TOD Starts With 23,000-SF Retail Building

"Lake and Pulaski was an unknown asset," Mary Nelson, president of Bethel New Life, Inc., recently told an American Planning Association convention panel.

Nelson's faith-based not-for-profit company is developing a $3-million, 23,000-sf building at the northwest corner of the intersection that promises to be another asset. It will include a two-story day care center, easily accessible by parents coming home on the Green Line from Downtown, as well as a landscaped rooftop with prairie grass.

That project comes after the building of new housing within walking distance of the Green Line stop, Nelson says, and is hoped to spur additional development, including a grocery store about two blocks south.

The West Garfield Park community may not be among the city's booming neighborhoods just yet, but it has improved since the 1990 US census, which found 40.5% of the area's 24,095 population living in poverty and a 24.7% jobless rate, Nelson says. Meanwhile, the area will begin seeing transit-oriented development occurring at the Green Line stop at Pulaski Avenue, she told an American Planning Association panel Tuesday.

Nelson recalls enlisting the aid of seven near west suburban mayors whose residents would have been affected by the elimination of the Green Line, which runs primarily over Lake Street. While the CTA came up with $350 million to repair the line, including constructing and rehabilitate stations, it also prompted the West Garfield Park community to take inventory.

"We realized we have a really great park with a conservatory nobody came to," Nelson says, referring to Garfield Park on the eastern edge of the neighborhood. A new CTA station allows a stop at the park's conservatory.