The Rosenwald: A City Within a City

In nineteen twenty-nine, Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, built something unusual in Bronzeville on Chicago's South Side. He covered an entire city block with a five-story Art Moderne apartment complex wrapped around a two-acre courtyard, designed to provide safe, affordable housing for the Black families pouring into Chicago during the Great Migration. Redlining and restrictive covenants had locked those families out of most of the city's neighborhoods, and Rosenwald saw the gap.

Residents called the complex the Rosenwald, and for decades it was a self-contained community of working families, shops, and storefronts. Notable residents included musicians, educators, and community leaders. The complex fell into disrepair in the latter half of the twentieth century and was abandoned around the year two thousand.

A major restoration completed in twenty sixteen brought it back as mixed-income housing, honored by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.