![]() Chicago is broken due to an open conflict between the gangsters and law enforcement agencies. To destroy the criminal gang, a police group was created, which is managed by 2 officers. Without a vision for something else or a directed capital campaign, the neighborhood is in this Goldilocks zone that seems to be just good enough for just enough people.In Chicago 1930: The Prohibition Mafia controls cities. ![]() They’re instead rented out to 20-somethings who want to be near public transit and some fancy bars. ![]() The buildings are too useful to be razed by the city, not useful enough to be redeveloped into something new. Until then, these re-used commercial storefronts tell one more story about Chicago in the 20th century. There’s a lot that could make life more pleasant for people who aren’t my age, my class, and my income bracket – and there’s the infrastructure in place to have it be so. Something cheaper than the $7 ice cream at the corner store on Leavitt would probably be welcome for the kids at any of the zillion schools nearby. I am able-bodied enough to walk up to North Avenue in order to get groceries or a coffee.īut higher density and more mixed-use would make things much easier for the older folks in the senior housing on Pierce. What does this mean for me? Not a whole lot. Which helps explain why the storefronts are gone - there’s a whole lot fewer people to spend money at them. It’s not single-family housing, but it’s about as low-density as you can get. The vast majority of those residential storefronts have been banned, as it’s virtually all R3 or R4 (residential-only, with a Floor-to-Area ratio of. ![]() What I do have is the 1957 Zoning Map for Wicker Park. I hope to have a Part Two when I get the chance to speak with him later this year. John Betancur, a professor at UIC who has studied the area in depth, is currently on sabbatical. I don’t want to get into the ethnic and racial makeup of post-1950 Wicker Park, mostly because I know even less about that and can’t find the resources yet. The neighborhood, of course, changed even if the buildings did not. “Near Blighted” is not “Blight.” The brick buildings and their storefronts stuck around. Blight, in its legal definition, is a pretty binary thing: a property is either blighted or it is not. A finding of blight meant the city could “acquire and dispose of devalued properties,” as Rachel Weber describes the process in From Boom to Bubble. Of all the bummer descriptions of mid-century Wicker Park, this might be the map that saved the built environment of the neighborhood. The area east of Humboldt Park was squarely redlined in the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps. And, of course, “ The Case for Reparations.” Here’s a couple of great examples from Whet Moser’s work. The story of mid-century urban change, from Federal Housing Authority (FHA) mortgage maps to highway expansion all the way through has been well-documented. Decisions made by politicians on every level of government changed the way this neighborhood behaved, if not necessarily the way it looked. So what happened? To be glib, the 20th century happened. Most often, those shops would be on the ground floor of the residential units. Most streets had a handful of shops, saloons or the like as well as two-to-three story brick residential units. West Town in the years before the depression was a finely-grained urban community. The laundry building is no longer around. On North between Bell and Leavitt is a Lutheran Church – still standing, though perhaps to be redeveloped – and what is shown as a “Chinese Laundry” in other maps of the time. streetcar and a couple industrial spots on that main road.
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