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News
Home of Chicago Rail Cars Set to Undergo Renovation
By ROBERT SHAROFF
Published: March 20, 2012
CHICAGO — At its peak, the town of Pullman housed upward of 12,000 people in a parklike setting 12 miles south of downtown Chicago. They worked at the Pullman Palace Car Company, and spent their time and money in housing, schools, churches and stores built just for them by George Pullman, the company’s founder and one of the world’s wealthiest men. Pullman, which was built over a four-year period starting in 1880, was one of the first built-from-scratch industrial cities in America. But the town’s fate was sealed just a few years later by the recession of 1894. Pullman simultaneously slashed wages but declined to lower workers’ rents. The result was a bloody two-month strike led by Eugene V. Debs of the American Railway Union that led to the deaths of several workers. In the aftermath, the state ordered the company to sell off its residential holdings. Pullman himself died in 1897.
In the decades that followed, Pullman became just another South Side neighborhood, albeit one with a distinctive look and feel. (The area is both a National Historic Landmark as well as a Chicago Landmark District.) The Pullman company remained the area’s largest employer before finally closing its neighborhood factory in the 1950s.
By the early 2000s the area was struggling. “A lot of the industrial companies that used to be here left, and the area started to go down,” said Anthony Beale, the alderman for the Ninth Ward, which includes Pullman.
Now, a series of projects and initiatives by various state agencies and nonprofit groups is raising hopes that the neighborhood may be on the brink. read more.
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Community Report
The Community Report is designed to allow for regular project updates while giving residents an evaluation on the status of the commitments we have made to the community. Monthly we will issue via CNI’s website the following Community Report:
Pullman Park, Community Report |
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Events
HUD touts Pullman redevelopment
Department Secretary Shaun Donovan tours Pullman Wheelworks Apartments, a complex undergoing a transformation alongside the neighborhood
Standing in a community room on Chicago's Far South Side on Tuesday, Shaun Donovan, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, promised to return to cut the ribbon when the renovation of Pullman Wheelworks Apartments is compete.
The makeover under way at the 210-unit rental complex, four years in the making, Donovan said, is a national model for subsidized housing — and for neighborhoods.
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