Last night was Late Night with Conan O’Brien‘s first show at the Chicago Theatre. To explore the Windy City, Conan enlisted Chicago native and fashion plate Mr. T to be his tour guide. In the segment, T picked Conan up in the Loop, ostensibly to show him around Chicago’s well-known landmarks. Instead, T whisked the talk show host about six miles south of the Loop to an empty field in Bronzeville where The Robert Taylor Homes once stood.
The former A-Team star grew up in the Chicago Housing Authority project, which has been razed to make way for Legends South, a 2,388-unit mixed-income development that we’ve been talking about lately.
Mr. T said his old stomping grounds had changed quite a bit since he grew up there. The Robert Taylor Homes, the largest public housing development in the world when it was completed in the early ’60s, once housed 4,300 units of public housing in 28 16-story buildings.
As Legends South breaks the old mold by combining public housing with affordable and market-rate units, perhaps Mr. T will make a move back to the old ‘hood. The neighborhood still faces challenges, but on the upside, there aren’t too many pesky trees to rouse T’s famous allergies.