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Photo: User:JeremyA, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
A major architectural landmark designed by Mies van der Rohe.
S. R. Crown Hall is a building on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Completed in 1956, the structure was designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the IIT's College of Architecture, which he led for two decades. Crown Hall is a Chicago Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a National Historic Landmark.
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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.
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.