This being Chicago, you’d figure that developers would have closed in on the wide open spaces of the tuberculosis sanatorium known as North Park Village as soon as it closed down in 1974. The bulldozers would have followed, plowing over flowers, uprooting trees, and ravaging greenery to make way for ugly high rises, tacky convenience stores, and concrete parking lots.
“The community won because they persevered,” says Ramon Muniz, the outgoing assistant deputy commissioner of the Department of General Services who pushed for the agreement despite opposition from city lawyers. “I’m a Chicago kid. Green grass is something I can appreciate because there wasn’t much of it in the neighborhoods I grew up in. This was an instance when the city decided it was more important to preserve our assets than to sell them off. The big payoff will be for future generations.”
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The sanatorium–whose grounds were bounded on the north and south by Peterson and Bryn Mawr avenues, and on the west and east by Pulaski Road and Central Park Avenue–was built in 1907. Fresh air, healthy food, and clean, uncongested environs were the standard treatment then for tuberculosis, before the advent of such drugs as isoniazid and rifampin. Built and operated with public monies on public land, the sanatorium was a fence-enclosed outpost on the as-yet-undeveloped northwest side, far removed from the filth and congestion of the inner city, through which TB swept at the turn of the century.
The residents worried that traffic from the mall would undercut the value of their property, and also that their neighborhood would lose a treasured landmark. The brick buildings that made up the Village–including two dormitories, a dining hall, a nondenominational chapel, and a theater–are of a classic turn-of-the-century design.
In 1982, the council got wind of a plan–hatched by the mayor’s office–to sell the land for development. Unbeknownst to them, meetings on the proposal had been scheduled by the Plan Commission. “We found out about it because one of our members saw a legal notice on the meeting in one of the papers,” says Fredrickson.
The residents and Open Lands remained determined to preserve as much of the land as possible–which was proving to be a difficult task. Over the years some vacant land in the Village had been lost incrementally to development. Added to the Village were a school built by the Board of Education, a Health Department facility, a 240-unit apartment building for low-income senior citizens, and Peterson Park, a sprawling recreational area complete with softball diamonds and tennis and basketball courts.
“Some of the people in our group didn’t like that compromise,” says Fredrickson. “They didn’t want to see any of the land developed. But there have been restrictions on the development; they can’t put a convenience store in or something like that. So most of us are satisfied.”
