Dearborn Park
[3] Early in Chicago history, this became an immigrant neighborhood before being ravaged by a fire in the 1870s, it was then bought up for railroad rights-of-way leading to Dearborn Station.
[5]: 187 Dearborn Park, like most of Chicago, was originally the home of Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Miami, and other Native American tribes and nations.
[14] The genesis of Dearborn Park emerged during a 1970 meeting of three Chicago business leaders: Thomas G. Ayers, President of Commonwealth Edison; Donald M. Graham, CEO of Continental Illinois; and Gordon W. Metcalf, CEO of Sears, Roebuck & Co..[5]: 2 Looking south from the 37th floor of the brand-new First National Bank Building (now Chase Tower), they expressed concerns regarding the area to the south of the Chicago Loop.
[5]: 2 The run-down area, impacted negatively by the decline of the rail industry and other factors, comprised abandoned railyards, a thriving vice district and many vacant, vandalized buildings.
Mayor Richard J. Daley had earlier sought to build a University of Illinois campus on the rail yards to replace the cramped, two-year branch on Chicago's Navy Pier, but had given up after failed negotiations with the railroad companies that owned the land.
[16]: 199–208 Ayers, Graham and Metcalf co-funded a small initial consulting study to evaluate options for the land.,[5]: 10–11 which confirmed the potential of the project but also identified numerous challenges, not the least of which was that 13 railroad companies owned pieces of the land, singly or in combination with each other.
[1]: 535 They wanted Dearborn Park: to be a catalyst for a new community on the barren rail yards south of the Loop; to halt the deterioration of the downtown area, strengthen its property values and add to the city's tax base; and to create an economically and racially integrated community "from the subsidized level to the semi-luxury level.
Activist Helen Shiller wrote in her memoir that: "It looked like the downtown was being fortified to protect the privileged while providing a catalyst to take on surrounding neighbors to whiten the inner city."
[19] Ultimately, the opposition receded, with the group had decided they had lost the battle to stop the first phase of Dearborn Park and the redevelopment of the South Loop, although Shiller later expressed regrets that they had given up too soon.
[18]: 175 As the group pursued negotiations with the railroad companies, they were surprised to learn in 1972 that Henry Crown, the head of one of America's wealthiest families, was also attempting to buy the rail yards, doing so on behalf of his friend George "Papa Bear" Halas, owner of the Chicago Bears, who wished to build a replacement stadium for Soldier Field inside of the rail yard land.
[5]: 42 In 1975, Halas, recognizing that he would not get mayoral support, reluctantly agreed to transfer his real estate option to Chicago 21, asking only to be reimbursed for his expenses and his deposit—a total of $100,000.
The first units in Dearborn Park II were offered for sale in late 1989, with the development of the community being delayed by unmet infrastructure needs that were being finalized with Mayor Harold Washington, replacing prior Mayor Eugene Sawyer who had shoveled the first dirt at the groundbreaking of Dearborn Park II in late 1988.
"[20] Noting that there were 1,700 saleable housing units in the area, Crain's reported that "residents are mostly couples and families who bought townhouses" and that the "neighborhood has a stable racial mix: about 50% Anglo and 35% African-American, with the remainder Asian and Hispanic.
"[5]: cover On the other hand, historian Edward Kantowicz castigated the early community, writing in 1998 that "They built a wall around their neighborhood and provided only one automobile entrance.
