As his aides tell it, Mayor Daley blew his stack when he heard the news about the Mercantile Exchange building.
The demolition-delay ordinance has always been something of a joke to preservationists, as is the city’s overall attitude toward preservation. Generally city officials like architecture all right–so long as it doesn’t get in the way of development deals.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Merc, a classic 1920s structure designed by Alfred Alschuler, sat at the corner of Franklin and Washington. In February 2002 the city’s buildings department gave the Merc’s owners, the Crown family, a permit to demolish it even though the building was rated orange in the Chicago Historical Resources Survey of local property (an orange rating is second only to red in the city’s ranking of architectural significance).
It only took a few days for the city to make its first mistake under the new law. Later that month a developer got a permit to tear down Cass Studios, an orange-rated art deco apartment building at 747 N. Wabash, even though the landmarks division hadn’t been consulted. When preservationists complained, officials said the appropriate computer systems hadn’t been installed in time to prevent the demolition permit from being issued, but since it had been, their hands were tied. Cass Studios went down several months later.
On December 7 Goeken e-mailed Moran an explanation. “We checked with [the permits department] this morning, and the demo permit was issued last Thursday, Dec. 1,” Goeken wrote. “As you know, the building is in the middle of the campus, without direct street frontage. The Chicago Historic Resources Survey . . . had the building addressed on Chalmers Place. But the official address is 910 W. Belden, which is why we did not see the permit.”
As Moran points out, similar confusion almost spelled doom for Saint Gelasius, the south-side church the archdiocese wanted to demolish in 2004. “With Saint Gelasius they didn’t have the address of the actual church on the demolition permit–they had the address of this little convent near the church,” says Moran. “It’s a gigantic limestone church that we were fighting to save, but they somehow managed to have the wrong address on the permit. Isn’t that convenient.”
