Sitting on Mary Bordelon’s expansive front porch on Ellis Avenue at 45th Street, you can take in a lot of history. Just across the street and set back among the trees is a frame house built in the mid-1880s; it was the original home of Wallace Heckman, who, as business manager for the infant University of Chicago, acquired much of the land for the campus. Looking north up the 4400 block, you can see a group of two- and three-story Romanesque Revival residences; the one at 4453 S. Ellis was the home of General Charles Bentley, a Civil War hero who served as grand marshal of Chicago’s Memorial Day parades in the late 1890s. Glancing south along the 4500 block of Ellis, you can admire a variety of Queen Anne, classical, and Romanesque styles. The building at 4559 S. Ellis, built in 1893 for Matthew Gottfried, owner of the Gottfried Brewery Company, has an unusual third floor balcony on the front that curves around to face the side street as well.
Bordelon, however, is not a fatalist: she has this conviction that what’s left here can and must be saved, and she’s determined to push, pull, and scream until it happens. In recent years she and her friend and comrade-in-arms, Ruby Harris, have become the unpaid, unappointed gadflies of the community: two people so passionate in their beliefs they take on everybody–urban planners, city officials, private developers, timid residents, community organizers. No one is immune from their opinions and their wrath. They want redevelopment, but not at the expense of the current residents and not at the expense of Kenwood’s history.
The division of the Kenwoods did not happen by accident; it was decreed in the 1950s when the University of Chicago, with the cooperation of city and federal agencies, formed a protective barrier around itself against the encroaching black ghetto. The northern edge of that buffer was 47th Street. Since then the boundary has achieved the stature of an inviolable line of demarcation. The south half of Kenwood was associated thereafter with Hyde Park and partook of that community’s status. Written off by the university, North Kenwood was similarly written off by urban developers and lending institutions, even historians.
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The land that became Kenwood was part of a large area along the lake acquired by the United States from Native Americans in the Black Hawk treaty of 1833. When parcels were offered for sale to the public, there were no immediate takers. The first permanent settler didn’t arrive until 1856. He was Dr. John Kennicott, a dentist from New York, who bought two pieces of property, one near what is now 43rd Street, another south of 48th, close to the new Illinois Central railroad tracks. He called his estate Kenwood, after his ancestral home in Scotland, and that was the name given to the Illinois Central station that opened in 1859 at 47th Street. Kennicott thus became one of the first south-side commuters, as he took the train daily to and from his dental office in downtown Chicago.
Important Chicago business and civic leaders gradually moved into the area and built large homes. In the mid-1870s one writer described Kenwood as the “Lake Forest of the South,” and Kenwood for decades retained this distinctively rural character: fashionable estates surrounded by acres of woodland. It was unlike both Hyde Park to the south, which had a more urban look because its founder subdivided the territory into small lots, and Oakland to the north, which in its early days was the site of a stockyards, a candle factory, and a military camp. In his 1884 History of Cook County, Illinois, A.T. Andreas wrote, “The estimation in which Kenwood was held by its residents has by no means lapsed with the progress of the years; the aristocratic denizen of that aristocratic suburb esteems it as the Faubourg Saint Germain was considered by the old regime of the Parisian aristocracy. It certainly is an undeniable proposition that in the region . . . can be found as exclusive, talented coteries of society as those existing in the old Quaker circles of Philadelphia, in the Knickerbockers of New York or Brooklyn, or the refrigerative haut ton of Beacon Street. With this distinction: . . . the inhabitants are too thoroughly gentlemen and ladies to be very amenable to the dogmas of snobbery.”
“This was a wonderful neighborhood to grow up in,” says Mary Bordelon. “Whites, Asians, blacks–race made no difference. You could take a walk through Drexel Park in the evening and never give it a thought. I used to go to the library at 49th and Blackstone any time and feel perfectly safe. People would leave their houses unlocked. This was an active, concerned community.”
In the early 1980s Mary Bordelon quit working as an interior designer, set her jaw, and began to condemn injustice. “We were cut out, squelched, sacrificed,” she says. “The good old boys, the Ira Bachs and the Julian Levis, they sat down at breakfast and decided who would live and who would die.”
