• The five original 1957-61 residential towers (Loebl, Schlossman and Bennett)
• The 20-acre grounds along South Martin Luther King Drive
• Lake Meadows (adjacent, 1954)
• Illinois Institute of Technology campus (adjacent)

Prairie Shores rose between 1957 and 1961 as one of the era's most ambitious experiments in planned integration, developed by Draper and Kramer as staff housing and a buffer for the adjacent Michael Reese Hospital. Designed by the architecture firm Loebl, Schlossman, and Bennett, its five nineteen-story towers offered floor-to-ceiling windows framing Lake Michigan and skyline views across a 20-acre site along South Martin Luther King Drive. The development followed directly on the heels of Lake Meadows, Chicago's first federally funded urban renewal project, completed in 1954 just to the south.

Draper and Kramer deliberately marketed Prairie Shores to draw white renters back to the city's Near South Side, and the buildings opened with a racial mix close to the city's own demographic split — an outcome heralded at the time as an exception to Chicago's deeply segregated housing market. The five original towers still stand today, their clean modernist lines a marker of the postwar planning era alongside the neighboring Lake Meadows towers and the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

From a hospital's staff housing to a landmark of planned integration, Prairie Shores carries a complicated, consequential history in its concrete and glass — one worth wearing with an understanding of where it came from.