South Side

Documenting life in Chicago's South Side through photographs and moving images, through oral histories and found ephemera.

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Robert Taylor Homes - Chicago Robert Taylor Homes was a public housing project in Bronzeville on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, bordered along State Street between Pershing Road (39th Street) and 54th Street alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway. The project was named for Robert Rochon Taylor, an African-American activist and the first African American chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). It was a part of the State Street Corridor which included other CHA housing projects: Stateway Gardens, Harold Ickes Homes, Dearborn Homes and Hillard Homes. Today everything but the Dearborn and the Hilliard Homes have been demolished in the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation.
Mariah Driver plays Hide and Seek with her sisters outside her house on S. Chicago St. in Chicago's Pocket Town neighborhood. The family has since moved to the Englewood neighborhoodand the house, which was in decrepit condition, has been demolished to make way for new development by the Comer Foundation. This is a story about place. Pockettown, or “the Pocket,” is a tight-knit African-American neighborhood in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. In 2001, Gary Comer, founder of Lands’ End and a Pockettown native, asked me to teach photography at Paul Revere Elementary School and to document life in the neighborhood. A Revere alumnus, Comer was providing substantial resources through his foundation to his alma mater and childhood community, which had shifted from a white ethnic area to a predominately black neighborhood. I agreed. In January 2002 I began working at Revere and in the community. For the first 18 months I photographed primarily within the school. But I felt that my role needed to be more than a photographer, so I also coached basketball and worked on a community newspaper. As I became more known, I started to concentrate on life outside the school. Since 2000 the South Side has seen major changes, including the destruction of many Chicago Housing Authority projects and the continued gentrification of many communities bordering Lake Michigan. As part of documenting life in the Pocket, these photographs attempt to illustrate larger trends of renewal, change and transformation on the city’s South Side. The project also includes audio interviews with neighborhood residents that record their feelings about the changes occurring in their neighborhood. My hope is to stimulate dialogue about inequitable access to education, jobs and housing-in short, about opportunity and the meaning of community. I have few answers to these questions, but I’m not done looking. Before the mid-1950's it was a pr
Uncle Al holds up his niece at Sam Binion’s house on the 7200 block of S. Ellis. The South Side of Chicago’s once proud industrial communities fell onto hard times during the 1970s and 1980s, changing from thriving working class communities to places far removed from local and federal resources, rife with unemployment, poverty, drugs and gang violence. Despite this adversity, many residents have held on and guard deep feelings of affection for their communities. More recently, though, another challenge has reared its head. Residents in each of these communities face the very real possibility of being displaced from the communities they love because they can no longer afford to live there.
Fans of Yung Jock scream and tossle for attention for the well known rapper as he rode by on the WGCI Radio Station's float in the annual Bud Billiken Parade in 2006. What began as the wish of Chicago Defender's founder Robert S. Abbott to organize the many youth who sold the newspaper, mushroomed into what is now the largest parade in the United States. The first Bud Billiken® Parade and Picnic was held August 11, 1929. The parade route ran from 31st and Michigan Boulevard to Washington Park. In the mid-30's the city rerouted the parade to South Parkway because its Michigan route tied up traffic as it went east into Washington Park. Around 1947, it was rerouted back to Michigan due to street repairs on South Parkway. After the street repairs the Bud Billiken® Parade and Picnic returned to South Parkway and has remained there ever since. South Parkway, now named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, runs through the African American neighborhood on the City's Southside. Since the Bud Billiken® Parade and Picnic began, more than 50 million children and their fSaturday in August a day of community and celebration of African American togetherness and just plain fun.The South Side of Chicago’s once proud industrial communities fell onto hard times during the 1970s and 1980s, changing from thriving working class communities to places far removed from local and federal resources, rife with unemployment, poverty, drugs and gang violence. Despite this adversity, many residents have held on and guard deep feelings of affection for their communities. More recently, though, another challenge has reared its head. Residents in each of these communities face the very real possibility of being displaced from the communities they love because they can no longer afford to live there. amilies have made the second The South Side of Chicago’s once proud industrial communities fell onto hard times during the 1970s and 1980s, changing from thriving working class communities to
Vacant lot at the corner of 71st and Ingleside. The vacant lot now houses a building by the Comer Foundation. The South Side of Chicago’s once proud industrial communities fell onto hard times during the 1970s and 1980s, changing from thriving working class communities to places far removed from local and federal resources, rife with unemployment, poverty, drugs and gang violence. Despite this adversity, many residents have held on and guard deep feelings of affection for their communities. More recently, though, another challenge has reared its head. Residents in each of these communities face the very real possibility of being displaced from the communities they love because they can no longer afford to live there.
View looking Northwest from 73rd St. in the South Shore neighborhood. The South Shore neighborhood was one of the wealthier and more prosperous neighborhoods that at one time had a thriving Jewish population. By the early 1980's it was almost entirely African-American and today the number of whites are less than 1,000, according to the year 2000 Census.The South Side of Chicago’s once proud industrial communities fell onto hard times during the 1970s and 1980s, changing from thriving working class communities to places far removed from local and federal resources, rife with unemployment, poverty, drugs and gang violence. Despite this adversity, many residents have held on and guard deep feelings of affection for their communities. More recently, though, another challenge has reared its head. Residents in each of these communities face the very real possibility of being displaced from the communities they love because they can no longer afford to live there.
The South Side of Chicago’s once proud industrial communities fell onto hard times during the 1970s and 1980s, changing from thriving working class communities to places far removed from local and federal resources, rife with unemployment, poverty, drugs and gang violence. Despite this adversity, many residents have held on and guard deep feelings of affection for their communities. More recently, though, another challenge has reared its head. Residents in each of these communities face the very real possibility of being displaced from the communities they love because they can no longer afford to live there.
Janelle McGee, right, poses with her niece Julia Bush in front of their relative's home on Chicago's South Side. In ‘Chi-Raq’ more young people have died in the past five years than in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. There still is not one trauma unit anywhere on the South Side, despite the fact that the city leads the country in the number of homicides, with the majority occurring south of the Loop. As often follows with arrests, incarceration tends to ensue. As a result, more than 100,000 people go through the doors of Chicago’s Cook County Jail each year. However, many of these young men and women are blind to how the city’s methodical and systematic control of land, divides their neighborhoods into war zones. This, results in wars with each other, in a seemingly endless loop of “survival”. Although the violence is consistently reported in the news, to understand what’s at stake we must look far deeper than the latest crime scene. It’s vital that we also show the immense waste of human potential that’s being lost with each violent act. While the violence that has spread to many of Chicago’s most economically depressed neighborhoods is in all ways real, the never ending focus on the violence obscures a larger and far more significant truth: that the wholesale neglect has led to the practical destruction of these communities. The combination of the large scale industrial meltdown, political disinvestment, and the failure of the war on poverty during the 1970’s and 80’s led to communities like Chicago’s South Side falling on extremely hard times. Today, the failure of the war on poverty is clearly evident. The poverty rate for the majority African-Americans stands at 32.6 percent, the highest for the ten largest American cities, according to Chicago Muckrakers. The aftermath is evidenced by failing schools, inadequate public healthcare, mass foreclosures in the form of abandoned and decaying buildings, widespread, but rarely seen hunger
Amanda Jackson consoles Sheena Hancock at the site of her sister Janeen’s murder in Merrill Park in the Jeffrey Manor neighborhood. Two more people were shot and killed in the same incident on that July evening. 2012
A couple re-enacts Michelangelo's Pieta on the steps of a South Side church during a friend's wedding. The couple asked me to come outside and photograph them in this pose.
Brick stackers collect and stack bricks at the site of the Ida B. Wells Homes in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The Ida B. Wells were one of the first large scale housing development on the South Side and were dismantled during the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation. The brick stackers work piece work and are paid by the pallet. The housing development was named after African-American journalist and editor Ida B. Wells.

Jon Lowenstein

Jon Lowenstein specializes in long-term, in-depth documentary explorations that confront the realms of power, poverty, and social vi…

Topics
Social Justice
Sub Topics
Conflict Violence
Regions
United States
Chicago

About South Side

The South Side of Chicago is one of America’s most publicized and least understood places. It is arguably the country’s largest and culturally richest African American community. It is also at the center of Chicago’s current epidemic of gun violence. It is the home of Barack and Michelle Obama, and it is disappearing, with disinvestment and a mass exodus of its population. For the two decades that I’ve made the South Side my home, I’ve documented life there through photographs and moving images, through oral histories and found ephemera. During this time, I have witnessed the systematic and ongoing deconstruction of many South Side’s communities, along with the ensuing struggle by residents there to maintain order. My Project aims to better understand and share with the world the South Side that I know, with all of its complexity and fullness, beauty and resilience.