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Photo: User:TonyTheTiger, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This major Bronzeville landmark is a performance venue showing movies, live jazz, blues, and more.
Harold Washington Cultural Center is a performance facility located in the historic Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago's South Side. It was named after Chicago's first African-American Mayor Harold Washington and opened in August 2004, ten years after initial groundbreaking. In addition to the 1,000-seat Commonwealth Edison (Com-Ed) Theatre, the center offers a Digital Media Resource Center. Former Chicago City Council Alderman Dorothy Tillman and singer Lou Rawls take credit for championing the center, which cost $19.5 million. It was originally to be named the Lou Rawls Cultural Center, but Alderman Tillman changed the name without telling Rawls. Although it is considered part of the Bronzeville neighborhood it is not part of the Chicago Landmark Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District that is in the Douglas community area.
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Some very serious basketball players hit the pavement here on weekends and the courts are worth a visit to watch the local players, but keep in mind that the park is in one of Chicago's roughest areas.
A very big park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The park has big open fields, which host numerous festivals, sporting events, and performances throughout the summer. Be sure to check out the DuSable Museum of African-American History and the "Fountain of Time" sculpture.
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.
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.
Chicago's museum of African-American history is named after the first settler of Chicago, a Haitian named Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. The museum often has excellent and moving temporary exhibits.
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.