I had lived in Bronzeville, Chicago, for a year before I started reading about the neighborhood—five years before I would begin advocating in architectural circles for housing as reparations. When I was a child, my family told me that Bronzeville held so much history—that it was designed by famous architects, home to a booming Black middle class, renowned for its jazz and gospel music. It was a place where people journeyed to during the Great Migration and have continued to search for ever since.
Martin Barbe Residence, 3157 S. Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1884–1963; Architects: Adler and Sullivan; Photographed by Richard Nickel before 1963; Richard Nickel Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, the Art Institute of Chicago
Some parts of Bronzeville are peppered with vacant lots, while in other parts there are large stretches of grassy land with no buildings, no people, but they’re not exactly empty—music from cars along the boulevard fills the air. Walking the neighborhood on a sun-drenched day recalls Kerry James Marshall’s painting set in Bronzeville, 7am Sunday Morning (2003). Leafy, dappled light streams through large trees lining the major boulevards, and breezes drift off Lake Michigan.
I grew up relatively nearby, in an integrated house in an integrated neighborhood with a lot of Richard Nickel prints of both intact buildings and ornamental fragments on the wall. My family considered the photographer, whose images define The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan (2010), to be a talented and tragic figure (Nickel was crushed to death during an architectural salvage mission in the Chicago Stock Exchange building in 1972).
Years after I left Chicago, homesick for the city and carsick from Los Angeles traffic, I craved the familiarity of the South Side, craved moseying past Chicago greystones knowing I was going to be late to the function and knowing that my hosts expected me to be. To my surprise and relief in LA, I found that the Art Institute of Chicago’s online Nickel archive (1850–2011) captured more areas of the city than I expected, including Bronzeville, with images of buildings I had never seen in person, buildings that had been demolished before I was born. The vacant lots don’t appear in the archive, but row houses freshly built or mid-demolition do. Which is why when staring at these photographs I found the relentless pattern in the Adler and Sullivan row house descriptions—“built . . . demolished . . . built . . . demolished . . . built . . . demolished”—to be eerie. And in tiny appendix font, I found haunting passages such as this: “In the late 1950s, the building was acquired by the Chicago Land Clearance Commission for the expansion of the Illinois Institute of Technology and was damaged by a fire before it was demolished.”[1]
Notes:
[1] Richard Nickel et al., The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan (United States: Richard Nickel Committee, 2010).
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Isabel Strauss, Plan, 2021. Includes elements from the following: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Something Split and New (2013) and Thread (2012); Richard Nickel, Louis H. Sullivan’s Henry Babson Residence, Riverside, Illinois (ca. 1908–09, demolished 1960); Paul Strauss, Grandma Ida on Martha’s Vineyard (n.d.) and Daniel with Bicycle (ca. 1997); Mickalene Thomas, Landscape Majestic (2010). Courtesy of Nathan Keay.
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Isabel Strauss