NORTH LAWNDALE Compiled by Martha Bayne, Neighborhood Captain
AFRICAN HERITAGE GARDEN AT 1245 S. CENTRAL PARK AVE. PHOTO BY SARAH JOYCE
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any residents of the North Lawndale community area don't call it that. To them, it's simply Lawndale, the neighborhood's original name. Blanche Killingsworth is a product of Lawndale. She came to the neighborhood from the South in 1962 and has lived there ever since. She currently serves as the chair of the North Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society. Killingsworth wants the world to know about Lawndale's rich and storied past. "I talk about North Lawndale everywhere I go," she said. The Central Park Theater on West Roosevelt Road, for example, was the first of the over fifty theaters in the Balaban and Katz Theater Corporation chain. It was designed by Chicago architectural firm Rapp and Rapp in the Spanish Revival style: a palace of red brick and terra cotta, with forest green roof tiles. The theater opened its doors in the fall of 1917, reportedly the first in the country with mechanical air conditioning. In its heyday, the Central Park Theater buzzed with the latest in music and film. "Benny Goodman debuted there. Dinah Washington sang there," Killingsworth said. But it fell into disrepair and shut down in 1969; the House of Prayer—Church of God in Christ took over the building in 1971 and began restoring the building to its former 60 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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glory. This year, the Central Park Theater was featured in the Chicago Architecture Center's Open House Chicago virtual tour. "Cornelius Coffey, the first African American aviator? North Lawndale. Hyman Rickover, the godfather of nuclear submarines? North Lawndale." Killingsworth chuckled, "Yeah, we've got a little history going on that I intend to tell the world about. Today, around 34,000 Chicagoans, eighty-eight percent of whom are Black, live in Lawndale. But between 1890 and 1910, it was primarily a Czechoslovakian community. By the 1920s, it had become home to a large Jewish population. In an interview with the Weekly, Killingsworth said that, at one point, the neighborhood had the most synagogues of any place in the city. Chicago's most famous Jewish commercial street at the time was Roosevelt Road. But white residents left in droves due to racist fear-mongering about precipitous declines in home values as more and more Black families from the South Side and southern states moved to the neighborhood. White flight flipped the neighborhood from white to Black in a decade. According to the Steans Family Foundation, the 87,000 white residents in Lawndale in 1950 dropped to less than 11,000 by 1960, while the Black population grew from 13,000 to more than 113,000.
