Chicago metropolitan area
Chicago
Maxwell Street and Bronzeville carry Chicago's record of clearance, the first under university expansion, the second under Title I toward Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores.
Chicago’s urban renewal record runs in two long movements. The first moved west. In 1961, the city cleared 630 acres near the Circle Interchange for the University of Illinois at Chicago’s new commuter campus. The project erased the Jewish, Italian, Greek, and Mexican-American blocks south of Roosevelt Road, including most of the open-air commerce along Maxwell Street. The university expanded again in the 1990s and took what the first round had spared. The second movement moved south. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the Chicago Land Clearance Commission and the Chicago Housing Authority bulldozed a wide corridor through the Black Belt for the Lake Meadows, Prairie Shores, and Michael Reese hospital complexes. The Black professional class built those mixed-income towers and stayed in the neighborhood; the working-class and tenant households the clearance displaced largely did not. The essays under this city hold the record of both, and of the organizations that have carried the street memory forward: the Maxwell Street Foundation, the DuSable Heritage Association, and the Bronzeville Historical Society.
Places
African-American
Bronzeville
The Chicago Land Clearance Commission bulldozed a wide corridor through the Black Belt after 1948 for the Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores towers. Bronzeville carries the record.
1910–1974
Multi-ethnic
Maxwell Street
Chicago cleared 630 acres for the UIC Circle Campus in 1961 and erased the open-air market that had anchored Jewish, Mexican-American, and African-American commerce for a century.
1870–2001