The Old, The New, The Always-Will-Be

The Old: Stateway Gardens. The New: Comiskey Park (I will never call it by That Other Name). The Always-Will-Be: Rock Island (now Metra) commuter train service. This is the northbound #516.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Chicago
• Housing
• Authority
• CHA
• Stateway
• Gardens
• US
• U.S.
• Cellular
• Field
• Comiskey
• Park
• White
• Sox
• Metra
• Rock
• Island
• train

[artistmac]

Townhomes, condos, single-family homes and, hopefully, lots and lots of chain stores, the kind I drive 10 to 20 miles to get to now. The city's Planning Department estimates the whole process will take 7 to 10 YEARS. (It didn't take them that long to rebuild the area around Cabrini-Green) But there's a Starbuck's at the southwest corner of 35th and State. The IIT students will love that one;-)

[artistmac]

UPDATE: You wouldn't have thought it would take them this long to put a FedEx/Kinkos next to a college, but finally, one is opening across the street from IIT on 35th Street just west of State. Never thought I'd see THAT in my lifetime;-)

[sugarbear522]

IMO, this may be a poor idea to attract rich people. As an architect, I like the redevolopment but not at the cost of purging affordable housing. Look at my neighborhood (Hyde Park) with all the condo conversions. Sooner or later (sooner I think with the sub-prime mortgage lending fiasco and tougher credit restrictions), no one will have enough cash to live in the city and use mass transit. And how many residents of these new buildings are African-American?

[artistmac]

The subprime mortgage meltdown is the wild card. And I have a feeling that it's going to take much longer than 7 to 10 years for State Street from 35th to 55th to be built up with homes and stores.

The black middle and upper class, who could be the market for whatever's built here, can live anywhere they want, and where they want to be (and where they live)is the suburbs. And they don't have to worry about their kids getting shot. The State Street corridor could definitely be whiter.

[artistmac]

On a brighter note, did you notice how quickly Treasure Island grocery moved into the store vacated by the defunct Hyde Park Co-op? Barely took three months. So these grocery chains can move like lightning when they want to.

Grocery chaine, listen up. The first one of you to open an store in Bronzeville will be RAKING in the money. Especially around the first of every month;-)

[tomitstube]

good for you, i refuse to call these new stadiums by their corporate names.

[artistmac]

With the mortgage meltdown, their intended upper-middle class buyers may not be able to afford them either. That's the wild card, and construction on the new housing has barely progressed since I filmed this over a year ago.

[nochey78]

what's the point of building those condos if the people in those communities can't afford them????..or have i answered my own question??

[intoodeep0606]

Well, part of Tiger Stadium might remain as part of any redevelopment of the area (that is if they get around to it [or they keep letting TS rotting as it is until the whole thing collapses]; who knows?). However, you're right on Yankee Stadium. All because they're required to have a park to replace the one they shouldn't take in the first place. I would have preferred a rebuild on the same plot of land.

Fenway will be around for a few more decades. Wrigley would be rebuilt in the near future.

[Jenkins29]

Tiger Stadium and Yankee Stadium will be gone before the end of this decade, despite the history of both those ballparks. So unfortunately, it seems disgustingly inevitable that Fenway and Wrigley probably won't make it through the next decade...but hey, at least we'll have exciting "Retro" parks in their place to remind everyone of what it used to be like, right?