Making Cities Look Like Those Who Built Them

When you drive around Chicago, or any city like it, recognition for its leaders should not just be visible in Black neighborhoods

See that highway hugging Lake Michigan? That’s Chicago’s historic Lake Shore Drive. Just last week it was renamed for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the Black man who is credited with creating a trading post and being the first non-Native permanent resident of the area that is now known as Chicago.

I was surprisingly emotional when I covered the ceremony changing the name of a downtown Chicago street from Congress Drive to Ida B. Wells Drive.

Wells, a Black woman and journalist, was one of many people the city had not adequately honored — with only a torn-down housing authority project bearing her name. This day, things were different as the new, shiny street sign was unveiled, a tribute to the woman who had created a lasting influence on the city and its people. So I wasn’t surprised when Alderman David Moore started to push for a street name change to Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Drive to honor the city’s first non-Indigenous settler, a Black man who is known as the “Father of Chicago.”

DuSable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa and built a trading post where the Chicago River and Lake Michigan meet that became a major supply station in the Great Lakes region. Their granddaughter, Eulalie Pelletier, became the first non-Native person born there.

Moore’s proposed change has garnered much discussion, mainly because it aims to change the name of Lake Shore Drive, which is the city’s most scenic and beloved street-slash-highway. But, surprisingly, most of that feedback is not about whether we should honor DuSable in a much larger way but exactly how it should be done, prompting my friend Natalie Moore, a reporter at WBEZ, to ask on Twitter: “Do you think Lake Shore Drive should be renamed for DuSable?”

Suggestions included changing the name of a street that is less beloved, changing the name of a street that is named after a problematic person such as (Christopher) Columbus Drive, or changing the name of the city’s Riverwalk — which aligns with an alternative proposal from Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Alderman Moore mentioned in a committee hearing that he’d been on a Chicago boat tour and was disappointed that DuSable wasn’t mentioned.