What is urban renewal?

Urban renewal refers to the mid-20th-century federal and state programs that built upon the slum clearance legislation of the 19th century, destroying countless historic structures and vital neighborhoods to “safeguard the value of business centers and property tax bases while providing more modern structures” (Chicago Public Library 2022), though largely without considering community interests. In Chicago, the “Little Hell” neighborhood just west of the Gold Coast was a target of municipal government slum clearance campaigns that equated morality with civic beautification (Vale 2013). This area was captured in Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929), a classic ethnographic case study that showed how differences in socioeconomic status did not map to social distance in this Chicago neighborhood, where the very poor and the very rich lived quite close together. Eventually, the Chicago Housing Authority’s Cabrini-Green Homes were built atop parts of Little Hell, heralding another experiment in affordable housing for Chicagoans through the mechanisms of urban renewal.

In addition to the federal urban renewal program established by the passage of the 1954 Housing Act, Illinois state laws charged the city with removing "blight"—empty lots, dilapidated or abandoned structures, “objectionable” businesses—via eminent domain. These laws include the Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Act of 1941 (amended in 1953), the Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act of 1947, the Relocation Act of 1947, and the Urban Community Conservation Act of 1953 (Hirsch 2005).

Carl Sandburg Village

While most urban renewal projects targeted neighborhoods on the West and South sides, one of the largest urban renewal projects north of the Loop was Carl Sandburg Village. Begun in 1961, the city-funded project consisted of nine separate high-rises and adjacent townhouses with 2,600 units for middle-class tenants. The development was bounded by North Avenue, La Salle, Clark, and Division Streets and was characterized as a neighborhood of “blight, brothels and banditry, all pressing in on Chicago’s exclusive Gold Coast” (Allen 1997:SW_A2). The development was seated to “protect” the Gold Coast from encroaching blight or, as developer Arthur Rubloff put it, without this project “the whole area would have gone down the drain” (Allen 1997:SW_A2).

But who lived there before they were displaced by this project? The area was home to a large number of Chicagoans from Puerto Rico. Many families ultimately relocated to Humboldt Park and West Town (Pérez 2004). There were also many “unmarried white renters” who were displaced by this project (Hirsch 2005).

Threats of Demolition and the Charnley House

Even the architecturally-significant Charnley House was not immune to threats of destruction. In the 1970s, the Charnley House was threatened with demolition when its current owners sought to cash in on the trend in lucrative high-rise apartments being built along the Gold Coast. While the threat to the extant built landscape was similar, it differed from the slum clearances that marked other periods of urban renewal both in its origin and in which socioeconomic and racial groups were impacted.

Beginning in the 1950s, some neighboring Gold Coast mansions were demolished, including Potter and Bertha Palmer’s Castle at 1350 North Lake Shore Drive, designed in 1882 and demolished in 1950 (Small 1954:A13). Newspaper coverage points to residents’ anxiety about the increasing numbers of high-rise structures replacing old, stately mansions and townhouses. Their different size, in a style that was characterized as all “sliced from the same old piece of reinforced concrete sausage,” was said to be “dimming the Gold Coast luster” (Gapp 1974:E7).

Architects, historians, and neighbors rallied to spare the Charnley House from the demolition that affected similar structures. As Chicago Tribune reporter, Casey Bukro, wrote in a 1972 article: “This home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright will either come down for ‘progress’ or stay up for posterity” (Bukro 1972:E11). The Chicago Commission on Historical and Architectural Landmarks heard testimony for the Charnley House in 1972 from a group of architects and from Nettie Waller, who lived in the house until 1969 (Chicago Tribune 1972). The Charnley House was ultimately designated a Chicago Landmark on August 20, 1972, helping make the future case to preserve it and paving the way for its ultimate status as a National Historic Landmark in 1998.