A West Woodlawn environmental nonprofit launched a new tourism center last week timed to coincide with the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center.
Blacks in Green soft-opened the Woodlawn and South Lakefront Tourism Center, 6431 S. Cottage Grove Ave., on June 18, the same day the Obama Center held its opening commemoration ceremony. The tourism center features a reading room stocked with South Side history books, a gift shop selling locally made products, short-term rental space and a small business center for visitors and residents.
“We have this moment in time where we can build an economy around tourism,” said Black in Green’s founder and CEO Naomi Davis in an interview with the Herald.
The tourism center launch coincides with many local businesses seeking to capitalize on the opening of the Obama Presidential Center last week. The $850 million presidential center drew thousands to its Jackson Park campus for its opening weekend and is projected to draw as many as 1 million people annually.
In the last two years, a successful landscaping business grew out of an entrepreneurship program developed by Sunshine Enterprises and Emerald South Economic Development Collaborative, two local nonprofits. Last month, a high-tea salon and cocktail bar opened at the Stony Island Arts Bank. And this week, the plan for Woodlawn Central, a $300 million mixed-use, megadevelopment, along the 63rd Street corridor goes before the Chicago Plan Commission.
Davis also thinks the Obama Center’s opening will create more opportunities for local nonprofits to attract new funders and partners. Davis said she met about “a half dozen potential collaborators” at the center’s June 18 opening ceremony.
For Davis, the tourism center’s launch is the culmination of years of work building what she calls a “Sustainable Square Mile” in West Woodlawn, her vision for a walkable, neighbor-owned neighborhood modeled in part on the close-knit Black communities of mid-20th century Chicago and her own childhood in Queens, New York.
Tourism, Davis said, fits squarely into those plans. Among the organization’s eight principles of “green village building” is a mandate to celebrate community culture, and Davis said she views the tourism industry as the commercial expression of that commitment.
The tourism center also includes a section called the “Michelle Museum,” a small retail area selling memorabilia and books related to former First Lady Michelle Obama, whose 2013 gardening book “American Grown” Davis said was similar to Blacks in Green’s early work trying to establish community gardens in West Woodlawn.
But not everyone is as sanguine as Davis about the effects of the Obama Center on the neighborhood. For years, local residents, housing advocates, and elected officials have worried that many current South Side community members will lose their foothold in the area. Those anxieties are driven by soaring housing costs, which continue to threaten displacement while the city’s affordable housing initiatives stall.
Over the weekend, Blacks in Green hosted four evening receptions presentations on topics ranging from architecture and real estate development to 400 years of Black music. On Friday, New Orleans-based artist Jean-Marcel St. Jacques unveiled wooden artworks made from salvaged materials from the restoration of the Emmett Till family home, which Blacks in Green owns and is developing as a museum.
Each morning last weekend, walking, biking and culinary tours departed from the center. Davis said the organization assembled a team of experienced guides for the weekend, including Cheryl Colbert, whom she described as a veteran tour guide with 30 years of experience, and Dr. Doug Williams, who has a Ph.D. in landscape architecture and is the son of a prominent artist from the AfriCOBRA era. Damien Lee, who Davis described as “very seasoned, very steeped in safety and health, and just the joy of bike riding,” led the bike tours, while Tanisha Kilpatrick, a South Side grower and caterer, guided the culinary outings.
Sunday’s reception featured Jill Koski, CEO of the Morton Arboretum, who discussed an emerging partnership with Blacks in Green around the organization’s efforts to build a horticultural workforce in West Woodlawn. Davis said Blacks in Green has planted more than 500 trees in the neighborhood and is working to establish an arborist training pipeline for young people.
The soft launch of the tourism center is a prelude to a full grand opening planned for Labor Day weekend, September 7. Davis said the organization plans to assess the inaugural weekend before setting a schedule of regular tours.
“We’re going to take a step back, assess how we’ve done and tighten things up,” she said.
The tourism center’s opening takes place as Blacks in Green continues fundraising for a planned $11.5 million mixed-use development at 6441 S. Cottage Grove Ave. that would add 20 affordable apartments and 12 commercial spaces to West Woodlawn. The group has secured about $2 million of that total so far.
Davis said the tourism center’s opening reflects the patience of years of work towards realizing Blacks in Green’s plan for the neighborhood.
“Some of us are just never going to quit, we’re never going to stop, we’re never going to slow down until the joy that we feel about what we’re excited about actually becomes material,” she said.
