Longtime Hyde Park realtor and community activist Winston Kennedy died on Sunday, February 1. This loss comes close on the heels of the passing of Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf and Dr. Lawrence Hawkins (for whom the memorial service on Saturday at Rockefeller Chapel was standing room only).
Win Kennedy seemed to have his hand in every important change in Hyde Park that involved our social life. He worked in the University's real estate office during urban renewal, chaired both the former Hyde Park YMCA and the Blue Gargoyle and was active on the board of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, the Hyde Park Historical Society and the Hyde Park Co-op. Lately, affordable housing had become a big interest for him. He also had a day job: Century 21 Kennedy, Ryan, Monigal and Associates, which was sold to Jeanne Spurlock in 1998.
"He was an intuitive adviser in how the community was going to be shaped," Spurlock said.
Well, that's one way of putting it. Another would be that Hyde Park bears his mark. He's a fine example of someone who agreed with the consensus values of our community and then set about executing them. I'm sure even he would agree that not everything proceeded as intended. Kennedy backed the Co-op's expansion onto 47th Street, the single most important decision leading to the organization's downfall. I will say this for Kennedy and Billy Gerstein-- they both admitted their part in that debacle and tried to help the Co-op stay going while others walked away.
Kennedy also played a large role in urban renewal, although he gets points from me for saving the Art Deco building which otherwise might have been razed. And that's where he located his firm.
Mistakes were made, too, he admitted. “There was a clearing of Hyde Park, maybe to much.” The federally-funded Urban Renewal project of the 1950s and 60s converted much of the neighborhood’s retail environment to new housing, especially townhomes and condominium developments that Kennedy said catered especially to homeowners affiliated with the University of Chicago who wanted to live near work.
Before Urban Renewal, Kennedy said there was very little code enforcement in the area and the housing stock deteriorated. Kennedy was manager of the university’s commercial real estate department from 1956 to 1967, when Urban Renewal was at its peak. During that time the university created the South East Chicago Commission [sic-SECC was in its heyday then, but was created in 1952] to enforce codes and track crime in Hyde Park.
Kennedy credited the creation of the SECC—as well as the university’s decision in 1952 to stay in the neighborhood and not to move to the suburbs—with improving the area’s real estate market.
The change was gradual “The financial community had written off the South Side and Hyde Park,” Kennedy said. He said banks often would not give mortgages to Hyde Park homeowners. “It was partly a racial thing,” he said.
Kennedy understates this. It was entirely a racial thing. From the Depression until the late sixties, redlining made investment in inner cities very difficult. For a couple decades after the federal government set up a program to back home loans, neighborhoods with significant percentages of racial minorities were considered bad credit risks and redlined out of federally-backed investment. Because people in the neighborhoods could not get credit, the housing went to shambles, thus "proving" to bankers that redlining was wise. Even after the federal government stopped, private banks continued to redline until legislation outlawed the practice during the seventies. Redlining not only discriminated against African-Americans, of course, but also Caucasians living among them, hence exacerbating segregation. People like Kennedy who chose to live in an integrated community and fight these prejudices are heroes to me.
I fully intended to chat with him about the Co-op and urban renewal, but I missed my chance. Stupid me.
I think urban renewal was basically motivated by racial fears, but along with demolishing one-third of Hyde Park's rental housing, a pretty significant community of working-class whites was also moved out.
On Win Kennedy: when the Hyde Park Tenants Coalition in 1981 put out a Rehab Covenant to set standards for tenant protection during housing rehab projects, Kennedy was the only Hyde Park developer to sign it.
Posted by: curtis | Tuesday, 10 February 2009 at 11:09
You're right about the removal of working class housing primarily occupied by whites. But even that was motivated by race. The thinking was that that inexpensive housing would lure too many African-Americans (and the wrong "type" of African-Americans) into Hyde Park.
Win Kennedy always seemed to have the best of intentions. He strikes me as someone with a very generous heart. Sometimes, there were execution failures and sometimes he was overly optimistic.
The notion that Kennedy suggests above-- that urban renewal created new housing-- is a bit ridiculous considering that so much more housing was demolished, so HP ended up losing about 15K in population.
In any case, race was the biggest issue for most of Kennedy's adult life and he was pretty darned good on that issue. The stuff he was wrong about seems very forgivable to me.
Posted by: withrow | Tuesday, 10 February 2009 at 12:24