Chicago Bee Building

Hygienic Manufacturing Company, also known as Overton Hygienic Company, was a cosmetics company established by Anthony Overton. It was one of the nation's largest producers of African-American cosmetics. Anthony Overton also ran other businesses from the building, including the Victory Life Insurance Company and Douglass National Bank, the first nationally chartered, African-American-owned bank. The Overton Hygienic Building is a Chicago Landmark and part of the Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District in the Douglas community area of Chicago, Illinois. It is located at 3619-3627 South State Street. The building was commissioned by Anthony Overton in 1922 as a combination of a store, office, and manufacturing building. It was regarded as one of the most important buildings within the district. Overton would later commission the Chicago Bee Building in 1929. Walter T. Bailey, the first licensed African-American architect in the state of Illinois, had his first Chicago office on the second floor of the Overton Hygienic Building.The building was later named the Palace Hotel and served for some time as a flophouse, with residents crowded into stalls 8 feet by 5½ feet. The second, third, and fourth floors each housed 125 stalls, with dormitory-style bathrooms and showers, for a total of 375 stalls. The building is now owned and being developed by the Mid-South Planning and Development Commission, which will use the building as an incubator for small businesses and startups within the Black Metropolis neighborhood.

Stateway Gardens was a Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) public housing project located in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. It was located alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway, adjacently north of the former Robert Taylor Homes, and was part of the State Street Corridor that included other CHA properties: Robert Taylor Homes, Dearborn Homes, Harold Ickes Homes and Hillard Homes. Stateway Gardens was home to people living in mid- and high-rise apartment buildings. Finished by the late 1950s, Stateway Gardens was plagued by a large amount of gang violence, organized crime, and drug abuse. The area gradually became more neglected and underserved by city authorities and the local police department throughout its existence which led to mass abandonment and urban decay. Consequently, the housing project was fully demolished in 2007.

Wentworth Gardens is a low rise 344-unit housing project operated by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). it lies just south of Guaranteed Rate Field in Armour Square. The site had originally been home to South Side Park, a baseball stadium for the Chicago White Sox (1900-1910) and then the Chicago American Giants of the Negro Baseball League (1910-1940). In 1944, the HA purchased the site to build a 422-unit apartment complex of low-rise buildings and row houses. Wentworth Gardens opened in 1947 for returning World War II veterans and later thousands of low-income African American families in a tight-knit community. During the 1950s it was labeled as “The best housing in the community in the city" until the gangs began closed in. By the 1970s the buildings became more unsettling and less tended to by CHA as crime and drugs flowed through freely. The Gangster Disciples controlled many of buildings in Wentworth as well as the drug trade and battled with the smaller Black P. Stone sets. In the early 2000s It gained the nickname "Murdertown" due to the frequent homicides that occurred there. It is also the name of the GD set that control the project. As Chicago tore down the massive high rises, the families from there were displaced in the Wentworth. This led to a small increase in crime. In 2007 the project was fully renovated with new rehabilitated units and walkways but lacked a security system which was installed into other active CHA developments.

Stateway Gardens, now Park Boulevard, is a neighborhood located in the Douglas Community Area on the South side of Chicago, Illinois. The neighborhood was named after the Chicago housing development, Stateway Gardens, that once took up most of the area. The buildings were overrun with crime and fell into disrepair. They were demolished in 2007. The area is now being redeveloped as Park Boulevard with small family sized housing units and condos.

Wabash Avenue YMCA is a Chicago Landmark located within the Chicago Landmark Black Metropolis-Bronzeville Historic District in the Douglas community area of Chicago, Illinois. This YMCA facility served as an important social center within the Black Metropolis area, and it also provided housing and job training for African Americans migrating into Chicago in the early 20th century. In 1915, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, one of the first groups specializing in African-American studies, was founded at YMCA.Black contralto Marian Anderson gave one of her early performances here in 1919.The Black Metropolis area in Chicago, centered on the area of 35th Street and State Street, was a city within a city developed by the black community as an alternative to the restrictions, exploitations, and indifference of the city at large. Wabash Avenue YMCA was opened in 1914, supported by Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company at the time. Rosenwald had a philanthropic interest in black-oriented causes. YMCA provided job training programs such as auto repair and manual training. The Black Metropolis district thrived through the 1920s, but competition from white-owned businesses on 47th Street and the effects of the Great Depression led to the closure of many of the black-owned businesses. Declining membership and deterioration of the building led to its closing in 1981. In the late 1990s, however, a nine-million dollar renovation project was undertaken by TRC to return to the building to its rightful condition.It was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1986.

The Chicago Fire Department (CFD) provides fire suppression, rescue services, Hazardous Materials Response services and emergency medical response services to the city of Chicago, Illinois, United States, under the jurisdiction of the Mayor of Chicago. The Chicago Fire Department is the second largest municipal fire department in the United States after the New York City Fire Department (FDNY). It is also one of the oldest major organized fire departments in the nation. The Chicago Fire Department is led by the Fire Commissioner, currently Annette Nance Holt. The Fire Commissioner is appointed by the mayor of Chicago, is confirmed by the Chicago City Council, and is assisted by the First Deputy Commissioner, who oversees the department's bureaus. There are four bureaus under the command of the First Deputy Commissioner: Operations, Fire Prevention, Administrative Services and Logistics. The Chicago Fire Department receives over 800,000 emergency calls annually.

The John W. Griffiths Mansion is a historic house at 3806 S. Michigan Avenue in the Douglas community area of Chicago, Illinois. The house was built in 1893-94 for John W. Griffiths, a prominent building contractor who worked in Chicago during its reconstruction after the Great Chicago Fire. Architect Solon Beman designed the Chateauesque house, which features a limestone-clad exterior, an octagon-shaped tower on its northeast corner, corbels along the roof line, and dormers topped with finials. The house was typical of those on Michigan Avenue at the time, as many affluent Chicagoans built their homes there; it was also one of the last such homes, as the Panic of 1893 and industrial development led the area to lose its popularity with the wealthy. After Griffiths died in the 1930s, the home became the meeting place of the Quincy Club, a social club for black railroad workers. It later became the first home of the DuSable Museum of African American History.The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 5, 1982.

Youth Connection Charter School (YCCS) is the largest charter school in the United States. Founded in 1997 it is the only charter school in Illinois that targets dropouts and other at-risk students. In 2010 YCCS served over 3,500 students through 23 campuses throughout Chicago.

35th–Bronzeville–IIT (formerly Tech–35th) is an 'L' station on the CTA's Green Line, located in the Douglas neighborhood. It is situated at 16 E 35th Street, just east of State Street.

Shimer Great Books School (pronounced (listen) SHY-mər) is a Great Books college that is part of North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Prior to 2017, Shimer was an independent, accredited college on the south side of Chicago, with a history of being in different cities in Illinois prior to that. Founded in 1853 as the Mount Carroll Seminary in Mount Carroll, Illinois, the school became affiliated with the University of Chicago in 1896 and was renamed the Frances Shimer Academy after founder Frances Wood Shimer. It was renamed Shimer College in 1950, when it began offering a four-year curriculum based on the Hutchins Plan of the University of Chicago. After the University of Chicago parted with both the college and the Hutchins Plan in 1958, Shimer continued to use a version of that curriculum. The college relocated to Waukegan in 1978 and to Chicago in 2006. In 2017, it was acquired by North Central College which established the Shimer Great Books School to continue offering its curriculum. It has a long reputation as being intellectually original, demanding, and rigorous. The current academic program is based on a core curriculum sixteen required courses in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. All courses are small seminars with no more than twelve students, and were based on original sources from a list of about 200 core texts broadly based on the great books canon. Classroom instruction is Socratic discussion. Considerable writing is required, including two comprehensive examinations and a senior thesis. Students are admitted primarily on the basis of essays and interviews; no minimum grades or test scores were required. Shimer has one of the highest alumni doctorate rates in the country.According to The New York Times, students "share[d] a love of books [and] a disdain for the conventional style of education. Many say they did not have a good high school experience". Students, who tend to be individualistic and creative thinkers, are encouraged to ask questions. Shimer historically averaged 125 students, and enrolled 97 in 2014. Most Shimer alumni went on to graduate studies.Shimer was, until joining North Central College, governed internally by an assembly in which all community members had a vote. In 2016, Shimer announced an agreement to be acquired by North Central College. The agreement came to fruition on June 1, 2017, when Shimer's faculty and curriculum were subsumed into North Central as a department known as the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College.

Pershing was a station on the Chicago Transit Authority's South Side Elevated Line, which is now part of the Green Line. The station was located at Pershing Road and State Street in the Douglas neighborhood of Chicago. Pershing was situated south of Tech–35th, which is now named 35th–Bronzeville–IIT, and north of Indiana. Pershing opened on June 6, 1892, and closed on August 1, 1949.

The South Side Community Art Center is a community art center in Chicago that opened in 1940 with support from the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in Illinois. Opened in Bronzeville in an 1893 mansion, it became the first black art museum in the United States and has been an important center for the development Chicago's African American artists. Of more than 100 community art centers established by the WPA, this is the only one that remains open. The center was awarded Chicago Landmark status in 1994. Named a "National Treasure" by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2017, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.