Sinai Chicago’s One Lawndale Community Care and Surgery Center in Ogden Commons has opened an exhibit to celebrate more than 100 years of the hospital’s history on Chicago’s West Side.
The display on the first-floor lobby of One Lawndale Community Care and Surgery Center is made up of panels installed over a partial street map of North Lawndale and shows a timeline of Sinai Chicago. The exhibit is the first of its kind at Sinai Chicago and was developed with input from community partners.
“Because the building itself was developed in collaboration with our communities, it seemed like a natural home for this display, which celebrates Sinai’s close relationship with the neighborhoods it serves,” Sinai Chicago officials said in an email to the Austin Weekly News.
The exhibit’s history begins in the early 1900s when Morris Kurtzon founded Sinai Chicago. As a Jewish immigrant and businessman, Kurtzon wanted to open a hospital in North Lawndale, which had a large Jewish community at the time. He wanted to provide care that was culturally and religiously appropriate for his Jewish neighbors, plus create jobs for Jewish doctors and nurses who were discriminated against at other hospitals.
By the 1940s, a quarter of Chicago’s Jewish population lived in North Lawndale, according to the exhibit. Also, around that time, the demographics of the area began to change.
As Black families fled the Jim Crow South, many of them settled on Chicago’s West Side and, by the 1960s, North Lawndale was predominantly Black. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. moved to North Lawndale, bringing awareness to the neighborhood’s civil rights disparities, according to the exhibit.
As the West Side’s population grew and became predominantly Black and Latino, Sinai expanded its real estate and services. Hospital leadership worked with community organizations to better understand local needs — a process that continues today to provide equitable healthcare and celebrate diversity.
“The exhibit shows how the history of the hospital has been deeply connected to the Jewish, African-American and Latino communities we’ve served and continue to serve,” said Raul Garcia, Sinai Chicago’s director of community relations, in a statement.
The latest stamp in Sinai Chicago’s history is the launch of the One Lawndale Community Care and Surgery Center at Ogden Commons, which opened in June 2022 at 2652 W. Ogden Ave. The center provides health services, a grocery store, affordable housing and commercial space for those on the West Side. The new building offers resources to those who have long seen disparities in health services because of factors like inadequate access to food and housing.
Today, Sinai Chicago serves about 150,000 patients yearly, a majority of whom live on Chicago’s West and Southwest Sides, according to the hospital.
The center’s new exhibit was funded by Crown Family Philanthropies and created by Peter Alter, Rodney Brown, Irving Cutler, Anne Cohn Donnelly, Raúl Garcia, Luis Gutiérrez, and Blanche Killingsworth.
“It explores our commitment to the city’s West Side and how we remain dedicated to our mission of advancing health equity for Chicago’s most under-resourced communities,” Ngozi Ezike, president and CEO of Sinai Chicago since 2022, said in a statement.