A $23.3 million effort to turn an architecturally significant 81-year-old former Altgeld Gardens commercial building into an after-school center has been approved by the Chicago Plan Commission.
The panel last week approved the By The Hand Club For Kids’ project to convert and expand the dilapidated one-story modernist building at 13100 S. Ellis Ave. into a facility with classrooms, a gymnasium and meeting space.
The development represents quite a potential turnaround for one of the city’s less recognized but historically important buildings.
Designed by noted modernist architects Keck & Keck — and nicknamed the “Up Top” building by Altgeld residents — the distinctive fan-shaped brick structure with an overhanging curved roof was built in 1945 as stores, offices and services for the then-new Far South Side public housing development.
The building became the birthplace of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s when the late Altgeld resident Hazel Johnson’s People for Community Recovery set up shop there.
The Up Top was granted preliminary city landmark status earlier this month.
“We just think that there’s so much great history in the building, and we know it’s something the community wanted us to do,” By The Hand Club For Kids Chief of Partnerships and Development Andraya Yousfi said. “Lots of incredible history in the building that’s really meaningful for the community.”
By The Hand Club has been active at Altgeld for 25 years. The housing development’s Local Advisory Council President Bernadette Williams was instrumental in getting the organization to reuse the building.
“With them preserving it, it’s going to be a new amenity [that helps with the] beautification of Altgeld Gardens,” Williams said. “It’s an eyesore right now.”
The renovation would convert the long-vacant building into a K-12 after-school center with computer labs, nine classrooms, a kitchen, offices and a multipurpose room.
“The expansion — it would help our teenagers, especially the ones who find their way into getting into violence,” Williams said. “It would help pull them off the streets to help them become better role models to the next generation. The children need help.”
Also under the renovation by the firm Present Future Architects, the building will gain a brick addition that will have a full-size basketball court.
And a breezeway that contains a memorial with the names of Altgeld residents handwritten on a yellow brick wall will be preserved. The city’s landmarks designation report said the wall dates back to the 1960s.
Renderings depict the renovated space as a bright new enclosed lobby that prominently features the memorial wall.
“They’re going to encase those names,” Williams said.
The Up Top was designed by architects George Frederick Keck and his brother William. It’s a straight-up modernist structure — more apparent in early photos — quite in contrast to the more traditional-looking Altgeld homes and buildings designed by Naess & Murphy.
George Keck gained fame by designing the House of Tomorrow, a futuristic 12-sided glass for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. The home, relocated to Beverly Shores, Indiana, after the fair, is currently under restoration.
At Altgeld, the Kecks designed “a high-quality, cost effective and energy efficient commercial building,” the city’s designation report said.
Storefronts with large shop windows faces south to take advantage of natural sunlight and the warm rays of the low winter sun.
The renovations would bring back the big windows, giving the building a transparency and a visual weightlessness that hasn’t been seen there in at least a generation.
The landmarks commission’s preliminary designation — which protects the building from demolition and unsympathetic alterations — is supported by the By The Hand Club, Yousfi said.
And the distinction is good until a permanent designation is granted by the City Council.
The designation honors the building for its architecture and architects but also for its connection to the groundbreaking environmental activism of Johnson and the People for Community Recovery.
Johnson and the organization were nationally recognized for exposing how industries in the Calumet region emitted toxins that were harming the predominantly minority areas that surrounded them.
Yousfi said she hoped the renovations could begin by January of next year.
The completed building would join its next-door neighbor, architect Jackie Koo’s Altgeld Family Resource Center, 955 E. 131st St. — built in 2021 with a Chicago Public Library and a childcare center — in serving the historically underserved community.
Then there’s the CTA Red Line extension, which is scheduled to be completed in 2030 with a station terminal at Altgeld.
“It’s just an exciting time for the neighborhood,” Yousfi said.