W E D N E S D A Y
August 17, 2016 Vol. 34, No. XX ONE DOLLAR
JOURNAL of Oak Park and River Forest
OPRF Housing Center Special pullout section
@O @OakPark
Whiteco apartment building sold again, this time for $68M
Photo by Bernard J. Kleina
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. marches from a rally at Soldier Field in 1966. The rally was one among a series of demonstrations in Chicago that year designed to protest the city’s segregated housing system. The idea that King and other activists would rally around the issue of housing was, in part, due to the work of activist Bill Moyer in Oak Park.
Oak Park: King’s northern dream?
The legacy of the Chicago Freedom Movement By MICHAEL ROMAIN Staff Reporter
This year, there have been ceremonies throughout Chicago commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Chicago Freedom Movement — the strategic alliance launched in January 1966 between Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and a
broad coalition of local activists called the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO). Earlier this month, there was a ribboncutting for a memorial in Marquette Park, where King and hundreds of others marched in August 1966. They were pelted with rocks and spat upon while attempting to raise awareness about the city’s racism — which, through numerous discriminatory real estate practices, relegated blacks to substandard housing and squalid living conditions in ghettos on the city’s West and South sides.
Fifty years after the movement launched, Marquette Park is a very different place, but not in the way King may have envisioned. The area surrounding the park is roughly equal halves black and Hispanic, and less than 5 percent white. Most of the city’s all-black areas — such as the North Lawndale community where King famously moved into a slum apartment in January 1966 to put a spotlight on urban blight — remain impoverished. If any place deserves a monument to
Sale is likely the biggest property transfer in Oak Park history By TIMOTHY INKLEBARGER Staff Reporter
The so-called Whiteco building, named after the development company that built the structure in 2008 and now known as Oak Park Place, has been sold to a Canadian financial services company for $68 million. Known as the home of the local Trader Joe’s and for extended controversy over its size and design during a long public-approval process, the recent sale suggests the strength of the Oak Park market for new apartment construction. The building’s previous owner was the $43 billion Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System, which covers state employees, as well as those in higher education and public school teachers. According to public records, the 204-unit apartment building at 479 N. Harlem was sold to the pension fund in October 2012 for $62.8 million.
See KING on page 13
See WHITECO on page 15
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