“It’s Not the Location; It’s the Institution”: The New Politics of Historic Preservation within the Heritage Tourism Economy

The local group used traditional preservation language and arguments to save their building, while the University of Chicago employed skewed marketing-speak to argue that they were saving an “institution” while knocking down that institution’s building. That this kind of spin won the day proves nothing except that money and power and influence will usually win the day.

— Jennifer V. O. Baughn, Chief Architectural Historian, Mississippi Department of Archives and History¹

A “Familiar” Story?

On the eve of the new millennium, South Side Chicago’s infamous Douglas and Grand Boulevard neighborhoods were putting on their fancy clothes. Newly built condominium developments and renovated hundred-year-old greystones slowly overshadowed vacant lots and run-down store-fronts. Under the larger heritage tourism banner of “Restoring Bronzeville,” neighborhood boosters trumpeted the emergence of a cultural corridor along 47th Street housing a string of coffee shops, restaurants, public art, and monuments alongside restored historic buildings (Figure 1).² The name Bronzeville—once a statement of community self-definition and black pride—had become a municipally conferred historic landmark designation and marker of real estate value. At the center of urban revitalization stood the famed Checkerboard Lounge (Figure 2). Black residents hoped to renovate this historic blues venue as the signature showpiece of a “new Bronzeville,” but owner neglect and municipal divestment made this desire a near impossibility.³

Figure 1.

Ida B. Wells House, 3624 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Chicago, Illinois, 2008. Photograph by TonyTheTiger, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Then in November 2003, the University of Chicago (U of C) entered the picture. The university took notice of the Checkerboard dilemma and expressed a shared interest in the preservation of Bronzeville history and culture on the South Side. In a startling turn of events, U of C not only bought but also relocated the Checkerboard from 43rd Street to a new university-owned building inside the Hyde Park neighborhood’s Harper Court shopping district (Figure 3). To be clear, U of C did not relocate the actual building but moved the “intellectual property” of the Checkerboard Lounge to Harper Court, while the actual building in Bronzeville was ultimately demolished along with its significance as a site of South Side blues history. Outraged, Restoring Bronzeville advocates immediately charged U of C with “cultural piracy.” Bronzeville preservation advocate Bernard Lloyd led a protest to the campus where he argued, “You can’t take the Checkerboard out of its physical and cultural context, or you create a different institution.”⁴ The university quickly responded that its acquisition and relocation was not only a simple economic transaction between owner and seller but also an act of black historic preservation, in the case of a venue neglected by its own community. U of C director of real estate operations Jo Reizner offered Lloyd a direct and simple response: “It’s not the location; it’s the institution.”⁵

Figure 2.

The “Old” Checkerboard Lounge, 423 East 43rd Street, Chicago, Illinois, 2003. Photograph by discosour, Flickr Creative Commons.

To many within the field of historic preservation, the Checkerboard controversy may hardly seem surprising. Jennifer V. O. Baughn, chief architectural historian at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, described it as a very familiar story. For her, U of C’s claim of “saving” the Checkerboard was not historic preservation but simply “skewed marketing-speak,” a “spin” that “proves nothing except that money and power and influence will usually win the day.”⁶ Elsewhere, I have chronicled the rise of “UniverCities” and the growing power of higher education in shaping urban development, which confirms Baughn’s suspicions about the for-profit real estate interests of institutions like U of C.⁷ Yet the struggles here over the meaning of black historic preservation are less familiar than we may think. Restoring Bronzeville and U of C engaged in competing visions of black historic preservation—different urban plans based on a shared desire...