Dearborn Homes
Dearborn Homes is a Chicago Housing Authority public housing project located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. It is located along State Street between 27th and 30th Streets, and bounded by the Metra rail line to the west. It is one of only two housing projects that still exist from the State Street Corridor which included other CHA developments: Robert Taylor Homes, Stateway Gardens, Harold Ickes Homes and Hillard Homes.
The project occupies and consists of mid-rise, six-story, and nine-story buildings. They were designed in modernist style by Loebl, Schlossman & Bennett, with cruciform towers to allow for ventilation and light, placed in a parklike setting. There were 800 units.
History
Dearborn was the first Chicago housing project built after World War II, as housing for blacks on part of the Federal Street slum within the "black belt". It was the start of the Chicago Housing Authority's post-war use of high-rise buildings to accommodate more units at a lower overall cost, and when it opened in 1950, the first to have elevators.While still unfinished, it was used to receive lower-income residents displaced by redevelopment; half the buildings were also increased in height by three floors when more money became available during construction. The buildings soon fell victim to vandalism; in 1958 a Chicago American reporter visited Dearborn and wrote of "torn window screens, mutilated storm doors, yards littered with garbage,... walls, doors, and casings marked by knife slashes and crayon marks; holes gouged in plaster; obscenities scrawled on the stairway walls".