January 2006

Bronzeville's historic Pilgrim Baptist Church goes up in flames!

This terrible photo of the fire that engulfed Pilgrim Baptist Church was taken at 3:30 PM this afternoon www.bronzevilleonline.com.

The Aftermath of the Fire:

The Church Before the Fire:

More Information about Pilgrim Baptist Church:

Address: 3301 S. Indiana Ave.
Year Built: 1890-91
Architect: Adler & Sullivan
Date Designated a Chicago Landmark: December 18, 1981

The decorative and planning skills of architect Louis H. Sullivan, along with the engineering abilities of Dankmar Adler, are embodied in the strong masonry forms of this building, which is embellished with terra-cotta panels of intricate foliage designs. The dramatic interior of the church contains similar ornament. Built as Kehilath Anshe Ma' ariv synagogue, the building has housed the Pilgrim Baptist Church since 1922. During the 1930s, this congregation and its longtime music director, Thomas A. Dorsey, were instrumental in the development of gospel music. Among those who sang here were: Mahalia Jackson, Sallie Martin, James Cleveland, and the Edwin Hawkins Singers.

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ARCHITECTURE

Resurrecting history -- an argument for Pilgrim Baptist

By Blair Kamin
Chicago Tribune architecture critic
Published January 15, 2006

Rebuild it.

A little more than a week after Pilgrim Baptist was pronounced dead and the eulogies delivered, it is clear that the church can -- and should -- rise from the ashes.

Other historic religious structures, such as New York's Central Synagogue, have been miraculously revived after suffering devastating fires. Historic preservationist John Vinci last week pulled out of storage architectural drawings that could guide the church's reconstruction. Also present, and just as crucial as the drawings, is a vision for making Pilgrim Baptist the centerpiece of efforts to draw tourists, along with investment and jobs, to the historic Bronzeville neighborhood.

The only major hitch, besides the need to raise lots and lots of money: Engineers still have to deem the building's charred remaining walls structurally sound.

Why rebuild? Originally a synagogue, Pilgrim Baptist was that rare thing: a powerful, if compromised, work of architecture, as well as a social and cultural landmark. The architects who shaped it, Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, broke with the precedent of the Moorish Revival, meant to evoke a long-lost Jewish Golden Age in Spain. They crafted a pair of stacked cubes, topped by a steeply pitched roof, with comparatively little ornament. The progressive architecture expressed the progressive spirit of the Jewish Reform congregation. Today, the building's muscular walls and graceful rounded arches evince the authority and power of a Roman ruin.

But buildings do not exist in an aesthetic vacuum. Unanticipated events imbue them with added meaning, adding rich layers of history. After the German Jews who built the synagogue in 1891 moved on, the Great Migration brought thousands of blacks from the Deep South to Chicago and other Northern cities. When they found prejudice as well as opportunity, Pilgrim Baptist provided shelter amid the storm after it occupied the synagogue in 1922. Here, the soulful sounds of gospel music were born.

This broad-based significance surely explains why leading politicians and philanthropists are rallying behind Pilgrim Baptist. Among them: Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who has stirred the wrath of the American Civil Liberties Union by pledging $1 million in state funds for the church. The ACLU is concerned about a possible violation of the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. But federal policy, at least, has shifted in a way that favors Blagojevich.

In 2003, reversing a previous Justice Department opinion, Interior Secretary Gale Norton said that federal historic preservation grants could be awarded to historic religious properties. The first beneficiary: the Old North Church in Boston, still an active church, where Paul Revere instructed a sexton to hang lanterns to signal the first sign of British troops.

"The secular purpose of preserving historic properties is a valid basis for government funding, as long as the money is not given to benefit religious institutions, but simply to preserve history," says Paul Edmondson, general counsel for the Washington-based National Trust for Historic Preservation. States also have provided preservation funds for the restoration of historic religious structures, Edmondson explains.

Still, other questions swirl around Pilgrim Baptist's future: Why rebuild a church with a seating capacity of more than 1,000 when there are only about 250, mostly senior citizens, members? Why lavish public funds and political attention on this reconstruction project when other religious edifices that are certifiable masterpieces, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park, also need restoration funds? Is that the equivalent of showering money on the victims of highly publicized disasters, like the tsunami in South Asia, while ignoring less-visible causes?

There are no easy answers to the distribution question. One can only hope that giving to one historic religious structure does not produce a zero sum game in which others go wanting. But there is no denying the architectural significance of Pilgrim Baptist, even accounting for its flaws, which resulted, according to Sullivan biographer Hugh Morrison, from a lack of funds.

Soaring wood vaults

In contrast to Adler & Sullivan's deft original design, the building rose abruptly from its lower cube to its upper cube. Its upper mass had to be covered with pressed metal rather than masonry. Yet the interior, with its soaring wood vaults, an intricate frieze with Stars of David and superb acoustics, was a dazzling worship space.

Fortunately, the tools are at hand to reconstitute this spectacular room and the shell that housed it. They begin with five sheets of detailed architectural drawings made in 1964 for the Historic American Buildings Survey. The survey operates under congressional authority from the Historic Sites Acts of 1935. Its mandate, as its Web site spells out, is to record historic structures so Americans can better understand what they tell us of the past and to ensurerecognition by future generations. Are you listening, ACLU?

It gets better. Vinci, who helped the late photographer Richard Nickel save fragments of doomed Sullivan buildings and led the restoration of Adler & Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange trading room at the Art Institute, has an even more detailed set of Pilgrim Baptist drawings. When he taught a class in 19th Century Romanesque architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology during the 1980s, he and his students spent hour after hour at Pilgrim Baptist, just east of IIT. "We crawled all over," Vinci says, showing the drawings, which include floor plans, cross sections and elevations that show what facades looked like. He restored the original colors and detail of the church's interior in 1986.

Working blueprint

Combine the drawings with plaster casts of the building's decoration, pictures of the church taken by Nickel's studio and fancy computer technology that would allow details to be built to the correct proportions, and you have a working blueprint for the essentials -- the bones and the flesh, the structure and the ornament.

Better yet, there could be improvements on the original.

Engineers surely would seek to convert the wood roof trusses, which went up in flames, to hardier structural steel. Smart but flexible historic preservationists make changes like that all the time. Only the hidebound ones insist on not rebuilding destroyed structures because they have lost their historic "patina."

Would it be better to let them remained charred hulks, preserving ideological purity rather than real buildings?

Forward-thinking people also are looking at the future of Pilgrim Baptist in a broader context, among them Harold Lucas, president and chief executive officer of the Black Metropolis Convention & Tourism Council. He envisions the restored church becoming the crown jewel of a resurgent Bronzeville, which boasts such handsomely restored structures as the Supreme Life Building at 35th Street and King Drive but still lacks a glittering centerpiece -- a there there.

The church, as Lucas sees it, would become a place for blues and gospel concerts, justifying its seemingly too-large capacity. It might also house museum displays about its Jewish and African-American roots, bringing two groups that were allies during the civil rights movement, but have sometimes been at odds in recent years, into closer physical, and perhaps, social, proximity.

Above all, there is the prospect of an economic revival for Bronzeville, based on tourism.

"It becomes more than just a church," Lucas says.

"It becomes an anchor institution in the development of the whole area as a heritage area."

Forget, at least for now, the price tag of rebuilding (almost sure to run into the tens of millions) or the politically touchy question about who would administer a restoration: the church, the city or a non-for-profit foundation modeled on the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation, which seeks to preserve and restore that building. The focus should be on rebuilding this great landmark, whose power is encapsulated by its architecture yet reaches far beyond it.

Contact the writer - bkamin@tribune.com

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Fire a blow to Bronzeville
Loss of Pilgrim Baptist Church could harm revitalization of impoverished neighborhood

By Antonio Olivo and Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporters Johnathon Briggs and Jason George contributed to this report
Published January 10, 2006

As inspectors and insurance adjusters poked through the smoldering rubble of Pilgrim Baptist Church on Monday, and as politicians and pastors pledged money toward rebuilding, neighborhood activists began to assess what the loss of the landmark might mean for their long efforts to revive Bronzeville, birthplace to the story of black Chicago.

City fire inspectors determined Monday that Friday's blaze, which also burned down the adjoining Loop Lab School, was caused by repair workers using blowtorches to fix the building's roof as part of a renovation.

On Monday, Gov. Rod Blagojevich pledged up to $1 million in state funds to help cover the cost of rebuilding the South Side church's school and administrative offices. Blagojevich, who also pledged $1,000 of his own money, said the state funds would not directly go to the church in order to maintain the constitutional separation between church and state.

The destruction of the landmark was certainly a tragedy for church members and architectural buffs worldwide.

But it was also a blow to the surrounding community, which saw the historic 115-year-old structure as a centerpiece in their efforts to lift Bronzeville out of years of poverty and neglect.

The building "was the anchor of the community," said Paula Robinson, president of Bronzeville Community Development Partners, which has sought to capitalize on Bronzeville's history to turn it into a tourist destination.

Now it is unclear what role the site at 33rd Street and Indiana Avenue can play.

Portions of the slightly charred limestone facade remain standing. With the fire investigation complete, city engineers will examine the structural integrity of those remnants, all that is left of the building completed in 1891 by legendary architect Louis Sullivan and his partner Dankmar Adler.

Meanwhile, church and architectural preservationists are contemplating the enormity of building a new sanctuary within the storied arches where gospel music was born.

As shown in the attempt to rebuild around the Pullman factory clock tower--another landmark and neighborhood focal point that went up in a blaze in 1998--such efforts at combining the past and future can be complicated, expensive and politically tangled.

So far, workers in Pullman have re-created a perimeter wall and roof at a cost of $10 million shouldered by the State of Illinois. Plans for the site have changed repeatedly over the last seven years, and it took more than a year to agree on a design for a new clock tower, critics of that project have said.

"The clock tower could have been up there a year ago had things worked out properly," Dan Bergin, president of Chicago Heights Construction, the project's contractor, told the Tribune in August.

At Pilgrim, the big question is how to handle the limestone walls that have reminded some spectators of images of war-torn cities. Others saw the walls in a more optimistic light.

"I was so impressed by how beautiful those stone walls looked," said architect John Vinci, who has done restoration work at Pilgrim and visited the ruins over the weekend. "It looked like a building in construction."

If the walls aren't salvageable, replicating the building could cost "multimillions of dollars," said David Bahlman, president of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois.

By contrast, it cost $110,000 to build the original structure, which housed Kehilath Anshe Ma'ariv, Chicago's oldest Jewish congregation.

Above one of its arches is a Hebrew inscription that states: "Open for me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them, to praise the Lord."

Robert Vaughn, chairman of Pilgrim's board of trustees, said the church's insurance "is not enough" to cover what it would take to put up a new Sullivan-like building--with its terra cotta designs and soaring vaulted ceilings.

"I would like to see anything as close to remembrance as possible," said Vaughn, adding that $500,000 had been spent on church renovation work before the fire.

Several preservationists said the burden of rebuilding the church shouldn't be left to a congregation of 200 people because the building was an architectural treasure, a cornerstone of African-American history.

"It's society's job to preserve this and not just these poor elderly people's," Vinci said, calling for government support.

Constance Buscemi, a city Planning Department spokeswoman, was noncommittal about a future role for the city in reconstruction, saying it would require further study.

Blagojevich, who spoke Monday at St. John Missionary Baptist Church on Chicago's South Side, said he has great faith that Pilgrim will recover. The church "will rise like a phoenix from the ashes," he said.

"This investment is much bigger than the investment in a church," the governor said, referring to Pilgrim's cultural and historical importance.

Wilbert Hasbrouck, a Chicago architect, expressed deep reservations about the possibility of restoring the building.

"Even if you can put it back together, it will no longer be the building," said Hasbrouck, who has done restoration work on more than 25 buildings. "A landmark building requires a patina of use. You can't restore that with drywall."

Robinson said the church factored heavily into the community's push to be made a National Heritage Area, which would require a designation by Congress. Heritage status could bring federal funds and attract a private sector interest in the neighborhood.

"This community has a dramatic story of blues, jazz and gospel music" Robinson said.

Today, the ruins of the church sit amid a blend of carefully restored graystones and worn Victorian structures. Nearby 35th Street hosts liquor stores, fast-food joints and currency exchanges.

Elmira Mayes, director of the Loop Lab School, which also burned in the fire, said she expects the school will begin classes Wednesday at a temporary site while it searches for a new home.

Rev. Hycel Taylor, a former pastor at Pilgrim, recalled the long struggle to garner support for preserving the church before the fire.

"I had been all over the country appealing to people to help," Taylor said. "Now, everyone is vowing to raise money after it's been burned down."

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Landmark church destroyed by fire
Pilgrim Baptist was birthplace of gospel music

By Andrew L. Wang, Johnathan Briggs and Antonio Olivo, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporters Ron Grossman, David Mendell and Dave Wischnowsky contributed to this report
Published January 7, 2006

Fire swept through Bronzeville's historic Pilgrim Baptist Church on Friday, sending flaming walls and timbers crashing into the grand sanctuary where gospel music was born.

The building, a cornerstone of Chicago's African-American community and a landmark work by architect Louis H. Sullivan, was a total loss, fire officials said.

As the ruins steamed Friday evening, that loss had to be assessed from many angles.

A neighborhood had lost a church; worshipers, a church home.

Chicago had lost a precious Sullivan building.

And American culture had lost the soaring hall where Thomas A. Dorsey, a jazz and blues artist who turned to church music during a period of personal grief, had developed a new musical idiom called gospel.

"I can't imagine another space comparable to it anywhere in the country," Brian Goeken, deputy commissioner of the city's Department of Planning and Development. "It was a masterpiece and something like this can never be replaced."

For others who gathered near the church at 33rd Street and Indiana Avenue as the fire raged, the loss was deeply personal.

"I'm devastated," said Valerie Miles, 53, a lifelong member of the church. "I hate the loss of such a great structure. It will be missed."

The fire broke out at about 3 p.m. and quickly roared into an extra-alarm blaze, sending flames high into the sky. Smoke could be seen for miles.

The flames burned so hot that nearby parked cars caught fire and a melting copper cornice on the church's roof dangled like a strand of holiday tinsel.

The cause of the fire was under investigation, fire officials said Friday evening. However, it appeared that the fire started on the roof where workers were making repairs.

"The roof was being worked on and the fire began on the roof," said Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford. "That's what we know." The roof was being worked on Friday before the fire started, fire officials said.

Four firefighters suffered minor injuries, Langford said.

About 60 pupils at the adjacent Loop Lab School had to be evacuated. The school, too, burned in the fire.

Langford said the church was "a total loss."

Inside the 10,500-square-foot building, history also burned.

Rows of wall murals painted by legendary African-American artist William E. Scott were likely destroyed, said Rev. Hycel Taylor, a former pastor who has sought to restore the building.

Also likely destroyed were the church's horseshoe-shaped oak balcony, the high ceiling curved into a half moon and an intricate panel of terra-cotta designs crafted by Sullivan and his engineer partner Dankmar Adler.

The building, completed in 1891, was originally a Jewish synagogue. It became the Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1922 and quickly became a spiritual pillar of black Chicago.

Blacks arriving from the South during the first Great Migration between World War I and World War II found refuge at Pilgrim, with church leaders helping them to find homes and jobs nearby, said Timuel Black, a Bronzeville historian.

Birth of gospel

As the congregation grew during the 1930s, Dorsey arrived as Pilgrim's music director and developed the then-revolutionary idea of applying jazz and blues to music for the church, creating modern gospel music.

The songs, drawn from old spirituals and the jagged pain of the then-nascent blues, resonated with the community, drawing hundreds to the church, said Dorsey's niece, Dr. Lena McLin, a composer and music teacher.

Dorsey was Pilgrim's music director for 55 years, she said.

"This new music touched the soul ... it was in the style of the hymns and very basically the blues, but it was with a beat," McLin said. "Because Dorsey had been music director of [Gertrude] "Ma" Rainey, the mother of the blues."

Dorsey's music, much of it based on his own personal loss of a wife and child, "allowed the audience to interact, because it was something they knew about," McLin said.

Among those who sang there were the legendary Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke, church leaders said.

Also filling the pews was Rev. Junius C. Austin, a charismatic minister who was pastor from the early 1920s into the 1960s, turning Pilgrim into a cultural and political institution for blacks in Chicago, Black said.

"He was an actor," said Black, who attended Pilgrim services regularly in his youth. "He would strut up and down the pulpit and kind of talk about how well he was dressed, and he was. And how good looking he was, and he was. And people would be glad to go watch Rev. Austin, to hear his sermon, but also to watch him in action."

With Dorsey's music and Austin's sermons, on many Sundays "people would be standing outside listening to the sermon on the megaphones because the inside was filled completely," Black said. "They'd be standing near the windows peeking in."

That was when the Bronzeville neighborhood was in its heyday as a cultural and social mecca for middle-class blacks. During those years, the church became active in local politics, youth athletics, and helped develop businesses and homes in the area.

Then, in the 1950s and `60s, when the lifting of restrictive deed covenants allowed blacks to move outside of segregated neighborhoods like Bronzeville, church attendance dropped dramatically, Black said.

It became increasingly difficult to keep up the imposing structure. The church's current membership is 200, associate pastor Joseph Waters said.

Showing signs of wear in a neighborhood that began to see escalating crime rates and increasing poverty, Pilgrim Baptist Church was designated a city historic landmark in 1981.

By 2002, as Bronzeville began to see new homes, the church's chipped paint, water-damaged walls, sagging ceilings and crumbling latticework placed it on a list of the nation's 10 most endangered religious buildings.

Restoration had begun

Witnessing its final demise, "really hits you in the gut," said David Bahlman, president of the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. "It is like a historic painting being torn from the wall of a museum and being cut to bits and burned."

Waters said church officials had been trying to restore the building, which was to cost $2.6 million. A new roof was recently installed, Waters said.

"It's a real tragedy," said Waters, as fire licked at a Hebrew scripture still carved above the building's stone archway.

But "God has a plan," he said. "The plan is to build it better than before."

© Chicago Tribune 2006

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Related Links:

Blaze destroys historic church

Chicago Tribune | Another jewel of Sullivan's legacy lost