The Origins of the Dual City: Housing, Race, and Redevelopment in Twentieth-Century Chicago by Joel Rast

Author:Joel Rast [Rast, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Urban, American Government, Sociology, African American Studies, Local
ISBN: 9780226661582
Google: kySyDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 44179344
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-01-15T11:53:59+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

The New Convergence of Power

In 1972 word began leaking to the Chicago media about a new plan for the city’s central area. It would be the city’s official plan for the downtown area, but it would be produced not by city planning officials but by the Chicago Central Area Committee. The downtown business group had organized a fundraising drive to cover the entire cost of the $375,000 plan, at the time an unprecedented sum of money for a city plan. Just weeks before it was publicly unveiled in June 1973, one journalist described it gushingly as “the biggest, most elaborate, costliest plan for central area revitalization in the history of the United States.”1 Titled Chicago 21: A Plan for the Central Area Communities, the plan presented a $15 billion thirty-year program to transform the city’s downtown and its surroundings in accordance with “a vision of the Central Community of the 21st Century.”2 Major new developments were proposed for the downtown and near-downtown areas. Meigs Airport on the lakefront would be demolished to create new park space and improved access to the lake. A new pedestrian mall was planned for State Street; sidewalks would be widened, with vehicular traffic limited to city buses. Just north of downtown, Navy Pier—a little-used docking structure for lake freighters and passenger boats completed in 1916—was to be transformed into a lively entertainment area with restaurants, exhibits, and an auditorium. Capping it all off would be a “miniature supercity” for 120,000 residents built on 650 acres of underutilized land, mostly defunct railroad yards, just south of the Loop. Residents of the new development would be connected to the central business district by a futuristic rapid transit system in which a passenger “would enter a small car, push a button on a map showing his destination, and zip away automatically.”3

Chicago 21 was the first new plan for the central area produced since the publication of the Development Plan for the Central Area of Chicago in 1958, and it is worth considering for a moment what had changed during the fifteen-year period since the earlier plan was released. The 1958 Development Plan had been prepared during a time when the attack on the slums was still in its infancy. New urban renewal projects such as Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores—at the time still under construction on the city’s South Side—inspired hope on the part of business leaders that areas bordering downtown would soon be targeted for a similar upgrading. Through a combination of new public housing developments and private construction under the urban renewal program, the city’s political leaders promised to eliminate slums and blight wherever they existed, and downtown business elites looked forward to a time when the city’s central business district would be the economic center of a city of stable, well-kept neighborhoods. Some areas would, of course, be more prosperous than others, and those would ideally be located close to the central business district. However, even families of little means would at least live

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