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Photo: Joe Ravi, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The Illinois Institute of Technology Academic Campus is one of the five campuses of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), located in Bronzeville on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is roughly bounded by 30th Street, Michigan Avenue, 35th Street, and the Rock Island District railroad line. Parts of the campus, comprising 26 buildings between 31st, State, and 35th streets and the Rock Island railroad, are designated as a National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) historic district. The campus includes buildings constructed both by IIT and one of its predecessors, the Armour Institute, which was established in the neighborhood in 1890. Its layout is derived from a master plan devised in the 1940s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the director of IIT's architecture school from 1938 to 1958.
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Built in 1887 to house a Jewish social organization, this building became famous as the headquarters of the Peoples Movement Club, founded by Oscar Stanton De Priest (1871-1951), the first African-American on Chicago's City Council and the first northern black delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.
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.
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.
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.