Urban Renewal and the Removal of Odgen Avenue

For a brief 40 year period Odgen Avenue ended at the intersection of Armitage and Clark. The above highrise sits on land that was once the street. Today Odgen Avenue pretty much ends at Chicago and Milwaukee, thou it does stretch north to Chestnut.

I plan this to be a multi-day piece in which I cover the walk I did this morning. Most of this information comes from Forgotten Chicago's webiste. I followed the route of a walk they hosted in August of 2008. They've just recently posted the details of the walk on their website.

I started the walk at the site of were I took the above picture, on the grounds of the Chicago Zoology Society. I Crossed through this site and walked along the Odgen Mall, pictured below.

Odgen Mall, was the only retail that was developed along what was once Odgen Avenue. You can see that it is quite quiet! So why did they get rid of Odgen Avenue? Well the Lincoln Park neighboorhood was one of the first to go through what we now call gentrification and it happened in Lincoln Park during the 1960's. Odgen was extended from Chicago Avenue in the mid 1920's with the idea people would use it to get to the Lakefront. There was two problems with the exectution of that plan. First, Lake Shore Drive was extended one year later than Odgen Avenue but no attempt was made to link the two together. Secondly when the expressway's were build, Odgen was not really provided any service as an on ramp. These shortfalls caused Odgen with much lighter traffic loads than the six lane road needed.

By the late 1960's it the road was in poor shape and the NIMBYS in Lincoln Park wanted the road truncated, so in 1967 the street was cut back to North Avenue.

This concludes part one of this walking tour.