Some time ago, a priest drove a bunch of us teenagers somewhere. As we headed down the Dan Ryan just past the turnoff for the Stevenson, he said, “Look out there at all those churches. Chicago sure is a Catholic city.” I remember looking out and seeing the many, many steeples rising to the sky above Chicago neighborhoods, as far as my eye could see.
That was in the spring of 1963. Half a century later, on November 25, 2014, President Barack Obama—speaking the Copernicus Center on the Northwest Side—made a similar comment: “Anyone who’s driven along the Kennedy has seen the silhouettes of steeples jabbing at the sky—steeples as diverse as the houses of worship that they belong to, and the immigrants that built them, and the communities who call those neighborhoods home to this day.”
Chicago, as everyone knows, is a city of neighborhoods. At their beginnings, those neighborhoods often formed around houses of worship. Because of the waves of European immigrants at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the vast number of those houses of worship were Catholic churches.
In recent decades, the archdiocese of Chicago has closed and consolidated some of those parishes. A number of churches now house the congregations of other faiths. Others have been put to secular use. Many have been demolished.
All of which helps to make Harrison Fillmore’s book of drawings Chicago Catholic Churches: A Sketchbook not just interesting, fun and informative, but also somewhat poignant.
Fillmore is the pseudonym of Charles “Greg” Daly, a retired Chicago police homicide lieutenant who has been sketching and selling his art since his years at Lane Technical High School. Find his website here.
In an interview, Daly said he started sketching churches after witnessing the demolition of St. Salomea in the Southeast Side neighborhood of Hegewisch. “We were on stakeout, and I saw the wrecking ball taking it down and thought, ‘This is tragic.’ ” And I took a couple pictures.”
This was in the 1990s, and initially Daly worked to make sketches of churches scheduled to be razed. Then, he branched out, aiming to get every Catholic church in city. It wasn’t until he neared the end of his project that he realized the sketches would make an interesting book.
The process, he says, was “a simple one, yet labor intensive.” He would take photographs of the building or find images in the archdiocesan archives or elsewhere. Using the photos as a guide, he would outline a church in pencil and draw it freehand in pen-and-ink. “Some of the more ornate churches would take hours, even days. The results are realistic illustrations intended to spark one’s own memories of their respective churches.”
Landmarks along Busy Streets
In fact, Daly’s sketches of 299 church buildings are likely to spark the memories of even non-Catholic Chicagoans. If you live or work in the city, you’ve seen some or maybe many of these churches, probably on a daily basis. You know some or many, even if you don’t know their names.
If you live or work in the city, you’ve seen some or maybe many of these churches, probably on a daily basis. You know some or many, even if you don’t know their names.
Anywhere you drive or walk, anywhere you ride on a bus or an el train, these churches are part of the cityscape—landmarks along busy streets and major presences on side streets. Away from the Loop and the lakefront, a Catholic church is often the tallest structure in a community. That’s true, too, in the suburbs although Chicago Catholic Churches doesn’t include any from outside of the city borders.
Church buildings, of course, don’t hold a monopoly on God, as Daly notes by including a quote from Chicago priest and bestselling novelist Andrew Greeley: “In Chicago our God lurks everywhere. In the elevated train’s husky roar. Beside the blinking lights of intensive care. In the clamor of the soybean trading floor, with those who suffer poverty and fright. In the humid mists of the summer by the lake.”
Rev. Thomas Nangle, the former Chicago police chaplain, echoes that in his short introduction to the book, but also adds that a church holds the “intimacies and connections” of a parish family of faith:
“Along with the decades-old essences of incense and beeswax smoke, varnish, flowers, stone and wood, it holds the tears and smiles of worry and relief, desperation and trust, weddings and funerals, sin and virtue, despair and hope, abandonment and gratitude, isolation and love, birth and death and every fire-and-ice moment in between.”
In the bottom right corner of the cover of Daly’s book is St. Clement Church in the Lincoln Park neighborhood where, in the early 1980s, Nangle was a parish priest. I knew him there because I attended St. Clement for much of my twenties. St. Clement is where I met the woman who became my wife. It’s where we were married, and it’s where our first child was baptized.
Drawings That Evoke Memories
Daly’s drawing of the church on page 157 is a key element of my personal reaction to the book. As is the drawing on page 129 of St. Thomas Aquinas Church—the church in the Far West Side neighborhood of Austin where I was baptized (and where my 13 younger siblings were baptized) and where I served as an altar boy and where, on Sunday mornings, I would sit outside with my Great-Uncle Eddie and my brother David to sell newspapers. It’s amazing the memories that Daly’s drawing evokes in me.
Yet another key sketch for me is St. Gertrude Church on page 165. This is the parish where my wife Cathy and I settled in 1984, and where we raised our two kids and where we still attend Mass.
"It was only a building, yes. But it held so many memories of birth and death and everything in between for me and my family."
Beyond these three, there are dozens of other churches in Daly’s book that have touched my life in some way. Such as Our Lady of Guadalupe in the South Chicago community where I worked one spring when I was trying to decide if I wanted to be a priest. (I decided I didn’t.) And Saint Sabina in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, an African-American parish where I once attended a four-hour Sunday Mass and enjoyed every minute. And St. Mary of the Woods on the Far Northwest Side where I watched my grandniece Maeve celebrate her First Communion.
With each drawing, Daly includes two or three sentences about the parish’s history. For instance, St. Thomas Aquinas was built in 1923. In 1989, it was renamed for a Black saint, Martin de Porres, reflecting the new racial makeup of the parish.
St. Martin de Porres was a consolidation of three parishes: St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Mel and Resurrection. St. Mel is now the New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church. Resurrection on Jackson Boulevard, just a few blocks south of St. Thomas Aquinas, was razed in 1988.
At this distance in time, I can’t be sure, but my recollection is that the Chicago Park District purchased the Resurrection church. I remember hearing that and wondering if people were playing basketball in area where the pews used to be.
Resurrection was Nangle’s childhood parish, and he mentions in his introduction that he was driving past where the church had been when he realized it was missing, now just an empty lot.
“I felt a bit unmoored and mildly betrayed, sad and nostalgic, angry and wondering, all jumbled together. It was only a building, yes. But it held so many memories of birth and death and everything in between for me and my family. The big old gray place had a soul.”
Daly’s drawing of Resurrection is on page 128.
Chicago Catholic Churches: A Sketchbook is available at bookstores and through the Arcadia Publishing website.