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by Michael R. Allen and Claire Nowak-Boyd Posted December 1, 2004. Although both the cities of Chicago and Saint Louis are in the midst of rapid redevelopment and infusions of new residents and money, the losses within their built environments continue without slowing. Developers certainly are attracted to historic properties, but only when they can “make them work.” Anything from a collapsed roof to a building’s inadequate floor space can be used as justification for demolitions, usually accompanied by patronizing apologies for the unfortunate necessity of such destruction. We want to remind readers that most buildings that are demolished -- probably over 90% -- in these cities could be saved within reasonable budgets. What developers lack is the patience to make buildings work, the imagination to save the ones that have sat derelict and the foresight to make good urban design choices. In Saint Louis, developers have easy excuses since many of the buildings that they tear down are indeed derelict, although few carry fatal structural flaws. In Chicago, however, developers often tear down well-maintained, occupied historic buildings simply to erect bigger, cheaper and uglier condominium boxes. The sad thing is that few people can keep up with the rate of demolition in both cities. The prosperity seems to accelerate the process, not slow it down. Even we can only stumble upon the scenes of demolitions too late to document most buildings while they are still intact. Last month, in October 2004, we came across two very disheartening demolitions -- one in Chicago and one in St. Louis -- that are indicative of general patterns in those cities. ~ Currently, we reside in Chicago’s historic Humboldt Park neighborhood. We use the Damen Blue Line CTA station and walk to it through the western edge of the prosperous, gentrified Wicker Park neighborhood. Last month, while walking through the tree-shaded streets of the neighborhood, we passed a demolition site where two to three late 1800s homes had already been bludgeoned to pieces. All that remained were basement walls and pipes, but judging from the kind of brick and mortar that had been used and the few shards of broken bright orchid-purple-painted woodwork and pipes that we could see, it was plain that these had been pretty Victorian homes that matched many of the others in the neighborhood.
We were shocked. Not only had we missed the placement of this house within the fenced demolition zone, but we had not expected to find the other homes missing so soon. We had only moved to the neighborhood a little over a week earlier, but all had seemed well then. Because the home was inside of the site fence and because Wicker Park is currently a hot site for yuppies to move into hideous, soulless, cheaply constructed condos, we suspected that the house would probably soon be nothing but basement walls and a heap of dirt, like its former neighbors. Yet it was perfectly sound with no signs of decay. Since rehabbed buildings go for a pretty penny around this neighborhood, we vainly and momentarily hoped that it would be spared. Workers had salvaged very little -- just a few windows -- from the building and its porch remained, so perhaps it'd be okay. Perhaps. It was, after all, still a perfectly useful, attractive, and healthy building. We each snapped a few pictures. One of us took out a marker and piece of paper and made a sign that said "Do you really want more faceless SHIT in your neighborhood instead of this?" Perhaps this was not the best message we could have chosen, but it was hard to be anything but outright pissed off in the face of pointless destruction. We taped our sign to the site fence and we left. You know what happened next, but we will tell you anyway: When Claire was walking to the train the next day, she passed the site again. That last house -- that pretty and completely healthy, useable brick home that had stood there over a hundred years -- was being gored by a few men with construction equipment. It was gone. It had been reduced to a couple of side walls, one small window, a few pieces of lumber and a cloud of drifting dust. The back wall was gone. The second floor was gone. And the front of the house, with those attractive, quintessential Chicago stone lintels with their little red-and-green paint job? It was a heap of rubble. We had lived in the area less than two weeks and already there was one less nineteenth-century house than there had been when we arrived. ~ Our second surprise came a few days later on our trip to Saint Louis. Our purpose was to document the demolition of the Century Building, but we ended up having to document another wrecking-in-progress that completely took us by surprise. We stayed with our friend Anthony at his Fox Park rowhouse, where Michael lived this summer. In addition to sharing his home with us, Anthony shared news of an unforeseen event just a half-block away: the destruction of the three-story corner commercial-apartment building at 2652 Geyer Avenue (at Ohio Avenue), which most likely had occupied that lot since the early 1890’s.
If only Michael had enough money to have actually saved the building, or if the LRA had tried to do anything other tear the building down, we would have been walking down to photograph roofers at work instead of wreckers. Alas, we walked down the street to catch only part of the rounded corner still remaining and most of the building’s western wall gone. The eastern bays were intact enough to convey some sense of the building’s appearance from Geyer Street, but the elegant corner was torn away above the first floor, and the western bay was completely missing save the first floor corner and part of the second story elevation wall on Geyer. Colorful pieces of linoleum and 1970s wallpaper littered the ground. A crew of workers was busy making up pallets of bricks, which they would sell to suppliers for $20 per pallet. (The suppliers will sell the pallets to projects for $170 or more each.) One man was breaking apart portions of the fire escape for sale as scrap iron. We tried to talk to him about what would happen to the cast iron storefront columns, but he was too busy to pay attention to us. We took photos amid overwhelming feelings of outrage. These feelings grew as we realized that not only was the building disappearing before our eyes, but that we had never found a day to photograph the building while it still stood. Unless someone else had taken photographs of the building at 2652 Geyer recently, none exist. This is a building that made such great use of its site, and could have provided an anchor for developing Geyer Avenue further. Geyer in Fox Park lost a lot of buildings to the construction of I-44 in 1960 and still others to senseless demolition plans that have left vacant lots. Three out of four corners are vacant lots at the next intersection west of Geyer and Ohio, Geyer and California. This is a street that has many dedicated residents but suffers from the disruptive energy of I-44. It certainly does not need the additional problem of demolition, especially of its few hybrid buildings. Surely, another vacant lot here could cause harm – although a shoddy replacement structure may be on the way. Now the street is further damaged and a building has been destroyed without substantial documentation. ~ Often our documentary efforts seem inadequate, despite our strong commitment and long hours spent accumulating images and conducting research. Perhaps our efforts and those of our allies are remarkably intense but the leaders of destruction have enough resources to be more than a few steps ahead of us. Saint Louis and Chicago are cities on the make, with some differences. In Saint Louis, old buildings often are demolished for transitional periods of marginal use (vacant lots, parking) while in Chicago there is almost always immediate replacement of demolished historic buildings with the archetypal four-condo building type. Both cities are joined in their rapid rates of demolition and the speculative nature of the changes wrought. Will these cities be stronger without conventional historic buildings like those at 1423 N. Leavitt in Chicago and 2652 Geyer in Saint Louis? These are, after all, visually interesting, well-built and already paid-for structures that allow people to live in the city affordably. They are the buildings that make up the common stock for the purposes of lower and middle class people, and their disappearance signifies a rather blatant attempt to relegate those people out of the historic cores of cities. Without these buildings and these people, what can we expect our cities to become? Who wants to find out? |
There was one home still remaining inside of the fence: the modest two-story 
This news startled us. Michael had once considered purchasing the stately Romanesque Revival building, which had been owned by the city’s Land Reutilization Authority for years. The building was derelict, with a collapsed roof, broken windows and deteriorating floor joists. Yet its distinctive presence and solid brick walls were intact enough to convey a sense of elegance to its corner, which was otherwise surrounded by two-story flats. The building’s corner was rounded, and its first-floor storefront was framed with lovely cast iron columns. The building had a narrow interior light shaft running north-south down its middle. Its five apartments were spacious, and its yard ample. In short, it was ripe for reuse as a vital component to the restoration of the Fox Park neighborhood.
Until a few days before we arrived.