Another church awaits its fate
The Pilgrim Baptist Church in Bronzeville, which burned down on Friday, was mourned by many--it was the home of gospel music and a historic Sullivan building, not to mention a place of worship.
The congregation hopes to rebuild, but that will take time and a lot of money. Perhaps they'd be willing to travel to the North Side, where there is another beautiful church building sitting vacant at the corner of Paulina and Highland. It's up for sale, and when bought, will probably be bulldozed to make way for condos or something.
What's odd, though, is that someone defaced the "for sale" sign, calling the property a "slum" and demanding that someone "clean this mess." I'm not sure what that person was referring to. While it's not as historic as the Pilgrim Baptist, the building is architecturally beautiful, the most striking building in the neighborhood. As Chicago mourns the loss of one church today, I wonder if anyone cares about this one.
posted by teacherman @ 10:28 AM
2 Comments:
Yet it seems like there are so many ugly storefront churches around the city. It would be great if Chicago gave those congregations some sort of deal to buy something like this beautiful place instead. I've even seen a few churches where the building is shared by several different congregations, sort of like a holy time share.
time share congregations - I like that.
So I went down to the south side to see the destroyed landmark and besides the whole sadness of the spiritual effect and the community anchor that the church represented seeing the land marked historic building was not that sad. The reason is that Daley has overseen the destruction of hundreds of landmarks and thousands of beautiful building (like the church in the picture) and a lot of those building were the heart and should of the neighborhood or could have easily been restored to be a focus of the area. But Daley prefers empty lots with wrought iron fence then the possibility of rebirth of an old building and always prefers the crap new condos over anything that may be standing in this architecturally significant town. So yes, there is a lot of sadness for the loss of the building for the Pilgrim Baptist Church but as far as a loss of another historic building, not half as bad as what Daley does every day.
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