Abraham Lincoln split wood to build houses before he was president. In 1986, five years after leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter came to Chicago to build a house.
Carter was volunteering at Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-based Christian ministry that constructed homes for the poor. He arrived in the city with his wife Rosalyn on July 6. This week they’d be doing their part in West Garfield Park.
Carter told reporters that Habitat for Humanity had given him and his wife “a new dimension in our lives.” They’d begun the Jimmy Carter Work Project by renovating a six-story, 19-unit apartment in New York in 1984.
The House That Jimmy Built, 2010
Now they were building a new four-unit townhouse on the southeast corner of Maypole and Kildare Avenues. During their time in Chicago, the Carters would live in the neighborhood, at the Guyon Hotel on Pulaski Road.
Over 150 people worked on the townhouse. Among them were about 70 volunteers from local building trades unions. Future residents were also on the job, giving them “sweat equity” in their home. The 61-year-old ex-president himself clocked a 14-hour day, sawing and hammering. Though the weather was rainy, construction was completed in four days, and the first families happily moved in.
Jimmy Carter’s Chicago week closed that evening with a Habitat reception at the Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue. Mayor Harold Washington praised Carter for the example he was setting for others. The mayor hoped the former president would continue his good work, and would return to Chicago often.
For many years afterward, Carter continued to participate in an annual project for Habitat. Unfortunately, the West Garfield Park townhouse he helped build eventually became derelict, and was torn down in 2010.