NEAR WEST SIDE REBOUNDS

Whenever the lights finally fade on the Bulls’ victorious romp, their basketball Camelot staged on Chicago’s Near West Side will leave a greater legacy than the NBA championship banners hanging from the rafters of the United Center.

The era of Michael & Co. has been among a multitude of factors that have helped resurrect the neighborhood, not unlike the Bulls’ own transformation.

Along with the team’s influence, there’s a booming local economy, particularly in the high-end residential real estate market. Oprah Winfrey has drawn tourists to the area by broadcasting from her Harpo Studios. The 1996 Democratic National Convention brought thousands of people to the area and an infusion of city money for streetscaping and other improvements. It also helped spur an unprecedented effort to remake the Henry Horner public housing development. And there’s spillover from the fashionable River North neighborhood.

All those factors have come together and helped realize the dream of an unusual coalition of community activists and two of the city’s clout-heavy sports honchos, a type more accustomed to bulldozing others.

The goal of that coalition– patched together after years of squabbling over what to do with a neighborhood ravaged by rioting and urban blight–was to make Jerry Reinsdorf and William Wirtz’s United Center not just a place where the affluent touch down for an evening’s entertainment, but the cornerstone of a Near West Side reborn as an attractive place for people of all incomes to live.

It is clearly a work in progress.

The Near West Side still has battered turn-of-the-century brownstones, but it also hosts pricey townhouses whose mortar is barely dry. The grit of the Henry Horner Homes remains, but it has been joined by the glitzy restaurants of West Randolph Street.

This is a community where the most popular place to drink used to be outside liquor stores on sidewalks decorated with Night Train bottles. Now, on Bulls nights, the manager of Marche restaurant reports that his staff serves 200 fans who quaff $50 bottles of wine before rushing off to the game.

“We get the court-seats up to the first-balcony” set, manager Laith Mirza said.

Another sign of change: Margaret Glenn’s new window frames.

They were replaced last fall, courtesy of Dennis Rodman’s foul mouth. After television cameras caught the Bulls’ star rebounder swearing, team managers fined him two games’ pay, $104,000.

In turn the Bulls gave the money to a community group to help repair the homes of the neighborhood’s veteran residents, those who persevered through the area’s worst years–a time when sports fans ducked in and out of the old Chicago Stadium, thinking it prudent to slip a few dollars to a street-corner entrepreneur as temporary car insurance.

“I love Rodman because he gave me this,” said Glenn, 80, nodding at a new wrought-iron fence and refurbished facade on the West Jackson Boulevard home she has lived in for 50 years. “He can say anything he wants to say.”

That much-needed work on Glenn’s home neatly reflects two intertwined and equally improbable transformations of the last decade: the creation of a sports dynasty in Chicago and the revival of the Near West Side.

In 1984, the first year a young man from North Carolina suited up for the Bulls, the Near West Side looked much like it did immediately after the 1968 riots that were sparked by the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: vacant lots, ramshackle buildings and rare pockets of shops.

All of that began to change 10 years ago when the husband-and-wife team of Lewis and Annie Kostiner completed the Near West Side’s first loft conversion, near pimps and prostitutes working West Ogden Avenue. Soon after, pioneering restaurateurs began gambling on the area’s future with places such as Vivo, 838 W. Randolph St., which started serving customers in the fall of 1991.

In 1992 the city covered those bets when it stepped in with its first Strategic Neighborhood Action Plan–a batch of goodies from new streets and parks to housing loans–meant “to jump-start the area around the United Center, knowing full well that the United Center alone could not do it,” said Terry Teele, Mayor Richard Daley’s deputy chief of staff.

Work has followed. The number of jobs on the Near West Side, which plummeted after the 1968 riots, rose nearly 20 percent, from 36,039 in 1990 to 43,062 in 1995, according to figures from the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission.

This year alone, half a dozen upscale restaurants have opened in the West Randolph Street area just west of the Kennedy Expressway amid the remnants of a food market. Since that first loft was converted, nearly 3,000 units of new housing have been completed, are under construction or planned in the community, the city estimates.

Clemmie and Beatrice Lynom, who used to rent in Lincoln Park, bought a new town home 2 1/2 years ago not far from Glenn’s home.

“We wouldn’t have even dreamed of moving to the West Side, not five years ago,” Clemmie Lynom, 52, said as he put a fresh coat of paint on the couple’s wrought-iron fence. “The (United Center), it made the difference.”

His wife said she was pleasantly surprised that their block was quiet, since she had expected to be somewhat of an urban pioneer. “I guess I thought there’d be a lot of people hanging around,” said Beatrice Lynom, 47. “It wasn’t like that, from Day One.”

A few blocks away, however, at the Henry Horner Homes, some residents wonder whether they will be left out of the neighborhood’s emerging prosperity.

Every spring during the Bulls’ annual assault on the NBA championship, the development’s residents watch from playlots filled with the skeletal remains of swing sets as silver Porsches and black Jeep Cherokees spills into parking lots just across the street. From them step men and women dressed as if headed to a charity ball rather than a sporting event.

Observing that parade before a recent playoff game, one resident, MC as he’s locally known, predicted that the neighborhood’s growing wealth would not long be shared with Horner residents. As he figures it, within 10 years the Horner high-rises will be parking lots for the condos of white urban professionals.

“That’s the Catch-23,” he said, mixing Michael Jordan’s jersey number with Joseph Heller’s classic novel.

Ironically, Horner residents probably have a better shot than most low-income residents to survive neighborhood gentrification, which usually means that working-poor and elderly longtime residents are driven out by skyrocketing property taxes.

At Horner, however, tens of millions of dollars are being pumped into new housing for them as part of a settlement to a lawsuit filed by Horner residents.

In 1995 the plaintiffs’ attorney in a landmark housing desegregation case cited the United Center as a reason that a federal judge should allow new public housing town homes to be built at the Horner complex. Alexander Polikoff successfully urged U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen to consider the Near West Side “a revitalizing area” partly because of the “spillover from the United Center.”

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Except for that decree, said Bill Wilen, an attorney who represents the Horner residents, the neighborhood might have wound up an upper-income enclave.

“The condos could have extended down Washington (Boulevard),” he said. “But the decree makes sure that that will remain public housing.”

For many years, as stadium plans for both the Bulls and Bears were discussed, neighborhood residents saw the team owners as enemies.

“For a while, everyone had a plan for us but us,” said Wilma Ward, secretary of the Near West Side Community Development Corp., a non-profit group that mainly builds affordable housing.

Church leaders helped organize a resistance movement that twice brought protesters to march in front of the Winnetka home of Bears owner Michael McCaskey. After he dropped his plans for a Near West Side stadium, they took on Reinsdorf and Wirtz.

Eventually the sports magnates and neighborhood residents realized they had more to gain by working together–especially after Daley stepped in to referee.

At a 1992 ribbon-cutting for the Reinsdorf- and Wirtz-funded replacement homes of those displaced by the United Center, Wirtz reminded Earnest Gates, president of the Near West Side Community Development Corp. board, of their former positions on opposite sides of the barricades.

“Well, Earnest, we’ve come a long way, baby, since I first met you,” Wirtz said. “I don’t think you liked me when you first met me, but I know you love me now.”

Today, United Center officials are downright contrite about how they handled their initial contacts with the community.

“They didn’t know who we were, and history indicated to them that they might be taken advantage of,” said Howard Pizer, executive vice president of the United Center Joint Venture, which wound up paying for some 28 replacement houses at an average cost of $220,000 apiece. “We should have been more sensitive to the baggage they were carrying and what they had been through.”

Pizer now sits on the board of the Near West Side Community Development Corp., which administers the Rodman Fund that fixed up Glenn’s house.

Her next-door neighbor to the east, a newcomer to the neighborhood, has his eyes on Glenn’s late Victorian-era residence. But she isn’t interested in his money. “There’s no other place I’d like to live,” Glenn said.

Should she hold fast to her resolve, she and the rest of her like-minded neighbors would beat the odds that usually govern redevelopment in the inner city.

Some community leaders contend that the financial support Reinsdorf and Wirtz have given to neighborhood schools, small businesses and other institutions will ensure that it remains a mixed-income community. The United Center, for instance, donated $600,000 to provide ongoing construction financing for private homes.

“If it had not been for the United Center,” Gates said, “the indigenous community could have been priced out of the neighborhood had there been a massive upscale redevelopment. Or it could have just been left the way it was.”

Either way, perhaps the most telling sign of the neighborhood’s new life is that an old landmark has returned. The Billy Goat Tavern & Grill, which sat hard by the Chicago Stadium before moving in the early 1960s to Lower Michigan Avenue, has opened a new location a few blocks east of the United Center.

“As soon as the Bulls became global-class, it revitalized” the neighborhood, said Bill Tziavragos, 59, manager of the new, old Goat. “Michael drew a lot of people. He gave life to the area.”