A History of Preservation in Chicago

Preservation in Chicago has a complicated, multidimensional nature. Preservation is a field of practice, a function of government, and an activist movement. In Chicago, each of these components have come together to determine how the built environment expresses the city’s history, culture, and growth. That history is then used to determine what’s worth saving—and what is not. These components often work imperfectly or unevenly, are deployed differently across individuals and institutions, and have changed in conception over time. Preservation has empowered Chicago to see its unique position within the scope of architecture worldwide, but has also formed the feeling of individual blocks at the neighborhood level.

While much study has gone into uncovering and interpreting the history of architecture in Chicago, the history of preservation in the third most populated city in the US, and relatively one of the nation’s youngest at just 187 years old, has been given considerably less attention. This is due in part to the fact that preservation is oriented around the development of historical narratives about structures and places as a means to prove that those structures and places are worth preserving. Once that case is made, the need to understand what happens after becomes less urgent.

Yet, as preservation reaches toward the future now more than ever before, and as it works to integrate itself into broader social and environmental goals related to the built environment, the efforts of preservation as a form of practice, of government, and of activism, require a historical perspective all their own.

A popularized history of preservation in Chicago begins with the attention paid by historians to draw public attention toward buildings of Chicago’s early history—the city’s first taverns, schools, and rail depots as it grew from a western frontier outpost to a US metropolis—particularly around the city’s 100th anniversary in 1937, when the Chicago Charter Jubilee committee installed a number of plaques in the locations of these structures, with information authenticated by the Chicago Historical Society. Many of these plaques were placed at locations where a historic building no longer stood. The text of some of these plaques, like one installed to commemorate the site of the Kinzie Mansion, “promotes narratives of white supremacy” according to the Chicago Monuments Project, a 2021 initiative intended to study Chicago’s monuments and public art on City property to determine which of them warrant additional context to tell a more inclusive history. As this popularized history progresses, a group of preservationists begins to advocate for the preservation of architecture within the canon of the Chicago School, including works by Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright, and particularly Louis Sullivan. These were advocacy efforts that led to the development of the Chicago Landmarks Commission and the enactment of the Chicago Landmarks Ordinance. While these efforts did further the ability for preservation to save more buildings from demolition under its broad umbrella, it has also set a specific standard for determining which buildings in Chicago are important enough to be worthy of the recognition and resources of preservation, developing a type of cultural litmus test that in recent years preservation has worked to dismantle in order to make space for more inclusive narratives.

This test created a standard for what constituted history worth recognizing or preserving. That standard ignored kinds of grassroots preservation that existed before those efforts and has presented a level of difficulty for acknowledging grassroots efforts since.

Acknowledging this as the only history ignores a type of preservation performed decades earlier, out of necessity, by Chicagoans that came to the city seeking a better life and to build generational wealth but were bound via economics or racial restrictions. These Chicagoans practiced preservation without recognition, regulations or incentives, and without the guidance of preservation organizations. In this way, it is significant to give the Black Chicagoans that made this city home during the Great Migration their due as founders of preservation in Chicago.

While all buildings require care and maintenance, it is the intentionality in that care and maintenance as deliberate efforts to preserve something for historical purposes that make this work preservation. This work went beyond identifying and raising awareness of the importance of historic places, and occurred before frameworks for saving historic buildings were established.

“Take a good look—for it may not be long before Chicago’s oldest house is wrecked.” It was 1941, and Chicago Public School teachers Lydia and Laura Walter were looking to sell their house, a thirteen-room Greek Revival mansion built for hardware merchant Henry B. Clarke in 1836.¹ The home, inherited from the Walker sisters’ grandfather, was too large for the sisters. “If we cannot get a buyer,” the sisters told the Chicago Daily Times, “we’ll have to wreck it.”

The Widow Clarke House, colloquially named after the wife of Henry B. Clarke, its longtime owner after the death of her husband in the 1850s, was older than Chicago itself. Built at a time when Chicago was a lakeside frontier town surrounded by wild prairie, the house had been moved from its original location, near what is now 16th Street and South Indiana Avenue, to 45th and Wabash Avenue after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

In 1940, the Homeowner Loan Corporation (HOLC) gave the area surrounding the Widow Clark House a “D” grade.² The HOLC was established to color code, or “redline,” maps of US cities using racial criteria to categorize investment and insurance risks, determining how much banks and insurers would invest in these areas. The determination that a given area was undesirable, or redlined, had catastrophic effects on neighborhoods, causing decades-long patterns of disinvestment. “The one family structures are mostly large units of substantial age and like the other dwelling units overcrowded,” a map description of the area stated. The map referred to the area as “a blighted area, 100 percent negro.” Yet, in 1940, there was one white family—the only one in many blocks—the Walters, who lived in the home with four cousins. The area had, according to the map description, been almost completely inhabited by African Americans for fifteen years.

In 1935, the Widow Clarke House was documented under the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), an initiative led by the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the American Institute of Architects to document United States’ historic architecture. The house was extensively photographed and measured, and drawings of its components—everything from interior doors to its rooftop cupola—were drawn up to restore the house’s original Greek Revival front porch, long since removed. “We wouldn’t be averse,” said Laura Walter, “to see these plans carried out and the house sold to the city of Chicago as a permanent monument.”³ In 1937, the house was given a plaque by the Chicago Historical Society in celebration of the city’s centennial.

Yet, it wasn’t the City of Chicago who stepped in to preserve Chicago’s oldest house; it was a preacher who had arrived in Chicago as one of the half million African Americans coming to the northern city from the south seeking better economic and social conditions during the Great Migration. Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Reverend Louis Henry Ford, who would become a Bishop, had founded the St. Paul Church of God in Christ in 1933 in a storefront near 45th Street and Wabash Avenue, and purchased the house from the Walters for $10,000 cash.

Over the next forty years, Bishop Ford and the St. Paul Church of God in Christ practiced preservation—the first grassroots effort ever in Chicago—at Chicago’s oldest house, opening it to the public, and throwing a celebration each August for the house’s birthday. For the house’s 121st birthday in 1957, a commemorative booklet describes the work the congregation had done on the house. “Great expense has gone into this project, but the house, despite its great age, is in remarkably good condition.” The woodwork, windows, ornamental fireplaces, and sliding doors, all original to the house, were continuously cared for. This work was performed prior to the widespread professionalization of the practice, prior to the creation of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks in 1957, and prior to the preservation movement capturing public support as cities were building highways and practicing urban renewal.

All the while, Bishop Ford remained outspoken about the importance of the house’s ability to share its history with a larger audience. In 1962, Bishop Ford told the Chicago Tribune, “I hope the citizens of Chicago will help us relocate the building to its original site at 16th Street and Michigan Avenue, complete with a park and a museum.”⁴ The house was designated a local landmark in 1970 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971—early in the history of both of these programs—and under Bishop Ford’s support. This idea would be actualized in 1977, when the city of Chicago moved to purchase the house, relocate it closer to its original site, and transform it into a public museum.

When the Clarke House Museum opened in 1982, it conveyed the history of a pioneer family through mid-nineteenth century furnishings donated by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Illinois. Church leadership was not invited to the opening, and the forty years of preservation efforts they performed on the house were commemorated with a portrait of Bishop Ford hung in a corner of the basement. In 2021, a grassroots effort led by Bishop Ford’s grandson, Pastor Kevin Anthony Ford of the church his grandfather founded, motivated the City of Chicago to add Bishop Ford’s name to the house, and to update the museum to share Bishop Ford’s story. The “Henry B. and Caroline Palmer Clarke/Bishop Louis Henry and Margaret Ford House” commonly known as the Clarke-Ford house, was renamed via a city council ordinance.

The recognition and retelling of the story of the Clarke-Ford House is an important moment in the history of preservation in Chicago. The renaming effort puts to question how preservation in Chicago has historically been understood, and who we have considered to be a preservationist.

As the Walker Sisters were considering whether to wreck the hundred-year-old Clarke-Ford House, developers were pondering the future of many of the Loop’s late nineteenth century Chicago School skyscrapers as they were approaching forty and fifty years in service. In 1938, the Monadnock Building, designed in two phases by Burnham & Root in 1891 and Holabird & Roche in 1893, was “modernized” with a “new granite façade to be installed and the entrances changed.”⁵ In 1955, the open grill elevators were replaced with enclosed models, and air conditioning and florescent lighting were added.⁶ Around 1950, the terracotta cornice surrounding the roofline of Burnham & Root’s 1895 Reliance Building was removed, with other Chicago School buildings, like Louis Sullivan’s 1899 Carson Pirie Scott & Company Building, following suit.⁷

In 1957, then-Mayor Richard J. Daley created the Commission on Chicago Architectural Landmarks, the precursor to today’s Landmark Commission, and the first step taken by the city to determine how to designate and then preserve historic places. Yet, the commission would have no legislative powers for the first eleven years of its existence. The original group of commissioners were all men, and all white. In 1962, the group designated thirty-nine structures and presented each structure’s building owner with a plaque.

In considering the development of the Landmark Commission, which would ultimately come to be supported by a staff of architects, researchers, and planners, and initially lacked any policy ability or legislative powers, it is critical to also consider the Urban Community Conservation Act, an Illinois statute enacted in 1953 that gave cities broad power to create local “conservation” boards, and designate areas as “rapidly deteriorating and declining in desirability as residential communities may soon become slum and blighted areas if their decline is not checked.”⁸ It then provided municipalities the right and power to do what they needed to do to ensure that blight would not increase. By 1955, there were 36 community groups “whose work is financially supported by men with business interest in the areas.”⁹ Conservation boards were often led by a corporate or university interest, which also provided funding to acquire and raze the buildings they deemed blighted.

These efforts yielded predictable results. The Hyde Park-Kenwood Urban Renewal Project, and corresponding survey, was intended to enable the area as a “good urban neighborhood to deal constructively with the inevitable impacts of obsolescence and decay.”¹⁰ Commissioned for the Conservation board formed by the act, the City of Chicago and the University of Chicago as the university interest, the survey found that twenty percent of the area was considered “dilapidated,” and found that a higher portion of people of color (of which 89% were Black) were living in dilapidated buildings with substandard facilities versus white occupants.¹¹ The demolition that would occur within the Hyde Park-Kenwood area would ultimately become one of Chicago’s largest urban renewal projects, leading to the demolition of over 1,000 buildings.

The Hyde Park-Kenwood Urban Renewal Project, like others, focused on “slum clearance” or redevelopment, and to prevent, decelerate, or “conserve” neighborhoods that were threatened by blight but not yet blighted. Legislation allowed Chicago to exercise its powers of eminent domain in order to take private property for a public purpose, of which both “slum clearance” and federal highway siting, was happening simultaneously.

While these projects and others like across Chicago had some public support, they also had opposition. In 1969, a group of representatives from the Young Lords and Young Patriots, street gangs that would evolve to fight for self-determination, housing, education, and healthcare, formed the Poor People’s Coalition, storming a meeting of the Lincoln Park Conservation Community Council and demanding that the council appoint an advisory committee for the urban renewal effort that included members of the Lincoln Park community that were African American, Latinx, and lower income, arguing for a seat at the table for a process that would drastically change their communities.¹²

It is impossible to measure how much of Chicago’s history as expressed through its built environment was destroyed during urban renewal and for highway construction, but urban renewal successfully filled Chicago’s landfills with demolition debris, an action that exacerbated our current climate crisis. By the 1970s, federally funded freeway construction and urban renewal schemes would ultimately cause the displacement of some 81,000 Chicagoans, with sixty four percent of those displaced being Black.¹³

Survey programs under the conservation boards, as well as the Chicago Department of Urban Renewal, were documenting neighborhoods, including their social, racial, and economic characteristics, but these surveys had no awareness of the architectural or cultural importance of areas considered either blighted or not blighted.

The job of identifying what buildings were worthy of landmark status, and how to identify them, rested on the Chicago Landmarks Commission, which did not have the influence or power to do more than suggest historic places as landmarks. However, the effects of state and institutionally funded and sponsored urban renewal and the threats to buildings within the Chicago School of Architecture had begun to change public sentiment around the preservation of historic places. In 1957, a 90-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright traveled to Chicago to protest the University of Chicago’s intended demolition of the 1909 Frederick C. Robie House. This visit generated a media frenzy, and while the University ultimately would not demolish the home, the Landmarks Commission was unable to affect the outcome.

In 1960, it was announced that the 1892 Garrick Theatre, designed by Louis Sullivan, was to be sold by its owner, the Balaban & Katz Corporation.¹⁴ Citing the building’s uneconomical operating expenses, office tenants were cleared from the building, and it went up for sale for redevelopment. Members of the public and elected officials, including then-5^th Ward alderman Leon Despres, voiced their opposition to the demolition of the building, including photographer Richard Nickel, a subject matter expert on the work of Louis Sullivan, who would supply the Commission on Chicago Landmarks with both information and photography for early landmark designations. In June 1960, Atlas Wrecking Company applied for a permit to demolish the building, with the Commission deciding to not intervene. “We have found,” the commission stated, “that it is not feasible to press for the retention of the Garrick. The office building has proved to be uneconomical for the owners to operate for some years. The design of the theater is such that it is virtually impossible to adapt it to the present wide screen requirements of a motion picture house.”¹⁵ On June 13, a rally was organized by Richard Nickel to draw public attention to the Garrick’s plight. Two days after, on June 15, Mayor Richard M. Daley met with the Commission, the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the Society of Architectural Historians, and representatives from Balaban & Katz to discuss ways that the building could be saved from demolition. The creation of a committee delayed the demolition of the building, and the owners took the city to court. In November 1960, the court ruled that the city building commissioner acted illegally by not issuing the permit, citing that there was no provision in the law to give the city the power to withhold demolition.¹⁶ Demolition of the Garrick Building began in January 1961 for a five-story parking garage.

In 1966, congress enacted the National Historic Preservation Act, intended to preserve historic and archaeological sites nationwide, creating the National Register of Historic Places, and State Historic Preservation Offices. Many US cities, including Chicago, would adopt their own Landmark Ordinances. In 1968, the city’s first ordinance was approved unanimously by City Council, providing a legal means with which to protect historic landmarks. The Landmark Ordinance codified preservation in Chicago, laid out the responsibilities of the commission and its staff, and provided the criteria for landmark designation, as well as the process.

Federal and local standards for preservation created a need for the professionalization of workers in preservation who understand how to meet these standards, including preservation architects, architectural historians, and tradespeople.

However, a legal means for protecting buildings did not come with any incentives to encourage their preservation, and building owners and developers continued to object to landmarking on economic grounds. In 1974, John J. Costonis, a law professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, developed a framework for financial incentives for landmarking. “The Chicago Plan” would allow owners of landmarked buildings to transfer surplus air rights over their buildings to other sites, and called for tax incentives.¹⁷ Presented to the city, this plan was rejected, and a counterplan developed by the city was never realized. In 1976, the National Park Service would introduce the Federal Historic Tax Credit program, allowing owners of buildings listed on the National Register an opportunity to receive a credit of 20 percent of qualified rehabilitation expenses. Owners of locally landmarked buildings wouldn’t see local incentives until 1997, when the “Class L” property tax incentive was introduced jointly by Cook County and the City of Chicago. In 2006, the Adopt-A-Landmark Grant program was introduced, providing an additional incentive for rehabilitation of landmarked buildings. These incentives would provide owners of buildings like the Reliance, The Monadnock, the Carson, Pirie Scott & Company Store, and other Chicago school skyscrapers with the financial means to redevelop these properties for new uses, thus saving them from demolition.

Since the early 1970s, the effort of preservation in Chicago has been offset by preservation organizations, some of which have grown from small ad hoc groups formed around preventing the demolition of one building to nonprofits that, in an absence of municipal resources for preservation, are able to support the work of preservation. In 1971, a group of “21 architects, lawyers, real estate men and others” formed the Landmarks Preservation Council in an effort to prevent the demolition of the Old Chicago Stock Exchange.¹⁸ The group intended to persuade the city to designate the building a landmark, and to buy it “using federal funds and public subscription.”¹⁹ While the designation would fail in City Council, and the building would ultimately be demolished, the organization, which would become the Illinois statewide preservation nonprofit Landmarks Illinois, would diversify to advocate for threatened historic buildings across the state.

Putting hyper local preservation issues into focus, the 1970s and 1980s saw the founding of a crop of neighborhood-level preservation organizations. In 1973, the Historic Pullman Foundation was founded in the Far South Side community of Pullman, a late nineteenth-century model industrial town. On the North Side, the Norwood Park Historical Society was also founded in 1973, as was the Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society. Logan Square Preservation was founded in 1980. The South Side’s Hyde Park Historical Society was founded in 1975. Intended to develop public interest in the history of their individual communities, local preservation organizations would find themselves also working as advocates, marshaling the support of elected officials to back preservation-oriented urban planning, and encouraging the city of Chicago to protect historic buildings in their individual communities. Supplementing the Chicago Landmarks Commission and the work of its staff, these organizations were instrumental in establishing individual local landmarks as well as local historic districts.

Two decades after urban renewal had divided, modernized, and changed the nature of Chicago as a city, undoubtably including the demolition of historic resources that if they had remained extant would have been elevated for the recognition of preservation, the city still had no database of historic buildings. In 1983, Chicago embarked on a comprehensive survey, with a sharp focus on individual neighborhoods. The Chicago Historic Resources Survey (CHRS) was a nine-year effort to screen nearly half a million of Chicago’s buildings, rate them for architectural and historical significance, and record data on each structure with the goal of identifying buildings that were worthy of landmark status. Buildings constructed after 1940 were not generally included in the survey in an effort to distance it from contemporary trends, unless they were understood as having outstanding importance, such as S.R. Crown Hall, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture in 1956. The effort was carried out by a team of surveyors on behalf of the Chicago Landmarks Commission, with the team fluctuating over the course of the survey based on the fluctuating availability of funding.

Each building was given a color rating based on its significance. Buildings with the highest level of significance were given a red or orange color rating, while buildings with lesser significance were rated yellow, green, blue or purple. Each building was coded onto a map at the individual ward level.

While the survey was a valiant effort for its time, the results, like the first efforts by the Landmarks Commission in the 1950s to identify historic resources, did not save buildings from demolition, nor did they deliver resources to building owners. The threat of the demolition of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Building, rated red on the CHRS, raised awareness of the survey’s lack of functionality as a planning tool. A group of volunteers advocating to save the Mercantile Exchange Building developed into Preservation Chicago in 2001, the first citywide preservation advocacy group. While the Mercantile Exchange Building would ultimately be demolished, Preservation Chicago encouraged the City of Chicago to codify a demolition delay ordinance that would place a 90-day hold on red or orange rated buildings in an effort to stave off demolition. In theory, the hold would provide the landmarks division with an opportunity to make a case for landmarking, yet with the color codes not a direct mirror of the criteria needed to designate a building, efforts to landmark red and orange rated buildings have proved difficult. While landmarking is a tool to prevent a building from being demolished, a building’s eligibility for landmark status shouldn’t be the only reason why it is saved from demolition.

For over forty years, the results of that survey have provided Chicago, particularly as preservation functions from a governmental standpoint, with a benchmark in terms of what buildings are considered historic. Even as newer buildings have either aged into significance or entered the public consciousness as eligible for landmark status, the survey has not been updated. More and more frequently, buildings proposed for landmark status do not appear on the CHRS.

“Chicago’s commitment to saving municipally designated landmarks is undergoing one of its most crucial tests,” wrote Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp in 1986. “If a little gem of a structure called McCarthy Building is torn down, the city’s landmarks protection ordinance will be devalued almost to the vanishing point.”²⁰ Gapp would sadly be proven correct three years later. The 1872 McCarthy Building, located within a section of North State Street in the Loop known as Block 37, had been locally landmarked only two years earlier, but was facing development pressure alongside other nineteenth-century buildings within the area bounded by Dearborn, Washington, Randolph, and State Streets, a block that had been designated “blighted” in 1973, providing an opportunity for federal redevelopment funds.

In 1987, the city stripped the McCarthy Building of its landmark status, which applied to the cast iron façade only, after the developer insisted that the façade of the building was too costly to move. “It’s a very difficult tradeoff between one public interest and another,” said Elizabeth Hollander, a City Planning Commissioner at the time. “It’s an extraordinary case, and it does not signal any change in the planning department’s commitment to landmarks.”²¹ The action caused the Landmarks Preservation Council to sue the city in 1987, and in 1989, the organization lost the lawsuit. Architect Helmut Jahn’s futuristic 1985 State of Illinois Center had become an anchor of a reimagined north Loop, and Jahn would be designing the new megadevelopment on the site of Block 37. The block was razed in 1990, but the megadevelopment fell through—as would subsequent developments—until 2005, when the first phase of Block 37 would break ground. The final phase, a residential tower, would open in 2016, marking the conclusion of a multi-decade saga.

Preservation has often come in conflict with the perception of how old a building should be in order to be considered “historic” and what aesthetic features or architectural styles are worthy of preservation. In 2011, Northwestern University announced its intention to demolish Prentice Women’s Hospital, designed by Bertrand Goldberg in 1975. The building, at only thirty-six years old, was shy of the fifty-year guideline often used to evaluate a building’s historic significance, but its nature-inspired cloverleaf design and humanizing interior were significant in its architectural uniqueness. Yet the fifty-year benchmark is not codified in local or federal preservation, and the value of the building from a design perspective was asserted by historians and then approved for landmark status by the Landmarks Commission, only to be rescinded as Northwestern presented an economic impact report hours later.²² “This is not a good looking piece of architecture” stated former 42nd Ward Alderman Burton Natarus of the building during the commission hearing.²³ The building was demolished in 2015.

Preservation in the 2020s in Chicago finds itself at odds with traditionalistic values, austerity, and relevance to both the public broadly and to other aspects of urban planning. The limits of the Chicago Historic Resources Survey and the Demolition Delay ordinance are salient in the destruction of vernacular architecture across the city, particularly vernacular housing. Once abundant in the forms of workers cottages, two flats, and courtyard apartments, vernacular housing—the backbone of Chicago’s neighborhood architecture and an important component in maintaining affordability—is being demolished with its eligibility for landmark status (or not) as the only stopgap measure against demolition. Systems in power, including preservation institutions and preservation as government, have yet to find a solution to address the issue of unnecessary demolition from a systemic standpoint.

While the landmarks ordinance has been amended over time to include provisions for owner consent, providing houses of worship with an opportunity to opt out of landmarking and sunset clauses, which allow for a building or district within the process to designate it a landmark to be treated as such until that building or district is either approved or rejected by City Council. The ordinance has ultimately led to 459 designated landmarks, 388 individual landmarks, 62 landmark districts, and 9 district extensions as of August 2024.²⁴ Unlike the first Landmarks Commission, contemporary commission members represent a broad range of ages, genders, and represent the racial diversity of the community they serve. A focus on landmarks that represent people of color and LGBTQIA+ Chicagoans has been a goal of preservation as a function of government, while the nonprofit and commercial arms of the field continue to build a movement and a practice that is reflective of an inclusive history of Chicago.

Preservation, however, doesn’t have a standard practice on how to look at its actions through an equity lens, a limitation made clear in an attempt to create a local landmark district including over 800 contributing buildings on the South Side neighborhood of Pilsen in 2020. Established by Bohemian and Czech immigrants in the late nineteenth century, and later settled by immigrants from Mexico, the neighborhood’s architecture was carefully cared for and maintained, and became a cultural center representative of multiple immigrant narratives. The effort to landmark Pilsen failed because it did not come from the community of business owners and residents of Pilsen, but from the Department of Planning and Development looking for ways in which to recognize the cultural significance of the neighborhood and combat gentrification and displacement through the creation of a landmark district. While public meetings for the district promised financial incentives to building owners, those incentives weren’t made explicit as the nomination moved through City Council, and the effort ultimately failed without community support.

Comparatively, the first local historic district established in Chicago, The Alta Vista Terrace District, designated in 1971, consisted of only one block of forty late nineteenth-century residential properties, and was, by all accounts, supported by the residents in the proposed district—or at least not subject to the mass objection conveyed by the public for the Pilsen Historic District.²⁵

The process to landmark a historic building or district was not developed to combat gentrification or displacement. The creation of a local landmark district prevents buildings considered “contributing” within it from being substantially altered or demolished. The creation of a district also requires Landmarks Commission staff to create a set of design guidelines for an individual district. Design guidelines are dictated by an understanding of established standards, but incentives for preservation, in the form of grants or tax credits, could be tailored to the needs of the community to combat the specific forces of displacement or gentrification facing it.

Much like the way in which the care of specific architectural features is tailored to an individual landmark district, specific incentives could be developed on a district-by-district basis.

The current moment of preservation in Chicago finds itself forced to ponder its future, and even what it considers to be preservation. In 2022, Google announced its acquisition of the 1985 James R. Thompson Center, designed by architect Helmut Jahn, from the State of Illinois through developer Prime Group, to be renovated as its Chicago headquarters. The most exceptional example of postmodern architecture in Chicago, Prime Group rejected a National Register nomination for the building, and the Landmarks Commission would not entertain the building for local landmark status, despite meeting multiple criteria for eligibility. While it is difficult to determine what the building will ultimately look like from the renderings Google has released, it appears as if the architectural features of the building will be substantially altered, including the replacement of its iconic pink and blue panels, and the openness of its interior atrium. While the building’s reprieve from demolition is a win for preservation from the broader viewpoint of the incorporation of environmental goals, as it will be adaptively reused and not demolished, the devil may be in the details in terms of whether it is a preservation win. Further complicating this is the use of preservation-specific language around the building’s value, including discussions about “preserving” the building’s “iconic architecture” and its status as a “landmark” when those in power walked away from the frameworks of preservation altogether.²⁶

Recent endeavors to use local landmarking as a tool to be more inclusive are benevolent, but like the early municipal efforts of the 1950s and 1960s to identify landmarks and install plaques, they fail to deliver tangible effects, and serve as only honorary acknowledgements. In 2019, the City of Chicago landmarked the Rainbow Pylons and the Legacy Walk, a set of urban markers commemorating Chicago’s LGBTQIA community on North Halsted Street. In 2021, The 1990 Little Village Arch, a tiled gateway spanning over West 26^th Street and commemorating the eastern entryway to the “Mexican capital of the Midwest” was landmarked. In 2022, the Paseo Boricua Gateway Flags in Humboldt Park, a set of steel sculptures in the shape of fluttering Puerto Rican flags, were designated. The sections of the public, LGBTQIA Chicagoans, and Latinx Chicagoans, groups that have been at best, historically excluded from preservation and at worst, harmed by the broader forces of planning and development in Chicago, do not directly benefit from these efforts. Put simply, they will not help keep the Chicagoans who they are looking to celebrate living, working, playing, and creating in these places if they choose to remain, and they will not protect them from harm. While preservation in Chicago was not established to preserve more than buildings, we are asking much, much more of it, and we must—and can—adjust and grow our policies, our activism, and the practice to meet that standard.

Ultimately, history cannot remain static and must absorb the current moment. Preservation is tasked with meeting the current moment by recognizing ways in which it can be more inclusive, and how it can help to meet broader goals in terms of housing affordability and environmental sustainability. Beyond preservation just ensuring that historic places survive as a conveyance of the past, which makes it a default public benefit when the public interfaces with preservation directly, there must be a clear understanding of what kind of resources and recognition preservation will bring to help that public with their goals, hopes, and dreams.

The renaming of the Clarke-Ford House opens up a conversation about what kinds of preservation have and do occur away from historians and landmarks commissions, and how the field can celebrate that work as preservation that has and is vital to the care and stewardship of the built environment. Not every building may be worthy of local landmark status, or listing on the National Register of Historic Places, but if instead of considering if a building is too important to be demolished, perhaps consideration could be put toward what is worthy of the damaging economic and environmental effects that demolition brings. While there may not be a case to landmark every worker’s cottage, two flat, or any viable older building given a demolition permit, there is a case for creating the framework for new policies grounded in the ideals of preservation, that make reuse a feasible and desirable option.

The ever forward moving lens of preservation will rapidly need to consider other buildings of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and beyond that, like the James R. Thompson Center, represent a moment of time in architecture that may be difficult to consider worthy of preservation, because the age of the evaluator, whether a member of the public or a worker in preservation, may have a concept of time that appraises time and even significance based on their own chronologic age. This lens will also require looking at a future for these buildings that may not include their original use, but a future use that can introduce new functionality for an old building.

60 East Lake Street, a parking garage designed by architect Stanley Tigerman to look like a Rolls Royce, is worthy of preservation, particularly as postmodernism, at forty years old, has reached a point in time where its age makes it fragile, and the demolition and alteration of buildings becomes more likely. It need not remain a parking garage to be preserved and it would likely be more culturally valuable, and have more longevity, adaptively reused. Perhaps, unlike the unwillingness for Chicago to see the Garrick Theatre as anything other than what it was, Chicago can see 60 East Lake Street, in all of its urban uniqueness, for what it could be.

The most complicated task in preservation is one that requires an understanding of both the present and the future of Chicago. What is being designed, built, renovated, reconstructed or even reused at this moment that will be worthy of advocating for, recognizing, incentivizing, and saving in the time ahead?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Nathaniel Parks for providing the images of the Clarke-Ford House; to David Schalliol for providing the sequence of the Prentice Women’s Hospital demolition; to Iker Gil for providing the images of the James R. Thompson Center; and to Margaret McCurry for providing the images of the 60 East Lake Street parking garage.