Preservation Chicago’s annual list of the seven most endangered buildings is so big that this year it includes eight historic sites.
Topping the list, issued Wednesday, is an urgent late addition: two century-old, early Chicago skyscrapers that the federal government purchased 15 years ago and now wants to demolish.
A $52 million bill is moving through Congress that would tear down the Century and Consumers buildings in the 200 block of South State Street, long-vacant monuments to early Chicago high-rise architecture. The government acquired the buildings in 2007 as a security buffer and potential expansion of federal office space behind the adjacent Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
Those expansion plans never materialized, and the federal government appears ready to cut its losses.
“These are two of the last buildings representing the Chicago School of Architecture and those early skyscrapers in Chicago,” said Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago, a nonprofit group focused on protecting historically significant architectural structures. “Their loss would be tragic to the city of Chicago and its reputation as a city of architecture.”
The terra cotta skyscrapers are deteriorating, but still stand tall as seminal developments in downtown Chicago. Completed in 1915, the 16-story Century Building at 202 S. State St. was designed by Holabird & Roche, a pioneering Chicago architecture firm that built a number of prominent commercial high-rises. The 22-story Consumers Building at 220 S. State St. was completed in 1913 and designed by Jenney, Mundie & Jensen. Lead architect William Le Baron Jenney is credited as building the first modern skyscraper, the nearby Home Insurance Building, in 1885.
A proposed $141 million mixed-use redevelopment of the buildings by CA Ventures fell through in 2019 over security concerns raised by federal judges working at the Dirksen building.
Preservation Chicago is proposing an adaptive reuse as a collaborative national archives center for religious groups and other organizations, with the federal government selling the buildings to a nonprofit created for that purpose. Miller suggested the federal government put the $52 million allocated for demolition into renovation.
“The federal government should invest that $52 million into repairing the facades on these buildings with the idea that they would get a Chicago landmark designation,” Miller said. “These landmark buildings belong to all of us as Chicagoans, and these are important buildings to the development of the skyscraper as we know it today.”
Other sites making the 2022 “Chicago 7 Most Endangered” list range from a stretch of North DuSable Lake Shore Drive earmarked for redevelopment to the original Cabrini Row Houses, the last vestiges of the mostly-demolished Near North Side public housing complex.
Public housing sites
Built in the early 1940s, hundreds of Cabrini row houses sit vacant and fenced off on a 16-acre site that was once part of the Cabrini-Green housing complex on Chicago’s Near North Side. The high-rises were demolished between 1995 and 2011, a catalyst for gentrification in the once crime-ridden neighborhood.
The CHA renovated 140 of the 584 row houses, leaving more than 440 units to languish for years amid plans to tear them down.
Bounded by Chicago Avenue and Larrabee Street, the row houses were built “to a beautiful scale” and should be renovated and reused as low- and middle-income public housing, Miller said.
“We’ve got these modest townhouse buildings that are not unlike something you would see in a European city, and it could house a lot of families in need as we are having an affordable housing crisis in Chicago,” Miller said.
Preservation Chicago also listed the south campus of Lathrop Homes, a historic public housing complex on Chicago’s North Side, as endangered. Completed in 1938, Lathrop Homes was one of the first public housing complexes in Chicago, and among the last to be tackled as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s 2000 plan to transform the city’s entire public housing stock.
While developers have restored the north campus into a mixed-income residential community, redevelopment of the south campus has stalled and remains mostly vacant, according to Preservation Chicago.
The group also listed two nonresidential buildings at the CHA-owned Altgeld Gardens public housing complex on the Far South Side as endangered.
North DuSable Lake Shore Drive
A five-year-old plan to redevelop and expand North DuSable Lake Shore Drive between Grand and Hollywood avenues put the iconic Chicago roadway on this year’s endangered list.
Miller said turning Lake Shore Drive into something closer to a highway might improve traffic, but would destroy the scenic character and slower pace of a lakefront boulevard, which has defined its use throughout the city’s history.
“You’d have Lake Shore Drive tunnels between Navy Pier and Oak Street,” Miller said, citing one proposed improvement. “That would be just miserable — you’d be driving in a car and you wouldn’t even be able to see the lake.”
Other endangered sites
St. Martin de Tours Church, 5848 S. Princeton Ave. A 130-year-old Gothic church on the South Side that closed in 1989 is deteriorating after years of deferred maintenance.
Peterson Avenue Midcentury Modern District. The two-mile stretch from North Park to West Ridge is the “finest collection of Midcentury Modernist Building” in Chicago, Preservation Chicago said. The buildings are threatened by “neglect, abandonment, unsympathetic alterations and demolition,” with the recently razed Sapphire Building at 2800 W. Peterson Ave. the latest casualty.
Promontory Point, 5491 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive. The man-made peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan is under “immediate threat” from plans by the city and the Chicago Park District to replace its historic limestone revetments with concrete, Preservation Chicago said.
Central Park Theater, 3535 W. Roosevelt Road. Closed in 1971, the historic theater was taken over by a church but is need of restoration to avoid demolition.
Moody Triangle, Lincoln Park. A highly visible triumvirate of buildings sectioned off by North Avenue, Clark Street and LaSalle Drive, the triangle includes the historic, century-old Moody Memorial Church, a bank building and a gas station. All of the buildings are threatened by “looming redevelopment” of the surrounding Moody Bible Campus, the preservation group said.
