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Photo: User:TonyTheTiger, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The home of the Chicago Bee newspaper, which was founded by Anthony Overton to promote black businesses and issues. The art deco building has an elegant terra cotta façade and today houses the Chicago Bee Branch Library.
The Chicago Bee Building is a historic building on Chicago's South Side. It originally housed the Chicago Bee, a newspaper serving the African Americans of Chicago. The building now houses the Chicago Bee Branch of the Chicago Public Library. The building was named a Chicago Landmark on September 9, 1998. It is located in the Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District in the Douglas community area of Chicago, Illinois.
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Built by the wildly successful African-American entrepreneur Anthony Overton to house the headquarters of his nation-wide cosmetics franchise. The building housed several of his other businesses, including Victory Life Insurance Company and Douglass National Bank, America's first national African-American bank. The building is now owned by the Mid-South Planning and Development Commission. Just across the street from the now demolished, notorious Robert Taylor Homes, the formerly beautiful art-deco building is in a sad state of disrepair.
Bronzeville's YMCA, housed in a huge 1913 brown-pressed brick building, was a major social and cultural center for the neighborhood in its heyday, providing job training and housing for recent arrivals in addition to its more common functions. A painstaking restoration was completed in 2000 and the YMCA is again open to the community.
A community arts center open since 1940, which was for long the only place around where minority artists could exhibit their work. Today, the center's gallery (free and open to the public) focuses primarily on African-American art, especially art related to the South Side. The arts center also features occasional poetry readings.
Built in 1899 as a synagogue, this building housed the Chicago Defender (the nation's foremost African-American newspaper through World War I) from 1920-1960. The Chicago Defender published works by Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, and is largely credited for starting the Great Migration in its exhortations to southern blacks to move to the North for greater economic opportunities and freedom. The building is oddly vacant and neglected and may be available for sale.
A major architectural landmark designed by Mies van der Rohe.
Bronzeville Military Academy
This was the first armory for an African-American regiment, serving the "Fighting 8th," which fought in the Spanish-American War and served with distinction in World War I. After years of disuse, this grandiose building has been restored and now houses the nation's first public college-prep military school, which is unfortunately not open for visitors.