In the historic preservation arena, you’ve got to pick your battles. Invariably, you are fighting the forces of the real estate market and when there is money to be made in real estate, people will go to great lengths to make it. Almost inevitably, greed will defeat conscience, so you are sometimes tempted just to throw your hands up and move on. Which is not to say there aren’t battles worth fighting.
There is nothing about the house at 600 W Stratford Place, completed in 1888 when this was the township of Lakeview, that would make you think of the Auditorium Building or the Carson Pirie Scott store, but like them, it was designed by the great architects Adler & Sullivan. The AIA Guide to Chicago tersely tells us that although it has been “greatly altered,” it’s “of interest” because it’s one of only two frame houses the firm designed.
Last week Preservation Chicago alerted members of an alarming but unsurprising development: the owner wants to scrape the site. Zoning would permit up to 10 condo units.
Stratford Place doesn’t have much of its 19th century flavor left; in the 1950s and 1960s it was infested with a swarm of Four-Plus-Ones [compared to which, the red brick stackables are actually an improvement], and the house in question is one of only a handful of single family dwellings remaining, so it’s hard to make a case that another new condo complex would destroy the urban fabric.
No one pretends that this building is in any way architecturally significant. But you can’t deny its historical value. Any structure by Adler & Sullivan is probably worth saving on principle alone, primarily because so many of its greatest achievements — the Schiller Building, the Chicago Stock Exchange — were demolished before there was much of a preservation consciousness here, but particularly after the fire at the KAM Synagogue/Pilgrim Baptist Church last year.
That’s just part of the issue, though. Another is simple posterity. Not everything is good because it survives for more than a century, but how many other houses in Chicago can you point to that are 118 years old?
You hate to co-opt a red-state aphorism, but this looks a lot like one of those slippery slopes.