Leave the Seat Empty: 1863 North Fremont 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.
1863 North Fremont Street
Permit issued 08/21/2023
This two-flat sat within the RANCH Triangle in Lincoln Park for approximately 135 years before its demolition in 2023.
The Triangle gets its acronym name from its boundaries: Racine, Armitage, North, the Chicago River, and Halsted. During the mid-20th century, this part of Lincoln Park saw a significant influx of what at the time were called "urban pioneers", white upper middle class new arrivals who sought to reshape this working class urban neighborhood. They generally wished to create an idyllic community of like-minded people via architecture preservation, local school advocacy, new business and arts endeavors, and other tactics during a time when most of their generational cohort was headed to the suburbs.
Lincoln Park was reshaped by that generation of new residents, whose individual and organizational relationships with existing residents were often fraught. The urban pioneers helped set in motion Lincoln Park's path to the immense wealth it attracts today, displacing working class white residents and a sizable Puerto Rican community along the way. But not every old family left during that era. Though the seven-figure land values around here these days cause each home to carry a substantial property tax burden, which poses a challenge even for the remaining urban pioneers who arrived the '50s, '60s, and '70s, a tiny number of the families who lived in Lincoln Park before the urban pioneers still have a foothold.
Until 2019, this two-flat on Fremont was one such foothold. Owned by a German-American family with more than a century of history in Chicago, the building bypassed the urban pioneer era in its entirety. When the time finally came that the longtime owners decided to sell, that meant two things: a big payoff, and a near inevitability that their buyer would choose to demolish the home. The RANCH Triangle and adjacent portions of Lincoln Park are among the wealthiest areas of Chicago today, and scattered vernacular wood frame buildings like this one are common targets for replacement by massive new single family homes.
The 2019 buyer, who paid $1.35 million for the two-flat, was restaurateur Brendan Sodikoff (known for Au Cheval, Doughnut Vault, etc.), acting through an LLC tied to his restaurant group. Sodikoff likely planned to demolish and build anew here, but his plans fizzled out. Given the timing of the sale, it's possible that the impact of 2020 and 2021 on the restaurant industry may have helped put those plans off course. It's also possible that Sodikoff intended to buy out the neighbors to the north (another older family who own a brick two-flat on a double lot), but was unsuccessful in doing so.
In 2021, Sodikoff's LLC sold the property seen here for $1.47 million in an off-market transaction, with the two-flat still standing. He then acquired a row of four parcels just one block north of this address, where he tore down more than half a dozen units of housing scattered across four single family and multifamily buildings (including a couple that had been rehabbed by previous "urban pioneer" owners). A new single family home is now being constructed on that site, penned by high end architecture firm Northworks, and another new single family home recently went up next door to it where an 1880s three-flat and its unusual three-story, two-unit coach house once stood on a double lot.
Back in the 1800 block of Fremont, where these photos were taken, the 2021 buyer of this building was a law industry family who lived nearby in a 1980s townhouse. While they're not a locally notable name like Sodikoff, a litigation finance firm led by one of the buyers made headlines a few years ago for helping fund lawsuits against public-sector unions in the wake of the Janus v. AFCSME Supreme Court decision. As expected in this part of town, they moved to demolish the old two-flat after purchasing it.
The family commissioned local firm Wheeler Kearns Architects to design a contemporary three story single family house with a basement and a roof deck, a home that's currently under construction. At the time its construction permit was first issued, the home was expected to cost $2.1 million to build (not including the cost of the property and the cost of demolishing the two-flat). Homes of similar size and cost are common in the RANCH Triangle now. As property values continue their rise into the stratosphere in this part of Lincoln Park, it's not surprising when older families from the urban pioneer era and from eras before them finally take their payday.
