Built 1929 Opened 1929 Added to NRHP 13 August 1981 | NRHP Reference # 81000218 Area 2 ha | |
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Location 47th Street and Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois Similar Wabash Avenue YMCA, Pilgrim Baptist Church, Edgewater Beach Apartments, Hilton Chicago, Fort Dearborn | ||
Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments (also known as the Rosenwald Apartments) is a large apartment building located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. It is located at East 47th Street and South Michigan Avenue, just one block east of the former Chicago Housing Authority's Robert Taylor Homes site. In total, the building is made up of 421 apartments and it was originally built as non-governmental subsidized housing.
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History
The building was constructed in 1929 by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, then president of Sears, Roebuck & Company. The housing project was modeled after the Dunbar Apartments built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in 1926 in Harlem, New York City. Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments received National Register of Historic Places designation in 1981.
Building Uses
In 2010, filming for the 2011 film Transformers: Dark of the Moon was done on site. In the movie, the apartments doubled as part of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine.
In 2015, a complete renovation of the building, which had been added to the National Register of Historic Places, began. The last residents had moved out 15 years earlier. When complete, the building will hold a mixture of senior citizen apartments and affordable housing for families.
