The twists and turns of Englewood’s history have left the South Side neighborhood a checkerboard of rubble-filled blocks and streets lined with tidy homes.
On either side of Normal Boulevard between 57th and 59th streets, mounds of dirt laced with building parts form pyramids, some 20 feet tall. To the east and west of the hollowed-out section are single-family homes, some brick, others wood framed. A similar mix of residences once occupied the blocks now piled high with rubble.
Deborah Payne’s house was buried under one of those mounds. “I thought I was going to stay here forever,” she told the Tribune in 2021. “It’s a raggedy thing to you but it’s my home.”
The leveling of those homes wasn’t due to the natural cycles affecting much of Englewood: owners growing old and unable to maintain their property, or moving on and replaced by people of limited means.
The destruction along Normal was deliberate and organized by the Norfolk Southern Railway, which runs freight trains along an adjoining embankment.
The railroad, armed with the power of eminent domain, acquired the homes of Payne and many of her neighbors. Generally, eminent domain is associated with the government’s power to take over property needed for projects in the public interest, such as a highway. Railroads were granted the right on the theory that they foster commerce that benefits all Americans
Joyce Edwards didn’t think it fair that the Norfolk Southern could make her sell it her home. She and her family fought for years, including by filing a counter lawsuit. Legal papers flew back and forth, until the railroad’s police and local law enforcement evicted the family on Aug. 6, 2021.
Her son, and the wheelchair he’s confined to, were set outside side on a sweltering hot day, according to her lawsuit.
“Who would do that to an elderly woman and a disabled son, knowing how hard it was for Black people to get a home in the ’50s and ’60s?” asked Ald. Jeanette Taylor, 20th. “And you took it from them to do what, to park trailers?”
The railroad needed to expand the yard where it stores the shipping containers that have replaced boxcars for transporting freight. The expansion plans took in the blocks piled high with rubble that included the remains of Edward’s home.
To be fair, it was the railroads that get credit for creating the community. In the 1850s, eight lines laid their tracks in the area long before there was a village of Englewood, let alone a Chicago neighborhood so named.
The place where several tracks met was originally called “the Junction,” and a passenger station was built there in 1852. A cluster of homes sprang up around it, a product of the emotional mix that gives rise to suburbs: A taste for a city’s cultural opportunities coupled with a longing for a quieter life.
To confirmed urbanites, the parlay was incomprehensible. When a forthcoming teacher-training facility in Englewood was announced, Chicago newspapers lampooned the Cook County Normal School as being built next to a frog pond.
City slickers could giggle, but the locals got what they were looking for. “Sleighing parties on the ice of the sloughs were occasions of merriment and innocent enjoyment to the people,” an old settler recalled in “The Story of Englewood,” a history of the years 1835 to 1923 published in 1924 by the Englewood Business Men’s Association.
“Picnics in the different groves that surrounded the little town were of weekly occurrences in summertime, and the same catastrophe followed the young gallants, who in their white duck trouser sat down in the succulent custard pies.”
But the landscape was changing. A well near what is now the intersection of 63rd and Halsted streets was a place to exchange gossip. Farmers sold produce there off their wagons. Stores followed,
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“Old residences were moved back in the lot to make room for business fronts and every available foot of ground between 55th Street and 69th Street was soon occupied by prosperous business concerns,” recalled another contributor to “The Story of Englewood.”
Soon immigrants were disembarking at Englewood’s train station. Many were lured by the nearby Union Stockyards, which offered jobs that could be performed by those who didn’t speak English.
In 1920, there were 533 newcomers enrolled in English and Americanization classes at Lindblom High School. They chose to live in Englewood rather than in tenements surrounding the slaughterhouses for the same reason the town’s early residents had settled there.
Englewood’s boosters bragged that while a substantial police force was needed to keep the peace in the crowded Stockyards’ district, Englewood had only a few cops. They had little to do “other than to ornament the landscape and see the cows were not disturbed in their peaceful pastures,” an early resident recalled.
That didn’t last. As Englewood urbanized, its virtues and vices mimicked Chicago’s, which had annexed the area in 1889. In 1910, for example, the Tribune reported that “Ralph Hoffman, 13 years old, weak from hunger and exposure, staggered into the Englewood station last night during the storm, leading his crippled mother, and between sobs told how they had been deserted by the husband and father.”
On the other hand, Englewood had stately hotels and luxurious apartments. The seven-story Yale Building at 6565 S. Yale Ave. is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as a pioneering residential high-rise.
Halsted and 63rd had become a major retail center, exceeded in Chicago only by the Loop and anchored by Sears and Wieboldt’s stores.
There was a small Black community. “It was sort of an elite neighborhood,” Marilyn Frizzle, 75, recently told John Lippert, a freelancer for the Tribune. “The shopping district on 63rd Street was like being downtown on Michigan Avenue. Everything you needed was there.”
But racial harmony eluded Englewood as more Black families moved in. The Chicago Defender reported on Aug. 1, 1963: “Extra police have been keeping watch in the area of 5659 S. Morgan after a crowd estimated at 1,500 milled around the 30 year red brick building into which the Reginald Williams family moved Monday night.”
As other Blacks joined the Williams family, whites moved out of Englewood, taking a significant portion of the neighborhood’s buying power with them. Storefronts were vacated on 63rd and Halsted.
Englewood Hospital closed in 1988 and its building was later razed. A grand theater that opened as the Hippodrome in 1912 and was later named the West Englewood, where Bob Hope had emceed shows in the 1920s, was knocked down in 1962.
Two train stations in Englewood were closed despite protests from the community.
Crime soared, as did the poverty rate. Renewal programs were repeatedly announced. The most successful was Kennedy-King College at 63rd and Halsted. Others came and went.
Frizzle, her son Jeff and daughter-in law Alicia hung on. Now they face the side effects of a transportation revolution that benefits the rest of us.
Goods were traditionally packed and unpacked repeatedly as they moved from producer to consumer. But under the intermodal system, goods are packed only once into large shipping containers. There they stay as a container is carried by ship from, say China, to America. Then they’re transferred to railroad flat cars, really just a set of flanged wheels. Lifted off those cars, the container may finish its journey in a truck, atop pneumatic tires.
Chicago is the nation’s intermodal epicenter. But its success has required ever more places to store those shipping containers. Stacked on top of each other they look like a metal riff on the Great Wall of China. The railroad calls its current Englewood collage the 47th Street Intermodal Yard. Another will soon be built on those blocks covered with pyramids of rubble.
Which leaves Alicia Frizzle with a question:
“Seeing those piles makes me think, ‘what happened, and how is it that a community that once was vibrant has been turned into a rail yard?’ “
An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote made by Ald. Jeanette Taylor.
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