In 20 years of fighting to save historically valuable buildings on the Near North Side, Barton Faist thought he’d seen everything. Then he discovered that a developer, the Fordham Company, had started promoting the 12-block area bounded by Chicago, Ontario, Michigan, and State as the “Cathedral District,” a label it said celebrated the area’s “spirituality, beauty, history, community.” Faist saw the new label as a gimmick, one that could serve to distract local residents from the developer’s plan to tear down some of the last remaining vintage town houses in the area in order to construct a 50-story condo complex. “It left me speechless,” he says. “I guess I should appreciate the cleverness of this strategy–invoking history and community while destroying community and history.”
One of the busiest developers in the area has been the Fordham Company, which has built one upscale high-rise (the Fordham, at Wabash and Superior), is in the process of building a second (the Pinnacle Tower, at Wabash and Erie), and wants to build a third on Superior between Wabash and Rush.
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“I remember when the Fordham went up–it broke my heart,” says Faist. “There was a lovely old 1920s building right there on the southwest corner of Wabash and Superior. It’s gone. There was an 1880s mansion just next to that building. It’s gone. There was another 1870s mansion on that block–gone too. These were special old buildings. I can still see their ghosts. In their place is a big, tall, ugly concrete bunker that looks just like all the other big, tall, ugly bunkers. People come from all over the world to see our architecture–and we’re destroying it.”
But in late January, just a few days after the ordinance passed, Faist noticed that some of the building’s apartments looked vacant. “I thought something was up, like maybe the landlord was moving out his tenants, so I called the building department,” he says. “Sure enough, they’d issued a demolition permit. I called the planning department and Landmarks Commission to ask them how this could happen without a hearing. And they told me, ‘Oh, Barton, we made a mistake.’”
The pamphlet lists six religious institutions–Holy Name Cathedral, Saint James Cathedral, Chicago Sinai Congregation, Congregation Kol Ami, the Fourth Presbyterian Church, and the Moody Bible Institute–that have joined a steering committee to “guide and implement the vision of the Cathedral District.” It’s not clear who would pay to implement Skidmore’s design, though the brochure promises Fordham will kick in $1 million if someone else comes up with the other $2 million.
Faist sees all the do-gooder language of the district proposal as nothing more than an attempt to deflect community opposition to the tower. “It’s another facade,” he says. “It’s an ‘ecumenical’ movement conjured up by some guys in PR to celebrate the demolition of our past–or at least to divert our attention while they go about demolishing our past. Forget about setting up a cathedral district. The city should make that a landmarked district, preserving all of the old buildings there.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jon Randolph.
