Sixty years after opening its Near West Side campus, the University of Illinois Chicago continues to attract students. More than 33,000 people from diverse backgrounds are enrolled in the public university’s bachelor and graduate programs, making it the largest college in the city.
City and university officials always knew a school of its kind would be popular with those who desired a higher education but couldn’t afford to or didn’t want to leave the area. The need was also great for a four-year college experience in Chicago for a student population that included many commuters. And, after decades of planning, it was finally realized in 1965.
Yet the university’s evolution has not come without challenges. Recently, budget deficits have prompted the school to consider closing some of its schools and terminating nontenured faculty. Resident advisers — seeking higher pay, additional time off and the removal of a one-year cap on raises — have moved to unionize.
Choosing the permanent site for UIC’s campus was the school’s first controversial decision. Here’s a look back at how it happened.
Oct. 21, 1946
About 4,000 men and women attended the first day of classes for the new University of Illinois extension at Navy Pier.
The university’s beginnings were modest. The two-year branch was located in huge vacant storage sheds as a temporary measure to handle the flood of World War II veterans seeking entrance under the GI Bill of Rights.
Late 1950s
The branch had surprised most observers by surviving and even thriving, and the move was on to build a permanent campus for a four-year college — especially before post-World War II baby boomers would start college in 1963.
Mayor Richard J. Daley wanted it constructed near downtown, but his first choice, the railroad land south of the Loop, fell through.
Feb. 10, 1961
After considering dozens of options, a January 1961 Illinois Supreme Court decision meant the possible locations for the school campus were narrowed down to two sites — Garfield Park on the West Side or west of the Loop.
Mayor Daley announced the 103-acre Near West Side site was chosen and architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill would plan the new campus. He called it a “great milestone in Chicago’s history.”
A Tribune editorial praised the decision
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, calling it, ” … an occasion for rejoicing. This branch inevitably will become one of the great universities of the world, and its start has been delayed too long.”Feb. 14, 1961
Though the Tribune described the location as a “slum clearance site,” it was home to a tight-knit community.
“What was so great about my neighborhood was that it was self contained economically,” Scala recalled in a 1997 Tribune essay.
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“The plumber lived on Carpenter Street; the tailor shop was here; the fish store, across the street; the butcher, right down there; the guy who made the sausage down the block,” she wrote. “Your kids are going to school together. All of that, that’s what makes a neighborhood hum.”
A few days after Daley’s announcement, Scala organized more than 150 people in a march from Polk Street and Blue Island Avenue to City Hall. It was the beginning of her campaign as leader of the Harrison-Halsted Community Group, which for months fought the city at every step.
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“She was kind of a Rosa Parks of the Italian-American neighborhood, and she was just filled with joy and spirit,” syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, a reporter on the civil rights beat at the Chicago Daily News in the early 1960s, told the Tribune in 2007. “She awakened that whole neighborhood.”
“Mayor Daley and others think it is easy to run roughshod over us,” she told a pre-march rally. “We must show him we are not going to take this lying down.”
Daley invited them to come up to his office and promised them new homes and stores in another neighborhood. They turned him down. They wanted to remain where they lived.
Oct. 18-19, 1962
More than a week after Scala started a sit-in outside Daley’s office at City Hall, her home at 1030 Taylor St. became a target. A bomb was set off on the front porch of her family’s three-story home though no damage was done, the Tribune reported. Another was set off early the next day and it made extensive damage to the backside of Scala’s building.
Scala fought long and hard, but announced she would step down as Harrison-Halsted community leader after the incidents.
“She was my heroine,” Studs Terkel told the Tribune after Scala’s death in 2007. “She tried with intelligence and courage to save the soul of our city. She represented to me all that Chicago could have been.”
Feb. 26, 1963
The Illinois Supreme Court cleared the way for construction to begin by upholding the condemnation of land for the campus, which was expected to cost $150 million to complete.
Another battle for Scala was trying to save a remnant of Hull House, the social service center for immigrants founded by Jane Addams.
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Scala and her husband had taken refuge in what was then a large complex of buildings that made up Hull House after their house was bombed. But as the university campus was built, all but one of 12 Hull House buildings were torn down.
Feb. 22, 1965
Ribbon-cutting for the new campus, which opened its doors to 10,000 students, was held.
It was called the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle because it was at the circular junction of what became the Kennedy, Eisenhower and Dan Ryan expressways.
1982
The campus merged with the university’s Medical Center campus to become the University of Illinois at Chicago, or UIC.
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