Mary Ellen Guest made sure the mission of the Chicago Bungalow Association, as much as it was about the brick-and-mortar gems central to the city’s DNA, was really about the people who lived in them.
Before she was hired as executive director in 2008, the non-profit centered on celebrating and preserving the unique architectural style of Chicago bungalows, which account for a third of the city’s single family housing stock.
“Mary Ellen transformed our mission to focus on the people who live in the bungalows,” said Gillian Wineman, deputy director of the association.
“She took the white gloves of preservation off. She made preservation practical and accessible, helping homeowners get what they needed to stay in their homes and make them safer, more comfortable, and affordable to live in,” Wineman said.
Ms. Guest died Sept. 20 from health complications following a fall. She was 71.
The association, which receives part of its funding from the city, was created by Mayor Richard M. Daley (who grew up in a bungalow) in 2000 to help preserve and maintain the city’s iconic homes. It has more than 68,000 members.
“She really had the ability to connect on an individual level with members and understand their true needs, and she always stayed true to her “meet you where you are” approach,” said Wineman, who is serving as interim executive director.
Membership, which is free, nearly quadrupled under Ms. Guest’s watch.
Ms. Guest was especially proud of focusing membership growth in underserved communities on the South and West Sides.
She attended up to 80 events a year in spaces ranging from church basements to community centers to spread the word about the many ways the non-profit could help with things like connecting homeowners to energy efficiency programs, trusted contractors and funding sources.
She also expanded the scope of the association’s mission to include older homes that were not bungalows.
“Everybody she worked with loved her, and she was tireless, she’d work all day at their office in the Monadnock Building and then be beating the drum out in the community,” said Tom Murphy, a founding board member of the association.
“For better or worse home ownership is the path to wealth building in this country and has been for a long time and Mary Ellen took pride in helping steer resources to working-class neighborhoods to preserve housing stock,” said Chris Meister, a longtime friend who serves as auditor general of the state of Illinois.
Ms. Guest also oversaw a “Stop the Pop” campaign that began in 2016 against “pop top” expansions of bungalows — so named because they “pop” off the lower roof of a bungalow and replace it with a much larger, usually squared-off, second floor.
The group believes the approach sacrifices the quintessential look of a bungalow for the sake of space.
To change minds, they offered two preferred alternatives to second floor additions that emphasize thoughtful design but cost about the same, if not less, than a full “pop.”
The campaign marked just how far appreciation for the bungalow had come. When the association was founded, bungalows were unfashionable and “thought of as your grandma’s house,” Guest told the Sun-Times in 2018.
When she took the helm, the group’s title was the “Historic Chicago Bungalow Association.” Ms. Guest lopped off the word “Historic” to emphasize its active and forward-thinking mission.
But she made sure paying homage to the history of the bungalow remained key, overseeing an expansion of National Register Bungalow Historic Districts in the city.
Ms. Guest was born Aug 3, 1955, to Ronald and Helen Guest. He was a dispatcher for a trucking company. She worked as a medical librarian for a hospital.
Ms. Guest grew up on the Southwest Side and attended the now-closed Queen of Peace High School and earned an education degree from Chicago State University.
In 1982 she got into political campaign work, starting as a volunteer and working her way up to head the campaign office for Adlai Stevenson III’s unsuccessful 1982 gubernatorial campaign.
She worked on a number of other campaigns, including Richard M. Daley’s unsuccessful mayoral run in 1983 and his first two successful mayoral campaigns in 1989 and 1991, for which she became known as the “Queen of the Phone Banks” by recruiting and organizing hundreds of volunteers to work the phones.
She later served as executive director of Working in the Schools, a Chicago non-profit that promotes literacy, and A+ Illinois, a coalition that advocated for equitable school funding reform.
“She was such a positive and wonderfully warmhearted person who served as a mentor to lots of people and really was like the glue who got people to stick together and work together on things,” said friend and political strategist Pete Giangreco, who worked in the campaign trenches with Ms. Guest.
“And she was a force,” he said. “You didn’t want to be on the other side of a righteously indignant Mary Ellen.”
Ms. Guest loved baking, her Irish heritage, attending the South Side Irish parade and her two sons whom she raised as a single mother in the Beverly area.
“The throughline for her was just a deep, deep care and love for other people and dedicating herself to doing things for others,” said her son James Schulte. “Her grandparents came here from Ireland and she carried the immigrant’s perspective of self sacrifice to advance the next generation.”
In addition to her son James, Ms. Guest is survived by her son John Schulte, as well as two grandchildren.
Services have been held.