IIT CAMPUS
Bronzeville
Learn More
Read about IIT and Mies van der Rohe.
Read about Chicago Southside Piano and Mecca Flat Blues.
Listen to “Mecca Flat Blues,”Priscilla Stewart with Jimmy Blythe recorded in 1924.
Watch Nora Brooks Bailey reading some selections from In The Mecca, by her mother, Gwendolyn Brooks.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s sleek, spare buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) campus are widely celebrated for their bold, modern aesthetic and their assertion, in steel and glass, that “less is more.”
When the IIT campus was built, Mies broke from traditional collegiate architectureand joined an elite group of Chicago architects, including Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.
But modern architecture history is not the only American history that was made on this site. Before there was Mies, there was Mecca.
Mecca Flats
Mecca Flats was an apartment building that once stood at 34th Street and South Dearborn Street. Its design helped create a template for the classic courtyard buildings found all over Chicago.
More than that, the Mecca was a social space: a community. In and around it, African Americans who had come to Chicago during the Great Migration celebrated their own unique American aesthetic, especially in music – jazz and blues performed by some of the era’s greats in such venues as the Plantation Café and the Sunset Café.
Over time, the Mecca Flats apartment community was challenged by the same issues of urban decay that other city neighborhoods struggled with: overcrowding, crime, and poverty. But when IIT wanted to raze the Mecca for its campus, its residents fought for their community – and ultimately lost.
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ In the Mecca celebrated the building and its community, but also captured its complexity and tragedy. In the Mecca was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1969.