The Decline of 63rd and Halsted, #3
Sears. Wieboldt's L. Fish Furniture. Walgreen's. The Southtown and Englewood Theaters. Hillman's Grocery Store. Jewel. And dozens of other stores, restaurants and banks radiating out in all directions from the intersection of 63rd and Halsted. It's like they never existed. The 3-story building that housed Kresge's burned a while back, and is now just a water-filled hole in the ground. You can still see the scorch marks on the building just to the south.
The vacant lot at the northwest corner of 63rd and Halsted is supposed to be the future home of a Whole Foods. I suppose it will all work out -- the urban planners who devised it (and whose predecessors devised the turning of this intersection into a pedestrian/bus mall in the 60's, which only hastened its decline) have much more experience in this sort of thing than I.
But if they're planning on a summer 2016 grand opening, they're going to have to move at warp speed.
I still say that this Whole Foods (in a neighborhood where the median income is $30,000/yr and whose population has declined by two-thirds since 1960) is a thinly veiled message from the City to Englewood's low-income residents that their days here are numbered.
And if you don't think that kind of real-estate chess game can happen, ask the working-class Puerto Ricans who used to live along Armitage in Lincoln Park.
UPDATE: The Englewood Whole Foods, that opened to much fanfare, and $1.99 loss-leader half gallons of milk in September 2016, closed in November 2022. How long will it take for another grocery store to take its place? We shall see.
The Decline of 63rd and Halsted, #3
Sears. Wieboldt's L. Fish Furniture. Walgreen's. The Southtown and Englewood Theaters. Hillman's Grocery Store. Jewel. And dozens of other stores, restaurants and banks radiating out in all directions from the intersection of 63rd and Halsted. It's like they never existed. The 3-story building that housed Kresge's burned a while back, and is now just a water-filled hole in the ground. You can still see the scorch marks on the building just to the south.
The vacant lot at the northwest corner of 63rd and Halsted is supposed to be the future home of a Whole Foods. I suppose it will all work out -- the urban planners who devised it (and whose predecessors devised the turning of this intersection into a pedestrian/bus mall in the 60's, which only hastened its decline) have much more experience in this sort of thing than I.
But if they're planning on a summer 2016 grand opening, they're going to have to move at warp speed.
I still say that this Whole Foods (in a neighborhood where the median income is $30,000/yr and whose population has declined by two-thirds since 1960) is a thinly veiled message from the City to Englewood's low-income residents that their days here are numbered.
And if you don't think that kind of real-estate chess game can happen, ask the working-class Puerto Ricans who used to live along Armitage in Lincoln Park.
UPDATE: The Englewood Whole Foods, that opened to much fanfare, and $1.99 loss-leader half gallons of milk in September 2016, closed in November 2022. How long will it take for another grocery store to take its place? We shall see.