Exploring the Archives: Chicago History Museum

This edition of Exploring the Archives provided community members an opportunity for a behind-the-scenes look at selected items from Chicago History Museum’s architectural and place-based collections, accessible to public researchers through the Abakanowicz Research Center.

In this edition, three public historians selected items from the collection and discussed them in relationship to overlooked social histories, community connections, and impacts on broader Chicago history (and beyond). Attendees also heard from CHM staff about efforts to increase access to and awareness of CHM’s architectural collections through the Digital Futures and Chicago Sacred Initiatives.

Lucy Hereford, Lilly Endowment project archivist
Chicago History Museum

The Chicago History Museum was founded as the Chicago Historical Society in 1856, making it Chicago’s oldest cultural institution. Today, CHM serves researchers from all over the world in the Abakanowicz Research Center. The research collection includes over 100,000 books and periodicals; 10,000+ maps; approximately 6.5 million photos; 23,000 linear feet of archival manuscripts; and around 250,000 architectural drawings. CHM began actively collecting architecture material in 1976, building a collection that today represents a comprehensive cross section of commercial, residential, and industrial work across all areas of Chicago and into the suburbs and contains works by Holabird & Roche, Harry Weese, and Alfred Alschuler, among many others.

Elena Gonzales, PhD, Curator of Civic Engagement & Social Justice
Chicago History Museum

Public historians do it different

I’m not an architectural historian, though I believe place and space are essential historical considerations. When we were planning this event, and I asked Rebekah Coffman, our Curator of Religion and Community History, about our general focus, and she said “Public historians do it different.” This stayed with me.

Public historians are still historians, but we prize collaboration, be it community-based or interdisciplinary. To that end, our focus is people and often our relationships with people. I bring my training in Anthropology to my work in American Studies and Public History. As the field of Public History developed, in the 1960s and ’70s, History wasn’t as interdisciplinary a field as it is now. The training was more rigid and less informed by the contemporary and by lived experience. Though we public historians are scholars, we reject the idea of our expertise as paramount along with the concept that expertise originates mainly within the academy.

My presentation for Exploring the Archives included two fragmented chapters that are based in the built environment but also showcase methods from Public History. These chapters are from my research for our at Chicago History Museum, Aquí en Chicago (2025–2026), which I curated. The project is part of our response to a group of high school students who protested the museum’s lack of Latine history in 2019. Specifically, the exhibition presents the persistent cultural presence of Latine people in and around Chicago since the mid-nineteenth century through diverse forms of resistance to white supremacy, from traditionally activist modes to many types of cultural maintenance, placemaking, and placekeeping.

The Sanitary and Ship Canal: It’s about the land.

Exploring the Archives is the collaboration at CHM with MAS Context based on the program called Tracing Traces. The idea of tracing a trace got me thinking back to some of the first research I did at CHM when I started as a guest curator on the project that would become Aquí en Chicago. The canal is one of the city’s oldest infrastructure projects. The idea for it actually predated the founding of Chicago, and it grew up with the city. So, when I started researching for Aquí in spring of 2021, one of my early questions was whether or not I could demonstrate that Latinos worked on the canal. I have tantalizing evidence—a trace—but nothing concrete that I could place in the exhibition.

Understanding the Canal

The Sanitary and Ship Canal here in Chicago is a piece of infrastructure that crippled the delicate ecosystem of the waterland in an effort to make a city possible in this space we call Chicago.¹ I hate it when people call Chicago a swamp. Swamp has negative connotations now because of the way we use that word. But Chicago was a waterland before our civil engineering of the infrastructure around the Chicago River and other local river systems as well as the watershed between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. The waterland was an integral system that functioned cyclically.

The first object we looked at in this part of my presentation was a map of the Sanitary and Ship Canal from 1899 with River Diversions, the natural meander of the river with the straight and rigid path of the canal overlaid on top of it. (CHM Collections: Alpha Subjects: Chicago, Water Works and Sanitation 1907)

The canal was a simple solution to a complex problem, which, as an overall strategy, has a tendency to go poorly, as does betting against the independence of water. As Dan Egan put it in “A Battle between a Great City and a Great Lake” (Portside, 2021), “Today, Chicago is still fighting to put water in its place.”² But water will find a way. Water will always win.

Egan sketches out the timeline of three hundred years from the journey of Marquette and Joliet to what would become Chicago in 1673 to 1832 when the uncontained filth of the bourgeoning city bred a public health crisis of cholera. Chicago incorporated in 1833 and in 1836 the new city of a few thousand people began planning the construction of a canal to connect the great lakes and the Mississippi River in an effort to alleviate the danger of sluicing the muck out into Lake Michigan.

From that point on, Chicago grew dramatically. By 1870, 300,000 people lived in Chicago, and the public health crisis was ongoing. In the 1850s–’60s, Chicago sought a novel solution to the frequent backwash of sewage into the city by raising the street level so that the sewers could flow down. Still, sewage remained a problem. It flowed into the river and into the lake, but Lake Michigan was and is the source of our drinking water in Chicago, so many people still fell ill.

In 1864, Chicago extended the intake for drinking water out two miles into the lake, but that didn’t solve the problem. In 1889, the city formed the Sanitary District and made the decision to reverse the flow of the Chicago River, engineering it so that it would not flow into the lake. Construction of the Sanitary and Ship Canal began in 1892 and ended in 1899.

As part of this project, the city dynamited the 28-mile-long canal connecting the Chicago River to the Des Plaines River. The new Harbor Lock system provided a piece of infrastructure within the built environment that ratified the naturally occurring continental divide between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. But storms could still cause the river to rise so much that the city would be forced to temporarily reverse the flow of the river back to the lake. From the 1970s to the present, the city has been building sewage storage tunnels and reservoirs to avoid flooding the Loop with sewage during particularly bad storms. So far, the project has built 109 miles of tunnels, holding 2.3 billion gallons of water and sewage, and reservoirs holding another 12 billion gallons. The plan provides for 20 billion gallons of storage by 2030.

The canal is an ongoing ecological disaster. Homes on the South Side flood with sewage, and that is by design. The trigger point for reversing the flow of water back into the lake is protecting Downtown, not lower-income residents. That flooding is worsening in tune with our global climate emergency. In 2020, Lower Wacker Drive flooded, and it could have been—and will ultimately be—dramatically worse.

Workers on the Canal

Addressing my quest to learn who worked on the canal, I shared a photo album, Chicago Drainage Canal Album, Photos from 1898 by William M. Christie, Civil Engineer from Lemont, IL, and William F. Prawiz, a photographer from Chicago (1983.0219). Though one pair of surveyors looks to my eye as though they are likely Latino (probably Mexican), it would be a mistake to ascribe heritage or race to these people based on the photo alone.

Another photo in “Progress photographs documenting the construction of the canal, 1892-1900, presentation album for Adm. George Dewey” (X1697.1991, which I also shared with the group) caught my eye. Two young children, perhaps three or four years old, sat beside each other in a camp of workers on the canal. They delighted at being together and the caption, penned directly on the negative so as to appear in white on the photograph, reads “compades,” almost certainly a misspelling of “compadres,” or, in this case, best friends. The children are dark-skinned and presumably, given the context of a (likely) African American camp of laborers documented in adjacent photos, African American, though they could be Latine or of another heritage entirely.

This trace led me to another, a thread that connected the whole story of the canal back to Latines and colonization. The board of trustees of the Sanitary District of Chicago presented the photo album to Admiral George Dewey in 1900 as a gift. Dewey became famous for his victory at Manila Bay in 1898 during the so-called Spanish American War when the US enacted a historically significant bait and switch maneuver.

The Philippines is a nation of 7,641 islands in Southeast Asia. During nearly four centuries of colonization, the Spanish profoundly influenced everything from the name of the islands to the form of governance, economy, cuisine, agriculture, religion, social structure, and language. Filipinos were winning their independence from the Spanish when the US stepped in to supposedly assist with their revolution. Dewey followed orders to attack the Spanish at Manila Bay, but instead of stepping back at that point, the US took over colonial rule from Spain and colonized the Philippines for another forty-eight years.

The completion of the Sanitary and Ship Canal took place at a moment when the national zeitgeist celebrated US colonization of Latin America including not only the Philippines but also Puerto Rica and Cuba (both also in 1898). So, the photo album opens with a poem, “Dewey’s Welcome” by the Chief Engineer, Isham Randolph:

What is this work of ours?
It is a bloodless victory
O’er Natures rock ribbed powers…

The riven rock to heaven
Rose in tons on tons of wreck,
Then fell like shot from Dewey’s guns
Upon a Spanish deck…

So a welcome gallant sailor
Who in this month of May
Sailed in and sunk the Spanish fleet
In far Manilla bay.

CHM has another object in its collection that illustrates the national mindset at the time and the public perception of Dewey and the colonial project even more fully, the Dewey Loving Cup (1934.77a-e) by Gorham Manufacturing Co. 1899. Silver smiths in Rhode Island (whence the slave trade) created the loving cup, nearly as tall as a person, clad in 70,000 dimes that United-Statesians across the country sent in for the purpose. The overall sentiment does not imply that there was a Mexican group of laborers working on the canal, although there could have been. I still think it’s quite likely. But rather, it suggests that “compadres” was a reflection of the times.

“Operation Wetback”: It’s about the people.

My grandfather, Captain Federico “Fred” Gonzales, was a pilot for the US Air Force during World War II. He flew as the lead pilot for the 398^th Bomb Group, a group of 700 B17 bombers often called the “Aluminum Overcast.” On January 23, 1945, a German teenager shot down Fred’s aircraft, killing everyone on board but Fred and breaking nearly every bone in his body. He was taken to a POW camp where he narrowly survived the remaining four months of the war before being liberated on the brink of starvation. He returned to marry my grandmother, Anna Marie Mosher. I showed a photo of Fred and a compass from a B17, though not Fred’s, from my father’s personal collection.

During WWII, many United-Statesian auto makers shifted their production to the war effort, including Studebaker, which had its main factory in South Bend, IN, and a smaller branch in Chicago at 5555 S. Archer. Studebaker in Indiana made 60,000 R1820 radial engines for the B17. Chicago supplied South Bend with components for the R1820.

After the war, the auto industry contracted, and many factories closed, including the Studebaker Factory in Chicago. Studebaker had been leasing the property from the federal government. During Exploring the Archives, I showed the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map that that had just come off display in Aquí en Chicago (Plate 55 (1959), Insurance maps of Chicago, Illinois, vol. E).

The map shows the building under the occupancy of the new tenant in 1954, the US Air Force. When the federal government put the property back on the market for other federal agencies to lease, it had advertised the former factory as useful for warehousing and manufacturing.³ In fact, the building ended up warehousing Mexicans and those suspected of being Mexican during so-called “Operation Wetback.”

“Operation Wetback” newly militarized deportation in 1954. 2,250 people were detained each month that fall in Chicago, nearly eight times as many as in 1951, often using unconstitutional search and seizure. This created a climate of terror as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) swept brown people off the street, often kidnapping US citizens in the process. Puerto Ricans were especially vulnerable. This operation was difficult to represent in the gallery because of the context, documents, possessions, and relationships that are lost when people are ripped away from their families and communities. This map offers a glimpse of the space where INS incarcerated people while they awaited deportation.

If Fred and Anna Marie had moved to Chicago in the 1940s instead of Houston, as they easily could have done, then Fred or any of their seven sons could have found themselves imprisoned in the very factory that made the engine of Fred’s aircraft. The compass I showed was a gift to my father from his lifelong friend, the Lithuanian photographer, Jonas Dovydenas. Jonas was eight years old when his family fled their country through Germany in 1945, seeking safety from the war. As they passed through Ingolstadt, the 398^th Bomb Group attacked the city. After having been bombed by B17s, Jonas thereafter collected components of the airplanes, and he shared this one with the son of a man who could have killed him.

Rebekah Coffman, Curator of Religion and Community History
Chicago History Museum

Activating the Adaptive Reuse Archive

For Exploring the Archives, I gave a preview into the process and work done through the Chicago Sacred Initiative, including our sacred and cultural collections inventory work, in preparation for the forthcoming Everyday Sacred exhibition series. This series (beginning in 2027) will explore places of memory, memorial, ritual, and belief in and around Chicago, considering the idea of “sacredness” as something “set apart,” activated, and preserved through community action. The participatory series focuses on spatial succession, temporary places, adapted buildings, and appropriated spaces as sites of community resilience. Drawing on Chicago’s legacy as a city of many beliefs, we are asking Chicagoans to consider alongside us: what is sacred to you?

This framing of “sacredness” is intentionally aligned with how many of us might consider preservation and memory work more broadly. Be it buildings, artifacts, objects, or practices, “setting apart” something for the future requires us to recognize and argue for its value. As Richard Nickel so famously asked, “Do we dare squander Chicago’s great architectural heritage?” For me, he was essentially asking the same question: what is sacred to us?

Sacred Histories

I counter Nickel’s question with my own: do we dare forget the voices of communities in uplifting what makes Chicago the city we know today?

For Exploring the Archives, I wanted to demonstrate how underrepresented religious and community histories are interwoven with preservation histories of the city. For a number of years, preservationists, historians, urban planners, and people living and working in Chicago who care about its architecture have called for a new Historic Resources Survey.⁴ The currently used survey was completed in 1995 as a way to identify and rate buildings of architectural merit across the city.⁵ As it was being prepared, surveyors followed the “50-year rule,” meaning the temporal standard for how much time must pass for buildings to be of sufficient age to be considered eligible for historic listing.⁶ This means buildings completed after 1940 weren’t even considered for the list, including many Modernist and Post-Modernist buildings, and many preservationists bemoan the losses of mid- and late-twentieth century buildings that didn’t carry recognition or heritage protection.

But there are of course numerous other reasons why a new survey is wanted beyond expanding the time period for architectural styles. In recent years, preservation as a field in the US continues to look for tools for how to argue for historical significance beyond architectural merit and to introduce frameworks for how to place value on the meanings behind the buildings: the people. How do we create space for stories beyond materiality that have equally shaped our collective history? How do we place value on architecturally ordinary but culturally rich spaces? How do we account for layered, nuanced, and complex histories?

For me, the process to seek answers to a lot of these questions is in the toolkit of public historians. Our practice centers community-centered and -driven work and social justice-anchored perspectives for how to share authority and uplift underrepresented histories. We place value on individual and collective voice through tools like oral histories and put archival and historical information in dialogue with the contemporary lived experiences of communities.

My own personal grappling with these tensions between architectural emphasis and community-centered meaning has driven much of my academic and professional career. From a lifetime of personal and professional experiences in adapted buildings, I have spent the last decade or so developing a framework for valuing adaptive reuse as a tool for re-aligning significance beyond an “authentic,” “original” architectural framework. By focusing on the many ways communities have used and reused buildings, it creates a new vocabulary for how to describe value, holding the physical in balance with intangible heritage and memory.⁷

Much of my work has focused specifically on religious contexts, though the principle of this tangible and intangible balance holds true across sacred-secular lines. However, returning to the 1995 Chicago Historic Resources Survey, another of its noted shortcomings is its de-valuation of religious buildings. In their study and subsequent 2011 publication The Place of Religion in Chicago, Wilbur Zelinksy and Stephen A. Matthews note the survey fell short of recognizing religious heritage as central to the architectural story of Chicago, calling it the “decidedly subsidiary role of the sacred” in the surveyors focus and arguing this is a problematic oversight.⁸ They note a scant 3% of the historic resources listed in the survey account for the combined total of overtly religious structures (churches and synagogues), “miscellaneous” religiously affiliated objects, and mausoleums and funeral homes. Since 2011, more of Chicago’s religious buildings have been added to the National Register and Chicago Landmarks list, but the total numbers still pale by comparison to the statistical representation on the national level.⁹ And all these figures and shortcomings are still centrally focused on purpose-built religious structures of architectural merit, say nothing of the innumerable important religious heritage places and community stories found in vernacular structures and adapted spaces.

Sacred Archives

It may not be in my power to formally ignite the City’s new Historic Resources Survey (though I would eagerly welcome it from those whose it is), but my passion for recognizing this need brought me to ask what was possible with the tools within my purview. My response to these representational inequities and concerns over erasing our important collective histories was to ignite a process, alongside my colleagues in Collections, to use one of the most powerful tools we have—our rich archival collections—to create a new format for understanding Chicago’s built environment through the stories of places and communities. Instead of only looking at what is extant in the built environment today as the start of significance and working our way backward to understand historical meaning, this approach allows us to more comprehensively survey and integrate the many layers of stories that have shaped the built environment, including the many intangible ways community uses have been underrecognized because they are less visually prominent.

I firmly believe that to make long-lasting change, you need to think not just about what needs to be changed but how to recreate the system to support those needed changes. In a previous talk hosted by MAS Context, I spoke alongside my colleague Aries Gomez Moreno about how we’re approaching the very system of the architectural archive differently to create a bigger, fuller picture of Chicago’s built environment through the archives themselves. Through the ongoing work of the Chicago Sacred Initiative, we work to connect these more nuanced archival practices to the communities whose stories we hold, aiming to create relationships and empower communities to have better understanding of how the museum connects with and can support their own lived histories. And, through the forthcoming Everyday Sacred exhibition series and launch of digital tools through our Digital Futures Initiative, we will have an even bigger platform for engaging and sharing in this work in an ongoing way.

Sacred Places

Turning to the materials featured in the Exploring the Archives event itself, I wanted to draw a through thread for guests to see how historical framings of architectural and place-based collections have informed both preservation and museum collecting practice. I used a series of examples centering religious heritage across different eras of Chicago’s history to draw out how we saw a valuation system forming for what and whose heritage “counted” for long-term preservation efforts, and whose stories and presence could have been lost through time without the ongoing advocacy and activation of communities, often outside established systems of recognition.

Some the examples I discussed came from coursework created for and with students at American Islamic College as part of the Heritage Studies course I teach, centering the experiences of diverse diasporic Muslim communities in Chicago. We started with a place many see as an important anchor in Chicago’s historical and architectural legacies: the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Drawing on themes of permanence and impermanence, we looked at materials that discuss the many ways religious identity was “on display” as part of the WCE and how this did (or did not) relate to the ways communities embodied ritual and practice. For example, we saw photographs of the Turkish mosque constructed on the Midway Plaisance, which is one of the earliest purpose-built mosques in the country and was used regularly for prayer during the run of the WCE.¹⁰ This served in part as a way for Muslims at the fair, many of whom were working in the various cultural pavilions and gamified Midway displays, to have personal expression and agency amidst a very Orientalist and Othering setting. However, the intentional impermanence of the WCE’s structures, including these early mosques, resulted in their physical erasure and reliance on archival activation to bring forward these Islamic roots in the city.

Springing forward to the 1930s, we then looked at examples from Chicago’s second world’s fair, the Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933, including Thielbar & Fugard’s Hall of Religions, also a temporary structure now gone that has surprisingly scant attention in the written legacies of the 1933 fair. Moving forward a few more decades, we then encountered materials from the Chicago Heritage Committee’s formative years in the 1950s and 60s. We examined publications from the National Trust, seeing how a valuation system anchored in civic identity with a Christian normative leaning was driving national discussions for igniting preservation actions. We saw how Chicago preservation legends like Richard Nickel and Thomas Stauffer were in line with national trends amidst local concerns over mass demolition driven by urban renewal. We called attention to the framing of “sacred” as a part of many advocacy efforts beyond specifically religious building preservation.

Finally, we moved into a few contemporary examples to see how layered, underrepresented religious heritage is overlooked by preservation systems and how communities advocate for their own right to space in the city and preserve memory of their presence. These included: the former Immaculata High School and Convent building, an all-girls school designed by Francis Barry Byrne for the Blessed Virgin Mary religious order in 1921 that later became the home to American Islamic College in 1981; the former Epworth Methodist Episcopal Church building, built in 1891 to designs by congregation member Frederick B. Townsend with a community house addition by Thielbar and Fugard from 1930 and currently in the process of being adapted by the Barakah community into their new mosque home; and finally a commercial building on Broadway Avenue that was used for many years as an auto showroom, transitioned to a number of different commercial uses, and is today home to the Ismaili Jamatkhana of Roger’s Park.

In each case, these buildings have relationships to formal preservation efforts: in one case, a long-standing National Register listing and Chicago Landmark status for decades; in one, a recent addition to the landmark roles based on preservation advocacy in the face of pending demolition; and in the third, a part of a historic district area. Yet, all three examples fail to include the full stories of each space and their connections to Chicago Muslim communities.

Sacred Why?

These brief examples, explored in the course of a morning together, give a small window into the wider work and planned future of the Chicago Sacred and Digital Futures Initiatives in the coming years. It provided the opportunity to show how we are working to bridge architectural archives to communities and their stories, including through an adaptive reuse framework. Sharing this work in-progress helps us continue to address what it means to create a more inclusive form of archive, and what it is we even mean by “architecture” or “built environment.” In these examples from Chicago’s longstanding Muslim communities, it shows the power and impact of communities to steward their own stories that were previously omitted by mainstream archives like CHM’s, including in partnership with organizations like American Islamic College through empowering students to discover and share these histories for themselves. And, it hopefully inspired those in attendance (and beyond) for how they can also become partners and allies in uplifting layered, adaptive, and vernacular spaces as paths for circumventing historical omissions and erasures.

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