A church on the verge

This is St. Boniface Catholic Church, down in Ukraine Village on the west side, at Chestnut & Noble Streets.



Closed since 1990, this imposing 1902 building made it onto 1999's Landmarks Illinois Most Endangered list for the whole state.

It's an absolutely wonderful church building, no two ways about it. The side elevation could pass for the main facade of a lesser church. In front, the main portal has a delightful array of patterned columns, each with a different design.





Today, the venerable building is in a sorry state. Roof leaks have gone unchecked over the side aisles, developing into miniature roof collapses, and the interior is pretty well trashed. Efforts to secure the building by walling up the main entrance with concrete block have failed, as the wall stands broken down, the security fence pried apart, and the door's portal windows shattered out.





A small rectory building stands behind the church. Sadly, a school building to the east and two convent buildings have already been lost.





Things might be looking up for St. Boniface. A web site devoted to the church reports that, after over ten years of the community fighting to save the building, a developer is moving forward with plans to renovate and redevelop the property.

Renderings of the proposed construction may be seen here. To put it mildly, it's a pretty aggressive intervention. It essentially adds a 6-story building that wraps around 2 sides of the church, completely burying the building's white-brick-clad eastern facade, (a side that was meant obscured by the other buildings previously on the site). The plan cuts lots of windows and skylights into the facade and roof. Some changes, such as the new round porthole windows on the lower towers, blend right in (they match the round windows on the tall tower), while others could use some refinement - I sure hope they aren't actually going to destroy the tall arch-topped aisle windows behind the tall tower, only to replace them with stacks of punched openings. The roof skylights could likewise be visually unified somehow, tied together into a single element rather than a scattered patchwork of squares. And couldn't the rose windows be saved?



The new construction also replaces the rectory building. It's not clear why the vacant land to the east isn't used for this additional housing instead - perhaps it wasn't part of the land deal; perhaps it was the only way to avoid having multiple buildings with multiple services. But the loss of the rectory is damaging to the complex as a whole, diminishing its integrity further. The building is nothing too special, but it's definitely integrated with its parent structure.

Overall, the preservation purist in me cringes, but the realist side of me recognizes an economically viable renovation when I see it. If it's this or total demolition, then bring on the construction crews.



I tend to go back and forth on historicist churches. On the one hand, they're wonderful, no doubt about it. They're elaborate and ornate and embody thousands of years of tradition. On the other hand, I look around at all the flowering creativity of churches from the 1950s and 1960s, where every church could be something brand new under the sun, and start to have dismissive feelings about yet another French Gothic or Italian Renaissance styled church.

But then I find a place like this, a handsome, magnificent church that overwhelms in its splendor, and all those doubts go flying out the window. The preservation of a building like St. Boniface is a moral imperative.



Read more on St. Boniface at Saint Boniface Info.com, a comprehensive site about the church. Be warned, your heart will break when you see the vintage photos of the interior before its abandonment.

Another Stade Church, but not just another Stade church

Midcentury architect Charles Stade didn't often break from his standard A-frame mold, but he certainly could do so when the budget and program called for it. This was certainly the case with St. John's Lutheran Church (W. Pratt, just east of Cicero), where Stade's typical A-frame model was discarded in favor of soaring vertical walls that frame a relatively narrow space.

St. John's is one of those pesky buildings that, today, is so obscured by trees and greenery that it's hard to get a photograph of the entire building. This is about the best I could do:





Inside, it's all vertical, though some basic Stade elements remain, such as an altered rendition of Stade's random cathedral glass, and those magnificent laminate wood beams.





As usual, Stade eschews most traditional ornament, but still decorates the space, using a celestial cosmos of floating globe lamps. The space is impressive by itself, but it's the globe lamps that really put it over the top, transforming it into a superb artistic work and also a fine representative building of its era.





Stade didn't do a lot of buildings entirely in brick, but here he shows a clear appreciation for the medium. Grids and rows of bricks project or recess, creating patterns in the wall. He uses randomly placed clinker bricks as wall decoration both inside and out. They give a human quality to these otherwise towering brick walls.



Even the cornerstone reflects the tall, boxy nature of the building.

Art within the church favors a sort of floating, variable-size font:







The Chicago Tribune of the era, which frequently profiled new Modern-style churches, is strangely silent about this one; thus I have no idea who the artist was.

Outside, a small projecting chapel wing reaches out to the west, at right angles to the main building; together, they form a small plaza space.



You might be shocked to find this view on the south-facing alley side of the chapel:



Turns out, Stade's design simply engulfed the 1953 chapel that was already on the site. What remains of the chapel's original skin appears to be a done timid, watery Gothic style; it was reskinned to work with Stade's vision. It doesn't seem like much of a loss, considering what we got in return.

Charles E. Stade, Architect

He's most famous for his magnificent chapel at Valpairaso University, south of Chicago. But Park Ridge architect Charles Stade designed dozens (reportedly hundreds) of churches, across Chicagoland and across America, from the early 1950s until his retirement in 1981. He worked with many denominations, but his own Lutheran faith gave him the largest number of commissions.

It's not hard to spot a Stade church: just look for the big A-frame building with a random checkerboard of colored glass squares, with gill-like stacks of sloping wood mullions. It's a style that was heavily influenced by the angular styles of Frank Lloyd Wright, particularly his Unitarian Meetinghouse in Madison, WI.


Winnetka Presbyterian Church - Willow Road, Winnetka, IL


Immanuel Lutheran Church - Des Plaines, IL


St. Timothy Lutheran Church - w. of Logan Square, Chicago


Hillside Free Methodist Church - Evanston, IL


Trinity Lutheran Church - Lombard (York Center), IL

Ashlar-cut gray stone end walls are also pretty diagnostic of Stade's stock style.


St. Peter Evangelical Lutheran Church - SW Chicago


Elston United Methodist Church - NW Chicago


Stade was a consumate Modernst. He designed simple, elegant, geometric buildings, largely bereft of ornament, that relied on the magic of light and space to bring them to life. Also in keeping with the Modernist ethos, he was not at all ashamed to recycle ideas for building designs, to the extent that many of his smaller churches are totally interchangeable.


Trinity Lutheran - Lombard


Elston United Methodist


Faith Lutheran Church - NW Chicago


Immanuel Lutheran, Des Plaines

And yet, none of them are clones. Each is uniquely designed. Each contains an original floor plan, each has unique glass patterns, each has custom-designed liturgical furnishings.

Stade loved his angles. Some of the most hypnotic moments in his designs are where angles repeat and pile on one another.





And he loved his grids. Nearly every Stade church has a wall that's a grid of randomly sized openings in different colors.














Bethel United Church of Christ - Elmhurst, IL




Stade even designed doors in this style, sometimes setting the handles in a deeply recessed grid of thin wood elements. There's definitely something memorable about reaching your hand into that grid to grasp and pull the handle.










A fourth Stade element is simple concrete sculpture plaques, displaying symbols of the church along with short quotations.










And a final Stade signature is the cornerstone - usually rendered in limestone, with a simple, raised sans-serif font announcing the year of construction and nothing else.








One can see him settling into his trademark style with the 1953 St. Andrew's Lutheran Church, an early work up on Northwest Highway which already contains several of the signature elements. St. Andrews has red brick, a solid end wall, and boxed-out stained glass windows with faceted glass, all of which mark it as unique from the stock style that Stade would be mass-producing in by 1958.


Saint Andrew's Lutheran Church, Park Ridge, IL



Stade was one of the second-generation Modernists, bringing contemporary design to the masses, making good, serviceable buildings that were affordable, handsome, clean and elegant - ideal for the suburban frontier. His work was not necessarily scrutinized by the glossy high-end magazines, but it was certainly worthy of it.

Double Deco

Pure coincidence let me find out about the fantastic Art Deco-facaded building at 6420-6424 N. Western Avenue: the Rogers Park Historical Society was headquartered there in the 1990s, and thus mention the building in their online history.

It was designed by William C. Presto, an associate of Louis Sullivan - the same guy who called in Sullivan to do the Krause Music Store facade, the final work of Sullivan's career. The Western Ave. building was home to Cutsler's Cafe in 1931; beyond that, there's not much about it in the Tribune archives, my usual research stop. It's a beauty, though, with a design vocabulary that brings to mind vaguely Egyptian imagery but is a unique creation.





Well, I thought it was unique, anyway... till I had occasion to venture through the small town of Dekalb, IL, where the exact same design style appears on a small commercial facade, the Wedberg Building. Presto must have figured nobody would notice if he recycled a design in a small town a hundred miles away!



Of course, the Internet isn't very forthcoming about this one, either. Best guess is it was built for an Albert T. Wedberg (his 31-year-old wife's name appears on the 1930 census), who may have been a photographer (he's credited with a photograph of the town from the same time period).