From the outside, the old Victorian three-flat at 3241 S. Indiana seems ready for the wrecker’s ball.
“After a while it’s no longer progress to tear down old buildings. It becomes desecration,” says Rivers. “This building is faced with Joliet limestone, which is rare–they stopped using this kind of limestone in the early 1880s. There’s so much history in these buildings. There are names and voices and people from the past. We should be learning from the past, not destroying it.”
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None of them knew much about the building, except that it was probably built sometime in the early 1870s, just after the great Chicago fire. Over the years it had decayed, as had the surrounding neighborhood. By the 1960s it had been converted into a rooming house. A separate entrance for the top floor was added, and the basement and top two floors had been subdivided into several apartments.
“This was a work of love,” says Rivers. “We stripped layers of wallpaper from the walls. In some places, we stripped paint that was a quarter-inch thick. I painted the ceiling the color of sky, which reminded me of the sky in central Illinois where I grew up.”
“The old landlords had said they would never sell, but basically they were offered more money than they could turn down,” says Rivers. “When they sold, that was the beginning of the end.”
She went through old records in City Hall and discovered that the house had originally belonged to a Mrs. Amanda Cook, widow of Charles W. Cook, a prominent banker and financier of his time. Amanda Cook bought the plot of land on which the house stands from a developer named James Sinclair, who built the house according to her specifications.
A few years ago the city designated a portion of the Gap as a historical landmark district. That means any construction or demolition there has to be approved by the landmarks commission. Unfortunately for Rivers, her section of South Indiana falls just outside the district’s boundaries.
