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In the case of Bronzeville’s Metropolitan Community Church, at 41st and King Drive, it also took a 72-year-old woman with a can of pepper spray. Church members were shocked two years ago to learn that their pastor was planning to demolish the Romanesque building, erected in 1889, and replace it with a modern structure. They were particularly surprised since they’d raised more than $150,000 for renovations, the building was structurally sound, and it had been the site of historic speeches and events, including the founding of the Pullman porters’ union. A small group began meeting weekly to strategize. They formed the Coalition to Save the Met, wrote to city officials, staged protests, circulated petitions, and began to patrol the empty property. “We tried not to have a legal thing,” said coalition president Linda Slaughter. But when one of their members had to haul out the pepper spray to fend off a crew sent to remove the church’s stained glass windows, they went to court and got a restraining order that remained in effect for ten months. After they prevailed in court, Slaughter said, they were denounced by their old pastor. The coalition was able to nullify sales of windows and artifacts that had already been removed and was instrumental in the building’s recent sale to another church that’ll move in and preserve it.
Then there’s the Auditorium Theatre. Last fall Roosevelt University won an eight-year legal battle against the theater’s former board, the Auditorium Theatre Council, over control of the venue; the fracas started in 1994, when members of the ATC sued the school to keep it from using theater revenues for a campus extension instead of renovations. Just 12 days before the LPCI awards, Roosevelt hosted an open house showcasing the theater’s three-year, $14 million renovation without bothering to make it clear that the work was almost all done under the old regime. There wasn’t any confusion on this point at the LPCI dinner, however. University provost Lynn Weiner and trustee Charles Gardner were there, but the award went to former ATC executive director Jan Kallish, dumped last spring by the university, and former board member Fred Eychaner, who put more than a million dollars of his own money into the restoration.
