History
The Near West Side region was easily accessible from the Lake Street business center between the 1840s and the early 1860s. The wealthy residents of Union Park intended to create the West Side, an elite retreat from the everyday bustle of the expanding metropolis because it was conveniently located near the business center.
A modest middle class had gradually replaced the affluent households around Union Park by the 1870s. In the 1830s, the first African American colony in Chicago appeared along Lake and Kinzie streets. Irish immigrants settled in wooden cottages west of the river in about 1837. Germans, Czechs, and Bohemians, as well as French immigrants, quickly followed the Irish. Following the 1871 fire, nearly 200,000 people sought safety on the Near West Side, resulting in overcrowding. Jews from Russia and Poland and Italians began to replace the Irish and Germans at the end of the century, with the Italians living between Polk and Taylor Streets and the Jews settling southward to 16th Street.
In the 1870s and 1880s, wholesale traders and manufacturers were concentrated in the north along an east-west axis. The region, lined with three and four-story buildings, many of which held many businesses, created a dense center of job prospects.
Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House in the midst of this quickly changing neighborhood in 1889, one of the few institutions inclined to combine an Americanization program with a celebration of the community’s cultural diversity. African Americans were less accepted and were instead restricted to institutions that solely served black people.
Various ethnic groups’ efforts to restore cultural worlds left behind in Europe constructed institutions on the Near West Side. The development and relocation of religious and educational institutes reflected ethnic tensions over urban space. These violent tensions, combined with economic mobility, resulted in a continuous process of neighborhood succession, with older groups being supplanted by newcomers. Those who fled sold their institutions to those who remained or to newcomers. The Chicago Hebrew Institute, for example, was founded on the grounds of Sacred Heart Academy.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the African American community on the West Side increased dramatically, but housing options remained primarily limited to ghettoes on the South and West Sides. The conflict between the two districts became an important part of African American neighborhood culture.
The Near West Side underwent significant changes in the second part of the twentieth century. A large chunk of “Greek town” was obliterated by the Chicago Circle freeway junction. The Hull House complex and the old Italian neighborhood were demolished during the development of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Neither urban renewal nor the development of public housing, both of which began before 1950 and lasted into the 1960s, were able to alleviate the poverty that had resulted from the West Side’s eroding economic base.
Academic expansion near the close of the twentieth century changed the Near West Side once more, nearly demolishing the old Maxwell Street Market and adhering to gentrification trends set by other areas around the Loop. With the rise in real-estate values near UIC and the development of the new United Center, areas of the Near West Side became more appealing to middle- and upper-middle-class Chicagoans looking to live close to the city.
