As a child in the late 1970s, Sherita Sylvester used to look up at the impressive greystone house across the street with awe. “It was a big, spectacular place, really nice, and I would tell my mom that one day I wanted to live there,” recalls Sylvester, a postal worker in Lincoln Park.
Then she grew up and, like many other people, left her neighborhood, North Lawndale, a oncelively section of the West Side of Chicago that had declined slowly from the Depression on, and then swiftly after the riots that followed the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The next two decades saw disinvestment by landlords, retailers and others, until North Lawndale was one of those devastated gashes in the cityscape.
But when Sylvester grew up a little more, she went looking for a house to buy with her husband, Mark. Finding themselves priced out of most of the city, they ended up back where Sherita had stood as a girl: looking up at that inviting greystone.
Like the neighborhood, the house had taken some hits. Empty for 13 years, the house had no glass in its windows, a front balcony was hanging off, and inside “you could see all the way up to the sky from the basement,” Sylvester recalls. “But we could see past all that.”
The couple paid $16,000 for the 4,100-square-foot house in 1999, spent almost a year and $200,000 rehabbing it, and now live with their daughter in the warm, sunlit home less than a block from sprawling Douglas Park and a 15-minute drive from work.
The Sylvesters’ greystone, one of thousands in the neighborhood, has stood solid through Lawndale’s rise and fall. And now those greystones– many gorgeous even in disrepair and some commanding attention with their high parapets, muscular columns and leafy carved detailing–are at the center of a drive to restore Lawndale as a thriving neighborhood.
“I’m going to stay here and watch this neighborhood build back up,” Sylvester says. “I’ll be the old lady telling kids to get off my lawn, just like an old lady used to do to me.”
The city has launched its Greystone Initiative, which like the Bungalow Initiative that preceded it, aims to focus funding and attention on the homes, encouraging owners to bring them up to 21st Century standards while preserving their historical nature.
Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, a non-profit agency, is restoring a greystone in the 1800 block of South Spaulding Avenue, the work on which will make up the guts of a book of tips and resources for greystone renovators, to be published in 2007.
The same group is planning a “Green Greystone” seminar in spring, featuring tips on making the old buildings more energy-efficient.
2,000 survivors
Even after years of rampant demolitions, North Lawndale has about 2,000 greystones, more than any other part of Chicago. An estimated 30 to 35 percent of existing housing in the neighborhood are greystone two- and three-flats, single-family homes and mansions. Some cluster in long, photogenic rows along tree-shaded blocks, while others stand alone like sentinels in long stretches of vacant lots.
On some, the stone is hidden behind layers of paint; others have doors hanging open, balconies and roofs damaged. But to neighborhood activists, developers, city planners and people like the Sylvesters, the greystones look like the raw material of a neighborhood renaissance.
“This is an iconic building type for the neighborhood, and we can build on that to brand this as the city’s greystone neighborhood,” says Charles Leeks, the North Lawndale director for Neighborhood Housing Services.
Greystones speak of solidity and permanence, especially on blocks gap-toothed with vacant lots.
“Greystone has a stature and dignity,” says Roberta Feldman, a professor of architecture and co-director of the City Design Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which in 2006 published the book “The Chicago Greystone in Historic North Lawndale.” “It’s a more expensive building material and it’s carved, so you have more detail. It just oozes that kind of historical charm that so many people love.”
The neighborhood is layered with Chicago and American history, Feldman notes, “but most people in Chicago don’t see any of that anymore. They drive by on the Eisenhower and they don’t know anything is there or ever was.”
That’s becoming less true as more people find out about North Lawndale’s proximity to the Loop and expressways; newly renovated “L” stops on Ogden and Pulaski; Douglas and Independence, two wide, tree-lined links in the old boulevard system; Douglas Park; and, of course, the greystones. The former Sears headquarters at Homan Avenue and Arthington Street has been transformed with new housing and a Park District center in the last decade.
Elsewhere in the neighborhood, non-profit developers affiliated with churches and activist groups have been joined by for-profit developers and investors, whose signs are visible all over the neighborhood. “You can’t say `it’s going to come to Lawndale’ anymore,” Sylvester says. “It’s here.”
One group of investors that has staked its claim in North Lawndale is a band of New Zealanders who recently opened a branch of their graphic design company here. Since early 2005, the group has bought at least six buildings, most of them renovated greystone three-flats, says their real estate agent, Amanda McMillan of Prudential Preferred. They may buy as many as 20 more, she says.
The plan is to rent the units out initially, and then “in 5 to 10 years, when the neighborhood has really gone up, they’ll sell,” McMillan says. She says her clients have little doubt they’ll make good on their investment; in the first year they were buying, the value of a renovated three-flat in North Lawndale went up more than 10 percent, to $400,000 from $360,000, she says.
On top of that, McMillan asks, “how can the neighborhood not go up, with all it has going for it?” She points to the striking old synagogues–many of them now Christian churches or schools–that line the boulevards, the abundance of buildable lots near “L” stops, Eisenhower ramps and Ogden Boulevard. “There’s very little retail yet, but that will follow the people in,” she says.
No Lincoln, Wicker, please
Leeks is happy to see the attention being paid to Lawndale, but he and others hope investors aren’t seeing a new Lincoln Park or Wicker Park. “A lot of the new residential development in Chicago–and in other cities, like Atlanta and Washington, D.C.–is skewed toward high-end residential,” Leeks says. “Lawndale offers an opportunity for some balance.”
That’s in part because much of the vacant land is owned by the city, which took over hundreds of abandoned properties in the 1980s and ’90s and “fast-tracked” demolitions to reduce problems with safety, loitering and drug dealing that empty buildings generate. As the neighborhood’s major landowner, City Hall should be able to exercise control over what gets built, and keeping city neighborhoods affordable is a major priority . “Anything that happens is going to happen with consideration for the people who are here, the people who stuck with Lawndale,” Leeks says.
And that’s exactly what Sherita Sylvester wants.
Having put so much into her home, she could be hoping to see that investment skyrocket as affluent people flood the neighborhood. But she’s not looking at a return on investment as much as she is a return to Lawndale’s great past: “I don’t want this to be the place where everybody from the past gets pushed out,” she says. “There are good things coming in, but it can only make what’s already here better.”
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Stand up, greystones say, for history is housed here
The greystones of North Lawndale (a neighborhood often called simply Lawndale, since South Lawndale became known as Little Village) were mostly built between 1890 and the 1930s.
That was an era when the people building new homes “valued craft, valued exterior decoration,” says Roberta Feldman, a professor of architecture and co-director of the City Design Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “They covered these homes with ornate carvings, columns and elaborate detail.”
Initially the greystones, and other styles of housing in Lawndale, housed mostly Irish and German workers at the huge industrial facilities of the McCormick Reaper Works, Sears Roebuck headquarters, Ryerson Steel and Western Electric, all in or abutting North Lawndale.
As World War I approached, Chicago’s Eastern European Jews started moving to the neighborhood from near Maxwell Street, and by the late 1930s the neighborhood had earned the nickname “Little Jerusalem.” It had more than 60 synagogues–half the total in the city, according to a fall exhibit on North Lawndale mounted by the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
In that period, North Lawndale was home to the jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman, Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet, and even Golda Meir, who worked in the neighborhood branch library while involved in a local Zionist movement. (She lived in a greystone, though Goodman didn’t.)
After World War II, Lawndale’s Jews began moving to Rogers Park, West Rogers Park and the suburbs, and in their place came African-Americans, from the South Side and southern states. Legendary singer Dinah Washington lived in the neighborhood (in a greystone), and so did Jean Terrell, who replaced Diana Ross in the Supremes in 1970, and her brother Ernie, a heavyweight boxing champion (they, too, lived in a greystone that is still owned by relatives, says Charles Leeks, North Lawndale director for Neighborhood Housing Services.
In January 1966, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. moved with his family into an apartment in North Lawndale to draw attention to the campaign for a race-blind housing market in Chicago and elsewhere. While King did not live in a greystone (the building has since been demolished), Leeks says his stay in Lawndale is a key reason the neighborhood’s “narrative is very complex; it pulls in so many aspects of the American story.”
Storied Route 66 passed through the neighborhood in its first few miles en route to Los Angeles, some of the first of Chicago’s lavish movie palaces were built here, and the pioneering Midwestern landscape architect Jens Jensen designed parks here.
–Dennis Rodkin
