Yo’s truly escaped the wintry weather on Saturday by diving into the Chicago Architecture Foundation, 224 S Michigan Ave, which is staging a small exhibition titled Learning from North Lawndale. The free exhibition closes Nov 18, so if you find yourself nearby this week, I recommend you duck in for a quick look.
What did we learn? Quite a bit, actually. The exhibition touches on the significant people and events that shaped the neighborhood’s, and in some ways, Chicago’s history, ranging from the time Golda Meir spent there as a teenage Zionist activist to Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s efforts to improve the quality of Chicago housing for African Americans, drawing attention to the cause by moving into and sprucing up a North Lawndale tenement.
The exhibition, which is being staged in the building’s Atrium Gallery, also looks at the campaign to preserve and restore the neighborhood’s charming stock of greystones. It mentions local community leaders’ succesful legal battle to stop real estate agents’ predatory lending practises to African Americans who could not obtain conventional mortgages from banks.