The Commission on Chicago Landmarks will decide this week whether to ask the City Council to approve permanent landmark status for Pilsen‘s St. Adalbert Church.
The 110-year-old Renaissance Revival-styled Catholic church deserves the thumbs-up by the commission.
But if the church and four adjacent former parish buildings are landmarked, then what? Who then steps up to preserve and reuse this architectural and cultural asset?
“We don’t want it torn down,” Raul Serrato, an ex-St. Adalbert member who opposes the designation, told the Sun-Times in 2023. “Once it’s landmarked, it really complicates what you can do with that property.”
‘Prominent feature’ in Pilsen
Inspired by the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, the edifice is a bit of the Old World brought to the New. Located at 1650 W. 17th St., the church is among Pilsen’s most beautiful and visible buildings with its ornate design and twin 185-foot towers.
St. Adalbert’s originally served decades of Polish churchgoers before the congregation and the neighborhood became predominantly Latino.
“St. Adalbert has been a prominent feature of the Pilsen neighborhood for over a century,” the commission said last year when it voted to grant the building preliminary landmark status.
The church was shuttered by the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2019 and its congregation was merged with that of nearby St. Paul’s Church, 2127 W. 22nd Pl.
St. Adalbert is one of 115 city and suburban churches closed since 2018 under a parish consolidation effort called Renew My Church.
“St. Adalbert Church, while holding sentimental value, does not merit landmark status,” the archdiocese said in a statement Monday. “Landmarking would impede religious freedom, forcing Catholic faithful to maintain an unused property at significant cost.”
Landmark status would keep the church building safe from demolition. And it would also help protect the unused structure from being stripped bare like an abandoned Pontiac — which is what the archdiocese was doing until preservationists and former parishioners rightfully started kicking up a fuss.
Needed: Creative thinking, financing
If St. Adalbert is granted landmark designation, the next issue to tackle would be finding a new use for the church and parish buildings.
And that’s an expensive undertaking not unique to St. Adalbert. There is a mounting inventory of vacant churches around the city as congregations of nearly every stripe dwindle and ultimately walk away from the expense of maintaining these aging structures.
Sometimes, the former religious edifices can be reused and given new life.
The former Church of the Epiphany, built in 1885 at 201 S. Ashland Ave., was turned into Epiphany Center for the Arts.
And in Lincoln Park, the 125-year-old Second Church of Christ Scientist, 2700 N. Pine Grove Ave., is being turned into a six-story mixed-use structure that uses the building’s original Beaux Arts facade.
And there could be financial help on the way for St. Adalbert if a new owner ever surfaces.
The Community Development Commission next Tuesday votes on expanding the boundaries of the existing Pilsen tax increment financing district to include the area in which the church is located.
The expansion would then need City Council approval. But a yes vote could make the TIF funds available to St. Adalbert’s next owner for preservation or rehab.
A Miami buyer last year was interested in purchasing the building and turning it into an events venue, but the archdiocese said the church is not under contract to be sold.
Meanwhile, there are other vacant but historic Chicago churches that are in need of help. Buildings like the once-picturesque 84-year-old former Little Flower Church, virtually rotting at 80th and Wood streets in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood.
And it’ll take some creative thinking — and financing — to rescue these buildings.
It’ll be hard work. But it would be far better than letting these places, which represent an important class of Chicago architecture, simply fall apart.
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