Near West Side Renewal Project

UIC and The Near West Side

The University Illinois Chicago (UIC) was constructed as Circle Campus in the early 1960s. The new campus was an urban renewal project championed by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. UIC’s construction displaced the multiracial multi-ethnic working-class and poor residents who lived in the area known alternatively as Taylor Street, Little Italy, Harrison-Halsted, or the Near West Side. The Near West Side was home to Hull-House, the country’s most influential social settlement started by Anglo-American Protestant women in the late 19th century who aimed to serve the immigrant poor on Chicago’s Near West Side—at the time mostly Southern and Eastern Europeans. Over the first half of the twentieth century, African American migrants from the U.S. South and Mexican and Puerto Rican im/migrants increasingly lived in the neighborhood, in addition to Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, and other ethnic communities. The Near West Side was also home to Maxwell Street Market, at one point, the largest open-air market in the United States; and one of the Chicago’s first public housing developments, the Jane Addams Homes, opened in 1938 and named for one of the founders of Hull-House. Twentieth century redevelopment projects, including urban renewal, transformed the Near West Side. While some in the community organized against urban renewal, many of the community’s existing residents and institutions were ultimately displaced by the building of UIC, medical centers, and highways. This project grapples with this history and legacy.

“About,” Hull-House Museum, https://www.hullhousemuseum.org/history-mission-and-values

Ira Berkow, “Maxwell Street Market,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/794.html

The Renewal Project

The Renewal Project is a national project focusing on the history and ongoing relationship between urban renewal policies, universities, race, class, and displacement—coordinated between the Smart Cities Research Lab at Trinity College; the Humanities Action Lab coalition housed at Rutgers-Newark, and Minnesota Transform at the University of Minnesota. During the Fall 2024 semester, students in Prof. Elizabeth Todd-Breland’s course, HIST 494 Urban Renewal and the Archive, studied the history of urban renewal at UIC, while learning from local community and institutional collaborators. The work from this course is a contribution to the UIC team’s Renewal Project efforts.