Uptown, Chicago
Uptown is one of the 77 community areas of Chicago in Illinois, United States. It is bounded by Foster Avenue to the north; Montrose Avenue and Irving Park Road to the south; Lake Michigan to the east; and Ravenswood Avenue and Clark Street to the west.
Uptown rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as Chicagoland's largest commercial and entertainment center outside of the Loop thanks to its plentiful theaters, clubs, shops and parkland. It was also a center for early film-making. To this day Uptown remains a hub for live entertainment, particularly Uptown Square.
Uptown's amenities include Montrose Beach and multiple nature reserves. It is also home to Truman College and the historic Graceland Cemetery.
History
Early years
The historical, cultural, and commercial center of Uptown is Broadway, with Uptown Square at the center. In 1900, the Northwestern Elevated Railroad constructed its terminal at Wilson and Broadway. Uptown became a summer resort town for downtown dwellers, and derived its name from the Uptown Store, which was the commercial center for the community. For a time, all northbound elevated trains from downtown terminated in Uptown. Uptown became known as an entertainment destination. Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson and other early film stars produced films at the Essanay Studios on Argyle Street. The Aragon Ballroom, Riviera Theater, Uptown Theatre, and Green Mill Jazz Club are all located within a half block of Lawrence and Broadway. Uptown is also home to one of Chicago's most celebrated final resting spots, Graceland Cemetery.The Uptown neighborhood boundary once extended farther to the North, to Hollywood Avenue. Beginning at the turn of the 20th century, just after the World's Columbian Exposition, the entire area had experienced a housing construction boom. In the mid-1920s, construction of large and luxurious entertainment venues resulted in many of the ornate and historic Uptown Square buildings which exist today. The craftsmanship and artistry of those Uptown Square buildings reflects the ornate pavilions of the Exposition.
For over a century, Uptown has been a popular Chicago entertainment district, playing a significant role in ushering in the Gilded Age, the American Lyceum movement, the jazz age, the silent film era, the swing era, the big band era, and the rock and roll era. It has also been a filming location for over 480 movies. Uptown has ties to significant spectator sport athletes and organizations, including the Chicago Blackhawks and three Olympic figure skaters, as well as theater, comedy clubs, dance performers who later became nationally famous, and even "The People's Music School," a needs-based, tuition-free music school for formal classical music training.
Postwar era
By the 1950s, the middle class was leaving Uptown for more distant suburbs, as commuter rail and elevated train lines were extended. Uptown's housing stock was aging, and old mansions were subdivided. Residential hotels which had housed wives of sailors attached to the Great Lakes Naval Station during World War II now served low-income migrants from the South and Appalachia. Uptown developed a reputation as "Hillbilly Heaven" in the 1950s and the 1960s. The Council of the Southern Mountains, headquartered in Berea, Kentucky, launched the Chicago Southern Center in 1963 in Uptown, with help from the Chicago philanthropist W. Clement Stone. Chicago's anti-poverty program opened the Montrose Urban Progress Center. Students for a Democratic Society initiated a community organizing project, JOIN in 1963. Large-scale urban renewal projects like Harry S. Truman College eliminated much low-cost housing, and the low-income Southern white residents dispersed. New waves of Asian, Hispanic, and African-American migrants moved into the remaining neighborhoods.Beginning in the 1950s, Native Americans came to Chicago in increasing numbers as part of a relocation program initiated by the federal government, although those sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs may have constituted a minority of arrivals, who often came to the city independently in search of economic opportunities. With supportive neighborhood institutions such as the American Indian Center, availability of social services, and low housing costs, Uptown established itself as the central hub for the growing community. Indeed, the Native population in Chicago nearly doubled from 3,400 in the 1960 Census to at least 6,500 by the end of the decade, with growth continuing even after the lapse of the federal relocation program. The majority of Uptown's Native American residents dispersed following the decline in factory jobs throughout the 1980s, with some moving to neighborhoods west of Uptown while others returned to their reservations altogether.
Latinos forced out from other near downtown and lakefront areas by urban renewal settled close to the border with Lakeview at Sheridan, near Irving Park Rd. In 1975 Young Lords founder Jose Jimenez joined with a broad coalition of whites, blacks and Latinos and ran unsuccessfully against Daley-sponsored Christopher Cohen but still garnered 39% of the vote. His main campaign issue was housing corruption, which was displacing Latinos and the poor from prime real estate areas of Chicago.
21st century
Since 2000, gentrification has spread north from neighboring Lakeview and south from Edgewater. Developers have added more market-rate and luxury housing options, including by converting former single-room occupancy buildings. Between 2000 and 2005, median condo prices jumped more than 69 percent. In 2008, a group of residents sued the City of Chicago over its designation of the Wilson Yards lot as a Tax Increment Financing district.In 2009, the Chicago Tribune reported on problems in eastern sections of Uptown where a cluster of nursing homes housed more than a thousand mentally ill residents, including several hundred felons. Some of these nursing homes have since closed.
Neighborhoods
Andersonville
Andersonville is a neighborhood in western Uptown and Edgewater known for its Swedish roots, plentiful local and independent businesses, and vibrant LGBTQ community. At its core is the Andersonville Commercial Historic District, which spans the length of Clark Street from Ainslie Street in Uptown to Rosehill Drive in Edgewater. The neighborhood traces its name to a parcel of land in Uptown bounded by Clark Street, Ravenswood Avenue, Foster Avenue, and Winnemac Avenue, on which the historic Andersonville School building was built in 1854. In the 1960s, the Uptown Clark Street Business Association successfully lobbied the city to name the neighborhood Andersonville in its honor.Argyle Street
Also known as "Asia on Argyle," "Little Saigon", and "Little Vietnam", the Argyle Street neighborhood was once a predominantly Jewish community. In the 1970s, it became home to immigrants from China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, many of them refugees from the Vietnam War and Sino-Vietnamese War. Argyle Street hosts numerous Asian eateries, cafes, and grocery stores, including Vietnamese, Thai, Laotian, and Chinese cuisine. In the summer, the Argyle Night Market, a weekly street festival, draws tens of thousands of attendees.The neighborhood was founded by William C. Goudy in the 1880s as Argyle Park. Originally a suburb outside the city limits, Argyle Park was linked to Chicago by the Evanston and Lake Superior Railroad in 1885 and was annexed to Chicago in 1889.
The neighborhood is served by the Argyle stop on the CTA's Red Line and CTA busses on Sheridan Road and Broadway.
Buena Park
Buena Park is a neighborhood bounded by Montrose Avenue, Irving Park Road, Graceland Cemetery and Lake Shore Drive. At the core of the neighborhood is the Hutchinson Street Historic District, a tree-lined stretch several blocks long featuring mansions that make up "one of the best collections of Prairie-style architecture in the city." It is in sharp contrast to the skyscrapers that populate the area around it. The neighborhood was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. It can be accessed from the Sheridan stop on the CTA's Red Line.Robert A. Waller developed Buena Park starting in 1887 by subdividing his property. The site of the original Waller home now holds St. Mary of the Lake church. Buena Park pre-dates the remainder of Uptown by a number of years. Buena Park is also home to one of the most active neighborhood organizations in Chicago: Buena Park Neighbors.
"The Delectable Ballad of the Waller Lot" by Chicago poet Eugene Field:
Up yonder in Buena Park
There is a famous spot,
In legend and in history
'' the Waller lot.''
Margate Park
Margate Park is situated in the northeast corner of the Uptown community, nestled between Sheridan Road and the pleasantries of the northern reaches of Lincoln Park. It is bound by Lincoln Park and Sheridan Road to its east and west, and Foster Avenue and Lawrence Avenue to its north and south, respectively.Its tree-lined streets, historic mansions, and gilded mid-rises reflect the area's development in the bustle of Uptown's entertainment industry from the early 1900s, now undergoing a burgeoning revitalization. The diverse housing also includes ornate, imposing terracotta clad buildings, immortalized in the movies of early twentieth century Chicago as apartment hotels and boarding houses. Some of these 1920s, Jazz-Age hotels have since been converted to high-end condos and co-ops, adding to the tremendously diverse population of the area. The Margate Park community, as well as much of the Uptown neighborhood of which it is a part, is a popular and thriving home to many of the city's LGBT residents. On Margate Park's western edge is also one of the city's longest running gay bars, Big Chicks, owned and operated for the past 30 years. Designed in 1937 by architect Charles Kristen, its asymmetrical facade, clearly influenced by the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, features dazzling decoration, with yellow vertical piers on a backdrop of cobalt blue, as well as splashes of aqua. The building itself is architecturally significant for its deco facade.
Margate Park contains a Lake Shore Drive underpass near Argyle Avenue adjacent to the Margate Playground, just east of Marine Drive, which permits pedestrians and bikers easy access to the lakefront path and the Foster and Lawrence Avenue beaches.
Many of the houses here were built from the 1890s to the 1920s. Although it has remained a mostly white and wealthy area throughout the 20th century, it is a fairly integrated community. In 1940 some blacks who lived as domestic workers resided in a single block of houses in close proximity to their employers. Those houses were described by Jacalyn D. Harden, author of Double Cross: Japanese Americans in Black and White Chicago, as being "modest".
At 5000 North Marine Drive is The Aquitania, a co-op building constructed in 1923 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2002. The Aquitania was built by Ralph C. Harris and Byron H. Jillson in the Classical Revival style. It was developed by George K. Spoor, the co-founder of Essanay Studios, a producer of silent movies in the first decades of the twentieth century. At this time, Chicago rivaled both New York City and Hollywood in film production, and Spoor was able to use his considerable wealth to build an apartment he felt fitting for the film stars connected with Chicago's growing entertainment industry.