Landscape Information
Located north of the Little Calumet River in Riverdale, this 193-acre historic district incorporates two contiguous housing developments built from the 1940s to the 1970s and intended for African American war workers, veterans, and their families. The district is characterized by a mix of straight and arcing drives with residential blocks of two-story brick rowhouse apartments that wrap around a central institutional and commercial core that includes a public park. In 1945 the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) engaged architects Shaw, Naess and Murphy to design Altgeld Gardens Homes, named for Illinois politician John Peter Altgeld. Eight years later the CHA commissioned successor firm Naess & Murphy to design an expansion as Philip Murray Homes to the immediate east and west, which honors labor leader Philip Murray.
Most of the residential blocks are divided into four equal quadrants. Each features a U-shaped arrangement of rowhouse apartment buildings that frame lawn courtyards planted with deciduous canopy trees and traced by symmetrical curvilinear paths. The courtyards each face a parking area, within which are situated an additional pair of parallel rowhouse apartments. The blocks surround the community’s central core, which includes former school buildings (1944–1945), a Modernist former commercial building (1945), and Carver Park (1955). The latter features an indoor swimming pool (1958), an expansive, relatively level lawn, and a picnic grove shaded by canopy trees, including maple and linden.
In 1979 Hazel Johnson (1935–2011) formed the non-profit organization People for Community Recovery to address environmental racism and to improve conditions in Altgeld Gardens and the southeast side. In the mid-1980s Johnson worked with then-community organizer Barack Obama to hold the CHA accountable for remediating lead and asbestos in residences.
From 2007 to 2017 the architects Holabird & Root rehabilitated the residential blocks, replanting trees and improving walkways. The district was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2022.
