Chicago hospital thinks it’s in Schaumburg*

Thorek Hospital is a 118-bed hospital on Chicago’s North Side. It is most definitely not a major research institution. It ranks as “below average” in U.S. News and World Report ‘s evaluations of U.S. hospitals. Many (although not all) of its Yelp reviews are savagely negative. There’s nonetheless every reason to think that it’s a reasonably competent place, and, if I ever had a bad fall or a heart attack while walking in its vicinity, I’d be very glad that it was there.

I’ve lived a couple of blocks from Thorek since 1996. Fortunately, I’ve never had to use its services. The aspect of Thorek of which I have chiefly been aware is that, since something like the 1980s, the hospital has been on a campaign to bulldoze its neighborhood. It’s systematically acquired property in its vicinity, torn down whatever was there, and used the land for surface parking. Thorek’s smallish main building is now complemented by three huge parking lots that cover approximately five times as much land as the hospital itself. These lots are rarely very full. In fact, most of the time they seem rather empty. Here’s a map:

The area around Thorek Hospital. The building footprints dataset dates from 2017. The red lines show CTA tracks. The purple polygons show Thorek parking lots. The main hospital building is just east of the biggest parking lot. See note on GIS below for information on sources.

And here’s a 2012 air photo:

Joined 2012 air photos of the area around Thorek Hospital. The red lines show CTA tracks. The purple polygons show Thorek parking lots. See note on GIS below for information on sources.

Thorek’s obsessive effort to create surface parking puts it completely at odds with its location. The hospital is diagonally across from a CTA rail station, and it sits in a medium-high-density, prosperous, and generally safe neighborhood.

Exactly why Thorek became so interested in surrounding itself with parking lots is not altogether clear. No doubt it felt that it needed some parking, but it would have saved a huge amount of money had it opted to preserve most of the area’s urban fabric and built a mid-rise parking facility. I can’t explain Thorek’s actions in any way except to invoke a vague concept like “suburban mindset.” Important buildings in the suburbs are typically surrounded by massive amounts of parking, therefore … One aspect of a suburban mindset of course is to be frightened half to death of complicated urban neighborhoods. Parking lots from this point of view functioned as a kind of moat between the hospital and the neighborhood.

Let’s take a look at the history of the area.

The blocks around Thorek were mostly rather empty until the early 20th century when they began to be filled in with small apartment buildings and Chicago “greystones,” which served either as single-family houses or (more commonly) contained three or four apartments. Here are Sanborn maps from the turn of the 20th century:

Sanborn maps showing structures around the start of the 20th century. Somewhat confusingly, the blocks north of Irving Park Road (then called Graceland Avenue) were mapped in 1905 while those south of Irving Park Road were mapped in 1894. This is a composite image from several different pages, which have not all yellowed to the same extent. I’ve added modern curbs as well as CTA tracks (which date from 1900) and Thorek parking lot outlines. See note on GIS below for information on sources.

The elevated rail line that is now called the CTA Red Line arrived in 1900, and the lots that were vacant in 1905 were filled in one by one in the years just afterward. There was enough demand for this land after the El arrived so that most new buildings were three- and four-story apartment buildings. There were also some commercial structures. This neighborhood—the southern end of Uptown and northernmost part of Lake View—was never exactly wealthy, but it wasn’t poor either, and it adjoined the quite upscale single-family neighborhood now known as Buena Park just to its north. Thorek Hospital was added to the mix in 1911, occupying a relatively modest mid-block space on Irving Park Road. Here’s a set of Sanborn maps from the 1920s:

Sanborn maps showing structures in the 1920s. The area north of Irving Park Road was mapped in 1928; the area south of Irving Park Road was mapped in 1923. I’ve included modern curbs, CTA tracks, and Thorek parking lot outlines. See note on GIS below for information on sources.

During the 1950s and 1960s, numerous tall apartment buildings were built in the blocks between Thorek and the Lakefront. Although the 1950s and 1960s were generally years of massive suburbanization in older American cities, Chicago was pretty successful in encouraging the construction of middle- and upper-middle-class high-rise housing in its North Side Lakefront neighborhoods. Neighborhoods just inland from the Lakefront did not do so well. There was definitely some downward “filtering” in the blocks right around Thorek. A couple of SROs just south of Thorek came to house a considerable population of economically marginal men, and, in the 1970s and 1980s, numerous Mexicans and other Latin Americans moved into some of the older apartment buildings in the area. None of the blocks became predominantly Hispanic, but there were enough Latin Americans to support a Mexican supermarket at Sheridan and Dakin next to the El station, and there were a few blocks (for example Cuyler between Broadway and Clarendon) that featured full-time salsa music all summer and car-repair activity down on the street pretty much all year. These years were the only time when there was some reason to worry about the future of Thorek’s neighborhood, and, not coincidentally, they were the years that Thorek began building a moat of parking around its main building, which was now located at the Broadway end of its block.

Slow gentrification, however, definitely set in by the 1990s, although it’s never been as powerful a force as it was further south; numerous long-time residents have stayed put. Most of the “filtering” over the last twenty or twenty-five years, however, has definitely been upward; newer residents have tended to be a bit better off than those they replaced. There has also been a modest amount of new construction. This consists mostly of four-or-so-story apartment buildings, which have replaced wooden single-family houses or marginal commercial buildings (including that Mexican supermarket). Thorek itself was partly responsible for the construction of a nine-story senior apartment building just to its west. Several much larger apartment buildings within a few blocks of Thorek have just opened, are now under construction, or are planned; several of these are TODs (“transit-oriented developments”).

The neighborhood remains economically complicated, but on the whole it’s a fairly prosperous place. Per capita income in the two tracts that contain Thorek was $48,254 in 2012/2016 according to the American Community Survey (Chicago average: $30,847). One striking feature of the neighborhood is that, despite the gentrification, it’s remained ethnically diverse. In 2012/2016 it was 68.6% non-Hispanic white, 12.3% Hispanic, 11.6% non-Hispanic black, and 4.5% non-Hispanic Asian. Like most of Chicago’s North Side Lakefront neighborhoods, the area around Thorek is a place with an unusually high proportion of well-educated people. 65.0% of the population 25 and over had a college degree in 2012/2016 (Chicago: 36.5%). The area’s doing all right.

Automobile ownership is modest, especially considering the area’s prosperity. 43.9% of households were carfree in 2012/2016. Most people (even many car owners) seem to get about largely on foot or by transit. Others have brought suburban habits into the city and drive everywhere, even though parking is scarce and/or expensive and minor traffic jams are common. There are, in fact, several automobile-oriented entities in Thorek’s immediate neighborhood, most dating from the decades when the neighborhood’s future was most uncertain: a BP gas station with a convenience store and a car wash on the southwest corner of Irving Park and Broadway; a storage center facing a U-Haul rental facility on Broadway north of Cuyler; and a (more recent) Walgreen’s with a parking lot at the southeast corner of Irving Park and Sheridan. Despite these incursions of “automobility,” I think it’s fair to say that, while the area is not Manhattan, it’s not the suburbs either, and it works well enough for those who prefer to have little to do with automobiles, although Thorek’s huge parking lots are certainly an aesthetic barrier to walkability.

Thorek Hospital continued its bulldozing all through the 1990s, even as the never-very-serious threat of neighborhood decline vanished completely. When I moved in in 1996, there were still several greystones in the area that’s now Thorek’s biggest parking lot; these were soon torn down. There was a McDonald’s where its northern parking lot now stands; I acknowledge that the destruction of the housing that once stood here predates Thorek’s acquisition of the site.

While many of the people who live nearby have lamented Thorek’s behavior, no one’s ever, so far as I know, tried seriously to stop it. One reason is that it wouldn’t be easy to do this. Chicago’s land-use laws wouldn’t have provided any help. The city’s weak historic preservation statutes only cover a limited number of landmark buildings and a few quite distinctive areas; ordinary early-20th-century landscapes are generally not protected. And Chicago’s zoning laws mostly act to discourage what are felt to be excessively intense land uses; they do not prevent lowering land-use intensity.

Of course, Thorek Hospital is hardly the only institution that has thought that the replacement of dense inner-city buildings with parking lots was a good idea. This is a widespread phenomenon in American urban areas, but it’s been commonest in places that were truly depressed or where the use of the land really was obsolete. Thorek’s been doing its dirty work in a healthy neighborhood that’s been getting healthier, and it’s a little hard to see the point.

Note on GIS sources

The GIS data were taken from many different sources, and they don’t always fit together perfectly.

Curbs and 2017 building footprints come from the City of Chicago’s data portal.

The CTA tracks were downloaded from the bbbike.org version of OpenStreetMap.

The outlines of Thorek’s parking lots come from the “land use inventory” data set prepared by CMAP, formerly the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. CMAP’s land-use data-set, a descendant of a land-use data set prepared by the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, was not really intended to be used for maps as detailed as those shown here; they generally underbound the parking areas. I’ve resisted the temptation to edit them, since the exact boundaries of the parking lots have changed over the years as buildings have been torn down, and I thought the outlines were probably good enough.

The 2012 air photos were downloaded from the United States Geological Survey’s EarthExplorer Website.

The 1894 Sanborn maps were downloaded from the Library of Congress “Sanborn maps online” Web page. I georeferenced the separate pages.

The 1905 Sanborn maps were downloaded from the University of Illinois’s Sanborn fire insurance maps Web page. I georeferenced the separate pages.

The 1923 and 1928 Sanborn maps were downloaded from ProQuest’s Digital Sanborn maps 1867-1970 Website, hosted by Chicago Public Library (and unavailable except to subscribers). These files were scanned for ProQuest from a set of black-and-white microforms published by Chadwyck-Healey. Resolution of downloads from this site is poor. There’s nothing to be done about this. I georeferenced the separate pages.

Footnote

*Schaumburg is a suburb northwest of O’Hare. The term “Schaumburg” in some dialects of Chicago English has come to imply an intensely suburban place. Those who began using “Schaumburg” this way were surely thinking of a district in Schaumburg that contains malls, big-box stores (an Ikea, for example), and office buildings, all surrounded by enormous parking lots. If the term “edge city” means anything, it would definitely apply to this area. Much of Schaumburg in fact is a medium-density residential suburb, with mid-sized single-family houses and modest apartment buildings. An unusually large proportion of its streets acquired striped bicycle lanes as long ago as the 1990s. The colloquial use of the word “Schaumburg” as an epithet isn’t quite fair.