WBEZ | demolition

City wrecks an 1890s apartment house

Mon, 13 May 2013 05:00:00 -0500

The Sheridan apartments at 71st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue—across from Oak Woods Cemetery—had been an unofficial landmark of the Greater Grand Crossing community since Benjamin Harrison was president.

But after more than 120 years, the long-vacant dilapidated three-story brick building with prominent bay windows is now being wrecked by the city under court order. Demolition equipment has ripped away the west side of the Sheridan as of today, exposing its interior.

The Sheridan's demolition had been under an automatic 90-day review because the building is listed in the city's Historic Resources Survey as having potential landmark qualities, but the hold was released April 25. A city spokesman had no information on site's future, but here's hoping something gets in the works soon. Too much of the South Side is vanishing under the wrecker's ball, leaving large tracts of undeveloped land in neighborhoods like Greater Grand Crossing returning to prairie. And less than 10 miles from downtown Chicago.

Add the senseless and ongoing violence to the mix and the symbolism of the Sheridan's demolition is jarring. Once the building is razed, its intersection will be marked by a vacant lot, a police station and a cemetery.

Built between 1890 and 1891 on the six-corner intersection of 71st, Cottage Grove and South Chicago avenues, the 16-unit structure is a remnant of the residential building boom in the years surrounding the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in nearby Jackson Park.

Here's a photo I took of the Sheridan last year when the building was relatively intact:

The Sheridan has been vacant since the mid-1990s. The city filed suit in 2008 to get the owners--who had attempted to convert the place into condominiums--to repair the property after inspectors found fire damage, rotting wood porches, crumbling brickwork, holes in floors, shifting exterior walls and evidence of squatters in the building. Heating, plumbing and electrical systems were also stripped out, a city building inspector testified. The demolition case made it all the way to the Illinois Appellate Court. The court ruled in favor of the city this year and you can read the file here.

South Shore resident Maurice Rabb has watched the building for years.

"I remember eyeing the building as a kid in the '70s and '80s every time I came up South Chicago Avenue with my mom," Rabb said. "It was an odd, yet handsome building [and] I always wondered whom might have lived there."

Tear down that wall? Not so fast: Permit to raze Reagan's Hyde Park boyhood home under review

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 05:00:00 -0600

A permit to demolish a boyhood home of President Ronald Reagan has been placed on hold as city officials decide whether the vacant Hyde Park six-flat is worthy of preservation, WBEZ has learned.

Heneghan Wrecking and Excavating Co., on behalf the University of Chicago, last Thursday applied for a permit to raze the three-story brick building, 832-834 E. 57th St. The move triggered an automatic maxium 90-day review by landmark officials because the structure is among a class of buildings with "potentially significant architectural or historical features," as listed in the city's Historic Resources Survey.

(The above news story from Voice of America last month shows the building's exterior and efforts to preserve the structure.)

The demolition permit is one of three currently under such review by the city. The list, which includes St. Boniface Church, 1352 W. Chestnut — the subject of a preservation battle for more than a decade — can be viewed here.

Reagan, a former California governor who served in the White House from 1981 to 1989, lived in the Hyde Park building with his family for about 10 months when he was four years old. It is one of several Illinois places Reagan lived as a youth. The best-known is the Dixon, IL home where Reagan moved when he was nine years old that has been restored and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Located on the northeastern edge of the expanding University of Chicago Medical Center, the building has been eyed for demolition since the university purchased it in 2004, angering some preservationists and Reaganphiles.

"[W]hile the university is more-or-less ignoring the Reagan home preservation effort, it is actively lobbying for an Obama Presidential Library," Former Reagan aide Peter Hannaford wrote in American Spectator last month: "Chicago politics being what they are, the betting is on that project and not saving the cold-water flat apartment building in which the only U.S. president born and bred in Illinois lived during his boyhood."

According to ordinance, the city's Department of Housing and Economic Development can look at a range of preservation options — or none at all — during the review period, including a landmark designation.

Chicago demolishes more than 250 vacant buildings

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 09:03:00 -0600

The city of Chicago has demolished more than 250 vacant buildings this year in an effort to eliminate potential gang hangouts in high-crime neighborhoods.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement Thursday the demolitions are part of a joint initiative between Chicago police and the city's Department of Buildings.

The city has focused on vacant and dangerous buildings that could become havens for illegal activity such as drug use and prostitution. Buildings are targeted for demolition based on recommendations from the community and the number of calls for service received.

Redevelopment plans put jazzy 1950s ex-hospital on the terminal list

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 05:47:00 -0600

The former Cuneo Hospital building reminds me of jazz. Moreso than any other structure in the city.

Like jazz, the elliptically-shaped building has a free-form energy. Curves, rectangles, solids and voids meet each other at will. The front of the building, which faces Montrose and Clarendon, looks nothing like the rear or the north sides of the structure. Yet a visual rhythm--a beat, if you will--keeps it all together.

Built in 1957, the shuttered modernist hospital might soon face music of a different sort, however. Developers seek to raze the building and its otherworldly 1970s addition to build a $220 million high rise and retail development on the site. The proposed development--replacing a previous developer's unpopular three-tower $350 million 2011 proposal--is making its way through community meetings in the area.

The renderings of the new project designed by Hartshorne Plunkard Architecture look pretty good--but more on that later. For now, let's walk around the old complex as Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet plays in your other browser window:

Originally a hospital for women and children, Cuneo Memorial Hospital is the work of architect Edo J. Belli of the firm Belli & Belli, an outfit that designed a range of modernist schools and hospitals for the Chicago Roman Catholic Archdiocese in the 1950s and 1960s. Cuneo was built for $2 million by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart order.

Dig that roof line!

The rear of the hospital opens up to provide views of Clarendon Park in the foreground.

And the later addition, linked to the older building by a skybridge over Clarendon:

The hospital closed in 1988 and was later the home of Columbus Maryville Academy children's shelter which, in turn, shut its doors in 2005, leaving the three acre site vacant.

Here's a view of the new project:

Cuneo's fate has prompted some chatter in the preservation community, but not much. The organization Preservation Chicago put the 1957 building on its "Chicago 7" most-endangered list for 2012 and urged the structure's reuse.

Demolishing foreclosed homes: Does it make sense?

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:13:00 -0500

Listen to this conversation

Is demolition a solution to the housing crisis in some of the Chicago area's most depressed communities?

Nowadays, many foreclosed homes end up in states of disrepair. Left vacant, they’re stripped of all valuable materials. Instead of attracting potential buyers, these homes often attract crime and end up sinking property values. That’s why some communities are tearing them down.

Former City of Chicago buildings commissioner Richard Monocchio estimates that between 6,000-9,000 homes should come down in Chicago alone. We'll talk with Monocchio and Chicago Heights Mayor David Gonzalez Monday on Eight Forty-Eight to learn about their expereinces using demolition as a tool to rebuild communities hit hardest by foreclosures.

After Shepherd's demise, what's next for the city's other sacred ruins?

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:37:00 -0500

The bulldozers finally began rolling yesterday on Shepherd's Temple Baptist Church--nee Anshe Kenesseth Israel synagogue--in the city's North Lawndale community.

An emergency demolition order issued for the vacant and dilapidated structure last December finally claimed the building, 3411 W. Douglas Blvd. Built in 1913, the old temple survived almost a century, housing three different congregations and two separate religions. The Rev. Martin Luther King spoke on its now-crumbled front steps when the building was home to the influential Friendship Baptist Church in the 1960s. A young Golda Meir, who lived at 1306 S. Lawndale, either worshipped at the temple or attended early Zionist movement meetings there during her brief stay in Chicago after coming here in 1917, according to some reports.

But in the end--and despite all that history and architecture--Shepherd's Temple was a big, neglected and deteriorating building located across the street from a school, no less. The admirable effort by preservationists bought the building a little time and a lot of attention--but ultimately no cash.

In truth, efforts to preserve this structure and pass it into capable, capitalized hands should have begun at least a decade ago. So what should rise from the rubble Shepherd's Temple? How about some kind of early-warning system developed by the city and faith leaders to get current and future Shepherd's Temples on the radar of thriving congregations looking for more space? If the city can market old retail and industrial areas in order to entice businesses, why not old churches?

The city can't force sales, of course, but it could identify and catalog these historic structures--much as it does for non-religious buildings. Maybe the information and the partnership with faith leaders could create marketplace and a grapevine for those who are looking to buy and sell.

For instance, Nefrette Halim, an Egyptian American and a preservationist who does battle on the North Shore, believes the old churches could be marketed to new immigrant Christian communities before falling into peril.

"There are Christian communities that are thriving and growing at break neck speeds," she said. "Obviously, the example I know well is the Coptic church. I do know, however, all the Middle Eastern churches are the same case: Iraqi churches, Syrian, Assyrian, Ethiopian, as well as many Asian Christian communities. The advantage is that many of these communities have built in networks [such as] preschools, English lessons, daycare, and are socially active and can immediately stimulate struggling areas if given the proper opportunity and introduction to a community."

That's one idea. What's yours? Feel free to comment below.

ALSO: In circumstances that mirror that of Shepherd's Temple, a housing court judge in December issued an order to demolish an historic, but ragged, synagogue-turned-Baptist church in a once-predominantly Jewish area of Buffalo, New York. The 109-year-old structure--the oldest synagogue building in the city--hangs on, though, and the great fixBuffalo blog has the story.

Rustbelt city wants immigrants, skilled or not

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:27:00 -0600

Lifelong Dayton resident Monica Schultz, 36, brings me to the East End block where she grew up. “This whole street was full of families,” she says. “Kids were running around playing, all within my age range.”

Now no kids are in sight.

Schultz points to a half dozen abandoned houses, including one right next door to her family’s place. She says the city has boarded it up a few times but stray cats keep finding their way in.

“We had a flea infestation problem,” she tells me. “People walking by could see the fleas or feel the fleas or get the fleas. All of the yards in the neighborhood here were becoming infested with fleas.”

Schultz says the city can’t keep up with houses like this. “It’s one of many that need to be bulldozed,” she says. “But it’s on a list.”

Dayton’s population has been shrinking since the 1960s. Most of the area’s factory jobs are long gone. To save the city, Schultz has embraced a new idea: Help immigrants and refugees lay roots in Dayton.

Schultz, who owns a small marketing firm, helped lead community meetings that generated a 72-point plan called “Welcome Dayton.” City commissioners approved the plan this fall. The points range from better immigrant access to social services, to more translations of court materials, to grants for immigrants to open shops in a dilapidated commercial corridor, to a soccer event that supporters envision as a local World Cup tournament.

Schultz tells me the plan could revive a Dayton entrepreneurial spirit that sparked inventions ranging from the cash register to the airplane. “You would have small businesses,” she says. “You would have coffee shops and you would have bakeries and you would have specialty grocery stores.”

Dayton is among several rustbelt cities suffering from population loss and brain drain. To create businesses and jobs, some communities are trying to attract immigrants, especially highly educated ones. Dayton stands out for the attention its plan pays to immigrants without wealth or skills.

The plan even addresses people without permission to be in the country. One provision calls for police officers to quit asking suspects about their immigration status unless the crime was “serious.” Another point could lead to a city identification card that would help residents do everything from open a bank account to buy a cell phone.

City Manager Tim Riordan, Dayton’s chief executive, says welcoming all types of immigrants will make the area more cosmopolitan. “I think there would be a vibrancy,” he says. “We’d start to have some international investment of companies deciding they ought to locate here.”

Foreign-born residents so far amount to 3 percent of the city’s 142,000 residents. For a mid-sized U.S. city these days, that’s not many.

But Dayton’s immigrants and refugees are increasing their numbers and, Riordan says, they’re already making a difference. He points to a neighborhood north of downtown where some Ahiska Turks have settled. “They were refugees in Russia," he says. "Here they’ve bought houses. They’ve fixed them up. And, sometimes when I talk to hardware store owners, people will come in and they’ll buy a window at a time. ‘I’ve got enough money to put in another window.’ It’s slow-but-sure change.”

Not everyone in Dayton is on board with the plan.

In a corner tavern on the East End, a 62-year-old bartender serves the only customer what she calls his last can of beer for the night. It’s a Friday, just 11 p.m., but she’s closing. “The owner can’t pay me to stay any longer,” she tells me, speaking on condition I don’t name her or the bar.

The bartender says the tavern could be on its last legs and tells me what happened to three other East End bars where she worked. They all shut down. She says that’s because many of the neighborhood’s Appalachian families, who arrived for manufacturing jobs after World War II, have moved away.

“NCR closed down, Dayton Tire and Rubber closed down, GM and Delphi and Frigidaire,” she says, pausing only when her customer slams down the beer and bellows something about a “last paycheck.”

The bartender tells me she doesn’t like how Riordan and other Dayton officials are handling the exodus of families who’ve been paying local taxes for generations. “Why won’t he try to keep those kinds of people here?” she asks. “He wants to welcome the immigrants to come in here. What can they do? Where are they going to get the money to fix up anything? What jobs are they going to get to maintain what they fix up here? There are no jobs here. None.”

It’s not just locals like the bartender who have doubts about “Welcome Dayton.”

Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington group that pushes for strict immigration controls, acknowledges that attracting immigrants would increase the size of Dayton’s economy. “But that’s different than arguing that there’s a benefit,” he says. “Growing an area’s gross domestic product, but not the per capita GDP, doesn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t be very helpful. In fact, there might be problems with that.”

Camarota says the low-skilled immigrants would put downward pressure on wages for workers on Dayton’s bottom rungs.

But Italian-born economist Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, says low-skilled immigrants would bring what Dayton seeks—and more: “One, they will increase the variety of local restaurants, local shops. Second, they will provide a variety of local services, such as household services, care of the children, of the elderly. Third, they will also develop and bring an atmosphere of diversity and higher tolerance.” Peri says these low-skilled contributions would all help Dayton attract immigrants with more resources.

The willingness of many immigrants to perform manual labor for low pay, Peri adds, could create jobs for longtime residents. He points to landscaping companies: “They will need people who mow the lawn but also they will need accountants, salespersons, a manager and drivers.”

Dayton’s approach—welcoming immigrants with and without skills—is the “optimal strategy,” Peri says.

Whether a city’s immigrant-integration plan can actually attract many people is another question. About an hour east of Dayton, the city of Columbus launched an immigrant-friendly initiative in 2002 and saw its foreign-born population grow fast. But that city’s economy is much more robust than Dayton’s. It had already been attracting immigrants for years.

The results of “Welcome Dayton” could depend on how it works for city residents like a 25-year-old mother whom I’ll call Ana López. (She doesn’t have papers to be in the country so I agreed not to use her real name.) López says she came from the Mexican state of Puebla as a teenager at the urging of a friend who had arrived in Dayton earlier.

López says her first job was in a restaurant with a big buffet. “We didn’t come to take work away from anyone,” she tells me in Spanish. “Rather, there are jobs nobody else wants.”

Now López and her husband have three kids, all U.S. citizens. The family has managed to buy a house. And it’s found a congregation, College Hill Community Church, that provides simultaneous Spanish interpretation through headphones.

But Dayton hasn’t always been hospitable. López says police officers caught her brother-in-law driving without a license and turned him over to federal officials, who deported him.

Looking at the “Welcome Dayton” plan, López says providing the ID cards and removing the police from immigration enforcement could make a difference for families like hers. “These families would tell their friends and relatives to move to Dayton,” she says.

That’s exactly what city leaders want to hear.

Wrecking ball in session at modernist old South Shore High School

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:36:00 -0500

The wrecker's ball is busy at work on the South Shore High School campus, bringing down a once-visionary late 1960s building that became the odd man out when a new school was completed earlier this year a block east at 75th and Jeffrey.

It is a spectacular demolition site as equipment knocks away at the fortress-like school. You can see colored interior walls, snatches of murals here and there and am intriguing concrete structural lattice running through the ceilings of the building. The block-long site on Constance Avenue between 75th and 76th street is surrounded by an eight-foot safety fence that blocks much of the views from the sidewalk, but you can still catch good glimpses here and there. Elgin's Omega Demolition Corp--their motto is "The Final Word in Demolition"--is handling the job.

Here's a photograph I took of the building earlier this year when I reported demolition had been announced:

Here's what the front of the school looks like now, thanks to an opportune hole in the netting of the fence surrounding the site:

The 43-year-old architecturally Brutalist school was built for $9 million and--as I wrote in January--the building was designed with hexagonal classrooms, closed-circuit television that would beam-in instruction to the classrooms, and motor-operated wall partitions that would allow instructors to change the size of their classroom spaces. There were even laboratory demonstration tables that would mechanically spin around to let students see science experiments from various angles. A photography darkroom, a skating rink and an amphitheater were also built.

The school was designed by the Chicago architecture firm Fridstein & Fitch. The firm's principal, Marvin Fitch, designed the old Kennedy King College at 69th and Wentworth, which was demolished last year. The South Shore building was never staffed adequately or maintained properly from the outset. Many of school's then high-tech features didn't work after the school was opened.

Located on the west edge of Rosenblum Park, the site will be converted to park space once cleared.

*By the way, follow me at Lee Bey's Chicago on Facebook. You'll see links to past blog posts and video links to my TV appearances and other stuff.

Demolition slated for an early Skidmore Owings & Merrill

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:33:00 -0500

A dilapidated one-time country estate that is among the first works by the architecture firm that later became Skidmore Owings & Merrill will be demolished by Lake County Forest Preserve, officials there said.

The Glen A. Lloyd House, built in 1936 in what is now Wright Woods Forest Preserve in suburban Mettawa, was designed by architect Nathaniel Owings and was completed the year the firm--then only Skidmore & Owings--was founded. The forest preserve district acquired the vacant home and its surrounding acres in 2005; the home has suffered years of water damage and lack of maintenance since then.

The move to demolish the house comes after the district unsuccessfully tried to find a person or entity to repair and restore the home in exchange for a low-cost, long-term lease--an effort this blog reported in May. Repair estimates on the 6,000 sq ft dwelling ran past $1 million. No one stepped forward.

“In the end, we did not get any responses at all,” Lake County Forest Preserve Executive Director Tom Hahn told the Daily Herald earlier this week. “I know it’s hard for a number of the commissioners, but there really was no one out there."

The district's finance committee voted last week to demolish the house, but will first have the building documented. Salvaged pieces from the home could be donated to the Lake County Discovery Museum.

Chicago to tear down historic Michael Reese building despite promise to save It

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 23:21:00 -0500

The city of Chicago plans to tear down a historic building at the old Michael Reese Hospital -- despite promises to save it.

The main hospital building is more than 100 years old. Landmarks Illinois says the building’s one of the few examples of a prairie-style high-rise. It was also the site of many medical innovations.

The city bought the hospital campus in the summer of 2009, planning to build the Olympic Village there. The city didn’t win the Summer Games, but demolished most of the other buildings anyway, including several that famed architect Walter Gropius had a hand in designing. The city vowed to keep the main Reese building and later also said it would try to preserve one of the Gropius structures.

Now Mayor Richard Daley says the main building is deteriorating and unsafe. Officials say the building was in poor shape when the city bought it, and now the roof’s starting to cave in.

Daley says it will cost too much to stabilize, especially during hard economic times.

Jim Peters, who heads Landmarks Illinois, says that’s a tremendous disappointment.

“It is the one building down at Michael Reese that even the city agreed to preserve up front when the Olympics were being discussed,” Peters says. “And as we all know, they ended up tearing down virtually everything else, and now they're going to tear this down.”

“So I guess we're better at demolition than preservation,” Peters said. He’s worried now about what will happen to the last Gropius building.

Peters questioned how the main building could fall apart in such a short time. He says there are plenty of properly-secured vacant buildings in fine shape a dozen years later.

Preservationists have charged that the city didn’t do enough to secure the site. They also said the city allowed salvage crews to remove items they shouldn’t have and to damage the property by breaking windows and throwing furniture out through those windows.

The city says despite its “best efforts,” squatters are still occupying the building and stripping the property for salvage. A spokeswoman for the Public Building Commission says those efforts include increasing security. She did not have details about when the security was added or what that entailed, but said she’d have that information by tomorrow.