Garfield Park and Lincoln Park: A Story of How Race Shaped Two Communities and Their Commercial Districts
“I hope that rents will not price out the diversity of the neighborhood. I don’t think it’s so much fun when everyone’s the same…You might as well live in the suburbs”
— Lincoln Park resident, 1976
Commercial districts are often the heart of a community. It isn’t just the transactional nature of shopping at a small business or dining at a popular restaurant, but the memories which breath life into these corridors. Yet without the neighborhood’s support, the bustling streets become quiet and the buildings majestic facades fall into disrepair. What is left is a memory the old reminisce on and the young can only dream of. The story of Garfield Park’s Madison Street and its polar opposite in Old Town is less a tale of two cities and more of a tragedy. A tragedy marked by Black residents being purposefully locked out of the wealth their white counterparts enjoyed. In the case of Garfield Park, white residents and business owners packed up and left; in Lincoln Park and Old Town, neighbors collectively organized to exclude African Americans from coming in. Racism won and its effects have determined the fate of these two commercial districts and communities ever since.
Part 1: Unequal Footing (1850s-1940s)
Lincoln Park always had an advantage over Garfield Park. Located in Chicago’s north side, the area had been viewed as having a geographic advantage for centuries. Before their forced removal in 1833, several Native American tribes considered the area home and held an important trading post there. The 1850s brought German immigrants to the area, seeing it as a ripe location for agricultural production. The Great Chicago Fire in 1871 destroyed most of Lincoln Park, but residents, determined to rebuild, were able to recover within a few years. What developed afterwards was a white middle class found to the community’s west while the area’s affluent whites resided to the east in what is now called — unsurprisingly — the Gold Coast. The prosperity seen in Lincoln Park was so rapid that by the start of the 20th century the community was home to several major cultural institutions in the city, including the Lincoln Park Zoo and the Chicago Academy of Sciences. Though the Great Depression and World War 2 took a toll on Lincoln Park, its reputation as a cultural powerhouse served as an insurance policy for the community and evaded the damage seen in other parts of Chicago.
Meanwhile Garfield Park, located west of Chicago’s downtown, wasn’t brought into the city’s limits until 1869 and was left undeveloped for decades. Without reliable transportation, Chicagoans found the area unappealing. This changed when an elevated transit line opened in 1905, which was soon followed by manufacturing companies. The West Side’s development as an industrial hub brought with it an eclectic group of western and eastern European immigrants and the creation of a white middle class. The area’s success transformed Madison Street as the financial center for both East and West Garfield Park. From 1914 to 1929 the commercial district enjoyed a period of growth which supported businesses like the Marbro Theater, a 3,600 person movie theater that would hold both live performances and show movies to sold out crowds. The Graemere Hotel, once a symbol of the area’s importance, was a prime location for west siders to hold weddings, banquets, and other celebrations. Much like the rest of the country, however, the West Side was soon suffering from the effects of the Great Depression and the rapid changes that World War 2 brought to American society. Unlike Lincoln Park, the neighborhood never fully recovered.
Part 2: Fight or Flight (1940s-mid 1960s)
The stories of Garfield Park and Lincoln Park intersect during the postwar economic boom that occurred in the late ’40s and throughout the 1950s. One of the effects from this period was the expansion of city centers through initiatives called urban renewal. Misleadingly positive, urban renewal efforts in Chicago came at the expense of working class residents, most of which were African American. On the West Side, the construction of the Eisenhower Expressway displaced the area’s residents, 40% of whom were Black. With few other options, Black families moved to the neighboring communities of East and West Garfield Park. This was immediately met with hostility by their white neighbors. Betty Johnson, a woman whose family moved to the area during the 1950s, told the Chicago Tribune: “They threw eggs at the door when we first moved here, they set garbage on fire, they wrote n — — r on the glass door. They harassed us really good.”
Galvanized by racism, white residents formed the United Property Group to prevent further property sales to African Americans. Another group called the Garfield Park Good Neighbors Council welcomed Black residents into the area. Both groups understood, though, that their friends and family distrusted their new Black neighbors. To find a compromise, they partnered together to try and attract the University of Illinois to bring their Chicago campus to Garfield Park. They hoped the campus’ economic benefits would stymie the growing exodus of whites from the area while also creating a racial buffer zone between Blacks and whites. The plan fell through, though, and the 1950s brought about dramatic demographic changes to the West Side.
Just a few miles up north in Old Town, a Lincoln Park neighborhood created as a civilian defense unit during World War 2, large numbers of young white middle class Chicagoans started to call it home. Its location made it an ideal place to live if you wanted to have a suburban experience while enjoying the city’s attractions. When Old Town started to become popular, however, residents feared that a predominantly working class Black neighborhood just to their south would disrupt the area’s boom. Fears arose that including them would cause white residents to move out towards the suburbs. This, in part, led residents to create the Old Town Triangle Association, which later received help from the Lincoln Park Conservation Association in 1954. Both neighborhood groups pursued renewal programs which, among other things, used a government initiative to subsidize property prices in order for them to be purchased by private developers. While this was going on, middle class whites who couldn’t afford to live in the Gold Coast moved to Old Town and renovated dilapidated housing units. Soon, enough people started doing this which eventually led to what became known as “rehabbed” blocks maintained by white property owners. These rehabilitations eventually encompassed not just Lincoln Park but other communities in the North Side.
Community organizing and neighborhood renewal projects were so successful that Lincoln Park was considered one of Chicago’s richest neighborhoods by 1970, with Old Town benefitting from this distinction. Unsurprisingly, the area also became overwhelmingly white.
Old Town’s boom led to the neighborhood’s iconic commercial district located on North Wells Street. While Madison Street was suffering from decline during the 1960s and ’70s, North Wells was drawing tourists and suburbanites. As the Chicago Tribune wrote in 1964: “North Wells Street is fascinating, lively, colorful, crowded and a pot of gold for the merchants…Sleek and well-dressed, [suburbanites] motor in from the north shore or the far western suburbs to infiltrate the shops and restaurants.” One of the shops they would’ve gone to was Crate and Barrel, which opened their first location on Wells Street. For a late night show you would find many up the street at The Second City, known for catapulting the careers of Stephen Colbert and Tina Fey. Yet what few remember is that Old Town’s success came at the expense of the area’s Black residents. Working class African Americans soon found themselves locked out of the neighborhood due to rising costs. Many became concentrated in housing projects, such as the infamous Cabrini Green apartment complex.
Part 3: A Dream Deferred (mid 1960s-present day)
From 1950–1960, the Black population in East Garfield Park went from 11,700 to 41,100. Meanwhile, the white population dropped from 58,100 in 1950 to 25,400 in 1960. Each passing year meant an astounding 2,300 additional white residents left Garfield Park. Discriminatory housing practices and negligent white landlords proved to be devastating for the newly settled Black population. Despite the circumstances, Black residents organized block clubs and neighborhood organizations to keep the community cohesive. This was further spurred by Martin Luther King Jr’s 1966 organizing campaign in neighboring North Lawndale, which inspired several grassroot organizations, including the East Garfield Park Union to End Slums that led rent strikes against neglectful landlords. The East Garfield Park Cooperative was also formed to help obtain groceries and housing for Black residents. For a moment in the early to mid 1960s, the Garfield Park community was hopeful their work would pay off.
Their hope ended on April 4th, 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. The events that transpired over the next 72 hours permanently changed the West Side. Riots broke out in East and West Garfield Park, which resulted in 116 stores and businesses located on Madison Street to be destroyed. While the area around Old Town experienced looting as well, Chicago’s west side was the hardest hit. The damage along Madison Street cost an estimated $9–10 million. For the remaining white business owners in the commercial district, this was the last straw. Many were already weary of the changing demographics but the damage done gave them an excuse to leave. It’s important to note that the vast majority of West Side residents did not participate in the violence. Nonetheless, 1968 proved to be a turning point. Garfield Park’s image was tattered and the disinvestment that followed was wrongly blamed on the area’s Black residents.
Today the Garfield Park community continues to suffer from the disinvestment propelled after 1968. Fourteen percent of all vacant lots in Chicago are in East Garfield Park and North Lawndale, both predominantly African American communities. While government investments have been made to the area, most of the efforts have been futile. One infamous example was Pyramidwest Development Corps., which received $22 million in government funds in the 1980s to help revitalize the West Side. A shopping center that was supposed to be built was eventually scrapped because the company couldn’t pay property taxes. However, a positive development to East Garfield Park was the opening of The Hatchery in 2019, which supports food entrepreneurs in the West Side.
In looking to revitalize the Madison Street commercial district, a 2007 report by an urban planning firm concluded that 26% of land in the corridor was vacant. This often created “full block faces with ill-maintained grass lots.” It also cited the deterioration of the area’s older buildings as a challenge to attracting businesses and also reported the commercial district was losing roughly 40% of potential retail purchases to other surrounding communities. An absence of family and child services, banks, and grocery stores contributed to these losses. More than fifty years later, a lot of work still needs to be done.
Part 4: Conclusion
It’s easy to view this as a story of two different cities, yet the larger theme that unites these two communities is the purposeful exclusion of Blacks by whites. Even before Black families had finished unpacking in Garfield Park, their white neighbors already saw them as a threat. The same could be said in Old Town. Warning their neighborhoods were in threat of becoming slums — a code word for becoming majority Black — whites were determined to do everything possible to prevent it. What I find amazing about Garfield Park is that white families who had lived in the neighborhood for decades had no problem leaving behind all of their history just so that they didn’t have to live next to Black people. The real tragedy of this entire episode, however, is the Black population in the West and North Sides that never experienced the middle class lifestyle that their white neighbors had. The once prosperous West Side is unrecognizable today. While middle class whites enjoyed the amenities of Lincoln Park and Old Town, Black residents were financially locked out, many living in cramped housing projects.
Race has been, and continues to be, a major issue in this country. This will be one of many articles exploring how race impacts different parts of Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. Each of us have a stake in leveling the playing field. I hope these entries are a start.
