• Lake Meadows residential towers (SOM design)
• Former Lake Meadows professional building (1954)
• Bronzeville-IIT CTA Station
• "Heart of Bronzeville" mural

Lake Meadows began in 1948, when New York Life Insurance invested $18 million to redevelop more than 100 acres of the historically Black Douglas neighborhood into what planners called a "suburb in the city." The project, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and completed in 1954, was Chicago's first large-scale urban renewal effort and one of the first in the nation, but it came at a steep cost: the development displaced roughly 3,400 families from a dense, thriving section of Bronzeville that Chicagoans of the era bitterly nicknamed "Negro removal."

In their place rose steel-and-glass residential towers set on wide green lawns with few through-streets, deliberately marketed as one of the city's first large-scale racially integrated communities. The former Lake Meadows professional building at 31st and Rhodes, a two-story modernist structure now being restored for new medical office use, remains one of the development's most architecturally significant pieces, and the neighborhood's shopping center, anchored by a Jewel-Osco, still carries a mural titled "Heart of Bronzeville" on its facade.

MY-NHD's Lake Meadows collection is built for a neighborhood shaped by one of the boldest, and most contested, redevelopment experiments in Chicago's history.