There’s been a professional baseball field in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood for more than 100 years. First South Side Park, at 39th Street and Wentworth Avenue, then Comiskey Park and now U.S. Cellular Field on opposite sides of 35th Street at Shields Avenue have stood sentry to the area known for its hardscrabble industry and its middle-class residences.
Today, the White Sox are World Series champions and 15-year-old U.S. Cellular Field is gussied up and the neighborhood is teeming.
Three hundred miles southwest, a new incarnation of the Cardinals’ roost, Busch Stadium, opened in April in downtown St. Louis. And the new retro-styled Busch sits amidst the hubbub of development, like the Cell.
Aside from these similarities, there are important differences in how and why the areas surrounding the stadiums came to be hot spots for development and the role the ballparks are playing.
To the west of the Cell, dozens of condos and single-family homes are taking shape on former industrial sites and emerging from rehabbed brick warehouses and factories. Bridgeport’s older bungalows are quickly snapped up for $350,000 to $400,000 and the cost of a teardowns can top a quarter-million dollars.
Many homes sport for-sale signs bearing Erik Henson’s name. “The whole area is just a construction site,” said Henson, a real estate agent with D’Aprile Realty.
Across the Dan Ryan to the east, 1,300 mixed-income apartments and town homes will rise from the rubble of the former Stateway Gardens public housing complex, in Bronzeville. The development’s boundaries are 35th Street south to 39th Street and State Street west to Federal Street. The market-rate units of Park Boulevard will sell from the low $200,000s to nearly $500,000, said Allison Davis, whose Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners is one of four developers involved in the project. There are contracts on 100 of the 300 units in the first phase, and the development will include a community center, and the park district pool on the site will remain, Davis said.
With seven architects designing the units, occupants will have lots of choices. While upgrades will include granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, “our intent is to make the units uniform in their appointments and their amenities,” Davis said. “We don’t want people to be able to point out, `The rich folks live over there, the poor folks live over here.'”
The Illinois Institute of Technology, also across the Ryan from the ballpark, has poured millions of dollars into a technology park and the restoration of architectural icon Crown Hall.
Lifelong Bridgeport resident and builder John Sabbia’s experience helps illustrate the area’s evolution. “Exactly where I live there was a factory there four or five years ago,” he said. “Behind the factory there was a pallet company. Now there’s 37 homes there, just east of me. It’s absolutely amazing.”
In 1999, Sabbia sold a home he had built at 35th and Emerald Avenue for $250,000. Five years later, the home was sold again for more than twice that.
And there sits U.S. Cellular Field. The park draws an average of 30,000 fans to the neighborhood on game days. And the team is considered a good neighbor, providing scholarships for residents of the nearby Wentworth Gardens CHA project and other community support. Yet Henson and others agree that park alone has not sparked development.
Low-interest rates and high demand have led to ever-increasing prices in popular North Side neighborhoods and pushed developers and buyers south. Henson said that historically, people on the North Side stay on the North Side. But he is seeing that change because of lower housing prices along with proximity to downtown. Both are drawing first-time buyers and empty-nesters to Bridgeport and Bronzeville, he said.
“The North Side is a huge hub for people straight out of college,” Henson said. “They rent or own a small condo. It’s an area that attracts a lot of young people. But when it’s time for them to move on to the next level, marriage, or possibly children, they don’t necessarily stay on the North Side. Most of them can’t afford it. They go to the suburbs or now they come south.”
Henson recently sold a lot and two-flat in Canaryville, another revitalizing neighborhood to the south of Bridgeport, to a twentysomething buyer from Wicker Park. “The reason he went down there to invest is because he can afford to invest. Wicker Park can be a pricey situation.”
Scott Goldstein, vice president of policy and planning for the Metropolitan Planning Council, identified the four rapidly growing populations in Chicago–empty-nesters, young professionals, Latinos and Asians–and noted “they’re all coming to Bridgeport,” which is near Pilsen and Chinatown, Latino and Asian hubs.
Dubin Residential is one a developer who has worked on the North Side and now is building farther south. With developments in Lakeview, Avondale, Rogers Park and Logan Square, Portage Park-based Dubin’s projects include the Lofts at Bridgeport in the former Spiegel building at 35th and Morgan Streets.
Davis also points to the demolition of public housing such as Stateway Gardens as another factor propelling the area. “It certainly changes the perception of the area,” he said.
“The crucial factor was the redevelopment of the public housing, not so much the ball stadium,” Goldstein said. “It was more a matter of pride in keeping the ballpark in the neighborhood than economic development.”
“I just think Chicago is re-creating itself and that momentum has reached this area of the city and it’s certainly helped by the fact that Stateway is gone,” Davis said.
That view is shared by many, including 11th Ward Ald. James Balcer, whose ward includes the ballpark. “It’s the redevelopment of the whole city, and we’re just part of the whole process.”
Goldstein pointed out that construction of the CTA’s Elevated Orange Line from the Loop to Midway Airport in 1993 gave Bridgeport another link to the rest of the city.
“Whenever you create a new line of transportation you’re going to have redevelopment around it,” said Roberto Requejo, public housing expert for the Metropolitan Planning Council. “That’s what’s supposed to happen.”
The Metropolitan Planning Council recently brought 10 planning and development professionals together for a two-day meeting to help Bridgeport officials “think through” development, Goldstein said, particularly around Archer Avenue, a major commercial thoroughfare that could use a shot of adrenaline..
The council sees things happening there. Already, million-dollar homes are under construction and a former landfill near Archer Avenue and Halsted Street is being transformed into a regional park.
In contrast to U.S. Cellular Field, which does not sit directly in the Bridgeport development zone, the new Busch Stadium and adjoining Ballpark Village, a planned $650 million residential and entertainment complex, are often credited with igniting the burst of construction in St. Louis.
Mayor Francis Slay acknowledges that several major projects were under way when plans for the new ballpark were announced, yet “knowing the new ballpark was coming, it really increased the confidence level of people who were investing in downtown,” he said.
The concept of Ballpark Village was born when, before shelling out public subsidies for the stadium, St. Louis extracted a promise from the Cardinals to develop a two-block area on the site of the old stadium. The Cardinals ended up with a comparatively small public handout–less than $100 million of the stadium’s $365 million cost–while the city stands to gain a major downtown development.
Much of St. Louis’ downtown renaissance can be traced to Missouri’s program of offering tax credits for redeveloping historic buildings, said Jim Cloar, president of Downtown St. Louis Partnership. The tax credits helped build a convention hotel as well as renovate dozens of old buildings into lofts, restaurants and shops.
Construction on Ballpark Village is slated to begin this fall, just north of the stadium. Plans include 450,000 square feet of retail/entertainment space, 1,200 condo and apartment units and 400,000 square feet of office space. Though required to complete only two blocks, Cordish Co., the Baltimore-based developer, promises six blocks.
The city had lamented the exodus of several corporate headquarters in the last decade, but now points proudly to the conversion of one of the vacated buildings, the former Pet Inc. base, into luxury apartments. Though only 37 years old, the 15-story concrete structure with a front-row view of the Mississippi River and the new stadium is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
“One of the most unique and exciting aspects is that we have the freedom to plan on a clean sheet of paper,” said Cordish Co.’s Blake Cordish. “It’s very unique in the heart of a city to have this amount of developable land.”
That deal in St. Louis was unheard of in 1990, when Illinois dollars paid to erect what was then the new Comiskey Park, said Richard Peiser, a professor of real estate development at Harvard University.
“The rules of the game are changing a little bit,” Peiser said. “There’s more of a trend now toward what they’re doing in St. Louis, to be a little more cautious and tie the public dollars to what’s happening around the stadium.”
Perhaps it was an understandable decision 15 years ago, when keeping the White Sox in Chicago was uppermost in everyone’s mind, said developer Davis.
