• Site of the former LeClaire Courts rowhouses
• LeClaire-Hearst Park
• Cicero Avenue corridor
• New mixed-income redevelopment (2020s)

LeClaire Courts takes its name from Antoine Le Claire, a fur trader who traveled through this stretch of the Southwest Side with John Kinzie in 1809. In 1950, the Chicago Housing Authority built 316 low-rise rowhouse units here, a deliberate alternative to the high-rise public housing common elsewhere in the city, expanding by another 300 units in 1953 and 1954. It was one of only two CHA developments built from the start in an outlying, previously all-white Chicago neighborhood.

For decades, residents remembered LeClaire Courts as a tight-knit community: gardens between the rowhouses, holiday gatherings, and a shared sense of family that outlasted the complex itself. The CHA demolished the last building in 2011, and the site sat largely empty for over a decade before a $400 million mixed-income redevelopment broke ground in the 2020s, planned around the adjacent LeClaire-Hearst Park and its fieldhouse.

MY-NHD's LeClaire Courts collection is built for the families who called this stretch of the Southwest Side home, and the community rising again on the same ground.