In the early 70s muralist Bill Walker covered the front outside wall and the back interior wall of the San Marcello Mission, a Catholic church near the corner of Larrabee and Clybourn, with messages about neighborly love, social justice, and what he called the “unity of the human race.” The interior work made the church “a little Sistine Chapel,” says Jon Pounds, executive director of the Chicago Public Art Group. “It’s also important because there’s so few examples left of what Bill Walker brought to the city.”
Walker’s 2,000-square-foot interior tableau featured more than 100 African-American adults and children learning, playing, working, worshipping. But you can’t see it anymore: this past summer the dingy, partially peeling mural was painted over with white latex.
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According to archdiocese records, the little church was built for an Episcopalian congregation in 1901. Twenty-six years later it became San Marcello, a mission of the Saint Philip Benizi parish intended to serve what had become a largely Italian neighborhood. The area became more integrated in the 30s, and during the 40s and 50s the CHA demolished more than 30 blocks of houses, first to make way for the low-rise Cabrini Homes, which absorbed many of the displaced Italians, and then for the high-rise Green Homes, which housed mostly African-Americans. San Marcello was one of the few structures spared.
In 1972 Kendrick wrote in a report that the mural had become a “center of attraction for artists and art lovers from all over the city. . . . The wall belongs to the community. They protect and celebrate his art.”
Meanwhile the archdiocese had been negotiating with the Strangers Home Missionary Baptist Church, which was renting a space nearby. In late November, Cardinal Cody signed the title over to the church, led by the Reverend Demcy Thomas.
Then early last summer the Reverend Thomas’s son John Thomas, who’s also a church elder, painted over the mural while cleaning up the church. He says he didn’t know it had historic value.
Pounds thinks the latex could be lifted off and the mural cleaned and restored. “It’s something we’d be interested in supporting,” he says. But Heather Becker, head of the Chicago Conservation Center, guesses the job would cost $40,000 or more. “The question is how hard it would be to remove the top layer without degrading the layer underneath,” she says. “We’ve had luck in the past, even if it means using scalpels.”
