Transportation
When the South Loop grew into the home of Chicago’s most wealthy and powerful residents, it was transportation that technology that influenced it. The neighborhood had ready access to several train stations, the working river, and the Central Business District. Prior to 1900, unreliable bridge technology didn’t allow wealthy and powerful businessmen to live across the river from the Loop-- existing transportation technology forced them to live in close proximity to the center of business, and on the side of the Chicago River that did not impede their travel.
As technology for crossing rivers improved around the turn of the 20th Century, Chicago’s industrialist abandoned the South Loop for less crowded environs. When travel across Chicago’s river bridges became reliable, they made the North Shore and the Gold Coast into their preferred neighborhoods, abandoning the South Loop in short order.
The South Loop became a warehousing center in the 1920s due to its central location. The South Loop was the center for film depositories and printing because it was at the center of population and railroad transportation, and close to the creative center of developing Chicago.
The exodus from the inner city to the suburbs was accelerated by the creation of Interstate Highways emanating outward to huge swaths of new development miles from the decaying city. But as the growing suburbs became congested, they offered neither respite from congestion nor the cultural opportunities available in a big city. Demographic changes also led to a change in the outlook and expectations of an aging and progressive urban generation.
The development of the Donohue Building in Printer's Row into loft apartments in 1979, together with the concurrent development of the Dearborn Park development on the vacated railroad tracks of Dearborn Station, provided a model for modern urban redevelopment and turned around consistent urban inner-city population loss since 1950. It is no coincidence that the success of these developments came at the same time as increasing fuel costs and rush hour traffic congestion.
The South Loop’s renaissance in the relatively-cheap oil climate of the 1990s was also due to transportation-no other neighborhood in the city provided such ready access to the Central Business District, Interstate Highways, railroads, culture, colleges, parks, and creative housing stock. Commuting time became much more important than commuting costs-a flashback to the conditions that bound early Chicago industrialists to the South Loop.
Sources: Chicago-l.org, Greg Borzo: "The Chicago "L", Wikipedia.
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