Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

 (photos by Lee Bey)

I took a spin through an old stomping ground recently, the community of Marynook, a postwar subdivision in the Avalon Park community on the South Side.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, we used to drive by here on our way to the long-gone Community discount store at 87th and Greenwood. In high school and college, I had buddies who lived there.  Given much of the South Side's homes were built before 1930 and were sewed like stitches to the city's right-angled street grid, Marynook stood out--leaped out--with its curving streets and colorful modern houses.

Marynook turns 50 this year. Let's hoist a toast...

More than a half-million Chicagoans cleared out of the city between 1960 and 1980. Many of them wound up in new split-level homes neatly arranged on the clean, cul-de-sac streets of suburbia. The city mounted a defense, most notably Marina City, which was an attempt to provide a modernity, a sophistication that you couldn't get in a postwar bedroom community. Then the city built suburban style subdivision on what little undeveloped land was left by then. Of that tact, no development was bigger or more ambitious than Marynook, built between 1957 and 1962 on 70 vacant acres bounded by 87th, 83rd, Dorchester and University.

Marynook was created by developer Joseph E, Merrion a huge figure in mid-century Chicago, but nobody remembers him much today. Merrion built the suburbs of Merrionette Park (a play on his last name, as was Marynook), Country Club Hills and Hometown. He also built Merrionette Manor, a subset of the Jeffrey Manor neighborhood on the Southeast Side. A street there, Merrion Avenue, bears his name.

At Marynook, Merrion built 432 split-level, single family homes and a handful of town homes. It was billed at the time as the biggest residential development in the city. As with smaller Merrionette Manor, Merrion pushed aside the typical street grid in favor of a suburban-style plan of curvilinear streets, driveways and no alleys. Original residents signed covenants agreeing not to alter the exterior of their homes without approval from the neighborhood board.

And there was another thing: Though located on the predominantly black South Side, Marynook was all white when it was built. The first black family arrived in 1962 and residents vowed--in newspapers, anyway--to create a peaceful integrated community. Marynook was half-black by 1968 and nearly all African American buy the time Merrion died in 1973. But the area still held its middle class tenor.

Today, Marynook is a mature, well-tended community. Homeowners still cut their front bushes in geometric Pop-Art shapes that play off the modernist vernacular of the houses. Along 87th Street,  knee-high, house-shaped stone markers inset with the word "MARYNOOK"--long in disrepair--have been renovated by the homeowners.

Architecture of the recent past has become the latest cause for landmark agencies, architectural historians, researchers and preservationists. Marynook is worthy of their attention.