The blight of banal architecture surrounding Wrigley Field, as detailed in Edward Keegan’s recent Tribune column, is sadly not an isolated situation on Chicago’s North Side. In recent years, Chicago’s Edgewater community has been getting a steady drip of new and mostly unrelentingly ugly buildings on both its residential and commercial streets.
Now, through a hastily conceived and ill-thought-out plan from Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration, what has been a slow drip could possibly turn into a fire hose of new bloated, bland, boxlike structures in Edgewater and to a lesser extent Uptown. The plan could cannibalize the very urban vibrancy that has made Edgewater so appealing in the first place.
At the heart of the Johnson plan is a proposal to radically upzone the vast majority of properties along Broadway between Montrose and Devon avenues. Although current Broadway zoning already allows for the construction of several thousand more housing units, the Johnson administration’s proposal would allow for upward of 10,000 more housing units along Broadway in Edgewater, or roughly as many units as currently exist in Edgewater’s very dense Kenmore-Winthrop corridor immediately east of Broadway. Another 10,000 housing units are located along Edgewater’s stretch of Sheridan Road just east of Kenmore and Winthrop avenues.
In the path of this potential destruction are more than 40 historic Broadway properties that have provided the street with significant character for more than 100 years and have helped fuel the thoroughfare’s significant renaissance in recent decades. Many of these charming and humanly scaled buildings contain small businesses and naturally occurring affordable housing now at risk because of the Johnson administration’s upzoning gambit.
The history and provenance of these buildings were documented in an exhaustive 2019 survey conducted by the Edgewater Historical Society. (Sadly, a much-beloved building included in our survey — a unique mission-style auto showroom at the southwest corner of Broadway and Hollywood Avenue — has already been torn down and remains a large vacant lot.) The Edgewater Historical Society is strongly urging the city of Chicago to exempt these historic properties from the proposed upzoning to eliminate the economic incentives for more teardowns.
The proposed zoning enhancements would allow new buildings to go from the current four-story height limit to eight stories. This proposed upzoning is being aggressively pushed with the wishful-thinking argument that it would spur a wave of new housing construction that would somehow magically reduce neighborhood rents and bring in more potential riders for the CTA’s ailing Red Line. The argument also claims that Edgewater and Uptown face a drastic shortage of available apartments. A cursory check online of available rentals in Edgewater and Uptown turns up many units at rental rates below the citywide average.
Chicago has had significant experience in mixing increased zoning with historic preservation. It did just that 10 years ago when it created the Fulton Market Historic District, now the city’s hottest neighborhood. The planning effort that went into creating the Fulton district wisely understood that young professionals gravitate to communities that combine new development and the best of Chicago’s fabled architectural heritage. Nothing so thoughtful has thus far been presented for Broadway.
Ironically, one of the arguments being pushed in service of the Broadway upzoning is that it would bring a vibrancy to Broadway similar to that enjoyed by Edgewater’s other main thoroughfare, Clark Street, the spine of the hugely popular Andersonville commercial district. This argument ignores the point of what makes Clark Street so popular: its well-preserved, architecturally interesting and humanly scaled historic buildings. This is exactly what may well be lost under the plan for Broadway.
To be clear, the Edgewater Historical Society, like numerous local block clubs abutting Broadway, is not averse to continued development in our community. We support well-designed and contextual new affordable development that wherever possible works within the context of the current built environment. That approach is not only aesthetically optimal but also the most environmentally friendly. Further, there are numerous vacant properties along Broadway that could easily handle development demand for the next several decades — with or without upzoning.
Since 2006, when an extensive community process produced the current zoning on Broadway, almost 850 units have been constructed in Edgewater’s Broadway transit corridor while another 500 units are in development.
What Chicago and other cities have learned in the past 50 years is that the most successful urban revival plans are those that leverage their historic built environments. For Edgewater to continue to be a desirable community of choice, we must be careful to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The plan being pushed by the Johnson administration does just that.
John Holden is president of the Edgewater Historical Society.
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