Why Not Any of the Other 82 Sites? The UIC Campuses That Weren’t

By Robert Burke, December 2024

Before the University of Illinois accepted the Harrison-Halsted site for its new Chicago Circle campus, a 1958 report by the Real Estate Research Corporation (RERC) provided leaders with a fascinatingly detailed study culminating in four suitable sites. Here’s the kicker: Harrison-Halsted wasn’t one of them.

It wasn’t the first report that the university contracted to RERC. Reports in 1954 and 1955 established the campus’s low-rise form, site selection criteria, and an initial index and evaluation of 83 sites.[1] Developments in the intervening years prompted the 1958 report, “An Analysis of Sites for the Campus of the Chicago Undergraduate Division.” Below, I provide some context, summary, and analysis for this intriguing document.

Planning and Development Context

In the 1955 report, all sites but a new island in Lake Michigan were considered to have deficiencies.[2] Indeed, Circle faced a constrained path when compared with other American institutions that had opened a century prior.[3] But Chicago in the 1950s was a dense city whose oldest buildings were coming of age. Residents could not afford to fix them, and a wave of migration from the south only increased pressure for new housing. At the same time, federal policy and racist practices effectively wicked white families (and money) to new suburbs. In the 1950s alone, over a million did so.[4] Civic and business leaders feared a death spiral if they did not dramatically remake their city.[5]

Simultaneously, pressures to abandon its Navy Pier facility had been growing, and the university wanted to capture the post-war population boom.[6] But dwindling options to assemble any of its preferred pastoral sites in the suburbs along with increasingly vocal support from Daley for a city location prompted the Board of Trustees to soberly acknowledge the need to re-evaluate the 1955 proposals.

Due Diligence

The 1958 report responded to a charge to review all 83 urban and suburban sites. These included golf courses, parks, racetracks, “clearance areas,” and even cemeteries, among other uses.[7] RERC developed evaluative criteria, which narrowed the list to four for intensive study: Riverside Golf Club (slightly west of city limits), Garfield Park, Northerly Island (the site of Meigs Field, a small airport), and a South Loop site then in use by 14 railroads and 3 terminals. The rail terminal site was favored by Daley and the Chicago Department of Planning. Land use analyses for these sites along with basic illustrative designs for these top locations were also included.[8]

The criteria included transportation access, site availability, expansibility, cost, and surroundings. The introduction discusses the basic premise and important nuances of these criteria confidently. Many pages at the end of the report are dedicated to the explanation of how these criteria were developed and why they are sound. Transportation networks, square footage estimates, population projections, spatial relationships, curriculum, student travel surveys, faculty programming questionnaires, and other campus’s planning approaches were studied and integrated.[9]

A significant portion of the analysis concerned transportation. The advantages of the Congress (now Eisenhower) Expressway in particular, as well as the ‘L’ line being relocated into it, emerged early on. The city was broadly favored due to its transit infrastructure, and the report even highlighted sites “relatively close to the hub” of the interstates then under development as sweet spots.[10]

Where It Actually Went

We know now that the campus could not have been located any closer to said hub—it even took its name: University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Yet this location was not a RERC finalist: in fact, RERC had ruled out all of the 30 urban renewal clearance areas in its initial list, due to the sheer number of owners to be relocated, as well as the time, optics, money, and burden on the city’s relocation backlog.[11]

In a twist, Harrison-Halsted would soon become “available” in the eyes of Daley and the city. The residents of Little Italy had organized and researched ways to improve their community, eventually having it declared blight for urban renewal. As RERC forecasted, it was not relocation or eminent domain itself that the university feared, it was the risks involved with doing so. With demolition underway, Daley had a convenient offer that the university accepted in 1961. Residents, who were promised housing and retail, were shocked. The details and impact of this part of the decision-making process are well-documented on other pages of our site.

Fair to Question

Given its failure to identify UIC’s permanent site, it is fair to question RERC’s report. While the evaluative criteria may have suited the needs of the client, what sites or criteria did they miss? Beyond that, what else might historical criticism shed on this moment? For example, a primary concern at most of the final sites was proximity to single-family homes for future faculty. While not enough to disqualify a site, it provides an interesting window into the firm’s values that may have shaped others. What message does this assumption regarding their residential preferences send? Perhaps it was a vestige from dreaming of an affluent, suburban campus, but it may also express exclusionary racial ideals. Despite the racial context affecting almost every development in the nation at the time, the report was almost silent on the topic, employing popular euphemisms as “deterioration and obsolescence” to describe the areas surrounding Garfield Park.[12]

Developments in the years since the establishment of Circle Campus makes one wonder what could have happened if RERC, Daley, or the university could have foreseen them. If only they knew the Crosstown Expressway would never materialize, altering their transportation analyses. If only they knew that the railroads would go bankrupt within years, freeing the highly desired rail terminal site. If only they knew that Daley’s son would rip up Meigs Field anyway. If only they knew the opening of campus would be delayed anyway. If only they knew they would merge with the Medical Center less than two decades later.[13] If only the community at Harrison-Halsted, which was a unique beacon of diversity, civic life, and hope for much of Chicago’s history, could have been spared.

What if they knew?

Bibliography

[1] George Rosen, Decision-Making Chicago Style, (University of Illinois Press, 1980), 30-35; RERC, Analysis of Sites, October 1958, 18-23, https://n2t.net/ark:/81984/d3xs5jt49. Note: an alternate scanned copy with an additional memo in the front cover from President David Henry to Robert L. Zander can be accessed at https://n2t.net/ark:/81984/d32v2cg4j, but quality is poorer and two pages are missing.

[2] Rosen, Decision-Making Chicago Style, 35; RERC, Analysis of Sites, 2-3. RERC found in its 1958 report that even the island concept had a singular big problem: lake infill would require an unacceptably long construction period (8).

[3] See Davarian Baldwin, “When Universities Swallow Cities,” in In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities (Bold Type Books, 2021), 28-32. The university did share many of the same idyllic desires for a pastoral campus popular since the century prior, as reflected in the RERC reports. For example, in its section on golf course sites, the 1958 RERC report notes existing trees and landscaping as advantages that “would be difficult to recreate on other sites” (26). In its detailed evaluation of site factors for the Riverside Golf Club, it notes the “good orientation and recreational potential involved in adjacent Forest Preserve areas” (15).

[4] Episode 3, “A Million in Captivity,” of Shame of Chicago, Shame of the Nation (docuseries), WTTW (local PBS affiliate), 2024, https://schedule.wttw.com/series/39654/Shame-of-Chicago/.

[5] Arnold R. Hirsch, “Urban Renewal,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, accessed November 18, 2024, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1295.html.

[6] Rosen, Decision-Making Chicago Style, 30-34; RERC, Analysis of Sites, 2-5.

[7] RERC, Analysis of Sites, 1, 18-23.

[8] RERC, Analysis of Sites, 33-49

[9] An extremely detailed breakdown of the creation and application of evaluation methods can be found in Chapter VIII: Explanation of Site Criteria (50-93), as well as in the four advanced site profiles (33-49).

[10] RERC, Analysis of Sites, 7, 30.

[11] RERC, Analysis of Sites, 4, 8, 27-29.

[12] RERC, Analysis of Sites, 14.

[13] I speculate that this may have changed RERC’s criteria and elevated the standing of a site across the Eisenhower from it, which was actually the very first site proposed by President George Stoddard in the early 1950s (Rosen, Decision-Making Chicago Style, 30).