Design
Building Up Chicago's South Side Through Ambitious Art
A constellation of projects initiated by Theaster Gates has helped create new energy in an economically devastated—and socially isolated—part of Chicago.
Art-inspired urban redevelopment is popping up along Chicago’s South Side. You see it on Garfield Boulevard in Washington Park. Around Dorchester and Kimbark avenues in Greater Grand Crossing. It’s happening on Stony Island Avenue, a little more than a mile west of Lake Michigan’s shoreline.
It roots itself in unlikely places like a once-dilapidated bank that hadn’t been active in more than 30 years, a recently shuttered currency exchange office, a retired beer warehouse, and a housing complex that had been shuttered after the city couldn’t find a way to stymie the violence that had permeated the site.