NEAR WEST SIDE — The almost 1,000-unit College Commons advanced on the Close to West Aspect wasn’t all the time a stylish condominium growth. Actually, the buildings that are actually condos housed the town’s largest produce market — the South Water Market — from 1925 to 2001.
On Sunday, the historic rental constructing advanced turned again the clock, together with working is it did for a lot of the twentieth century.
A block social gathering was held Sunday at College Commons, centered alongside fifteenth Avenue from Racine Avenue to Morgan Avenue, to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the previous house of the South Water Market that has since been transformed into condos.
The occasion recreated a small produce stand that might have been featured within the advanced’s buildings years in the past, that includes bushels of apples and oranges and a hand-painted signal hanging from the constructing’s renovated cover. A number of automobiles from the Twenties have been parked on the street for passerby to take photos with. The Chicago Metro Refrain, a barbershop quartet, offered time-period acceptable leisure.
Corporations who saved and bought produce out of the South Water Market even returned to the positioning for in the future solely.
“I feel lots of people transfer right here and don’t notice that they stay in a historic constructing and a part of the cool factor is we’ve got the unique facade nonetheless intact,” stated Chloe Koegel, who runs the buildings’ householders affiliation and helped manage Sunday’s occasion. “Even the loading docks haven’t modified.”
The South Water Market opened in its terra cotta-clad buildings in 1925. It was named after Water Avenue, which is the place the town’s earlier produce market was situated Downtown.
However the Downtown riverfront market was vacated by courtroom order to make approach for the development of Wacker Drive. So the produce suppliers and retailers moved to the Close to West Aspect in 1925, constructing the warehouses on comparatively low-cost actual property in an space that had developed a nasty status for legal exercise, in keeping with historian Frederick Rex.
The brand new South Water Market’s streets have been huge sufficient to accommodate horse-drawn carriages and early automobiles, giving distributors more room to function than within the earlier Downtown location. However by the Forties, with improvements made to logistics and transportation know-how, the market was already getting overcrowded.
By the late twentieth century, strain from builders within the space started to loom. The market’s proximity to the College of Illinois Chicago made it fascinating for school college students and younger professionals. Just like the close by unique Maxwell Avenue market, South Water Market ultimately closed, shutting down formally in 2001.
The advanced’s six buildings have been added to Landmark Illinois’ most endangered listing in 2002. However the buildings have been then bought to a developer, who transformed the advanced into condos from 2004-2007. By that point, most wholesale produce sellers migrated additional southwest to the Chicago Worldwide Produce Market, 2404 S. Wolcott Ave.
The buildings have been added to the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations in 2004.
One of many many households current at Sunday’s celebration have been the Truongs, who labored out of a market stall within the 90s and 2000s as a wholesale distributor of Asian produce.
Troung Enterprises remained on the strip lengthy after most of the different warehouses shut down in 2001, ultimately relocating to a bigger location on close by Halsted Avenue by the tip of the last decade.
“This neighborhood has modified dramatically,” stated Nhoan Truong, who opened the enterprise along with his brother, Hieu Truong, in 1992. “It was a warzone – it’s positively gotten safer, as you possibly can see. It was so hectic on these little streets, you’d typically see site visitors backups as a result of 18-wheelers would block the rights of approach for everybody else. It’s good to see the buildings nonetheless standing and to see households dwelling right here.”
The Truong’s mom even bought a rental unit in one of many constructing in an effort to proceed holding down roots within the neighborhood.
“I’d go in right here on a regular basis,” stated Tu Luu, who labored alongside her husband, Hieu, at Truong enterprises. “I’d carry my daughter with me, she labored too as a result of we didn’t have a babysitter. We labored seven days every week and would open up actually early within the morning.”
Tu Luu and Hieu Truong’s daughter, Jasmine Truong, remembered being impressed by the warehouse’s freight elevator.
“It was gigantic, you can most likely match half a automobile into it,” she stated. “You needed to manually cease it each time. It was sort of scary.”
“However you’d get the cling of it,” Luu interrupted with amusing.
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