Welcome to Austin
Austin Town Hall in Chicago's Austin neighborhood. Source: chicagoparkdistrict.org
Other entries in the occasional series observing Chicagoland places and spaces:
Welcome to Ashburn (via WBEZ)
Welcome To South Chicago
Welcome To Mount Greenwood
Welcome To Rosemont
Welcome To The South Side, JRW Style
I'm going to make a little deviation from the bulk of the "Welcome to..." stories you see above, which mostly focus on South Side Chicago neighborhoods (the exceptions are Rosemont, in Chicago's northwest suburbs, and Park Forest, in the south suburbs). Today we're going to venture to the city's West Side.
Today's entry, Austin, has an interesting origin story.
Austin sits on Chicago's far West Side, about seven miles directly west of the Loop. It borders the suburban communities of Oak Park and Cicero to its west and south, respectively, with Berwyn located just to the southwest. Really, Austin's story is intimately connected to the other three communities. Following the Civil War, all were united as unincorporated areas within the much larger Cicero Township.
The 1870's and 1880's saw Cicero Township grow immensely, just like the entire Chicago region. Commuter rail provided by the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad and the Lake Street Elevated provided easy access to newly developed "streetcar suburbs" for Loop workers. Austin became the largest community in Cicero Township and its residents dominated township politics. Austin had a plurality of the population in the township, but not a majority, and the residents of Cicero, Berwyn and Austin's neighbor Oak Park, seethed at Austin's leadership. They devised a plan.
Before getting into the plan, let's look at Cicero Township circa 1895. All four communities were early suburbs that boasted tree-lined streets with plentiful single-family homes, with a mix of small apartment buildings thrown in. Each had residential densities that didn't match the intensity of what was seen in Chicago at the time, but clearly was much more intensely built than today's conventional suburban development. Commercial development occurred along streetcar or commuter rail corridors like Madison, Lake Street and Chicago Avenue. With a strong grid pattern and a mix of housing types, the area had broad appeal. All four of Cicero Township's communities prospered.
The biggest difference between them, however, was class. Cicero and Berwyn early on developed a strong manufacturing/working class character, and became a manufacturing center (Cicero) and manufacturing bedroom community (Berwyn). Austin became a solidly middle class community that was becoming a favored destination for new immigrants to the area, just like in Cicero and Berwyn. Oak Park was an upper-middle class enclave.
To the east, Chicago was on an annexation binge; it was trying to eclipse New York as the nation's largest city. Cicero, Berwyn and Oak Park wanted to maintain their independence, but were thwarted by the Austin residents' township leadership. The last straw was the proposed extension of the Lake Street Elevated line to Austin Boulevard, Oak Park's eastern border and Austin's western border, in 1898. Austin favored the extension; the rest of Cicero Township did not.
So Oak Park, Cicero and Berwyn leaders, led by Oak Park, petitioned to annex a portion of the township -- Austin -- to Chicago. Annexation had to be approved by a majority of voters within the township, and the Austin leadership was convinced there weren't enough votes to split them off from the rest of the township. A referendum was held in April 1899. Indeed, annexation was soundly defeated in Austin. However, it was overwhelmingly approved in the other three communities, surpassing the total "no" vote in Austin.
Oak Park, Cicero and Berwyn traded Austin to Chicago for their own independence.
For the next 50 years or so, that meant virtually nothing in terms of each community's development. Austin, Berwyn, Cicero and Oak Park continued on the paths already established by the late 19th century. Austin and Berwyn remained middle class bedroom suburban-ish communities, Cicero was a hub of manufacturing jobs and working-class neighborhoods, and Oak Park was still an upper-middle class enclave. These current images of Austin are virtually indistinguishable from what you'd find in the other three communities:
In many respects they still functioned as one larger community but with distinct neighborhoods. This quote on Austin from the Encyclopedia of Chicago captures how the community developed in the half-century after annexation:
"Dense housing development almost completely supplanted the village landscape of large frame homes in the early twentieth century: north Austin sprouted brick two-flats, small frame houses, and the ubiquitous brick story-and-a-half bungalow; in south Austin, rowhouses, sizable corner apartment blocks, and a multitude of brick three-flats and courtyard apartment buildings flourished. Despite the massive scale change, the nineteenth-century village residential core is still visible in the Midway Park area north of Central and Lake, a designated National Register historic district (1985). This neighborhood boasts stately neoclassical and Queen Anne–style homes, many designed by architect Frederick Schock, as well as several structures by Frank Lloyd Wright and his students.
Austin's crown jewel was Columbus Park (1920). Designed in a prairie mode by renowned landscape architect Jens Jensen, the park featured a lagoon, a golf course, athletic fields and a swimming pool, as well as winding paths and an imposing refectory overlooking the lagoon."
By 1930 Austin, Chicago's second largest and most populous of its 77 community areas, had 131,000 residents. Combined with the other three communities, there were more than 300,000 people living within a contiguous 21 square mile area, nearly functioning as one place.
But by the 1960's, as Blacks from the South began moving westward after settling in on Chicago's West Side, the borders established 60 years previously played a critical role in each community's future. Their fortunes began to diverge. The first Black residents began moving into Austin in the 60's and 70's, making Austin a majority Black community by 1980. Cicero and Oak Park, being communities bordering Austin, took steps to mitigate against resegregation. However, their different class statuses meant they took differing approaches. Oak Park's progressive-minded upper-middle class residents adopted an approach to desegregation they hoped would not lead to resegregation. Oak Park established a Community Relations Commission, passed an open housing ordinance, and took a strong stand against discriminatory real estate practices. Cicero, meanwhile, took a much more confrontational approach. In July 1951 a race riot broke out in Cicero as a mob of approximately 4,000 whites attacked an apartment building that housed the community's first Black family. Smaller assaults on Black residents occurred as they tried to move in. Cicero became widely known as a "sundown town".
Actually, the approaches brought the desired impacts for Oak Park and Cicero. Oak Park was able to slow White flight and maintain its status as an upper-middle class community while welcoming affluent Blacks. Cicero has never acquired an appreciable number of Black residents. About 18 percent of today's Oak Park residents are Black; in contrast, Cicero had less than a hundred Black residents out of 85,000 in 2000, but it did become a major destination for Latinos over the latter third of the twentieth century. Cicero is now a majority Latino community, and Blacks comprise about 3 percent of the total today.
Austin did not weather resegregation well. Like so many other communities, it experienced housing disinvestment and abandonment, deteriorating commercial corridors facing competition from suburban malls, and a loss of the kinds of manufacturing jobs that supported so many households. But Austin also has the kind of community assets that can serve as a foundation for revitalization -- a wonderful housing stock served by public transit, excellent parks and a pleasant, walkable scale. I would not be surprised to see the Midway Park historic district area bounce back, or the broader area around it (bounded by Chicago Avenue, Lake Street, Central Avenue and Austin Boulevard). Few neighborhoods can boast of a housing stock like this:
Austin's got the bones to turn it around, just not the eyes.