April 16--In the two months since President Barack Obama named the Pullman factory district the city's first national monument, Chicagoans have been left to ponder what that designation will mean.
Starting Thursday, the public will have an opportunity to learn more from urban planning and design experts about what could lie ahead for the Far South Side neighborhood. Residents will also be able to contribute their ideas during two public meetings held by the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the National Parks Conservation Association, an organization that independently advocates for the preservation and expansion of national parks.
"People have been asking, 'So, what's next for Pullman? What's this place going to look like?'" said Lynn McClure, the association's Midwest regional director. "Those are the kind of questions we want to tackle."
The group will host a three-day "collaborative ideas workshop," in which teams of volunteer urban planners, architects, landscape architects, engineers, economists and historians will contribute ideas and draw up design concepts to help guide development of the Pullman National Monument.
About 40 members of the group will be divided into teams and assigned to categories including access and connections, historic preservation and adaptive reuse, community development and visitor experience.
Richard Wilson, an urban planner who has had a hand in designing Chicago's Riverwalk and expanding Beijing's central business district, will be among those offering expertise, McClure said. Representatives from the National Park Service, Chicago Department of Transportation, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, are expected to attend as well.
The teams will hold a community meeting from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday in Greenstone United Methodist Church at 11211 S. St. Lawrence Ave. They will be sequestered Friday to work on concepts and presentations, which will be unveiled from noon to 3 p.m. Saturday in the north wing of the factory building.
"At the end of the day, we will not have a binder report or a Word document that just sits on a shelf," McClure said.
One of the hottest topics will be transportation, both to the site from the Loop and within the roughly milelong area, which is bounded by 103rd Street to the north, 115th Street to the south, Cottage Grove Avenue to the west and the Norfolk Western rail line to the east. Pullman isn't accessible by CTA rapid-transit service, though the Metra Electric District line runs from Millennium Station in the Loop to the site at 111th Street and Cottage Grove. However, the platform is a flag stop, meaning it's a station where trains stop only if signaled to do so.
Parking is expected to be another talking point as planners want to avoid overflow from the modest parking lot near South Cottage Grove, which could create competition between residents and visitors, McClure said.
McClure said it generally takes the National Park Service a year to make a budget and put together a team. That could be expedited, McClure said, as Pullman already has a full-time staff assisted by Park Service staff from the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
The Pullman neighborhood owes its namesake to railroad tycoon George Pullman, who created a company town in the late 1800s, where the sleeper cars bearing his name were built, and an army of laborers lived in the ornate homes nearby. The company was one of the few, at the time, to hire African-Americans -- many of the men had been former domestic slaves in the South -- to be car porters. When economic conditions suffered, Pullman reduced wages 25 percent, prompting his employees to walk off the job in the Pullman Strike of 1894.
The company's porters founded the first African-American union, which is credited with being a launching pad for the civil rights movement.
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tbriscoe@tribpub.com
