In 1971, Chicago’s Tri-Taylor neighborhood stood on the brink of transformation. Nestled on the Near West Side, this once-thriving community was home to families, corner stores, and aging buildings that had weathered the passage of time.
Yet, within just a few years, much of it would be lost to demolition, making way for the expansion of the Illinois Medical District.
Capturing the neighborhood in its final years was Lou Fourcher, a graduate student at the University of Illinois-Chicago, who documented its streets and residents while participating in the school’s Valley Project.
His work, now a rare visual record of a vanished era, was rediscovered decades later by his son, Mike Fourcher, who shared 150 of these images on Flickr.
Reflecting on his father’s process, Mike Fourcher explained to journalist Lee Bey that gaining access to the neighborhood wasn’t easy. “He was a fish out of water in this neighborhood,” he recalled. “He told me many times that he got most of the pictures because he managed to talk a local gang leader into walking him around.”
Despite being an outsider, Lou Fourcher’s work in the Valley Project, a community health initiative, helped him earn trust among residents.
His experiences in Tri-Taylor would go on to shape his career, leading him to run nonprofit health centers such as Erie Family Health Center in Humboldt Park and New City Health Center in Englewood.
These photographs capture daily life among the backdrop of weathered facades, corner shops, and sidewalks bustling with residents who had no way of knowing their neighborhood would soon be gone.
Just a few years later, in the mid-1970s, demolition swept through the area, displacing longtime residents and replacing homes and businesses with institutional expansion.
By 1996, when the Chicago Reader documented the final stages of the transformation, the area known to locals as “the Valley” had already changed dramatically.
The publication described a landscape of vacant lots, a few remaining houses, and remnants of a once-tight-knit community.
“The ‘district development area’ is better known to its residents as the ‘Valley.’ It includes an old school, a new church building, a few corner stores, a lot of ramshackle houses, and many, many vacant lots.
Most of its residents are Black, quite a few are elderly, and many have lived in the Valley for a long time.
Over the years, many residents have given up and sold their houses, knowing that the medical district was authorized to come in at any time.”
(Photo credit: Lou Fourcher / Mike Foucher via flickr.com/photos/vouchey/albums/72157625828492479/).