Chicago’s turnaround in the 55 years after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is a point of civic pride.
And why wouldn’t it be? By 1926, Chicago — almost insatiably driven to rebuild after the big blaze — had turned itself from a dirty, at times ramshackle, prairie city to a mature metropolis of 3 million with a major national and international presence.
But Chicago’s West Side, rocked by fires following the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination 55 years ago, has not been as fortunate.
Indeed, Chicago, with all its prestigious political, civic, financial and economic might, has virtually ignored the West Side since 1968.
This must now change.
As shown by Sun-Times reporter Andy Grimm’s package of stories centered on West Garfield Park, there’s a desperate need for sustained, long-overdue action to improve the West Side.
Neighborhood violence and disinvestment tend to run hand in hand. Two miles of Madison Street between East and West Garfield Park went up in flames within hours of King’s murder, claiming at least 100 commercial and residential buildings and leaving scores of vacant lots that are still there today.
Add that to the global economic sea changes that had Chicago and much of industrial America on the ropes between the 1970s and the 1990s, and it’s easy to see why West Side communities are often the most troubled.
“When I was growing up, you had Sears [nearby North Lawndale] that had hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs,” Lashone Kelly, interim executive director of the Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative, told Grimm. “You had a Western Electric plant [in Cicero]. You had Brach’s candy factory. You had major retailers up and down Madison and Pulaski. Those jobs are gone.”
But things aren’t hopeless. New housing is slowly coming to the West Side. And novel new uses such as The Hatchery, a commercial kitchen at 135 N. Kedzie Ave., are finding a home there also.
“We have the Blue Line and the Green Line that run through the neighborhood,” Kelly said. “We have the most beautiful park in the city and some beautiful housing stock. What we don’t have is resources.”
It’s time to bring more resources — public and private — to West Garfield Park and to the greater West Side as well.
It’s big task, but having Austin resident Brandon Johnson as mayor — the first West Sider to sit on the Fifth Floor since Anton Cermak was elected in 1931 — might make things a little easier.
And much like the city flourished in the decades following the Great Fire, Chicago can only benefit from a safer, more livable and better-resourced West Side.
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