Conscious Choice: A Tale of Gentrification

June 2007 | From the Editor

A Tale of Gentrification — Chicago Style

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1994 I made an appointment to drop by the apartment of a local theater director named Steve Walker. I was supposed to pitch him a play I had written which I was considering staging in the studio space at Heartland Café. He gave me an address on Wolcott Street in Lincoln Square, just off the Montrose stop on the Brown line El. I thought about it and realized I had never been to that area of the city.

The area around the El stop was dark, there was a small commercial strip that was half empty, and there was subsidized housing on the corner. The apartment Steve lived in was on the ground floor of a hundred year old dual three-flat, and it was immense. Two full bedrooms, huge dining room, and both a front and back porch. It was run down as hell, but it had style. I asked him what he paid in rent, and he told me his share was $450. I was so jealous. I was living on my friend’s couch in an apartment above the old Center Theater on Devon Street.

Cut to early 1998 and I’m driving around Wicker Park in the back seat of my friend Rich’s SUV with this cat named Thaddeus Wong, who’s looking at old houses that he wants to buy, tear down and redevelop. He said he had a real estate company called @ Properties, and they were growing faster than he could keep up with.

Cut to early 2000, during the tech boom, and you find me at Ambrosi Advertising freelancing as a copywriter, where I would end up meeting one of my closest friends, Carrie. The first night we made plans to hang out, she gave me directions to her place, and they sounded vaguely familiar. Montrose stop on the Brown line, Wolcott Street.

When I arrived, the neighborhood looked different. The subsidized housing had given way to market rate rentals and a Starbucks in the storefront space. New boutique shops like Beans and Bagels populated the area around the El stop, and there was a lot more light. The area had come alive.

As you can probably surmise by now, I discovered Carrie lived in the same building where Steve Walker used to live, but the building had been renovated and sold as condos…by Thaddeus Wong of @ Properties.

The change was unbelievable, but it was only just the beginning. I would end up living in Lincoln Square for the next six years, and in that time I saw the neighborhood totally transform. Five Star restaurants opened along Lincoln Avenue, the Old Town School of Folk Music moved into the old Library, and dozens and dozens of old A-frame houses were torn down and replaced by towering cinder block town homes. Every Sunday I would look at the Real Estate section in the Tribune and watch as the median home value in Lincoln Square rose ever higher.

And surrounding page after page of those home value charts and feature stories about the ongoing “transformation” of Chicago, were page after page of ads for Thaddeus Wong and @ Properties. Except by now, the “@” logo was gracing the banners of high rises and whole planned communities. It got to be that the “@” logo was some kind of target aimed at poor neighborhoods and modest homes; whatever they pointed it at would disappear.

As this property prosperity ticker inched progressively upwards, a whole new class of people came to call Lincoln Square home. The Germans and Mexicans and Bosnians and Poles, and regular ole middle class folk that had lived in the area in 1994 when I first trekked through had given way to mostly white couples and lots and lots of children and dogs. You can’t say that Lincoln Square doesn’t look great today, because it’s completely beautiful. Well, at least it was the last time I was there. I had to move out recently — I couldn’t afford it anymore.

— Charles Shaw

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