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It’s the 1910s, and children shriek as they whirl around the White City amusement park’s coaster track. It’s the 1950s, and jazz is spilling out of the 411 Club east of South Parkway. It’s the 2010s, and the ringing of jackhammers heralds the construction of a Whole Foods market in Englewood.

In this issue, Exposition Magazine’s second collaboration with Chicago Studies, we share with you glimpses of 63rd Street. 63rd Street—more than nearly any other street in Chicago—has seen incredible physical, social, and economic change over the past century. Neighborhoods along the street that developed out of rural farming communities (like Woodlawn) or railroad towns (like Englewood) became desirable suburbs by the late nineteenth century. The next hundred years would see 63rd Street become one of the most successful commercial corridors outside of the Loop, a laboratory for Black self-determination, and a microcosm of many of Chicago’s most pressing contemporary issues.

Starting in the 1930s, 63rd Street became the southern boundary of Chicago’s expanding Black Belt and the focus of subsequent panic over real estate values. After the end of racially restrictive housing covenants in 1948, Black Chicagoans began moving east into neighborhoods from which they had previously been barred. One of these neighborhoods was Woodlawn. The immigration of Black Chicagoans to Woodlawn, abetted by the rapid development of the suburbs, sparked what we now call “white flight.” By the end of the 1950s, the neighborhood had gone from 85 percent white to 85 percent Black. For the University of Chicago, situated a few blocks north of Woodlawn, this racial change—accompanied by drastically depreciated property values—inspired panic. Various proposals by the University sought to raze everything between 63rd Street and the Midway Plaisance for the construction of a grand South Campus or to replace 61st Street with an extension of Lake Shore Drive in order to separate Woodlawn from Hyde Park. Neither of these plans came to fruition thanks to the efforts of one of Chicago’s most storied community organizations: The Woodlawn Organization, or TWO.

Founded by an alliance of pastors and community leaders, led by Bishop Arthur Brazier, and supported by famed community organizer Saul Alinsky, TWO was largely made up of Black Woodlawn residents who were able to combat both University and municipal power. The group’s organizing efforts pushed the University to agree not to build south of 61st Street in exchange for the construction of South Campus. TWO also started a job training program with members of the Blackstone Rangers street gang, which garnered hostility from the Chicago police but was instrumental in keeping Woodlawn relatively peaceful throughout Chicago’s 1967 and 1968 riots. This program, however, like other TWO initiatives in the second half of the twentieth century, became mired in controversy and collapsed after a federal investigation into the mismanagement of grant money. These stories are well-covered in John Hall Fish’s Black Power/ White Control: The Struggle of the Woodlawn Organization in Chicago, which was referenced extensively throughout the Century on 63rd Street research process. In subsequent years, the group also built or rehabilitated more than 2,000 homes and apartments, created a mental health clinic and grocery story, and—in a move that would have lasting ramifications for the neighborhood—pushed for the demolition of the east end of the Green Line in the 1990s, which had once extended all the way to Jackson Park. Although TWO itself disbanded in the early 2010s, Bishop Brazier’s Apostolic Church of God (now pastored by his son and grandson) continues to be a major force in shaping the neighborhood’s future, and was instrumental in bringing the Obama Presidential Center to Woodlawn.

Despite the efforts of TWO and its successors, the neighborhood continued to suffer from declining real estate values, exacerbated by a rash of arson cases in the 1970s and 80s. In 2017, the City of Chicago estimated that roughly 37% of the housing units and 10% of the land in Woodlawn sat vacant. However, the recent arrival of the Obama Presidential Center has created seismic shifts. The announcement of the project in 2016 immediately accelerated housing renovation and construction but also sparked new battles over the city’s inequitable distribution of affordable housing and feared rent hikes. A street defined by transformation is changing once again.

There is no simple story of 63rd Street, but rather a complex mosaic of people, places, and processes. This street best lends itself to a series of microhistories, to human-scale narratives that trace the ups and downs of everyday life in this most-fascinating part of Chicago. Victories, losses, changes, and continuities characterize every decade of the last century, a few of which are explored in these pages.

We invite you to explore the many facets of 63rd Street, from its days of grand trade expositions, to its era as an entertainment mecca, to its struggle with real estate values and empty lots. Through these fragments, we hope you can catch a glimpse of the whole. Welcome to a Century on 63rd Street.