By Ben Joravsky
If there are a few doubters (“Luddites,” the project’s backers call them), they’re old-timers who remember what the stretch of Howard between Clark and Sheridan was like in the good old days. The dividing line between Chicago and Evanston, it was the quintessential neighborhood business strip in the 60s and early 70s, one of many that flourished in the days before highways, cars, and suburban malls strangled the city.
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The area started to falter in the late 70s. Many of the shops and services closed, as did the bowling alley and movie theater. The bank stayed, but the insurance company moved to the suburbs, and the Gold Coin changed hands and names several times. The vast parking lot behind the insurance company soon filled with broken glass, abandoned cars, and piles of junk. In the last few years the local papers have occasionally run gloomy letters to the editors bemoaning the decline and predicting that it was only a matter of time before Howard Street, like all of Rogers Park, became just another inner-city slum.
But the ground-breaking ceremony is scheduled for July 31, and Dominick’s and the movie theaters should be operating by the fall of 1998. By then the CTA may even have completed its Howard Street-station redevelopment. Within a year the block from Clark to the el will be free of the mid-rises, as the insurance company building, the bank, and the Pivot Point building will all be demolished. The developers want to clear the land, so drivers heading south from Evanston will have an unobstructed view of the new Dominick’s.
