The city of Chicago is eager to demolish an apartment house on Woodlawn Avenue, but for the second time the city faces an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States meant to prevent this housebreaking. The thorn in the city’s flesh is Dr. Frederika Blankner, aged seventy, a retired professor of classics. She owns the building, and she believes in the doctrine of due process of law.
The Blankner apartment house, with its eighteen flats, is a solid structure of stone and brick, good-looking and adequately maintained; it has been fully tenanted. Dr. Blankner likes the building, which she inherited. The city urban-renewal gentry have forced out all other owners and tenants in the surrounding hundred acres of southside Chicago, and repeatedly have tried to get rid of Dr. Blankner through the doctrine of eminent domain; they have offered her a price far below the present cost of erecting a similar building, and indeed below the sum she could have obtained by mortgaging the building in recent years.
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