The busy intersection of 79th Street, Stony Island and South Chicago avenues — where the Chicago Skyway ramps lash overhead and the suited-and-booted Nation of Islam brothers sell the Final Call newspaper — holds one of Chicago’s most unusual architectural finds.
It’s the Rev. John L. Conner Fellowship Hall, a Moorish Revival dream rendered in polychromatic brick and terra cotta at 7901 S. Stony Island Ave. There is even an honest-to-goodness ornamental minaret poking above the building’s Spanish tile roof.
Built in 1928 as a high-toned restaurant called Raphael’s, the building — owned by nearby Haven of Rest Missionary Baptist Church, 7925 S. South Chicago Ave., since 1964 — has been a traffic stopper and curiosity at the intersection for nearly a century.
“It was the place to be,” Haven of Rest Church Clerk Annette Dewberry said.
The building has indeed seen better days. While the exterior still looks relatively good at nearly 100 years old, long-deferred maintenance and Father Time have wreaked havoc on its once glorious interior. So much so, that the building is unusable.
But the congregation wants to get the old hall rehabbed, restored and reopened by 2028. They’re looking to raise $5 million toward the effort.
Church officials last month gave a presentation on the building’s architecture, history and their plans for its future before the program committee of the city’s Commission on Chicago Landmarks, a first step in seeking a designation for the structure.
The congregation is also seeking a $10,000 grant from the preservation organization Landmarks Illinois to stop the building’s sieve-like roof from leaking, while planning the next steps of the renovation.
“It was designed to be something useful in the community,” Dewberry, a leader of the church’s restoration committee, said of their bid to get the building back on its feet. “I think that is the major reason for it to be landmarked.”
Architecture as escapism
You could get lost in the architectural details of the two-story building’s main entrance alone.
A filigreed burst of gold and blue terra cotta arcs like a rainbow over the main entrance. A vivid eight-point star medallion, similar to the Khatim motif found on classic Islamic architecture, sits above the double-door entry.
And that’s just for starters. The building is bathed in ancient Middle Eastern architectural flourishes.
The structure was designed by Frederick Stanton, an architect whose surviving Chicago commissions include a 1920s multi-unit apartment building at 4824 N. Damen Ave., and the Plaisance Apartments at 6104 S. Woodlawn Ave.
His Raphael’s was architecture as escapism: A 450-seat restaurant and tea garden designed to make a night out on the town feel like a trip to a far flung Middle East or Far Eastern land.
“This is not a building in Teheran, Persia, but it is a restaurant which is being erected on … our own South Side,” a Chicago publication wrote in 1928.
The building’s dining room mimicked an exterior courtyard, surrounded by second floor windows and halls with views of the space.
Some movie palaces of the time — called “atmospheric theaters” — were designed this way too, giving patrons the sense they were sitting in an open court in an exotic foreign locale watching a film.
The Music Box Theater, 3733 N. Southport Ave., is one example. So is Raphael’s neighbor and architectural cousin, the closed 2,200-seat Avalon Regal Theater, a Moorish Revival venue at 1641 E. 79th St., built in 1927 and designed by John Eberson.
As a restaurant, Raphael’s offered dinner, dancing and an 11-member live orchestra called Raphael’s Persians, led by bandleader Herb Zeller.
The Presto-Times, a Chicago music trade journal, wrote in 1929 that Raphael’s “is so constructed that the acoustics are splendid, giving a resonance that is indeed very pleasing to the ear.”
Raphael’s closed around the end of World War II and was later converted into the American Legion South Shore Post 388.
The Haven of Rest congregation bought the building in 1966 and held services there until their current church was built in 1977.
A ‘place of gathering’ — again
It’s remarkable that the building was able to retain its original essential functions as a place for folks to sit down, meet and eat — for almost a century under three different owners.
I toured the hall in 2017 to take scouting shots for my book, “Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side,” and the building was in good enough shape to host an event that occurred during my visit — while serving up some good-smelling food from the ovens in the hall’s commercial kitchen.
But no more. At least, not now.
Dewberry said the congregation applied for the Landmark Illinois’ $10,000 Timuel Black Jr. Grant Fund for the South Side last summer. The organization said it would review the application in about two weeks.
“I quite honestly wasn’t familiar with the building when [Dewberry] first reached out to us,” Landmarks Illinois Director of Reinvestment Suzanne Germann said. “When I saw it, it was like, ‘Oh!’ My heart just beat — oh, my God, I fell in love.”
Germann said the organization sent out a pro bono professional consultant to examine the building and create a conditions assessment report that details the hall’s problems. “And then they have that [report] in hand to go seeking further additional funds from other sources as well,” she said.
Haven of Rest restoration committee member Jessica Smith said the rehabbed building could host a range of community-centered uses, including, of course, a food pantry and a banquet hall.
“Just to be that place of gathering,” she said. “Which is what it always has been.”