At Home in the Loop: How Clout and Community Built Chicago's Dearborn Park

by Lois Wille

Lois Wille’s illustrated account provides behind-the-scenes insight into how a small number of Chicago business leaders transformed the dangerous and seedy South Loop into an integrated and thriving community in the heart of the central city.

The obstacles to the evolution of Dearborn Park were quite formidable, including a succession of six mayors, huge economic impediments, policy disputes engendered among people used to making their own corporate decisions, the wretched reputation of the South Loop, problems with the Chicago public school system, and public mistrust of a project supported by the wealthy, no matter how altruistic the goal. It took twenty years and millions of dollars, but it will pay off and in fact is paying off right now.

With Dearborn Park, Chicago left a formula that other cities can use to turn fallow land into vibrant neighborhoods—without big government subsidies. As Wille explains, the realization of this vision requires shared investment and shared risk on the part of local businesses, financial institutions, and government. It links private and public influence and capital. Wille explains how these elements worked together to build a neighborhood in a blighted tract of Chicago’s Loop. She also describes how key decisions affecting the public interest were made during a time of profound change in the city’s political life: Dearborn Park was conceived during the final years of the most powerful political machine in America and had to adapt as that machine crumbled and city government was reshaped.

280 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 1997

About the author

Lois Wille was a Chicago-based journalist, editor, and author. She won two Pulitzer Prizes.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who is relatively unfamiliar with issues of urban planning, I did not know what to expect when I picked up this book, but I found it to be a fascinating and well-researched look at how grand designs are whittled down by practicalities. Chicago's Dearborn Park neighborhood (built on decaying, unused train tracks) was designed to solve a few very particular problems: namely, to bring people back to live in and around the loop and set the stage for further expansion of middle-income housing.
Those are all nice words for gentrification, of course, and to Ms. Wille's credit she works to address those issues too, though there were times when I was put off just how far on the side of the Dearborn Park Corporation the author appears to be. But her central thesis -- that Dearborn Park made the South Loop and surrounding areas a desirable place to live again -- is hard to refute. The benefits to the city are obvious and ever-present today, but the book's account makes it clear that perhaps the biggest reason for that is that once the people who were the intended recipients of the system's benefits (that is, middle-income families) returned, even the surrounding areas reaped the rewards.

The book alludes to the fact that while the spirit of altruism and love for the city that sparked the project did not vanish entirely over the quarter of a century that the book covers, the practical requirements of keeping the project going ensured that only the amenities designed to sell -- cul-de-sacs, townhomes, you name it -- were the ones that remained in the end.

Definitely worth a read.

Edit, 9/13/20. It's been a year since I read this book and wrote this article, and it would be an understatement to say that my views on this have changed since then. I stand by most of my original review -- it's a fascinating look at how Chicago's politics and hard work from a relatively small and dedicated group produced a generally positive outcome for the city -- but the book largely pushed aside some of the more negative aspects of the gentrification of the South Loop. For example, Wille tries to acknowledge the valid complaints of the Hilliard Homes residents when they are told that their children won't be able to attend at the good school being built in Dearborn Park, but she is far too dismissive of those complaints and sides too quickly with the middle income families who were uninterested in the idea of sending their children to school with a substantial number of children from low-income black families. A more careful evaluation of the negative impacts of the development on the character of northern Bronzeville would also have presented a fuller picture.

[Christian Belanger]

The most worthwhile part of this book is its account of the diminishment of the plans for Dearborn Park — from a hundred-acre, hyperdense "workers' village" to, in the end, an insular group of rich townhouses infested with cul-de-sacs. Even the genuine civic benevolence of Chicago's old corporate overclass crumples when confronted with the demands of the market and a set of planning principles imported mostly from the suburbs. Of course, the end result is unimpeachable, gentrification without displacement, a few dried-up printing shops and homeless railway yard inhabitants excepted. (One woman tells Wille plangently that, while looking at a piece of undeveloped land next to her house, she wished they would put a fence up to protect "our hobo.") But reading about the early ideas for this development, or Bertrand Goldberg's original vision of the nearby River City, stifled by a city commissioner friendly to the Dearborn Park crew, is a useful exercise; it helps me imagine a South Loop that's not the funhouse magnification of a city in love only with its wealthier classes.

[Michael Boeke · Rating 4 out of 5]

As must-read for residents of Dearborn Park, Printers Row, and the greater South Loop neighborhood of Chicago. Also, good for anyone interested in how neighborhoods get developed in Chicago. A fairly easy read for what could be a dry subject. I wish someone would write a follow up for the subsequent 25 years after this book was published.

[Zak Yudhishthu · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re interested in the history of development in Chicago, this is a well-done history about a pretty interesting transformation in South Loop. I don’t think the book reaches any greater heights than that, nor does it really aspire to do so. In other words, it’s not the kind of urban history book I think that everyone should read, because I’m not sure it offers a lot in the way of broader lessons for urban redevelopment projects. The book flirted with some complex discussions about school integration, which was the one instance in which I thought hard about broader urban issues while reading it, but that was a fairly small section.

I also think that Wille was a little too uncritical towards these business leaders and the resulting class segregation of this development. Their achievements were indeed impressive, but this shortcoming didn’t receive much attention.

Still, because I am indeed very interested in the history of development in Chicago, I’m glad to have read this book.