We the Blvd: A Call to Activation Along the Chicago Boulevard System

My specific interest in the Chicago boulevard system largely stems from my own upbringing. I was born in Chicago in the early ’90s as a first generation Mexican American roughly two decades after my grandparents immigrated here from Mexico. I grew up in Logan Square, a neighborhood located on the northwest side of the city and one of the twenty-three community areas along the twenty-six-mile boulevard system that connects Logan Boulevard to Jackson Park.

Logan Square in the ’90s and early 2000s was a very challenging area to be from as it saw a peak in gang warfare, blight, and disinvestment that had permeated since the great white flight of the ’50s and ’60s. There is a popular PBS documentary made around this time titled “What’s Out There for J.R.?” that gives a sense of this area.¹

Pressure from local gangs to recruit young boys into nefarious lifestyles befell even my own close family members and friends. I bring this up because growing up in areas like this forces you to see your environment through a series of perceivable and imperceivable boundaries. Kedzie and Humboldt Boulevards served as some of these boundaries for us. My family would only frequent them on special occasions or moments of celebration, such as attending our local church of St. Sylvester, or around the holidays to see the Christmas lights that dressed the mansions. Otherwise, we exercised caution when driving through them or going to them at all.

When I left Chicago to pursue a degree in architecture, I took with me these memories. As I began to develop a thesis topic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I continued to question, “what is this green infrastructure system?” Boulevards are not really commercial corridors since retail and businesses are scattered, nor are they private residential streets as their immediate connections to the parkways visually invite the public to and from them. The parks they are connected to also aren’t sized like the typical parks seen elsewhere. Combined, Chicago’s boulevard parkways and squares are equal to around 300 acres. With the average park size in the city being around 2.2 acres, the boulevards alone would equate to around 130 Chicago parks.

How do these spaces affect the psyche and livelihood of the people and neighborhoods around them? This question drove me to do a deep dive into boulevards and their histories.

The French term boulevard originates from the Flemish word bolwerk, which in military terms means an exterior fortification or bastion. In Paris, as early as the fourteenth century, Charles V constructed a medieval bolwerk along Paris’s northern edge. Surprisingly, this became a favorite place among city residents for strolling. In 1670, in the wake of military successes in the Netherlands and to demonstrate to the population that they were safe from attack, Louis XIV ordered the walls be replaced with wide, tree-lined streets, named boulevards.

While this inception story holds true and with little controversy, the construction of boulevards in nineteenth-century Paris would serve as deliberate acts of displacement and crowd control by Napoleon III. At this time, Napoleon III requested that Baron Haussmann construct boulevards to connect and unify the different parts of the city into one whole and provide air and open space while making it more beautiful. Many historians believe it was partially motivated by this modernization agenda but mostly agree that it was a defensive strategy from the standpoint of Napoleon III, who was worried about uprisings from the masses.

During each of the political revolts from 1789–1871, sections of Paris had succumbed to revolutionaries. During times of conflict, urban mobs would blockade the maze that was the streets of Paris. Such barricades proved effective and made Paris all but controllable. The boulevards were used as both a slum-clearance strategy and to enable easy troop movements throughout the city reaching problematic neighborhoods.

This point of origin is useful in understanding the boulevard’s adoption into US society. In 1909, architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham and partner Edward H. Bennett asked in their Plan of Chicago, “How are we living?” as a way to critique the disorganized state of the city’s built environment. The bold plan proposed to consolidate existing “successful” infrastructures like the Chicago Boulevard system, which was initially envisioned by people like real estate speculator-turned-city booster John S. Wright in 1849.² Burnham & Wright saw use in adopting European standards of beauty and design into the American imagination, despite the implications that came with it.

Wright’s boosterism, along with others like him, ultimately convinced the city to construct the infrastructure after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Many contemporaries of Wright’s time and shortly after proclaimed the system a civic “success” as it provided ample space for carriage transportation and leisure activities such as strolling, biking, and resting.

In the case of Wright, his declarations for a “magnificent chain of parks and parkways,” was directly intended for, and I quote, “men of business, homeowners, or those who seek ownership, men with a good wife and kids,” and especially men from the Chicago Board of Trade, to which the writing is mostly intended for. In contrast, Wright's perception of non-homeowners, such as renters, is that of a rebellious nature, where he states, they “refuse to build for themselves.”³

When speaking of “renters,” Wright could be referring to recently arrived European immigrants. German, Polish, Jewish, and Italians were just a few who would often take up hard labor, working in places like the Union Stockyards as early as 1865 and settling in densely populated, impoverished neighborhoods. These newly settled residents were largely renters stacking up large families into two- and three-bedroom tenements and typically could not afford vehicles like carriages or bicycles, which were common modes of transportation for “homeowners” along the boulevard system.

At this time the boulevard system would have been situated along the city’s limits, surpassing some of the impoverished areas immigrants would have settled in, giving little reason for those without access to transportation modes or “renters” to use them. But as the city of Chicago grew in both territory and population, the peripheral boulevard system of yesterday reads almost like a geographically centered ring across the city today.

Demographic shifts over time have seen Eastern European immigrants settle around the boulevards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century but began waning by 1924 due to strict immigration policy. After white flight from the city to suburban communities, large waves of Latinos and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South formed communities around the boulevards.

So, who are “we” now? Of the 2.7 million individuals that reside in Chicago’s 77 community areas, 29 percent of them live within the 23 community areas along the Chicago boulevard system. While for the first time in the city’s history, we are evenly divided amongst Black, Hispanic, and white populations—around 30 percent for each—Hispanic and Black communities account for more than 90 percent of the 23 community areas around the boulevard system.⁴

From a spatial lens, we can see clear demographic boundaries that overlap the boulevard system. According to FiveThirtyEight’s mapping inequality study conducted in 2015, Chicago is considered one of the most diverse cities in the country—ranked seventh—yet it is also considered the most segregated city—ranked first.⁵ This is decidedly true due to the culmination of redlining practices, racial home covenants, urban renewal, and disinvestment in neighborhoods along the boulevards such as Bronzeville, Englewood, North Lawndale, Garfield Park, and Humboldt Park. The city’s explicit neglect towards communities of color throughout its history has affected the economic landscape of these areas.

According to a report by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, the most persistent issues facing cities today are not processes like gentrification but rather increasing poverty concentration.⁶ As racial demographics shift in Chicago neighborhoods, the city saw a shrinking middle class and increasingly polarizing economic disparities between the North Side, which is largely white middle and upper class, and the South and West Sides, which are largely Black and Brown communities.

One’s willingness to “build for themselves” is hardly the reason many of these communities suffer hardship. For instance, in communities like Greater Englewood, where 91% of the population identifies as Black, only 7% of non-faith-based businesses are Black-owned and 69 cents for every dollar leaves the community, a ratio that is 2.5 times higher than the national average.⁷ This shows the dominating hold that chain retailers have and the lack of reinvestment that they provide to these communities. This, among other disparities such as lack of high-quality food access, fallow land, employment, and concerns for safety, have played a role in the large exodus of Black Chicagoans leaving the city for better opportunities.

At a hyperlocal scale, conversations held with nonprofits in surrounding neighborhoods revealed additional grievances regarding the disparities present in their communities and their relationship to the parks and boulevards. These nuanced perceptions of space have been evident since the formation of the boulevard as a connection system. In 1871, three park commissions were formed and bound by natural and industrial systems and projected a local sense of stewardship of each side’s parks: North, West, and South.

The boulevards of today face a different set of challenges, which can be identified by whether they exist on the edge or the center. Boulevards that lie at the center of a homogenous community tend to have the most engagement. Douglas Boulevard, for instance, pulls into it the fabric of North Lawndale. The Stone Temple Baptist Church sits on the boulevard and owns many vacant properties along it. It has recently decided to offer some of its land to both the Lawndale Pop-Up spot and the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival, two initiatives promoting cultural engagement and stewardship of the place.

Similarly, East Garfield Boulevard, once a thriving commercial node for the Washington Park neighborhood, has undergone a revival through the efforts of Theaster Gates and the formation of Arts + Public Life initiative sponsored by the University of Chicago. Dilapidated commercial buildings and adjacent vacant land have been transformed into arts incubators, reconnecting residents to the boulevards through events and everyday use.

These private-public partnerships between institutions and “activators” create stability within neighborhoods, but due to their high level of organization and large scale, impact may inadvertently contribute to gentrification. A once predominantly Latino community, representing 70 percent of the population in the year 2000, Logan Square has seen a drastic drop of Latinos down to 30 percent, with new residents—classified colloquially as hipsters and yuppies—claiming space along the boulevard. The scene along Logan Boulevard on Sundays in the summertime exemplifies this, as it is enlivened by food markets and arts festivals that redirect traffic patterns and offer safe thresholds between cars and people, but that has shifted attention and program towards consumption like trendy vintage wear and furniture. The activation of this public space was originally supported by the City Mayor’s Office of Special Events back in 2005 and its organizers continue to offer seasonal programming organized by the farmer’s market.

On the southern end of the system, Drexel Boulevard has experienced its own demographic shift, witnessing a growing divide in income disparity between the low- to middle-income residents of the early 2000s and the influx of what sociologist Mary Pattillo describes as “Black Gentrifiers.” In her research, residents of the Oakland-North Kenwood area support an officers’ disdain and flagging of the current uses that largely non-homeowners of the area partake in along the boulevard. These include “barbecuing and setting up tents, selling snow cones, and drinking.” Those homeowners who can afford to live along the boulevard use it as almost a secondary lawn or front yard, encouraging “leisurely strolls and long rests.” In large part, as Pattillo describes, this is because of access to and ownership of their own decks and backyards, whereas renters largely situated away from the boulevards tended to use it for “socializing and barbecuing.”⁸

This disparity begs the question: who is the boulevard for? Even when the boulevard is at the geographic center of the communities, where curated efforts allow the parkways and roads to cultivate community, we can still read the territorialization of the boulevard as-is and note that those who can afford higher-quality homes fronting a parkway should be allowed to decide what goes on in “their” front lawn. However, residents of the 23 community areas that overlap the boulevard pay taxes for the maintenance and upkeep of its operation and often, Chicago’s Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts are formed along the corridor. In this way, the deliberation of who uses the boulevard and its recent historically designated boundaries should have input by all its residents regardless of their current presence or absence along it.

Boulevards on the edge of communities tend to act as borders that are underutilized. With no one claiming space, these areas are either avoided altogether or used as a different form of infrastructure relating to infrastructural city land uses. California Boulevard, for instance, is located between the Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods. Between them lies city-scale institutions, such as the Cook County courthouse, jail, and juvenile detention center. Seeing children present along this strip of parkway is encouraging until you quickly realize that they are only passing through to visit a loved one in court or in jail.

The industrial corridor of Western Boulevard is another example of neglected space. Between the rush of the cars and semi-trucks, lack of pathways, and a fragmented bus system that tries to make use of the parkway but fails in providing safe passage across busy streets, Western Boulevard remains unclaimed by all. Fragments along this section of the boulevard memorialize loss of life attempting to cross the road. Billboards indicate that the priority of Western is the vehicle, namely the semi-truck, something local aldermanic parties allow and promote. This thoroughfare becomes a home for political propaganda for local elections, as we witness yard signs illegally sprinkled along the edge of the parkway during election season. Despite letting this slide, the same city officials wield power to limit or prevent informal economies, such as street vendors.

“Open Boulevards” was an initiative backed by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot to encourage use of the boulevards during the pandemic. Activities included pop-up performances and food from local vendors. While I was researching the event program and speaking to its organizer, Jamie Simone, there was uncertainty around its scaling and evolution beyond what I have described as centered boulevards. Now, after only a few years, the program has been dissolved. Its governance structure was reliant on a top-down approach, with ad-hoc connections to existing community organizations.

I have realized an urgency for a coalition, one that is not reliant on our city—or federal— government, but rather one that integrates into existing community networks. I have therefore developed a framework built on the priorities and concerns of resident-based organizations across the twenty-three communities along the boulevard system, where funding mechanisms for activations can vary dependent on need, trust, and scalable resources.

A “kit-of-parts” system of deployable furniture and small-scale structures can be shared amongst this coalition. During my time as a Jeanne & John Rowe Fellow at IIT, I have crafted a seminar class that engages the boulevard through a series of field drawings studying a variety of boulevard conditions. I have invited amazing guest speakers and have coordinated field trips that have amplified the visibility and history of this important green infrastructure to IIT students.

Students have built on this research base and have contributed to the investigations through an exercise called “The TikTok Historian,” in which the students explore an aspect of the boulevards they are interested in and create a 90-second TikTok video explaining what they found. In addition, students were expected to provide recommendations for the boulevard that went beyond design, wherein they had to strategize how new ideas would exist in space and foster partnerships across multiple actors. Several interesting recommendations arose, which could help guide discussions amongst future coalition members. Some of these included integrating chicanes into the boulevard, which are curves used to slow down traffic, and enhancing the quality of viaducts that overlap the boulevards.

In the studio setting, I incorporated the boulevard to two third-year studio sections that I taught. The Garfield Boulevard field center on the South Side, for instance, took into consideration comments made by nonprofits on issues relating to informal vendors safety and inabilities to receive licenses because of a lack of a certified kitchen setup. Students of this course visited the site and met with informal vendors, asking them questions about their experience and discussing challenges and strengths of the communities of Back of the Yards and Englewood. This resulted in a number of proposals that placed food and kitchens as the primary use of a field center structure.

On the West Side, the Franklin Boulevard studio took inspiration from nonprofits like the Chicago West Community Music Center (CWCMC) who have occupied space in Garfield Park’s Golden Dome for twenty-five years. Their organization suggested placing large modal transportation networks and community center-type structures along the boulevard in an effort to serve program users that reach as far west as Jackson Park. Our studio identified three dilapidated residential structures at the node connection between Franklin and Central Park Boulevards as the project site. Students were expected to address the needs expressed by CWCMC to develop a music library that could act as a marker and bridge the divide along the boulevard. The resulting projects made use of the divide: the duality between old and new, between residential and civic.

Beyond recommendations and academic speculation, we wanted to create a physical impact on the boulevards. We began by identifying a site on South Western Blvd and West 48th Place, whose zoning politics stratified uses, setting one side to be industrial with semi-trucks frequenting its roads as a logistical route and the other side as commercial where a mix of auto body repair shops, car wholesalers, and retail chains lined the street, masking the residential fabric from visual access to the boulevard. The site was also determined by its divisional quality, an edge amongst three community areas: Brighton Park, Gage Park, and Back of the Yards, where the new Chicago Park District headquarters and Western CTA orange line station and bus terminal lay.

We then met with organizations that I had previously spoken to during my thesis work. We discussed the possibility of a collaborative project/event focused on this intersection. In all cases, the potential that any event might have to be approved by a local alderperson, was brought up. We could not confirm whether our proposed event would need to go through the alderpersons office for approval at the time so the organizations respectfully withdrew from this event with the understanding that another event could be achieved with a confirmation on the alderperson involvement. We didn’t realize how affected these councils were by the local alderperson decisions but have become familiar since.

We then searched for other potential partnerships in the area, this time looking at organizations that weren’t neighborhood councils but instead smaller nonprofits with an interest in crafting events for their communities. This led us to connecting with the Frida Community Organization and Raices Chicago Story Coalition. Both organizations had also brought up the question of the association to the alderperson and were assured of the limited connection this event would need to have, so we proceeded to work. Early conversations centered around shared cultural similarities between the community areas, the lack of and fear of access to a space like Western Boulevard parkway, and the potential to reach out to community residents as a call for involvement.

This all led to the idea that we could craft an event centered around Piñata-makers, a vital character in the Mexican household who produces piñatas for family events with very little recognition for the time and effort it takes to make them. A call was put out to local piñata-makers, including my own grandfather, who is the craftsman in my family. His involvement in this event ties directly to the boulevards as he is a long-time resident of Logan Square. We were surprised by the turnout of applicants, receiving more than ten from the three community areas around the site as well as other neighborhoods along the boulevard system. Of those applicants, a total of four were willing to be interviewed and showcased during the event.

In addition to the financial support this event would receive through the Jeanne & John Rowe fellowship, “Piñatas on the Blvd” was also awarded a Chicago DCASE grant to support the event activation. This included interviewing piñata makers, paying food and rental vendors, and helping to purchase a shipping container.

Early conversations with the organizations were geared around the types of structures we might build for the event. Modeling from programs like the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival, we considered how these installations can have a life after this event. Our conversation with Frida Community Organization shifted towards developing a structure that could store event material and acting as a backdrop for performances they hold in other spaces for various communities they engage with, including folkloric dance and Chicago Public Schools-supported arts programs. Similarly, we read the container as a potential asset for the “We the Blvd” coalition—an exhibition space we could use for other events.

Our design process considered how these objects in the field could take a life of their own. We represented them as lively characters that could serve as future lotería cards. Bi-weekly workshops with the organization at IIT were lighthearted and fun explorations into how the installations could be read as life-sized piñatas that one might inhabit.

Visits to the area also inspired the arrangement of colors that the installations could have. Given the visibility along these boulevards by oncoming traffic, we would constantly see people stop as they are passing by and ask what we were building. We were refacing the container offsite, but still along another boulevard.

Local residents in need of work also stopped by and assisted in the process. For example, Jose helped paint the container. Jose is a local resident of almost twenty years from the Brighton Park neighborhood who had recently become homeless for the first time in his life after losing his construction job. Jose mentioned that his older daughter who lives in the area spotted him as she was driving along the boulevards and was happy to see him safe and working.

Logistics of these structures had to be heavily considered. How and where we would load and drop off the structures made for a spectacle along the boulevard. It didn’t help that the permitting process dragged on. We took a risk continuing to work without assurance that we would be able to install on site and hold an event for many to enjoy. Our permit was finalized and issued hours before we were scheduled to begin.

This is the final result of the exhibition space. The day was alive. Paper mâché rolls flowed across model workshop stations. Candies exploded across the grassy lawn as youth and adults had their turn breaking colorful piñatas. Song and dance muffled the sound of semis flying by. An array of traditional Mexican garments could be seen from the nearby CTA station.

While the event was filled with joy and celebration for over 200 residents from neighboring communities that are geographically divided but culturally similar, it can also be understood as a form of contestation against the industrial nature of this thoroughfare and as reclamation of space through cultural production. In today’s political climate, this can be interpreted as an act of resistance against our current administration.

The boulevard system does not just consist of parkways and roads, so our second task, beyond activating the parkways, was to acquire fallow land adjacent to the boulevard system. Our journey began by assessing vacant parcels along the boulevard system that could best serve as culturally productive landscapes, responding to the wants and needs of its neighbors.

Building on our research focused on South and West Side neighborhoods, the first two parcels of land acquired were adjacent corner lots in between the Back of the Yards and West Englewood communities. Purchasing the lots through the Cook County Land Bank allowed us to close on the parcel within three months. Relative to programs that the City of Chicago offers, this is less than a third of the time that was expected.

Our first “Plan to Activation” was reaching out to the middle school directly across the boulevard to see what can be done with these lots. Suggestions have already included offering the outdoor areas for teachers to conduct outdoor reading sessions and events, as the school does not have any soft surface or landscape outdoor space in their property. Oftentimes teachers conduct events and programming in their hallways and cafeteria.

Growing Home, a nonprofit located just three blocks south of the site, has made great use of fallow land along what is expected to be the Englewood Agro-Eco District, anchored by the Englewood Nature Trail. This organization trains formerly incarcerated individuals to cultivate vegetables that can be served to the community through various events throughout the year. An initial idea that has been discussed is to offer space for Growing Home and other organizations to expand some of their annual programming to the lots such as the harvest fest.

We believe this sort of acquisition and activation can begin to connect the boulevards to emerging green infrastructures in adjacent communities, such as the Englewood Agro-Eco District and the Bronzeville Nature Trail, two projects that IIT’s students and faculty have helped shape.

The lot itself also has the potential to connect to its adjacent residents. In order to gain a sense for what the lot might offer, we are looking forward to holding community input meetings this summer from both residents of Back of the Yards and Englewood.

With that, we are releasing a “Call to Activation.” To the passionate students, designers, and organizers in the city, we ask them to become an activator. To share their skillset with communities that are often overlooked. To become a part of the legacy of thoughtful activators that embrace change, ground their work in context, and bring life to our Chicago boulevards. To help center the edge; areas of neglect have the potential to be transformed into culturally productive spaces through shared interests.

While we can’t ignore traumas and histories that have influenced this infrastructure, we can persevere and create a new process of working with existing fragments. Join the coalition of designers, nonprofits, residents, and institutions that have the ability to break boundaries that are both visible and invisible.

Exhibition photos