Landmarks Illinois Awards $25,000 to Three South Side Preservation Projects in Bronzeville, Englewood and South Shore

The short version: Landmarks Illinois announced on Oct. 13 that it has awarded $25,000 in matching grants through the Timuel D. Black, Jr. Grant Fund for Chicago's South Side to three preservation projects: $10,000 to Monumental Baptist Church in Bronzeville, $10,000 to the Englewood Real Estate Development Corporation for the historic Schlitz Tied House on 69th Street, and $5,000 to St. Thomas Lutheran Church in South Shore for its bell tower.

CHICAGO — Preservation money is rarely headline money. The checks are small, the buildings are old, and the work — engineering studies, priority repairs, a bell system — sounds like maintenance until you understand what is actually being maintained: the physical memory of Chicago's South Side, in three neighborhoods where that memory has too often been left to fend for itself.

Bronzeville: a 125-year-old anchor plans its repairs

The largest grant goes to Monumental Baptist Church in Bronzeville, which will receive $10,000 to pay for the architectural and engineering documents it needs before it can move forward with urgent repairs. The building is a 125-year-old Richardsonian Romanesque church, described in the announcement as a 'central lantern' church that has long served as a culturally significant community anchor.

The context on Landmarks Illinois' own fund page fills in why the congregation matters beyond its architecture. Monumental was formally organized in 1919 and purchased its current home at 729 East Oakwood Boulevard in 1934. The church building itself dates to 1899, was designed by Patton, Fisher & Miller, and was designated a Chicago Landmark in 2022; Landmarks Illinois describes it as one of the best surviving examples of a central-lantern church in the city and, historically, home to one of the largest and most active African American congregations in Chicago. This is also not the fund's first investment in the building — in an earlier round, Monumental received a smaller matching grant toward roof repairs, with Landmarks Illinois continuing to support the congregation's restoration efforts.

Englewood: one of the last tied houses

The second $10,000 grant goes to the Englewood Real Estate Development Corporation, for priority repairs to the historic Schlitz Tied House on 69th Street. A designated Chicago Landmark, the building is one of the last remaining tied houses in the city — the taverns breweries built and owned before Prohibition, contractually 'tied' to selling a single brewery's beer, in this case Milwaukee-based Schlitz. Nearly all of them disappeared over the last century, which is what makes the survivors worth a five-figure repair grant: each one is a working artifact of how Chicago drank, gathered and built its commercial streets before 1920.

The Englewood tied house has appeared in the fund's work before, too — an earlier round supported temporary roof repairs as the building is restored with the aim of serving again as a community gathering space. Tuesday's grant moves that project from emergency patching toward priority repairs.

South Shore: a bell tower that still wants to be heard

St. Thomas Lutheran Church in South Shore receives $5,000 to install a new electronic bell system in its historic bell tower. The stated goals are refreshingly practical: attract new members, engage the surrounding neighborhood, and help ensure the long-term preservation of the English Gothic-style building. A working bell is both a repair and an announcement — a way for a historic congregation to remain audible, literally, in the community around it.

The fund behind the checks

The grants come from the Timuel D. Black, Jr. Grant Fund for Chicago's South Side, Landmarks Illinois' program of planning and capital matching grants for people and organizations preserving the history, culture and architecture of the South Side. The fund is named for Timuel Black — civil rights leader, author and historian — who spent the majority of his life on the South Side documenting and promoting African American history. Per Tuesday's announcement, grants from the fund now range from $500 to $10,000 depending on need, are open to both nonprofit and for-profit entities, are awarded on a 3-to-1 matching basis, and are decided twice a year, with application deadlines on Jan. 1 and July 1.

Landmarks Illinois, founded in 1971, is the statewide membership-based preservation nonprofit behind the fund. Its stated mission is to accelerate the preservation and reuse of significant places across Illinois as a tool for healthy, livable, thriving communities — positioning preservation, in its framing, as practical community development rather than nostalgia.

Why $25,000 is bigger than it looks

None of these grants pays for a restoration. What they pay for is the part of preservation that quietly kills projects: the engineering study a funder requires before writing the bigger check, the priority repair that keeps water out while the campaign is organized, the small visible win that convinces a neighborhood a building has a future. On the South Side — where Bronzeville's landmarks carry the history of the Great Migration, and where Englewood and South Shore have spent decades fighting disinvestment — that first money is often the difference between a landmark that gets saved and one that gets documented before demolition.

Three buildings, three neighborhoods, one fund named for the historian who spent his life insisting this history mattered. The checks announced Tuesday are small. The argument behind them is not.