Chicago parks are filled with dramatic architecture, from the sculpted façade and gold dome on the Garfield Park Conservatory to the Ford Calumet Center, a hard-edged salute to the industrial past in Big Marsh Park.

But there’s hardly a park building more fanciful and charming than the Humboldt Park Receptory Building and Stable — “receptory” being an antiquated way of calling it a place to receive visitors. An asymmetrical collection of spires, turrets, arches, beams and diamond-patterned windows, the complex looks like a medieval building out of a fairy tale. 

Finished in 1896 at Division and Sacramento, the facility is a mix of Queen Anne and, according to the park district when it opened, the “old German style of country house architecture.” The Receptory Building and Stable housed stables for park visitors and staff, and was essentially the park’s visitor center.

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This piece of eye candy got a new next-door neighbor this year: a squat cinder block structure that looks like it could be the box the 1890s confection was delivered in.

Although the two buildings couldn’t look more different, they’re each components of the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture.

The museum first moved into parts of the 19th-century building in 2002 and has used the whole thing since a $7 million renovation was completed in 2007. This year, the museum started construction on the new building, which is intended for storage of its archives and collections in a climate-controlled space. But as Block Club Chicago first reported in October, “the project did not receive necessary permits or clear layers of city and state approval to start construction. A stop-work order was issued [by city officials] Sept. 25.”

With construction halted, the new building is not only a blank, unattractive neighbor for the 1890s beauty — it’s also an unfinished one. Seen from the west, the structure blocks the view of about one-third of the picturesque older building.

The stable and receptory is a four-sided building, pretty in every direction and surrounded by lawns and gardens. The best place to view the dissonance of the two structures is from the lawn south of the pair. On the far right, near Humboldt Boulevard, is a picturesque turret wrapped with windows and sprouting a steep spire topped by a finial. Your eye then moves to the left along a brick and stone wall, two tile-roofed peaks whose faces are half-timbered like a Tudor house, arched windows and doorway, and then…the windowless, drab gray cinder block structure.

Although he says he understands a museum’s need to have an archives building, Kurt Gippert, a bookstore owner who lives about two-and-a-half blocks from the museum, calls construction of the bland new box next to the older building “a disfigurement of the park.”

Gippert is one of the organizers of a petition calling for the building to be removed and a new location for the archives found. Tearing down a partially completed building may seem unlikely, but there’s precedent. In the late 1980s, the city successfully sued to have developer Lou Wolf tear down a four-story building he put up at State and Division when permits allowed only three stories.

Billy Ocasio, the former Chicago alderman who is the museum’s president and CEO, has not responded to multiple requests for comment about the buildings. About the construction of the new one starting without the required permits, Ocasio told Block Club “some honest mistakes were made, and we’re trying to correct them.”

A spokeswoman for the Chicago Park District told WBEZ’s Reset why construction has stopped on the new structure.

“The Park District directed the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture, which holds the lease to occupy the historic stables at Humboldt Park, to halt construction on the structure being built on park property,” the spokeswoman said. “Proper procedures, as detailed in their lease, must be followed, including the District’s prior written approval for construction. Additional approvals, including permits from the City, are also required. The District is currently evaluating the proper next steps and will continue to work with all relevant agencies to determine the future of the project.”

It’s not clear what will happen, but we do know this: The stable and receptory building is a survivor. Originally it was one of three related 19th-century buildings in the park, one designed by architect George Frommann and two by Frommann’s son Emil, as well as Ernst Jebsen. But when the park was revamped in a naturalistic style by the great Midwestern landscape architect Jens Jensen in 1912, the other two buildings were demolished.

In the mid-20th century, the park district began using the 25,000-square-foot building to store trucks and equipment, then as a garbage transfer station, and let it run down. In the early 1990s, a group called the Institute of Hispanic Cultures and the Chicago Park District began a rehab to create a museum. The project was stalled when a fire, believed to be arson, destroyed the roof and many of the historical architectural details.

The Puerto Rican museum moved into part of the building about a decade later, and in 2007, the $7 million restoration was complete. It included a new clay tile roof like the original, replacing the asphalt shingle roof that had been put on sometime in the down years and was destroyed in the fire.

Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset’s “What’s That Building?” contributor. Follow him on Twitter @Dennis_Rodkin.

K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for Reset’s “What’s That Building?” Follow him on Instagram @true_chicago.