(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — North DuSable Lake Shore Drive and a couple of vintage skyscrapers are among several sites on Preservation Chicago’s annual list of “endangered” buildings and places.
Included on this year’s list is:
-North DuSable Lake Shore Drive
-Promontory Point, the peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan around 54th Street in the Hyde Park neighborhood
-The Century and Consumer Buildings at 202 and 220 South State Street, which were built before World War I
-CHA buildings at the Altgeld Gardens, Cabrini and Lathrop Homes
-St. Martin de Tours church, a vacant limestone shrine at 59th and Princeton off the Dan Ryan Expressway
-Peterson Avenue Mid-Century Modern District, a two-mile stretch of mostly one- and two-story buildings constructed from the late-1940s through the 1970s
-Central Park Theater, one of the city’s first movie palaces that is now a church
-Moody Triangle in Old Town, a triangle block that includes Moody Bible Church, a mid-century modern designed bank building and a gas station.
Preservation Chicago lists North DuSable Lake Shore Drive as endangered because current renovation plans would turn a boulevard drive into an interstate-type highway, the group’s executive director, Ward Miller, said.
“We don’t want to see Lake Shore Drive turned into the Dan Ryan, the Kennedy Expressway or the Eisenhower with tunnels and trenches and berms and whatnot,” he said.
Preservation Chicago also wants to save the Century and Consumer Buildings at 202 and 220 South State. There’s a move by the federal government to tear them down, Miller said.
“We’ve been working with a number of organizations around the nation to come together and look at repurposing these buildings as an archive building,” Miller said.
Miller said a city known for its architecture will look like fools to the world if it continues erasing historically-significant buildings.
“We’re a city of architecture. We’re known internationally for that. We can’t keep demolishing these buildings that are special,” he said.
Miller said his organization is for development, but adds: “The most incredible and sensitive development is when you can you reuse your historic structures.”
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