Ferd Kramer's Chicago legacy

July 20, 2002

From time to time Chicago gets slapped with an ugly title: Most segregated city in America. And whether the description is absolutely true or not, it sets some people to do much fretting and hand-wringing about what can be done about it.

Ferd Kramer did something about it.

He wasn't a dreamer, he was a developer with ideas. He knew that in Chicago if you showed a soft exterior, you were going to get rolled. And so, whether you were the feds or the bankers or the mayor of Chicago, you worked with Ferd Kramer. You didn't mess with him.

He wanted not just to build housing in Chicago, he wanted to build communities that would shatter the notion that urban cities were destined to be racially segregated. In the 1950s and 1960s he was a key figure in the razing of a dilapidated area of the South Side and construction of Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores apartments, where reasonable prices and visionary developers created integrated neighborhoods.

If you moved to Prairie Shores, your developer was also your neighbor. Kramer, too, lived there.

He was a leader in founding the model post-war suburb of Park Forest, and in developing Dearborn Park, which invigorated the South Loop in the 1980s, long before the housing boom there turned it into a hot neighborhood.

He didn't back down when critics protested the changes he sought to make. He didn't back down when the federal bureaucrats threw obstacles at him. He didn't back down when his friends and competitors disagreed with him. Watching Kramer and developer Phil Klutznick tangle was like watching "two neighborhood cur dogs, snarling and spitting. I tell you it was wonderful to watch." That's what businessman Tom Ayers said in journalist Lois Wille's book, "At Home in the Loop."

Ferd Kramer lived to be 100. Put the emphasis on lived. He worked on development projects until he was well into his 90s. When he turned 90, he organized tennis tournaments for 90-year-olds so he could indulge his passion for the game.

He died Tuesday. The official biography will say that he grew up in one of the magnificent Prairie Avenue homes on the Near South Side; that he graduated from the University of Chicago; that he chaired the Draper and Kramer real estate company for decades; that at one time or another he led the United Negro College Fund, the Chicago Mortgage Bankers Association, and the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council; that he won 12 national seniors doubles titles in tennis.

The official biography could be much more succinct. It could say this: Ferd Kramer was one of the builders of Chicago.

Not many people can say that. Not many at all.