Rosenwald Court Apartments | |
Location | 47th Street and Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois |
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Coordinates | 41°48′36″N87°37′25″W / 41.81000°N 87.62361°W |
Area | 4 acres (1.6 ha) |
Built | 1929 [1] |
NRHP reference No. | 81000218 [2] |
Added to NRHP | August 13, 1981 |
Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments | |
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General information | |
Location | Bounded by 46th and 47th Street and Michigan and Wabash Avenues Chicago, Illinois, United States |
Status | Occupied |
Construction | |
Constructed | 1929-1930; renovated 2015-2016 |
Other information | |
Famous residents | Gwendolyn Brooks Nat King Cole Joe Louis Quincy Jones [3] |
Rosenwald Court Apartments (also known as Rosenwald Courts or the Rosenwald Apartments; formerly known as Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments) is a large apartment building located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. It is located at East 47th Street and South Michigan Avenue, just one block east of the former Chicago Housing Authority's Robert Taylor Homes site. In total, the building is made up of 421 apartments, a large landscaped courtyard, and retail space at street level. It was originally built as non-governmental subsidized housing and is considered to be among the earliest mixed-use housing developments.
The building was constructed in 1929 by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, then president of Sears, Roebuck & Company. The housing project was modeled after the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem, New York City, built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1926. [4]
In 1981, the Rosenwald Apartment Building received National Register of Historic Places designation. [3]
The last residents moved out in 2000, after mismanagement and lack of upkeep made the site uninhabitable.
In 2010, filming for the 2011 film Transformers: Dark of the Moon was done on site. In the movie, the apartments doubled as part of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine. [5]
In 2015, a complete renovation of the building and courtyard, which had been added to the National Register of Historic Places, began. The intention was to create a mixture of senior citizen apartments and affordable housing for families. [6] [7]
The rebuilding and landscaping was completed in 2016, and the site reopened to the public as Rosenwald Courts. [8]
Julius Rosenwald was an American businessman and philanthropist. He is best known as a part-owner and leader of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and for establishing the Rosenwald Fund, which donated millions in matching funds to promote vocational or technical education. In 1919 he was appointed to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. He was also the principal founder and backer for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, to which he gave more than $5 million and served as president from 1927 to 1932.
The Dunbar Apartments, also known as the Paul Laurence Dunbar Garden Apartments or Dunbar Garden Apartments, is a complex of buildings located on West 149th and West 150th Streets between Frederick Douglass Boulevard/Macombs Place and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. They were built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. from 1926 to 1928 to provide housing for African Americans, and was the first large cooperative aimed at that demographic. The buildings were designed by architect Andrew J. Thomas and were named in honor of the noted African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.
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The Arlington Village Historic District is a national historic district located at Arlington County, Virginia. It contains 657 contributing buildings in a residential neighborhood in South Arlington. The area was constructed in 1939, and is a planned garden apartment community that incorporates recreational areas, open spaces, a swimming pool and courtyards within five superblocks. It also includes a shopping center consisting of six stores. The garden apartments are presented as two-story, brick rowhouses with Colonial Revival detailing. There are three building types distinguished by the roof form: flat, gambrel, or gable. Arlington Village was the first large-scale rental project in Arlington County and the first Federal Housing Administration-insured garden apartment development. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
The Pilgrim and Puritan Apartment Complex is a historic apartment building located at 9303–9333 East Jefferson Avenue in Detroit, Michigan. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. It is a large and intact example of a courtyard style of apartment building complex, not found elsewhere on East Jefferson Avenue. The Pilgrim and Puritan provided housing for Detroit's growing professional and middle-class during a time when the surrounding area was being developed with luxury apartment buildings.
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