Leave the Seat Empty: 1542 North Mohawk Street

 

 Leave the Seat Empty consists of photos taken of buildings in Chicago in between the time a demolition permit is issued and the time the wrecking crews come.

The vast majority of the city's demolitions are vernacular residential buildings in areas that are either seeing immense new investment or immense ongoing disinvestment. In most cases, the doomed buildings are not deemed architecturally or culturally notable enough for proactive preservation efforts to succeed, where such efforts exist. They are most frequently replaced by new single family homes, or by empty land. These patterns aren't universal among demolitions, but are common outcomes of Chicago's current legal and market environment around land use, building vacancy, and new construction.

Despite its international reputation as a destination for architecture tourism, Chicago's policies around building demolitions often fail to protect historic structures. There are no easy answers to the question of which buildings should remain standing under which circumstances, but residents lack easy access to information about upcoming demolitions, leaving them unable to campaign effectively against demolitions they might oppose. I seek to document many of Chicago's doomed buildings in their final days, often with green demo fencing already up, and be present to acknowledge their disappearance.

1542 North Mohawk Street
Permit issued 10/24/2023

In the aftermath of Chicago's infamous, devastating (but oft exaggerated) 1871 fire, which destroyed much of the central portion of the city and spread into working class residential districts of mostly wooden buildings to the north, many city leaders sought to prevent a future catastrophe of the same scale by mandating brick construction for new buildings. They were met with fierce resistance from constituencies for whom wooden construction provided the opportunity for affordable homeownership that brick construction would not, and the city's "Fire Limits" regulations seesawed for the few years after the fire until wooden residential construction was eventually banned citywide in 1874 following a smaller fire with similar characteristics.

Though the 1874 ban was not always strictly enforced (and much of today's city limits was not yet part of Chicago at the time of its enactment), the city's new building material regulations caused a strong shift in construction techniques in and around the part of the city burnt by the 1871 fire. Today's 1500 block of North Mohawk Street was part of the burnt area in 1871, and while it was initially carved out of the 1872 Fire Limits for housing affordability reasons, by the time this home was constructed in 1888 all new construction was required to be brick or stone. It was built as a two-flat, common at the time as a way for working class immigrant families to offset the immense costs of achieving homeownership by renting out a unit. Brick two-flats like this one proliferated in the decades following the fire, and their various forms would come to define much of Chicago's residential vernacular into the mid-1900s.

This particular brick home had neighbors directly to its south at the time it was built, but those neighboring dwellings didn't even make it a decade before demolition. They were cleared out and knocked down in the 1890s by the new Northwestern Elevated Railroad - a privately managed precursor to today's CTA Brown Line and Purple Line routes. For 130 years or so, the trains rumbling past the roof of 1542 North Mohawk were one of the rapidly changing neighborhood's only constants.

During the second half of the 20th century, the onetime two-flat was converted into a single family home as Old Town went upmarket - it was one of the first neighborhoods in the U.S. to gain a public reputation as "Bohemian" in an artsy, nonconformist sense and then follow a trajectory that is now commonly referred to as gentrification. The property traded hands several times between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, when it landed with the white collar family who have owned it now for more than two decades.

In the course of documenting demolition activity in Chicago, it is uncommon to come across a building that is on track for replacement by a new structure while under the ownership of the same people who most recently lived inside the old building. Usually, demolitions of structures that have long-term owners take place when those structures have been severely neglected by absentee landlords or recently suffered a structurally destabilizing disaster. And usually, demolitions that result in new construction take place after a property sells to a developer or to a family commissioning a new home, without memories in the old one.

But here on Mohawk, this two-story brick home was demolished at the behest of its twenty-year owners because they wished for a contemporary, white-collar corollary to their immigrant laborer predecessors: financial stability aided by rental income.

The owners of 1542 North Mohawk worked with prolific local firm Hanna Architects to design a fairly unusual four story, three-unit building to replace their old home. They would live in Unit 3 on the top floor, overlooking the train tracks rather than huddling under them like their old home did. An elevator installed in the building would service their unit, making it accessible even in the face of potential mobility challenges one day. But that elevator wouldn't stop at the two units below them - a two bedroom, two bathroom unit in the middle of the building renting for nearly $4,000 per month, and a duplexed four bedroom, three bathroom unit at ground level renting for $6,500 per month. The oversize apartment on the bottom of the new building, on its own, is more spacious than the entire vernacular two-flat it replaced.