Mayor Richard J. Daley's Home
3536 S Lowe Ave (Bridgeport)
This 1939 bungalow was where former Mayor Richard J. Daley raised his family, including his son Richard M. Daley, who would also become the city’s mayor. Although the home was built after the 1920s vogue for bungalows had peaked, this is a modest continuation of the formula. In 1939, then-State Senator Daley commissioned this bungalow to be his family home. The family would eventually grow to seven children. Daley’s widow occupied the house until her death in 2003, then passed it to her grandson, former 11th Ward Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson. Throughout Daley’s time on Lowe Avenue, growing up and then later as an adult, Bridgeport was known as a highly segregated (mostly Irish) neighborhood. Daley, as mayor, always worked to keep schools and neighborhoods segregated. In 1963, according to Chicago magazine, a high-school teacher named John Walsh bought a two-flat, at 3309 S. Lowe Avenue. He then rented a unit to Black tenants. In Edward Robert McClelland’s April 2, 2023 Chicago article, he writes, “Daley’s neighbors threw rocks and bricks through the windows, while chanting ‘Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate.’ The police removed the new tenants’ possessions, and the ward organization ordered Walsh’s real estate agent to find some white renters.”
