Century-old church in Pilsen to get hearing on landmark status: ‘A treasure for the community’

A century-old church in Pilsen, that’s been at the heart of a drawn-out fight between former parishioners and the Archdiocese of Chicago, will get a special hearing on Monday to determine if the city should save it.

The church — St. Adalbert — and its 185-foot towers have stood over the Lower West Side since its construction in the early 1900s, but its future has been uncertain since the last Mass was celebrated in 2019. 

On Thursday, the city’s Commission on Chicago Landmarks announced that it will consider a preliminary landmark recommendation for the church, a move that preservationists say will secure its future and comes as preservationists have condemned the archdiocese for removing the building’s original stained glass windows, which they view as a prelude to its wholesale demolition.

Preservationists, from former parishioners and architecture enthusiasts to Polish cultural historians, view the building as an icon of the Pilsen neighborhood and for the Polish community in Chicago.

Supporters of preservation held a news conference at City Hall on Thursday to protest the removal of the stained glass and in support of assigning landmark status to the building.

“St. Adalbert is a stable and iconic site in the 25th Ward,” said local Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez.

The Lower West Side alderperson has long fought for the building’s preservation and convened the news conference. It is “treasure for our community,” he said.

According to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, the site met several criteria outlined in the city’s Municipal Code for landmarking, including regarding “its unique location or distinctive physical appearance or presence representing an established and familiar visual feature of a neighborhood, community, or the City of Chicago.”

Ward Miller, president of Preservation Chicago, and another longtime advocate also spoke. “If we want to be a first-class city, we have to honor and protect our buildings,” Miller said.

Miller had previously told the Sun-Times that the removal of a site’s valuable elements is how the archdiocese has signaled upcoming demolition in the past.

During the last fight at the Pilsen church, over the removal of a beloved statue, he told the Sun-Times, “Once the statue comes out, the wrecking ball comes in.”

In that fight, protesters camped outside the church ready to stop anyone from removing the statue — an exact marble replica of Michelangelo’s Pieta. It culminated in four protesters being detained by police for blocking its removal.

Preservationists say the stained glass, which includes a rose window at the church entrance, windows throughout the nave and an intricate skylight above the altar, are among the last of the church’s valuable features yet to be removed.

The archdiocese said the local parish, St. Paul, decided “to remove and safeguard the stained glass after several break-ins and rounds of vandalism left some panes destroyed.”

St. Paul, the church in Pilsen that absorbed the congregation of St. Adalbert after it closed, is where the removed statue was brought, but a spokesperson for the archdiocese ignored a question about whether that’s where the glasswork would go, saying, “The parish owns the glass and the glass will be preserved.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Planning and Development, in answering questions about whether the archdiocese could legally remove the glass, said, “Certain work like the removal or board-up of windows does not require a permit.”

Anina Jakubowski was among the dozen people who attended the news conference. She’s a former parishioner but also spoke out about the building’s significance as cultural patrimony for the Polish community and blamed Cardinal Blase Cupich for shuttering the church.

“This was their little bit of Poland. They built it for future generations,” she said, referring to the early Polish immigrants who built the church. “They didn’t build it for him to 100 years later come around and sell it because they needed money.”

From Polish Heritage 3D, a project to digitize Polish cultural artifacts in the U.S.

Michael Loria is a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.