High-Rise Madness is Crazy...Move Southeast!

The quaint, urbane flavor of Hyde Park/Kenwood shops, restaurants and residential streets are quite enjoyable, harkening back to the gentry of the 19th Century. The old growth of the tree-lined parkways make you feel like you're in a park at every turn...and, of course, you are!

While the numerous ornate, centuries old victorians, brownstones and brick facades are plentious and quite dense, the airspace is nevertheless open. The highrises are few, neighborhood planners long ago wisely ending the trend. You may at once experience place, sun and sky, with the lakefront moments away. A balance has been wonderfully achieved and, with the blending of new construction, maintained - but increasingly over-priced.

Approaching Near South Side's Museum Campus and Central Station, however, you witness a conflict of construction. Who would have ever guessed an entire neighborhood of high-rise condominiums would loom above South Michigan Avenue's more practical sized townhouse-type developments, blocking out sky views, competing for lake views and light? The rush for a high tax based population overshadowing common sense city planning has given birth to an exclusively high-rise neighborhood on the lake, where there is no real cohesive achitectural element to tie the buildings together. It seems each architect took great strides to be unique - and succeeded.
Look to the north and the dwellings grow higher still as the "New East Side" (for lack of a more original appellation) is also a high-rise hodge-podge of luxury livables, with plans to overtake even the Sears Tower with, what will amount to, the nations tallest condominium structures, and Trumps new digs further west add to the numerous monolithic households. Conversions, from out moded office spaces into lofts run amuck. Admittedly good use of recycled space.

Still, the stacks of terraces and balconies face one another. Someone having a bad day holding their drinks might want to spare their neighbors the trouble on the lower mezzanines, or the pedestrian walking under them. You can only have so many visitors to join you, and I see many used for storage.

The odds are high you'll get into a building that looks right into another one. With some binoculars or a telescope it's a voyeurs dream come true. Sacry to contemplate.
Not everyone can have the commanding views so heavily promoted in the Sunday Tribune, and how anyone would want to overlook the Eisenhower, or hear the CTA rumble by is beyond me.
Nevertheless, with buildable space so scarce and at a premium, downtown construction, seems endless, with new buildings going up on every nook and cranny available, the solution to volume meaning blocking out even more airspace. Below the throngs flood the streets night and day as shops, restaurants, boutiques and retail glut the walkways. Good for business, bad for serenity.

Unless you can afford one of the few spacious roof-top greenspaces or a building with a landscaped commons, since many downtown balconies offer more in the way of exibition than privacy, the only place to go for repose, peace and tranquility, besides the system of terraces and balconies jutting skyward along building edges, is to the lakefront parks.
On any given sunny day, however, even these pristine retreats are far from relaxing, as hordes of "neighbors" vie for space.

The only way to escape the high-end, high-rise crowds is to:

1. Go Near West, negating, in my opinion, the reason for living in Chicago - the Lakefront. Though it is a good choice, with an abundance of townhomes, mid-level lofts and commons to provide a more neighborly feel. Yet strangely enough, west of State Street pulls you further away from the lake the farther south you go.
2. You could live North, where affordability, and again space, seriously come into question for most of us. Parking is an endless search without the garage you must use if you have one. Lots and lots of stores though, keeping a multitude of neighbors and visitors alike moving about day and night. If you like that fast pace feel this is for you, but I'd be weary of the pedestrian traffic after a while. Besides all the 'Choice' spots to live are certainly taken. The pricey new "MacMansions" are upgrade havens effectively diverting from the density of the surrounding community. The South Side, on the other hand, is a vast array of depressed communities, mixed with revitalized enclaves, all landlocked, of course.
The gridlock of the Dan Ryan Expressway awaits those who move there, and for me, living anywhere west of Stoney Island Avenue is an unsavory prospect if you love the Lake - and I love the Lake.
So then...

3. Move Southeast; beyond McCormick Place, where South Lake Shore Drive broadens, out rivaling NLSD hands down with it's highly accessible beachfronts and acres of parkland, unlike what you'd encounter in the Gold Coast, Streeterville, or Lakeview.
Wonderful neighborhoods, to be sure, but packed with people with not enough elbow room for my taste. I, personally, would rather be a visitor. Lincoln Park Zoo is a great place to go. Some like seeing throngs of visitors coming and going.

As you pass Douglas and Oakland (the hot Bronzville properties getting quickly scooped up) the vistas, lake and land alike, are breathtaking, smoothly navigable, wonderfully landscaped and rarely congested. East of Kenwood, Hyde Park and Woodlawn, you wind comfortably through Burnham Park to Jackson Park, passing ponds, lagoons, harbors and wooded natural areas, instead of the towering streetwalls you encounter all along North Lake Shore Drive.
On the way, the historic South Shore Cultural Center sits back from it's entry on South Shore Drive, with its own lakefront amenities; a new 4 star restaurant, and the cities only 18 hole golf course on it's northern edge. Here the buildings tower only briefly, west of South Shore Drive. You can see the Lake.
And then you arrive, to the real Southeast Side; South Chicago, in upwards of 3300 blocks east of State Street. A virtually secluded working-class, Old-World, suburban-like community in transition since it's decline in the late 20th Century. It's a neighborhood on the cusp of reinvention and change. Single family woodframes are more abundant here than anywhere in the city, most a century old or better, even pre-Great Fire; bungalows, cedar framed cottages and first generation french pavilions mix with 1920 to 1950 brick raised ranches, 2, 3 and some 6 flats, without the density you'd normally expect in urban Chicago, and not at all like the North Side.
The same structures on the North Side are priced in the 300s, 400s and better.
The house I have now, though better built, is exactly like one I rented in Ravenswood, which was much more expensive. Location, location, location, so they say.

Remodeled homes are successfully completed and escalating. A refinished hardwood floor in a remodeled workers cottage is a one-hundred year old gem of rare, incomparable beauty, since Wisconsin Oak is virtually unseen on the North Side, and unavailable as a building material any where. I love my floors. They look new, but there is nothing that compares to charm of their antiquity. Plus, I gained an extra lot; new porches; a new garage; lots of updates, landscaped it, fenced it all in, and now have a garden home, with garden views. My private, urban retreat, just a few blocks from the new lake park.
South Chicago has it's own electric commuter rail service branch (Metra Electric District) of 3 newly built stations terminating right in the heart of the community. These take me comfortably, and quietly to virtually all the lakefront attractions and downtown in less than 20 minutes, so I can go to Panera Bread or Starbucks in style. They're along the way and steps from the stations. I'm sure it's nice, but I don't need to live across the street from one. Lake Shore Drive, our "expressway," is also slated for extention into the neighborhood.

Commercial Avenue(uptown)is the clean bustling business district, with it's own shops, restaurants and retail. More is coming all the time.
It is the gateway community to the Federally protected Calumet Industrial Heritage Corridor, which spans the Illinois/Indiana border. The beautiful Burnham Greenway bike route winds through the community, through nature preserves all the way into the far southeast suburbs.

Now good schools are an issue for families, and crime is certainly a concern for everyone. Many people wouldn't "appreciate" the diversity of the community, but as we have witnessed from other "urban pioneers," of the past a community is what you make it. Other once depressed neighborhoods have been recreated and transformed that don't have nearly the potential of South Shore, South Chicago and (the original) East Side.

Housing stock and buildable lots are still affordable on the Southeast Side where you can build like any Ravenswood, Edgewater or Lincoln Park house at a fraction of the price, yet closer to the lake than anyone in Lakeview ever could.
You'll beat the crowds for sure, since South Chicago is slated for the largest mixed development revitalization effort in Chicago history because of the Southworks lakefront parcel (larger than the Loop), that is already converted from a steelmill brownfield to parkland, the largest in the nation, and one of the largest since Jackson Park. Starbucks and Target have already come southeast to east 71st Street and Stoney Island Avenue (my personal east/west boundary line).
Unprecedented moves.
Developers are busy buying up parcels, so with such good housing as yet available, and affordable, on the Southeast Side, getting the schools up to par, and the crime under check are certainly as doable as any place has done before, and well worth the effort to live in a neighborhood that's quiet, spacious, closer and more accessible to downtown than living west, and best of all,

a chance to live closer to the lake we love than any other lakefront neighborhood to the north.

Calumetman