A vacant off-track betting site in Pullman will be transformed into a Chick-fil-A eatery by late fall 2024, in the latest initiative to revive the historic neighborhood on Chicago’s Far South Side.
The new chain restaurant will sit on a 6-acre parcel off the Bishop Ford Expressway just south of 111th Street. Construction is slated to begin this spring and will create 145 jobs, in addition to 125 positions at the Chick-fil-A when it opens later this year.
The Chicago Plan Commission approved the project Thursday, less than 45 days after its application was submitted. The redevelopment plan “is the latest step in the renaissance that we are experiencing in the Pullman and Roseland communities,” said 9th Ward Ald. Anthony A. Beale.
Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, a nonprofit community development organization, and the Rev. James Meeks with Hope Center Foundation, the nonprofit he founded, are leadingthe project. They acquired the land that once housed Hawthorne Race Course’s off-track betting facility.
“The transformation of Pullman from its neglected past into today’s growing and revitalized neighborhood is a model for community renewal in our city and throughout our nation,” said the Rev. Charlie Dates, senior pastor of Salem Baptist Church in nearby Roseland.
Hope Center Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Salem, the largest African American church in Illinois with more than 15,000 members. Meeks, founder of Salem Baptist Church, led the recruitment of Chick-fil-A to Pullman.
Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives has generated about $1 billion since 2010 for investments in Pullman, North Lawndale and other underresourced Chicago communities. The development organization has also channeled more than $18 million in grants and loans to small-business owners from its subsidiary, Greenwood Archer Capital.
Pullman was created in the 1880s as a company town to house workers who made luxury railroad cars at the factory of magnate George Pullman.
Yet over decades, industrial decline and other factors battered the country’s first planned model industrial town. By 2000, homes in Pullman lay vacant and 28% of its shrinking population lived below the poverty line.
But since 2014, more than $500 million has been invested in Pullman to create some 2,000 jobs.
In the last decade, Pullman and Roseland have seen an influx of new development, including a Walmart; the first Whole Foods Distribution Center in Illinois; the first Gotham Greens greenhouse outside of New York; the Pullman Community Center, the region’s largest indoor sports and education facility; a Method soap plant that was the first factory to open in Chicago’s South Side in 30 years; and the city’s first and only National Historic National Park.
