In the good old days they came by bus, train, or trolley to shop in the stores in the Lincoln-Belmont-Ashland business district. “You’d get dressed up to go shopping; it was a big thing,” says Anne LaFleur, a longtime resident of Lakeview. “You could buy fancy dresses and nice shoes; we’d go on weekends. It was special.”
“The average price of a home in Lakeview has gone up 268 percent in the last ten years,” says Hansen, who also sells real estate in the area. “A brick two-flat goes from anywhere between $190,000 to $275,000. I’m selling a house on Wellington that’s going for $2.6 million. Generally speaking the economy may be bad, but Lakeview’s still strong.”
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But there might be another reason people with cars don’t frequent the district: its stores. Lincoln-Belmont-Ashland’s busiest businesses are discount-clothing and shoe stores, whose customers live in the less affluent area west of Ashland Avenue. Even these stores are feeling the pinch of competition from malls and shopping strips.
The more recent resurrection along Southport just north of Addison is similar to that on Halsted–a commercial strip lined with coffee shops, restaurants, and clothing stores.
“They came in here and said they were going to fix up the neighborhood, but the building is in worse shape than ever,” says Michele Kunze, who owns the Signery, a local sign-making business. “It’s got graffiti and boarded-up windows and it just makes the neighborhood look bad. The least they could do is take care of their property.” (JMB officials could not be reached for comment.)
But the city is sending mixed signals about its intentions for the area by proposing to sell six nearby parking lots, many of which are underused and filled with weeds–just far enough away from most of the area’s businesses that most people don’t know they’re there, say merchants. “I’m not sure that selling the parking lots is a good idea,” says Haderlein. “Maybe we should be putting more parking in instead of taking it out.”
