“Eternally half-made and half-mad, the Near West Side is Chicago’s private face, a thousand miles distant from its lakefront profile,” writes Vincent Michael in the AIA Guide to Chicago. So varied is this part of the city that the Yo decided to make a day of Tri-Taylor, a pocket of the Near West Side bounded roughly by the Eisenhower Expressway, Roosevelt Road and Western and Damen avenues. Once a port of entry for thousands of new immigrants of all nationalities, the neighborhood is now home to a good chunk of the Medical District.
“Tri-Taylor exists because 20 years ago, if not a little more, the neighborhood had enough gumption to stand up against the Medical Center Commission clearing property right and left,” said William Lavicka, Near West Side resident and founder of Historic Boulevard Services. “They were wanting to clear the whole Tri-Taylor. The Landmarks Preservation Council and a group of residents made them stop doing that and delineate some territories.”
Parts of Tri-Taylor containing more than 300 buildings are designated a National Historic District, and the neighborhood’s 19th-century European-influenced rowhouses along streets like West Bowler have recently been joined by stretches of new condos along Harrison Street (what Lavicka calls “condo row”) and Western Avenue.
A two-story building enscribed with the name DiDiana, the family behind nearby Bacci Pizzeria, is under construction on the 2300 block of West Taylor Street, and there’s a condo building with four duplex units under construction at 512 S Claremont Ave.
We spotted several new condo buildings concentrated around the intersection of Western and Taylor, including Alliant Properties’ The Village at Tri-Taylor, an eight-unit development under construction at 900 S Western Ave.
“Along Western,” Lavicka says, “it was pretty ramshackle before. Twenty years ago it was half vacant lots over there, and sometimes one says any development is better than no development. Sometimes that’s true and sometimes not.”
