Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments

Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments (also known as the Rosenwald Apartments or Rosenwald Courts) is a large apartment building located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. It is located at East 47th Street and South Michigan Avenue, just one block east of the former Chicago Housing Authority's Robert Taylor Homes site. In total, the building is made up of 421 apartments, a large landscaped courtyard, and retail space at street level. It was originally built as non-governmental subsidized housing and is considered to be among the earliest mixed-use housing developments.

Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments / Rosenwald Courts
A 2012 photograph viewed from 47th Street and Wabash Avenue
Location47th Street and Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois
Coordinates41°48′36″N 87°37′25″W
Area4 acres (1.6 ha)
Built1929[1]
NRHP reference No.81000218[2]
Added to NRHPAugust 13, 1981
Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments
A 2012 photograph viewed from 47th Street and Michigan Avenue.
General information
LocationBounded by 46th and 47th Street and Michigan and Wabash Avenues
Chicago, Illinois,
 United States
StatusOccupied
Construction
Constructed1929-1930; renovated 2015-2016
Other information
Famous
residents		Gwendolyn Brooks
Nat King Cole
Joe Louis
Quincy Jones[3]

History

The building was constructed in 1929 by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, then president of Sears, Roebuck & Company. The housing project was modeled after the Dunbar Apartments built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in 1926 in Harlem, New York City.[4]

In 1981, Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments received National Register of Historic Places designation.[5]

The last residents moved out in 2000, after mismanagement and lack of upkeep made the site uninhabitable.

In 2010, filming for the 2011 film Transformers: Dark of the Moon was done on site. In the movie, the apartments doubled as part of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine.[6]

In 2015, a complete renovation of the building and courtyard, which had been added to the National Register of Historic Places, began. The intention was to create a mixture of senior citizen apartments and affordable housing for families.[7][8]

The rebuilding and landscaping was completed in 2016, and the site reopened to the public as Rosenwald Courts. [9]

See also

References
  1. Gilbert J. Cataldo. "Rosenwald Apartment Building - Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments Nomination Form". Retrieved 2013-10-30.
  2. "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. March 13, 2009.
  3. PRESERVATION CHICAGO Chicago’s Seven Most Threatened Buildings
  4. Devereux Bowly, Jr. "Subsidized Housing". The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago. Retrieved 23 September 2009.
  5. "Rosenwald(Michigan Boulevard Garden) Apartments" (PDF). Chicago’s Seven Most Threatened Buildings. Preservation Chicago. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 September 2009. Retrieved 24 September 2009.
  6. "'Transformers' Back in Chicago". ABC 7 Local. ABC 7 Local. 26 July 2010. Retrieved 2 August 2011.
  7. "ROSENWALD APARTMENTS RENOVATION BEGINS IN BRONZEVILLE". ABC 7. February 18, 2015. Retrieved 9 April 2015.
  8. Work set to start on $109-million rehab of Rosenwald apartments Archived 2015-10-01 at the Wayback Machine, Sam Cholke, DNAInfo, January 7, 2015
  9. Official timeline of the site's history
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