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Platted in 1830, Chicago was squarely set within the gridiron tradition systematized by Thomas Jefferson's 1785 Northwest Ordinance, which subdivided the Western Territories into townships of thirty-six square miles. This grid system divided the landscape into commodifiable parcels, thereby facilitating rapid (and rampant) land speculation. The grid homogenized the landscape in such a way that the cityscape was liberated, unanchored from its ground. Whereas earlier examples of landownership turned a deed or a title into a metaphoric stake in the earth, in Chicago and other Western cities, land became paper thin, as if each plot were but randomly dealt chances in an interminable, rapid paced game of Texas Hold'em. The writer James Silk Buckingham's hyperbolic description from the early 1830s provides a telling glimpse of the city's speculative whirlwind: "some lots changed hands ten times in a single day and the 'evening purchaser' paid at least ten times as much as the price paid by the morning buyer for the same spot!"(14) Such land division multiplied profits. The redundant, repetitive exchange of plots depended upon the assumption that the city's platted rectangles were both easily identifiable and interchangeable. Accordingly, the plots were numbered and, throughout the city's first real estate boom of 1836 were sold sight-unseen in auction houses in New York, oftentimes offering surprises to the owners when they eventually made their way to the city named by the Indians for its unpleasant smells.(15)

Despite the implied rigor of the ordinance grid's mathematical definition, Chicago's blocks have never been entirely homogeneous: the standard (or usual) Chicago block is 266 by 600 feet.(16) The word "usually," oft repeated within the pages of The Manual of Surveying Instructions of 1947, suggests regularity but admits aberration. If New York's unyielding grid "forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another," Chicago's is essentially the opposite: the grid itself is manipulated in order to distinguish one project from another.(17) The SSPB Plan replaced Chicago's dense blocks with half-mile-square (2640 by 2640 feet—suddenly 832 feet seems quite reasonable) superblocks with permeable perimeters, thereby maintaining public accessibility—sometimes visual and sometimes physical—across the Plan's entire seven-square-mile area. In keeping with the model initiated with the IIT campus plan that preceded the South Side Plan, the ratios of footprint to ground plane were kept low, leaving large, open, landscaped areas for pedestrian filled recreation use. Higher building heights allowed planners to create open space while still accommodating the necessary population densities, although the plan never aspired to replicate the extreme population density of the housing that it replaced.(18) Unlike earlier modern examples of superblock planning, the figured fields of the envisioned South Side Plan mixed densities, programs, and heights in order to diversify the urban experience of the block.

Within the South Side Plan, Lake Meadows was the first project to be developed under the auspices of the new Illinois legislation. The CLCC acquired and cleared the land of its 741 residential structures (originally containing 1,127 dwelling units; by 1949, these had been divided to create 2,782 units), and then sold it at cost to the New York Life Insurance Company.(19) The project was developed as an integrated, middle-class development.(20) Most of the low-income residents displaced by the project were relocated to the 800-unit Dearborn Homes, a Chicago Housing Authority project located immediately north of the IIT campus; once cleared, the Lake Meadows site became a tabula rasa landfill within the dense Chicago grid.

As described in a New York Times article of 1950, SOM's original scheme for Lake Meadows "would appear like two big blades knifing into Chicago's skyline."(21) While the scale of this analogy is so large as to suggest a mythical tale, the force of the image is startling in an article of otherwise mere reportage: are the knives indicative of the violence of the crime-ridden slums? Are they references to the "surgical operations" on what many planning periodicals referred to as the area's "cancerous slums"? Or are they part of a magic act—-a miraculous transformation of the South Side that would be no less incredible than pulling a rabbit out of a hat or sawing the magician’s assistant in two?

Lake Meadows’s “two big blades” and super scaled block were cast in positive terms through the project’s design, revisions, and construction—it was featured at the MoMA exhibition on SOM in 1950; referred to in both the popular and architectural press; and it has always, even to this day, been lauded as a progressive, integrated project and a well-maintained desirable housing development. Nevertheless, Lake Meadows has also had a curiously invisible presence on the horizon of America’s—or even Chicago’s—housing history. Its role in ushering in urban renewal legislation surely plays a role in this invisibility but its siting on the Near South Side and its African American constituency surely present even more significant factors. Furthermore, as the superblock currently undergoes renewed reviling from both the left and right following the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and as numerous public housing projects within the Near South Side are destroyed in an effort to find a quick fix for what is a much, much deeper problem than architecture, I would argue that Lake Meadows runs the risk of being swept in the tide of criticism against the modernist superblock. While the as-built project did not advance Chicago's urbanism in the ways that its more daring predecessor might have, Lake Meadows both expands and augments Chicago's elastic grid socially, economically, politically, and architecturally. The superblock was hardly the urban superhero that its proponents envisioned in the 1940s and 50s, but its short history, exemplified by projects like Lake Meadows, offers an important glimpse into the recent history of America's urban realm that might keep us from rendering the superblock's promise invisible.