Arts & Entertainment
This Bridge Witnessed the Glorious ‘White City’ and Now It Leads to Nowhere: Chicago’s 7 Most Endangered Announced for 2025
Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge/Columbia Bridge in Jackson Park, a Chicago 7 Most Endangered in 2025. (Eric Allix Rogers)
Preservation Chicago has released its annual “Chicago 7 Most Endangered” list of threatened buildings and assets, and the roll call reads like a trip through Chicago history: from a bridge that witnessed the shining White City, to a clock that’s measured the rise and fall of Chicago as a manufacturing center, to a church at the heart of the Great Migration.
“The very identity of Chicago is tied to our historic buildings and the stories they tell,” said Eleanor Esser Gorski, CEO of the Chicago Architecture Center, which partners with Preservation Chicago on the list.
Launched in 2003, the Chicago 7 Most Endangered is designed to raise the alarm and mobilize support for threatened buildings.
“Despite seemingly impossible odds, the public interest generated by the Chicago 7, coupled with devoted advocacy, has resulted in a remarkable number of preservation victories over the past 20 years,” Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago, said in a statement.
Here are this year’s Chicago 7.
Post-fire gem: Delaware Building
36 W. Randolph St., the Loop
Built: 1872-74, addition in 1889
The Delaware Building, a Chicago 7 Most Endangered in 2025. (Eric Allix Rogers)
The Delaware Building rose from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871, only to become an abandoned McDonald’s location 150 years later.
The Delaware is a designated Chicago landmark and is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places, so it’s not immediately in danger of demolition. But according to Preservation Chicago, plans for reuse have been stymied by a long-term lease held by the McDonald’s Corp., which operated a restaurant on the building’s lower floors. That location closed during the pandemic, but McDonald’s is hanging onto its lease.
In placing the Delaware on its “most endangered” list, Preservation Chicago aims to jumpstart stalled efforts to adapt and reuse this property.
“Currently, the lower levels of the building are requiring maintenance and looking forlorn,” Preservation Chicago said. “Amid a deeply challenging context for downtown commercial spaces, it is vital that the lower floor space be released and made available for renewed investment.”
World’s Fair remnant: Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge/Columbia Bridge
1766 Columbia Drive, Jackson Park
Built: 1880
Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge/Columbia Bridge, a Chicago 7 Most Endangered in 2025. (Eric Allix Rogers)
How do you get from one side of Jackson Park to the other? Not very easily these days.
The Darrow Bridge — originally known as the Columbia Drive Bridge — is one of the few surviving elements of Frederick Law Olmsted’s original design for Jackson Park. It was built to allow east-west passage across the park’s lagoon, which visitors took advantage of during the famed 1893 World’s Fair, enjoying a stunning view of what is now the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry to the north.
But the bridge has been closed to pedestrians since 2013, when it was deemed unsafe for crossing — making it challenging to move around the park.
Plans to repair the bridge — which is owned and managed by the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) — have been postponed, leading to continued deterioration, according to Preservation Chicago.
The organization is calling on the city of Chicago and CDOT “to sensitively address all necessary repairs and historic rehabilitation of the Darrow/Columbia Bridge, restoring access to this significant piece of Chicago’s history and its legacy of turn-of-the century city parks.”
Frank Lloyd Wright-designed: J.J. Walser House
42 N. Central Ave., Austin
Built: 1903
The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Walser House, a Chicago 7 Most Endangered in 2025. (Eric Allix Rogers)
The Walser House was Frank Lloyd Wright’s attempt at building affordable housing, for a cost of $4,000 back in 1903. Today, the house is one of only a handful of the architect’s structures still standing in Chicago.
The home’s most recent owner died in 2019, and the house has been unoccupied and unmaintained ever since, according to Preservation Chicago.
“The entirety of the house requires immediate evaluation and repair,” Preservation Chicago said, but with the property in “legal limbo,” efforts to protect the home have been hampered.
Multiple organizations are monitoring the house and are collectively advocating for the speedy settlement of the foreclosure process so that a long-term steward can be found.
Great Migration hub: Olivet Baptist Church
3101 S. King Drive, Bronzeville
Built: 1876
Olivet Baptist Church, a Chicago 7 Most Endangered in 2025. (Serhii Chrucky / Esto)
Olivet Baptist Church is the second oldest African American church congregation in Chicago and purchased the Bronzeville building from the First Baptist Church in 1918.
During the Chicago Race Riots of 1919, the church fought to maintain peace, according to Preservation Chicago, and later served as a community center during the Great Migration, when African Americans left the South for northern cities, including Chicago.
The church’s members grew from 600 in 1903 to 10,000 in 1920, when Olivet earned the status of world’s largest African American congregation as well as the world’s largest Protestant church at the time, according to Preservation Chicago.
More recently, though, the number of parishioners has declined and parts of the building are effectively closed and in need of significant repair.
Preservation Chicago is recommending the church pursue official Chicago landmark status.
Standing watch: Central Manufacturing District Clock Tower
2000 W. Pershing Road, McKinley Park
Built: 1917
Central Manufacturing District Clock Tower, a Chicago 7 Most Endangered in 2025. (Serhii Chrucky / Esto)
The entire Central Manufacturing District — a national model for large-scale industrial parks — has made the Chicago 7 list in the past, but this year the focus in on the clock tower, which is actually a clever visual trick.
The 11-story tower clock hides a water tank.
“Like many of the buildings throughout the CMD Pershing Road Development, the Clock Tower Building remains underutilized and vacant, and has laid in this state for decades,” Preservation Chicago said. “The building is in a significant state of deterioration and only the minimum necessary stabilization and safety measures are being undertaken.”
Preservation Chicago recommends designating this building an official Chicago Landmark, either on its own or as part of a larger landmark district.
Manufacturers’ row: Western Boulevard Industrial Buildings
4200 to 4500 S. Western Blvd., Back of the Yards
Western Boulevard industrial building, a Chicago 7 Most Endangered in 2025. (Serhii Chrucky / Esto)
“The factories and warehouses throughout Chicago, these buildings included, tell the rich history of labor, industrialization and Midwestern manufacturing, a story as important to the region as it is to the nation and its growth,” Preservation Chicago said.
The conditions of these buildings vary, and some are unoccupied. Placing the group on the Chicago 7 is a proactive listing, Preservation Chicago said, and is meant to encourage interest in their continued use for industrial purposes, as well as to prompt owners to keep up with repairs and maintenance of historic features.
Majestic overlook: St. Martin’s Church
5848 S. Princeton Ave., Englewood
Built: 1895
St. Martin's Church, a Chicago 7 Most Endangered in 2025. (Eric Allix Rogers)
St. Martin’s has been through a lot, including demographic shifts and multiple changes in name and ownership.
The gothic church — one of the finest in this style in the U.S. — originally served a German American Catholic community, and later an African American Catholic congregation.
For decades, it’s been a beacon towering over the Dan Ryan, even as construction of the expressway displaced surrounding residents and cost St. Martin’s its congregants as a result. Its iconic steeple and statue, the latter lost in a windstorm, were long a landmark for pilots approaching Midway Airport.
The Archdiocese closed the church in 1989 and sold the building, which eventually reopened as the Evangelical Chicago Embassy Church.
Closed since 2017, “the church building has suffered considerable deterioration due to vacancy and neglect,” according to Preservation Chicago, and yet it “continues to dominate the built landscape of Englewood’s two-story frame homes. It has acted as a backdrop for the lives of Englewood residents for over 121 years.”
Preservation Chicago is calling for “creative reuse and occupancy to rehabilitate the structure.”
Contact Patty Wetli: [email protected]
