WOODLAWN — The 1Woodlawn group released a new master plan for the neighborhood Thursday night that called for a renewed focus on fixing 63rd Street and abandoning past efforts to do it with housing alone.
The group of Woodlawn residents, organized by the Apostolic Church of God, has worked for more than a year on the plan, which it hopes will help guide real estate development spurred by the Obama Presidential Center to projects the community wants.
The focus of that plan is to push developers toward projects on 63rd Street, particularly ones that include residential and retail.
“There are a lot of people who now think Woodlawn has turned into gold,” the Rev. Byron Brazier, pastor of Apostolic Church, said at the Thursday presentation of the first draft of the plan. “This way people aren’t telling us what they want to give us, we’re telling them what we want.”
The plan, developed with help from Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, presents an outline for how the community wants the infrastructure of the neighborhood to develop as investment increases.
As more traffic moves to the middle of Jackson Park to get around the Obama Presidential Center, the plan envisions 63rd Street and Stony Island Avenue being the main gateway to the neighborhood. Hyde Park High School, the South Side YMCA and Mt. Carmel High School would all collaborate more with retail and restaurants encouraged to open on the corner to serve tourists.
Dawveed Scully of Skidmore, who led the drafting of the plan from months of community input, said the neighborhood has more than 110 acres of vacant land, with almost half of it owned by the city, which creates lots of opportunities for housing.
The question remains what to do along the Green Line tracks though.
Scully presented ideas from the community that included a series of greenhouses that partially would supply new restaurants encouraged to open at Cottage Grove Avenue and 63rd Street.
Brazier said he thought the idea was interesting, but wasn’t sure whether there was a developer out there yet that would want to pursue it.
The plan is now set for several months of revisions by the 1Woodlawn group and a second draft is expected to be released in October.
