ABSTRACT
Designed in 1891 by Edbrooke and Burnham, the ninety-six-unit Mecca captured the public imagination. It was Chicago’s first residential building with a landscaped courtyard open to the street. The courtyard apartment form, which became a hugely popular Chicago vernacular, built density while seemingly doing the opposite—cultivating the natural landscape. Two skylit atria also flooded interiors with light. Standing in the path of the expanding Black Belt of Chicago’s South Side, the Mecca changed from white to African American occupancy in 1912–1913. The Mecca inspired residents and artists to envision it as an icon of black Chicago. South Side blues bars improvised the “Flat BluAes.” Concerned over the viability of their campus within a black community, Armour Institute, later Illinois Institute of Technology, bought the Mecca hoping to demolish it. After years of community protest, the building was demolished in 1952, replaced by Mies van der Rohe’s famed Crown Hall.
