Last spring, former CW editor Sam Feldman chronicled the fate of the Michael Reese Hospital campus as a result of the failed Olympic bid for Newcity. The city has always intended to tear down the Bronzeville hospital complex, be it originally for the proposed Olympic village or now for the land to be sold off to developers.  But this came to the chagrin of many preservationists and architecture buffs, who shuddered at the thought of loosing the campus co-designed by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus movement. As a compromise Mayor Daley had promised that the hospital’s main building, an unusual Prairie Style high-rise, would be saved from the wrecking ball.

As it turns out, the city is now planning to tear down that main hospital building by the end of the year, citing the poor condition of the building and the costs involved in restoring it. Lee Bay has posted a nice synopsis of the situation on his blog for WBEZ.  As a consolation the Singer Pavilion, designed by Gropius, has been assured to remain standing. However, the Chicago Tribune’s architecture writer Blair Kamin has called into question the honesty of this promise and brought attention to the questionable decision-making process behind these series of moves.

It has been more than a year after the city’s Olympic bid failed, and the community is still struggling with the fallout.  As Sam pointed out in his article, many of the communities that were highlighted by the Olympic bid have fallen back into the periphery of the city’s collective vision; much of the urban plight that was promised to be tackled by the bid still remains unaddressed. But if anything positive can be gleaned from the story of the hospital, at least Chicago politics is working as well as ever.

Our former Editor-in-Chief Sam Feldman has written an excellent feature for this week’s Newcity on the aftermath of Chicago’s failed 2016 bid, some six months after losing to Rio de Janeiro. The remants of Chicago’s plans, plans it hoped would “stir the blood of men,” in the (alleged) words of Daniel Burnham, can especially be seen near the Michael Reese Hospital campus in Bronzeville, site of the proposed Olympic Village, and Washington Park, the site of the proposed 80,000 seat Olympic Stadium. Sam discovers what community developers, students, government officials, preservationists, and others have planned for these places now.

(courtesy of Liren Chen/Flickr)

An early morning fire spread through the kitchen of popular Chinatown restaurant Lao Sze Chuan. The blaze also damaged two neighboring restaurants in the Chinatown Square complex, but no one was injured. Although Lao Sze Chuan will likely be closed for a while, the indefatigable chef and “culinary superhero” Tony Hu has two other excellent restaurants nearby, Lao Beijing and Lao Shanghai. This fire follows a little over a year after another beloved Chinatown restaurant, Penang, succumbed to a kitchen fire. (via Gapers Block)

On a happier note, Chicagoist is reporting that the 47th Street Marketplace, destroyed by a fire in January, should be open again soon. Repairs are underway, and tenants such as Blu47 and the Jamaican Consulate are expected to be able to return in three to four months, according to building owner East Lake Management.

South of Roosevelt “resides an art community that is often invisible to the mainstream,” writes Andre Guichard in the first post on his new blog, Fine Art South of Roosevelt Road. As an artist and the director of Gallery Guichard in Bronzeville, Guichard is a tireless promoter of art of the African diaspora, and the blog promises to continue this work by introducing readers to more than one hundred artists and collectors south of Roosevelt. It will also include updates about art events and exhibitions.

(Grahm M. Balkany / Gropius in Chicago Coalition)

The City of Chicago finished demolition on its first building designed by renowned architect and founder of the Bauhaus movement Walter Gropius on the Michael Reese Hospital campus, the Gropius in Chicago Coalition is reporting. The Friend Convalescent Home, one of eight buildings on the Michael Reese campus designed in part by Gropius, was bulldozed this week in spite of the outcry from Gropius fans and preservationists. Architecture critic Lynn Becker, for one, is furious. The site was originally selected for the Olympic Village, but of course, the IOC had other plans. Now, after a quashed proposal for a casino, there are rumors of some sort of housing complex being built on the site, but no actual plan or developer. So why tear everything down? Becker has an idea: Read the rest of this entry »

In 2001, the Bronzeville Merchants Association (BMA) began a project to erect ten obelisks around Bronzeville with bronze plaques explaining the neighborhood’s history. Today the first two of those obelisks were unveiled at the northeast and southeast corners of 35th and State. Each triangular obelisk weighs four thousand pounds, stands six feet tall, and includes several Egyptian hieroglyphic characters that, according to historian Timuel Black, spell out “Bronzeville.”

Aldermen Preckwinkle and Dowell, at left, look on as State Rep. Burns reads from the obelisk's plaque.

The ceremony included remarks by aldermen Toni Preckwinkle (4th), Robert Fioretti (2nd), and Pat Dowell (3rd), as well as State Rep. Will Burns (D-Chicago), former State Rep. Elga Jeffries, Black, and BMA president Esther Barnett.  The BMA hopes to install two more obelisks at 35th and King next spring, and the remaining six after that in a circle around the neighborhood.

Chicago Defender, December 2, 1933

Compiled by memory and with the help of  some found news clippings, University of Chicago alumnus Leon H. Lewis’s (A.B. ’28) Map of Chicago’s South Side Jazz Clubs ca. 1925-1940 from the Chicago Jazz Archives at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago is a real topographical gem.  Lewis, a musician himself, was active in the music scene at the UofC, performing the banjo at fraternity events and dances on campus during his undergraduate career.  It appears, since he compiled his map from memory at the age of 80, that he was also a true jazz connoisseur, frequenting the clubs himself and most likely watching jazz greats like Louis Armstrong perform at the Sunset Cafe at 315-317 E. 35th Street with Armstrong’s band, the Sunset Stompers.

Deborah Gillaspie, Curator of the Chicago Jazz Archive, writes about how popular Lewis’s original 11″ x 17″ map was in its original form, and laments the difficulty of making it available to researchers abroad. “There have been jazz maps over the years — Paul Eduard Miller’s map on the endpapers of the 1946 Esquire Jazz Book comes to mind — but nothing as complete as Mr. Lewis’s, nor anything concentrating on the South Side venues,” she writes.  The map, in its new format, provides an interactive feature, where numbered locations direct to individual pages that feature historical paraphernalia from its heyday.