Imagine what a jolt Marynook must have been when the community was built on city’s South Side beginning in the 1950s.
The blocks east of the neighborhood were largely 1920s bungalows efficiently laid out on the city’s typical grid of streets and alleys.
Chicago as most Chicagoans would have known it.
But that ended at Dorchester Avenue between 83rd and 87th streets. On the west side of the street, the brand-new community of Marynook arose: 432 split-level and raised ranch homes, big back yards and curvilinear streets and cul-de-sacs.
Chicago on one side of Dorchester. Suburbia on the other.
Marynook turned 70 this year. And the Marynook Homeowners Association and residents are celebrating their mod little urban hamlet this summer.
“Marynook is still a wonderful place to live,” said Cheryl Strong Morris, vice president of the homeowner’s association and a resident there since 1969. “There’s a sense of community here you don’t find everywhere.”
A bit of suburbia on the South Side
The names of Chicago’s major midcentury builders still ring out now and again. People such as Nathan Manilow and Philip M. Klutznick, for instance, who built the south suburb of Park Forest.
Not so much with the late Joseph E. Merrion, even though he left his mark and his last name across Chicago and the suburbs in a major way.
After World War II, Merrion developed portions of the Southeast Side, including Merrionette Manor, a subdivision bounded by Chappel and Hoxie avenues, and 95th and 99th streets on the Southeast Side.
His other developments include the towns of Merrionette Park, Homewood and Country Club Hills.
Merrion built Marynook between 1955 and 1968 on a large vacant parcel bounded by 83rd and 87th streets, Dorchester Avenue and the Metra Electric line.
The neighborhood was designed to attract white homebuyers who were leaving racially changing Chicago and the South Side for the suburbs.
And Marynook was predominantly white in its earliest years. By the early 1960s, middle-class Black families began moving in. And by 1970, the neighborhood was virtually all Black.
(In 1962, WBBM-TV produced and aired a documentary on Marynook’s racial changes called “Decision at 83rd Street.” Check it out on YouTube.)
Yvonne Huey, a former longtime Marynook resident who now lives in Las Vegas, said she and her husband, Ernest, bought their raised brick ranch house on East 85th Street abutting 28-acre Avalon Park in October 1963.
“Things started opening up in ’61, ’62 for Blacks to move in different areas,” Yvonne Huey said. “We just fell in love with the area because it was all residential, no apartment buildings … and the homes are well built.”
The Huey’s former residence is among seven homes fanned out around a cul-de-sac at 85th Street and University Avenue.
“We always called it ‘The Circle,'” said Huey’s son Erik, 53, who grew up in the home. “I’d always look forward to the snowstorms … the city would … plow all the snow and into one huge gigantic mound right there in the circle. We’d all go outside and play.”
In the 1962 song “Little Boxes,” Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds both rightfully excoriated suburban style development as “Little boxes made of ticky-tacky … Little boxes all the same.”
But Marynook is different, with a clever variety of small, modernist, postwar homes, many with angled rooflines, glass-dominated front elevations, no alleys and wonderful topiary here and there.
Marynook is also assisted by some good town planning. The 87th and 83rd street Metra Electric stops are close by. And backing up the subdivision against Avalon Park was a nice touch.
Heather Ireland Robinson, her husband, Claude, and their family live in the Marynook home her grandparents purchased in 1968.
She said the home’s proximity to Avalon Park helped her grandparents seal the deal.
“The last hurrah of this family moving out and my family moving in [was the seller’s kid saying to my uncle], ‘You can walk to the park and play ball,'” Robinson said. “And my uncle was like, ‘Is this heaven? Are you kidding me? I can walk right over there?’ And it was.”
Richard Freeman, 60, an East Coast mechanical engineering professor who was born and raised in Marynook, moved from Chicago years ago but returned for a spell to work for Northeastern University.
“We were renting in Glenview … and there were a few times we were looking at houses in Niles or Morton Grove … Evanston, Skokie. Plenty of places that kind of reminded me of the midcentury houses [in Marynook]. And I was like, ‘OK, that’s how I grew up .'”
Marynook turning 70 is ‘really something’
Marynook holds up well for 70. The HOA, created when the subdivision was built, is active and forbids additions and drastic alterations to the fronts of houses, which helps the neighborhood keep its look.
Morris said the association and the residents held an outdoor celebration of the neighborhood’s anniversary on June 21 — right on that circle at 85th Street and University Avenue.
“One of our neighbors did decorations, hanging the signs and that kind of thing,” Morris said. “We had entertainment and … everyone was in the street. So it was lovely.”
“That’s really something,” Yvonne Huey said of Marynook turning 70. “It’s good to see that the community has survived. … We were all family. We were the Marynook family.”