Cabrini 6.26 by
Chicagooan, on Flickr
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/reale...ini-green-sold
A 19th-century church near the former Cabrini-Green housing project is being sold to residential developers who will most likely demolish the building.
Dennis Rodkin
The swift sale is a sign of how magnetic the former Cabrini-Green location is as a redevelopment area since the notorious high-rises were demolished.
Built in 1889 as the First Swedish Baptist Church, the structure at 509 W. Elm St. has housed the Wayman African Methodist Episcopal congregation since 1920, eventually becoming virtually surrounded by the Chicago Housing Authority's Cabrini-Green towers.
The Chicago AME conference listed the church and its 2.72-acre site for sale late in the day on June 21, asking $3.25 million, and by June 23 had accepted one of the multiple offers that came in, said Angela Pettis, the Baird & Warner agent representing the property for the church leadership.
Pettis said she can't disclose the contract sale price, the identity of the buyers or specifics of their plan for the site before the deal closes, but said that demolishing the church is a near certainty.
"The value is all in the land," said Pettis, who has represented other property, both sanctuary buildings and empty land, for the AME council, which has about 20 churches in the Chicago area. A recent appraisal of Wayman AME determined that "the life of this building is gone," she said. "There's no sense in even trying to repair it" for a conversion to residential units or another use, she said.
The Rev. Thomas Hughes, supervising elder for 18 AME churches in the Chicago area as part of the seven-state Chicago AME Conference, said the final deal with the buyer may include creating some space for the church's congregation on the site. "That's what we're going to attempt to do," Hughes said. "We've been on that spot so long, we would like to stay in the neighborhood if it's possible." During the Cabrini-Green era, the congregation was 250 people or more, Hughes said. It has dwindled to about 100, he said.
The Wayman AME site is about one-fifth of a city block, stretching from Cleveland Avenue to Cambridge Avenue along Elm Street. It's not yet clear what building height zoning will allow on the site, because "everything happened so fast," Pettis said. She said the buyer intends to start that research with city agencies today. The sale is tentatively scheduled to close in late August, she said.
The congregation cannot afford to update and maintain the structure, Pettis said. She said they will search for a new site to locate the congregation.
For several decades, Wayman AME was a spiritual haven for African-American residents of Cabrini-Green, which was built in stages from the early 1940s through the early 1960s.
In the early 1990s, Wayman AME was part of the backdrop of one of Cabrini-Green's most horrific incidents: On October 13, 1992, bullets fired by a sniper from a building just north of the Wayman AME church rocketed past the building before killing seven-year-old Dantrell Davis, who was holding his mother's hand as he crossed Cleveland Avenue a short distance south of the church.
Davis was the third Jenner Elementary School student killed that year. His death was one of the events that galvanized the city's Plan for Transformation, which included tearing down the Cabrini-Green highrises, announced in the late 1990s. In 2017, the CHA declared it had met its goals.
In the intervening years, many of the blocks around Wayman AME have been transformed, with market-rate housing at Parkside of Old Town and other developments, a new facility for Jenner, which in the fall will complete a merger with high-performing Ogden Elementary, and Target, Jewel and other stores on Division Street.
The Wayman site, Pettis said, "is prime for (residential) development, with Jenner across the street" and the many other changes in the neighborhood.
While it has housed an AME congregation for just short of a century, the building has roots that reach back to 1853, when the First Swedish Baptist congregation was established in the neighborhood, which had several other Swedish churches and came to be known as Swedetown.
Their first church, near the present site, may have been destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. They completed the present church building in 1889; it's not clear if, in 1920, they transferred it to the AME church, or if there was another inhabitant between the two congregations.
As Italian immigrants replaced Swedes, the name Swedetown was displaced by Little Sicily in the decades before Cabrini-Green was built.
Prev
But at least it got filled in and isn't a vacant lot
Linear Mode
