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Built in 1870 for a president of the Chicago Board of Trade, the Wheeler Mansion—at 2020 South Calumet Avenue—is today a stylish B&B surrounded by new South Loop housing.

The person who actually kicked open the gates was Gerald Fogelson, the developer behind Central Station, 80 acres—most of it former railroad land—that are now home to some 5,000 people. When drawing up the development’s master plan (which was approved in 1990), Fogelson originally expected it to tilt more toward office and hotel space, with a little residential thrown in. But things didn’t work out that way. “We were second place for a few major office projects,” says Fogelson, referring to the ABN Amro building that wound up in the West Loop and the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center, which picked a site north of the Chicago River’s Main Branch. “So we built townhomes to get something going,” he says. “We had this high-density land and we built low density to get it started. And it went well.”

Once Mayor Daley moved there, the project popped, and it has kept its momentum ever since. (In December 1993, the mayor paid $410,000 for his townhouse on South Prairie Avenue; today, similar homes have been selling in the upper $600,000s.) Big and lavishly landscaped, the gracious red brick townhouses on the blocks around Indiana Avenue and 13th Street reflected the area’s new confidence. Success bred success, and developers flocked to the area, snatching buildable parcels within Central Station and in the surrounding blocks. More and larger townhouses spread down Prairie Avenue until the few remaining 19th-century houses had rows of comple-mentary new neighbors.

And then came the new high-rises, going up at a faster rate than in any other Chicago neighborhood. This past January, Appraisal Research Counselors reported that six of the ten biggest-selling condo buildings in the city in 2006 were in the South Loop. As elsewhere in Chicago, sales have slowed somewhat from the go-go years: 51 percent of the South Loop’s condos remain unsold, according to Appraisal Research. “I expect to see [those unsold condos] taken in a reasonable amount of time,” says Gail Lissner, the company’s vice president. “There has been a lot of construction activity there; the buyers will catch up”—especially after more of those condos are finally built (though now still on the drawing board, some condos are already presold). What’s more, adds Lissner, “many of the buildings in the South Loop have sold at a faster rate than buildings in other parts of downtown.”

In the same period that has framed the South Loop’s explosive growth, River North and the West Loop were also developing new residential personalities to replace their outmoded industrial character. Even as both of those areas continue to build, they have yet to match the pace of the South Loop—for reasons, as with any real-estate venture, that have much to do with location. It’s hard for any neighborhood to top such South Loop amenities as the Museum Campus, Soldier Field, Grant Park, Northerly Island, and Lake Michigan—even more accessible since a pedestrian walkway over Lake Shore Drive opened in 2003 at 18th Street and Calumet Avenue. “We won the culture war,” insists Fogelson, explaining the neighborhood’s seemingly irresistible allure.

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The other key components of a neighborhood—schools, restaurants, and retail—are also flourishing in the South Loop. Consider the changes at the local public high school. Known as Jones Commercial when it opened in 1938, the school at 606 South State Street trained kids for clerical work and other office jobs. But in 1998, it became a magnet school and instituted a much more rigorous academic curriculum. Four years later, it renamed itself Jones College Prep. (The school is scheduled to get a sizable new addition to its south once the Pacific Garden Mission moves to a new Stanley Tigerman–designed facility west of the river later this year.) About a mile south of there, the ten-year-old Perspectives Charter School—a neighborhood gem in an eye-catching triangular Ralph Johnson building—demands discipline from its student body with a tough academic load and an insistence on community involvement. (The school’s South Loop campus, which serves 6th- through 12th-grade students, is at 1930 South Archer Avenue.)

There are dramatic signs of improvement in the neighborhood’s grade schools as well. Over the past several years, things have turned around at the struggling South Loop Elementary School, which before 2002 drew most of its students from Dearborn Park and nearby housing projects (the school is at 1212 South Plymouth Court). The most recent test scores revealed that 80 percent of the school’s third to eighth graders met or exceeded state standards—up from a woeful 33 percent in the 2002-2003 school year. Over at Old St. Mary’s Church—the city’s oldest Roman Catholic parish, which relocated to 1500 South Michigan Avenue in 2002—a new school is taking shape year by year. It began in 2004 with 18 preschoolers; this September, it will add a second grade as it builds toward establishing a full-fledged grammar school. With demand from parents growing, says Barbara Smith, the school’s principal, the parish might embark on a fundraising drive to build a new school facility behind the church.

Like other developing neighborhoods, the South Loop is farther along on restaurants than on retail. The north part of the neighborhood, above Roosevelt Road, had always had its hotel restaurants, lunch counters, and dive bars. But the real dining scene started south of Roosevelt around 1999, when Jerry Kleiner launched Gioco and Matt O’Malley débuted the Chicago Firehouse, all within a block of one another (see map on page 80). “That kind of let people in on it, that there was something down here on the far side of Roosevelt Road,” Kleiner recalls. (For more from Kleiner, see “Dish,” page 195.) Now each man has several places in the neighborhood, and O’Malley—a native of the Beverly neighborhood who has lived in the South Loop since 1998—is reaching south across Cermak Road into Motor Row, the next frontier.

Retailing has not been as dynamic, but it has gained traction in the past few years as Target, Office Depot, DSW Shoes, and other big-box stores have landed on and around Roosevelt Road, a street that may eventually rival Clybourn on the North Side for shopping frenzy. The South Loop already has a Jewel store and a nearby Dominick’s, and a Whole Foods is on the way. A 12-acre parcel of land at Roosevelt and Wells, originally zoned for 20 million square feet of office space, has been recast as the Roosevelt Collection, which would include 16 movie screens and at least 40 new retail outlets, with another 1,000 residential units upstairs. The developer, Centrum Properties, broke ground for the project this past March.

If the South Loop is lacking in one ingredient, it’s the idiosyncratic boutiques that can lend a hip flavor to a neighborhood. There are plenty of small hair salons, pet shops, and shoe stores, but very little else. “There’s not a little row of shops like on Armitage, and I don’t know why,” Kleiner says. “I keep telling people to come open a place here, but they don’t.” That may be in part because the little starter spaces that can be had in old buildings—places that once held a neighborhood butcher shop, hardware store, or tailor—don’t exist here. Retail space comes largely in big chunks at the base of new high-rises, often with forbidding rents. Those locations might work for the chains, but they are not ideal for a happening young entrepreneur with a cool idea.

Keep in mind, though, that the South Loop is still young. Even with all that has popped up in the past decade, there are still big, open spaces left, particularly in the southwestern part of the neighborhood, as it approaches Chinatown. And many of the buyers of those umpteen condos won’t move in for a year or more, when the towers are completed. When they arrive, the increasing foot traffic should carry the neighborhood another step closer to maturity.

“The story about the South Loop isn’t finished yet,” says Columbia’s Alicia Berg. “There is still a lot left to be done.”


Photography by Nathan Kirkman; Photoillustration by Vibracobradesign

 
 

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