-towner. The telltale sign? When a person’s car is parked on the street. That wouldn’t seem so odd, except all residents in Marktown park on the sidewalks. Just 16 feet across, the streets are so narrow motorists can’t do otherwise. This neighborhood quirk has earned Marktown a place in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” as the only town where people park on the sidewalks and walk in the streets.
Marktown’s streets have remained narrow since Shaw designed the community in 1917. The prime mover was Clayton Mark, who hired Shaw to design a company town to serve the needs of his growing Indiana mill, which manufactured steel pipes for his business, Mark Manufacturing Co. “In 1917, you didn’t have a lot of transportation in this area,” says Myers, a lifelong resident of Marktown. “People didn’t own cars, so you had to have housing close to work.”
Building a company town was new territory for Shaw, who cut his teeth on huge homes for wealthy clients. In fact, the original plans for Marktown were pegged for the Vanderbilt estate in Syracuse, N.Y.
Shaw is renown for designing Market Square in Lake Forest and numerous estates in Chicago’s Hyde Park and Kenwood neighborhoods. He got the Marktown job after Mark saw the wonders the architect worked on Mark’s father’s home in Evanston.
Yet when Shaw built Marktown, he knew quite a bit about company towns. “He knew about Pullman,” says Myers. “He designed the Pullman Press building, now gone, and a savings and loan [that’s] now a church.”
The architect’s company town was going to resemble those he saw in England. He envisioned charming stucco homes with porches and pitched roofs painted in pastel hues overlooking cute gardens and back yards — nothing like the dark brick and narrow rowhouses in Pullman — yet solid nonetheless. “[Marktown homes] are all made from masonry construction, so they’re pretty solid houses,” says Myers.
Like Pullman, Shaw had grandiose plans. He envisioned schools, a library, parks, tennis courts, baseball fields and playgrounds. In some ways Shaw’s master plan resembles Seaside, Fla., and other modern so-called neotraditional planned communities with its emphasis on porches and shopping within walking distance. Shaw used five floor plans and varied the homes with 12 elevations to alleviate monotony. He included such modern amenities as running water, toilet with a bath, gas and electricity.
Marktown expanded until after World War I, when the U.S. government canceled its contract to buy plating material. “After the war, there were literally hundreds of tons of armored plates made that the government had no plans to buy,” Myers says. “Today if a government orders a jet, and cancels the contract, they’d pay for the jet. But back then, they didn’t.”
That canceled contract badly hurt the mills. Mark sold his interest in Mark Manufacturing to the Steel and Tube Co. of America, which passed on Mark’s facility to Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. Consequently, only about 10 percent of what was planned for Marktown was built. Land earmarked for parks and schools was bought by the mills as they grew, so now the mills surround Marktown.
Things changed after World War II when Marktown went public, allowing residents to buy and sell its homes freely. Gradually, it became less of a steel industry town with residents commuting to jobs outside the area.
Marktown, which had been principally white, began to undergo ethnic and racial change. Manufacturing employment dropped. Designation as a historic landmark in 1975 failed to curb the neighborhood’s decline, according to Myers.
Property values dropped in the early 1980s, and gang activity began threatening Marktown in a way that the canceled armor plate contract never did, Myers says. Residents shied away from traditional neighborhood activities, even ones as innocuous as Easter egg hunts and Halloween parties.
The neighborhood improved in the 1990s with community policing, Myers says, but it’s still tough marketing the area to outsiders.
“I’ve had to tell people it’s not as bad as it used to be,” says resident Rafael Bejar. “There are a lot of good people here; it’s a few that make it bad for everyone.”
Aside from the community center, residents are working to restore the little town. Myers and others are crafting a voluntary restoration plan. If approved by the City of East Chicago, residents will receive tax breaks for home improvements. Residents will not be forced to comply with the plan. “Better to lead them into preservation than to beat them into it,” Myers contends.
Todd Zeiger, director of the northern regional office of the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana, agrees. “Preservation efforts are subject to the same factors that make any real estate valuable, or not. It’s all about location, location, location,” he says. “Hopefully, through continued marketing, Marktown’s proximity to Chicago, the unique atmosphere and its historic connections, others will be inclined to join in the effort to save Marktown.”
Bejar isn’t waiting for the restoration plan to rehab. He bought a two-bedroom Marktown home that he gutted. He’s now renting the house to a former Chicagoan. “I always said to [Myers], `When is the neighborhood going to change?'” Bejar recalls. “He’d say, `It isn’t going to change.’ Well, I decided to do something.”
Myers has since changed his mind. He’s happy with Bejar’s rehab.
“Talk about something phenomenal,” he says. “[TV personality] Bob Villa should see this home. Rafael hand-built the kitchen cabinets.”
Bejar has seen Shaw homes in affluent Lake Forest. Still, he prefers blue-collar Marktown, the community he and his family have called home for seven years. “I like the neighborhood basically because it’s cheaper,” he says. “It’s quiet. Everyone knows each other. It’s grown on me. Its history is one of the reasons I’m rehabbing.”
