Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

(photos by Lee Bey) 

I took a look at Lake Meadows over the weekend. I'm always drawn to a fight and it looks like a good one is going to brew over real estate titan Draper & Kramer's plans to demolish the 50-year-old, 100-acre complex and replace it with an entirely new neighborhood.

Lake Meadows' is best known for its ranks of generously-spaced modernist residential high-rises (some of them seen above) designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill. These buildings would disappear under the plan. But during my visit, I was drawn to a small public school that appears untouched by the proposed redevelopment, and a professional building that might be in the way of progress.

 (above) John G. Pershing School

Pershing School is little modernist gem in the northeast corner of Lake Meadows, along 31st Street. The 10-room school was built in 1959 for $478,000 and was designed to house grades K-6. The school was built with a multi-purpose room and medical and psychological testing centers in addition to classroom space. What had to feel pretty revolutionary for an urban school in the late 1950s: each class had views and direct access to the outdoor court and gardens. The next three photos show a little more...

I can't find any info on the architect. I'll take a total guess and say Perkins & Will. 

The fate of the Lake Meadows professional building just west of Pershing School seems unclear--to me, at least. The plan, printed in the Crain's piece in the link above, shows a new structure on the building's site. Nevertheless, the building is a handsome, airy piece of architecture, built in 1971.

The building is still in use, by the way. This has to be the work of SOM.

Lake Meadows began in 1949 when old Chicago Land Clearance Commission condemned the former neighborhood at a price of $16 million and wrote down the land to $2.3 million and sold it New York Life Insurance Co., which built the development. When the complex was completed in the late 1950s, experts from around the world--including Russia--visited in hopes of learning more about the public-private partnership that built Lake Meadows and turned around the once-depressed urban area.

The irony is there was a neighborhood there--my late father grew up in it--but it was branded a slum and demolished in the 1950s to build middle-class Lake Meadows, which could now be demolished for an even more middle-class neighborhood. Life in the big city, I suppose.