Like his charismatic father before him, the Rev. Byron Brazier, pastor of the Apostolic Church of God in Woodlawn, knows how to pack the house and work the crowd. More than 400 people showed up in the church’s banquet hall recently to talk about the prospect of a neighborhood renaissance — a painfully elusive goal for the long-idle South Side enclave but one that its backers say is within reach now that the Obama Presidential Center will be built next door in historic Jackson Park.
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The Network of Woodlawn community group, led by Brazier, is working with the city, the Obama Foundation, the University of Chicago and the Washington Park Consortium to examine how South Side communities can benefit from the Obama library project.
To support that effort, Chicago Community Trust made a $250,000 grant to Chicago-based advisory firm Next Street to examine successful redevelopment projects around the country. The trust gave another $75,000 grant to the Arthur M. Brazier Foundation, also led by Brazier, for neighborhood planning services. The foundation retained architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill to assist with that effort…
Historically, “there have been a lot of plans for all these communities on the South Side and West Side and in every city,” Dawveed Scully, a senior urban designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, said at the recent 1Woodlawn meeting. “There have been hundreds of plans, and none of them have really gotten to the change that we need.”