More than a half-million Chicagoans left the city between
1960 and 1980, trading their aged bungalows (and the
palpable fear of racially-changing neighborhoods) for new
split-level homes neatly arranged on the clean, curving
streets of suburbia.
The city tried to combat this flight in two ways. It tried
giving residents something they couldn't get in suburbia,
such as Marina City. Then it tried to give them a taste of
suburbia right in the city. Of the latter, no development
was bigger or more ambitious than Marynook, built
between 1957 and 1962 on 70 vacant acres bounded by
87th, 83rd, University and Dorchester.
Marynook was built by developer Joseph E. Merrion, a
huge figure in mid-century Chicago who is hardly
remembered today. Merrion also created the suburbs of
Merrionette Park (like Marynook, a play on his last name),
Country Club Hills and Hometown. He also built Merrionette
Manor, a subset of the Jeffrey Manor neighborhood on the
city's Southeast Side. A street there, Merrion Avenue, bears
his name.
At Marynook, Merrion built 432 split-level single family
homes and a few townhomes in what was billed the
biggest home development project at in the city at that
time. As with the smaller Merrionette Manor, Chicago's
nearly-relentless street grid gave way at Marynook to a
suburban-style plan of curvilinear streets, driveways
and---how un-Chicago is this?---no alleys. Residents signed
covenants agreeing not to alter the exterior appearance of
their homes without approval from the neighborhood
board.
And there was something else. Though located on
racially-changing South Side, Marynook was all white. At
first. By 1962, the first black family moved in and residents
vowed---in newspapers, anyway---to create a peaceful,
integrated community. Marynook was half-black in 1967
and nearly all black by the time Merrion died in 1973.
But the area still held its middle class tenor.
Marynook is a well-tended, mature working-class
community as it approaches its 50th year Homeowners still
cut their front bushes in geometric, Pop-Art shapes that
play off the funky modernist vernacular of the houses.
Unfortunately the quaint Marynook markers along 87th
Street----knee-high stone monuments shaped like a house
that were inset with the word "MARYNOOK" ---have been
altered or removed, but its a relatively small loss.
Architecture of the "recent past" has become the latest
cause for preservationists and architectural historians.
When the landmark districts of future are being
contemplated, here's hoping Marynook is in the mix.
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