Chicago murals: Altgeld Gardens gives residents their flowers on curved building designed by famed architect

The latest rotating mural on the side of the 80-year-old Up Top building in Altgeld Gardens is there to bring residents their flowers while they wait for the building to be restored.

“We’re going to try to do something while it’s in its in-between stage,” says Manwah Lee, executive director of Architreasures, the non-profit group that connects artists with communities to brighten and boost neighborhoods.

The mural is along the prominent curved wall of the Altgeld Gardens Commercial Center at 13100 S. Ellis Ave, typically called the Up Top building. It’s the heart of the far South Side neighborhood and was designed by historic Chicago architecture firm Keck & Keck — brothers William and George Keck. George designed the 12-sided House of Tomorrow, now in the Indiana Dunes, for Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair.

Over the decades, the Up Top building has fallen apart. A tree grows through the roof, broken wires hang over the awning. Last year, the nonprofit By the Hand Club for Kids signed an agreement to buy the building and restore it for after-school programming and social services.

That project won’t be done for about four years. In the meantime, Lee called Chicago artist Trotter Alexander and photographer Nathan Miller and asked them to make the main wall their canvas.

The result is Miller’s framed, black-and-white photos of Altgeld Garden families in their homes, blown up and displayed around the curve of the building. Miller overlaid quotes from the families pictured, talking about what home means to them.

“When I have heart-to-heart talks with my son, that makes me feel at home,” reads one.

“Home is where peace is,” says another.

“The whole team is welcome in our house. I look out for these boys like my own,” reads one more.

Interspersed between the photos are flowers and butterflies that Alexander created and printed on Polytab — like a giant dryer sheet — and hung with an adhesive gel. Giant red tulips stand between photos, while orange butterflies launch you on a walk across the photo wall. Kids who live in the community traced and painted images of their hands, which Alexander then arranged to create multicolored blooms.

The project is one of a number of community-centered exhibits that Lee, Miller and Alexander have planned for Altgeld Gardens. The murals on the Up Top building have rotated every year since 2023. The current version was installed in 2025.

Two more murals are just outside Altgeld Gardens in the Golden Gate Park neighborhood of Riverdale. There, Alexander painted both sides of a viaduct with murals honoring the neighborhood’s strong sense of community and the Black World War II veterans who first settled there after the war. That project also was commissioned by Architreasures.

With Altgeld Gardens and the surrounding neighborhoods, “there’s this overarching narrative” of environmental justice, Miller says. The environmental activist Hazel Johnson is from Altgeld Gardens, and the neighborhood is in what many call a “toxic donut,” surrounded by an expressway, a landfill and a water treatment plant. However, “then you go into the space and you learn the nuances of everyday life.” Those moments, Miller says, are what he seeks to capture.

“Those moments that are not as sexy or trendy or kitchy, they’re just normal,” and make Miller think about how he approaches his work as an artist, he says.

For Alexander, who remembers visiting his grandfather in Altgeld Gardens, the murals are a chance “showcase what Altgeld is to the community, and what it is to the rest of the world” — a garden of flowers.