Carl Schurz High School is an architectural marvel: An absolute Prairie School beauty at Milwaukee Avenue and Addison Street that rightfully earned city landmark status and a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
Built in 1910, the building is among architect Dwight Perkins’ finest work.
Meanwhile, its architectural doppelgänger James H. Bowen High School in South Chicago, also designed by Perkins and opened the same year as its North Side counterpart, has received no such love — until now.
The Illinois National Register Advisory Council last week voted to recommend the National Park Service add Bowen, 2710 E. 89th St., to the National Register.
“It hasn’t really sunk in yet, and I’m the kind of guy who waits to feel good about stuff only when it actually happens,” said Marc Edelstein, a 1968 Bowen graduate who has spent a decade trying to win a National Register status for the school. “But this is really a stunning building.”
The Park Service’s decision could come by September.
Schurz made the National Register in 2011 and has been a protected city landmark since 1979.
Bowen isn’t a Chicago landmark. Adding salt to the wound: The city’s 1979 designation report that makes the case for landmarking Schurz omits Bowen, while listing virtually every school Perkins designed as chief architect for the school system.
Was the South Side passed over for something good again?
“I’ve devoted a lot of thought to this, and I am totally in support of [the] theory that the South and the West sides get ignored,” Edelstein said. “But … in order for something to be recognized and given landmark status of any sort, someone has to put up the fight. And it’s just quite possible that there were people at Schurz who thought that was important back in the ’70s. No one had done this for Bowen — to the best of my knowledge — except for me.”
Bowen is a wide four-story building clad in red and orange brick and terra cotta trim.
The building has grace and visual power with its prominent overhanging gabled roofs, strong vertical lines and abundance of windows that let in natural light and provide views of Bessemer Park across 89th Street.
“This Bowen/Schurz prototype was the first complete expression of the modern high school in Chicago,” the National Register nomination report said.
The document was created for the Bowen High School Alumni Association by Chicago’s Ramsey Historic Consultants. A $2,800 award in 2025 from the Landmarks Illinois’s Timuel D. Black Jr. Grant Fund for Chicago’s South Side helped pay for the consultant’s work.
Much of Bowen’s original interiors are intact, including its near-cavernous domed auditorium and the dramatically arched ceilings of the space’s balcony and stage.
“The [school’s] main entrance is lined with marble and has this vaulted ceiling that’s wonderful,” Edelstein said. “On the top floor, there is this place that’s currently used as an exercise room. It had been a study hall. … It’s got huge skylights and a phenomenal view of the city looking north.”
Bowen was built to educate the kids of South Chicago-area residents, who worked in the neighborhood’s then-vibrant steel industry.
The school’s mascot is a boilermaker — not the drink, but the person who makes and fixes the high-pressure tanks used in the steelmaking process.
“When I went to school there, the mills were operating three shifts a day,” Edelstein said. “And when you graduated, you went to college, or you went to work in the mills.”
“It was in the heart of the steel community, and Bessemer Park across the street was named after the Bessemer steel process,” Andy Davis, 1964 Bowen graduate and film director, including for the 1993 film “The Fugitive,” said of the school.
He also remembered the study hall’s skylights — and that the school wasn’t always in the best condition.
“We all felt the pigeon droppings had something to do with keeping it together,” Davis said. “Somehow [it] felt like a haunted house.”
Bowen was expanded in 1940 and 1969, which throws off the school’s symmetry a bit. But the additions’ brickwork approximates the color of the original building and were done sensitively enough as to not overpower Perkins’s design.
“It’s a great day for proud Boilermakers everywhere and the Southeast Side specifically,” Perkins devotee Shaun Fleischhacker said of the proposed National Register listing.
The retired Chicago police lieutenant became a fan of Perkins’ work while a beat cop in the 1990s. Last year, he got a stretch of Milwaukee Avenue in front of Schurz named in the architect’s honor.
“The recognition further highlights the remarkable collection of fabulous architecture in that overlooked area of Chicago,” Fleischhacker said.
Bowen needs work. The Public Building Commission of Chicago said Bowen has received no significant work since the 1990s. And none is planned.
A National Register listing would require renovations to preserve the its historic character, as outlined in the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation.
And the big school, overcrowded in the 1960s, has only about 300 students now. But Edelstein sees the school building as critical to the area’s future, particularly with the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park that’s being built nearby at 80th and Lake streets.
“This would be phenomenal architecture” to preserve, Edelstein said of Bowen. “It’s just like a rock around which things can be built.”