On April 18th 1961 a Chicago City Council committee voted to change the residential zoning designation for a large portion of the Near West Side at the intersection of Harrison and Halsted streets. The move would allow the city to transfer the 106-acre parcel to the University of Illinois as the future female neighborhood residents "pounded desks, threw council journals across the chamber, waved their arms, and shouted insults at council members and Mayor [Richard J.] Daley" as the committee filed out. "The first surveyor is going to get it in the head with a crowbar," one woman told a reporter. The crowd later staged a three-hour sit-in at the mayor's office. Overnight someone tossed a dummy with a dagger in its back onto Daley's front lawn.

               The resistance continued for two years. Neighborhood activists held meetings, marches, and more sit-ins to protest the campus project until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city and the university. Despite unrelenting grassroots opposition, UIC was coming to the Near West Side. Building the campus meant uprooting an ethnically and racially diverse working-class community near the Harrison and Halsted  intersection: Greek-town in the northernmost section, a growing Mexican-American community along Halsted Street, several heavily African American areas south of Roosevelt Road, "Little Italy" along Taylor Street, and the commercial free-for-all of Maxwell Street-a corridor of mostly Jewish-owned shops that hosted a weekly open-air market. When classes began at UIC in September 1965 nearly 1,900 families and 630 businesses had been displaced. Except for the original Hull family mansion, the thirteen-building Hull House complex also faced the wrecking ball.

               In popular memory UIC's origin story often becomes a David-versus-Goliath conflict pitting big personalities like Florence Scala-the tenacious Little Italy resident who bcame the face of neighborhood resistance-and Mayor Daley, Chicago's all-powerful machine boss. That narrative is partially accurate, but it misses the larger national context. The sweeping physical transformation that accompanied UIC's creation occured in large cities throughout the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. During those years, many observers thought urban America needed a major intervention. The perceived crisis was caused by several factors. First, urban areas suffered from a shortage of quality housing and deteriorating public infrastructure. Second, suburban growth drained central cities of residents, businesses, and tax dollars. "While flight" to suburbia occured in direct response to the third trend. African American migration to northern cities.

               Government and private interests responded to these class and race-based fears about the changing face of cities by crafting an ambitious set of policies. Urban renewal, as these policies were known, was the product of a diverse group of stakeholders: elected officials, city planners and architects, business executives, real estate developers, insurance companies, educational and medical institutions, and cultural organizations-almost everyone, it seemed, except neighborhood residents themselves, who rarely found a seat at the table.

               The Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 provided the legislative foundation for urban renewal. The 1949 federal law provided funds to local governments to buy and clear properties in "slums and blighted areas." It also offered subsidies to private developers to rebuild on the land or to city agencies that would construct public housing. The follow-up 1954 law placed new emphasis on rehabilitation, which provided the entire process with the name "urban renewal." The rehabilitation idea mimicked state-level "conservation" programs, which targeted neighborhoods that were not slums yet but seemed headed that way. Public officials frequently designated white neighborhoods for conservation, while targeting communities of color for slum clearance. Author James Baldwin bitterly described urban renewal as "Negro removal."

               Chicago's Near West Side was the kind of neighborhood tailor-made for urban renewal. City boosters feared that physical deterioriation in working-class areas like the Near West Side would cause white residents to leave for the suburbs. Worse, they feared that African Americans would take their place. Throughout the 1950s, Chicago's business leaders worked to prevent urban "blight" (a biological term suggesting contagious infection) from spreading to the areas surronding the downtown, where they have invested so much money. Business leaders especially feared that the "Black Belt"-a densely populated, narrow corridor on the South Side to which most African Americans were confined-would Belt and downtown. The neighborhood's ABLA public housing complex, with 3,800 total units, represented the 2nd largest concentration of public housing in the city. It was a population in which people of color predominated by the late 1950s.

               Downtown business groups like the Central Area Committe and the State Street Council lobbied for redevelopment throughout the 1950s. Their efforts bore fruit in 1958 with the publication of the Development Plan for the Central Area of Chicago, a comprehensive planning report prepared by  the Department of City Planning. The plan proposed a new campus for the University of Illinois on 130 acres of vacated railyards between the Chicago River and State Street south of the Congress Expressway-a half-mile east of the Harrison-Halsted site. But the powerful railroads rejected the proposal.

              While City Hall and the University of Illinois searched for a feasible campus location, an organization called the Near West Side Planning Board (NWSPB) was advocating its own form of grassroots, democratic urban planning. The NWSPB consisted of neighborhood residents (white, African American, and Latinx), local businesses, citywide organizations like the Commission on Human Relations and the Urban League, and community organizations Hull House (which provided  the group's funding). Historian Lilia Fernandez has described the NWSPB as a model grassroots planning organization: democratic, interethnic and interracial, and possessing a positive vision for the neighborhood's future.

              The board intiated public health and sanitation drives, inventoried the neighborhood housing stock and lobbied the city building comissioner to raze run-down buildings. The NWSPB also backed the city government's efforts to desginate the Harrison-Halsted area as a federal urban renewal site. Supporting the urban renewal designation proved to be a fatal mistake. Despite its inclusivity and democratic decision-making, the organization largely accepted the prevailing national narrative about city decline, and more importantly, endorsed the most popular prescription, namely urban renewal.

              In 1958 the city applied the urban renewal designation to a 55-acre portion of  the Harrison and Halsted site. Chicago officials announced that the area would be cleared and rebuilt with new housing for the old residents. Around the same time, the city secured $3 million in federal urban renewal money for a 237-acre conservation area in Little Italy, directly west of the Harrison and Halsted site. Significantly, the census tracts in the conservation area were overwhelmingly white, while the smaller parcel at Harrison and Halsted slated for clearance featured a large Latino population. But then in the fall of 1960 Mayor Daley announced that the city would sell the Harrison-Halsted tract to the U of I at a steep discount. Near West Side residents felt betrayed. Local people, especially those affiliated with the NWSPB, had envisioned quality housing at the site for existing residents. Instead, those residents experienced large-scale displacement.

             The history of UIC's founding demonstrates that the physical, economic, and racial transformations of post-World War II cities were neither natural nor inevitable. Rather, they resulted from specific decisions of private actors and policymakers at all levels of government. Those interventions in the urban landscape had wrenching consequences in neighborhoods like the Near West Side. But despite their relative lack of power, those ordinary people mobilized, albeit unsuccessfully, to influence that intervention and make their voices heard.