Wrightwood 659, one of Chicago’s most influential boutique museums, faces a challenge in court over its planned 10,000-square-foot expansion on a residential Lincoln Park street.
The lawsuit, filed March 26 by Lisa Berron, a managing partner in a venture-capital fund, raises larger questions about neighborhood museums and what they can and can’t do in residential areas. And it puts back in the spotlight the dealings of founder Fred Eychaner, a newspaper magnate and Democratic megadonor who owns all the properties along West Wrightwood Avenue from 653 through 673, except for 655, and another lot behind the museum on Deming Place.
Because the project meets zoning requirements and has a valid initial building permit, the lawsuit focuses more on process. Berron alleges negligence and malfeasance in terms of how she was informed of the project, how alterations were made to her building and how Wrightwood entities bought the two other units in her building and infiltrated her condo association.
“I’m stuck in this quagmire. I’m spending all this money just to assert my property rights,” said Berron, 50, who contends that she is already out six figures in attorney’s fees and has had to dip into her savings to cover the costs.
Berron said she bought a third-floor condominium at 675 W. Wrightwood 22 years ago and planned to live there into old age. Now she wonders if she can stay in part because of the blocked views from the new construction that will be three feet or so from her residence.
“This is my forever home,” she said, choking up several times as the sounds of a crane driving steel piles into the ground shook her walls and reverberated outside.
Attorneys for Eychaner, who lives next door to the museum, said they are trying to expand a philanthropic museum, one that has opened ambitious exhibitions such as “The First Homosexuals.”
“We’re not the bad guy here,” said Louis D. Bernstein, one of two attorneys representing Eychaner’s company Newsweb, Wrightwood No. 3 LLC and the construction company Norcon, all named defendants.
“We’re building a philanthropic museum. No one wants to hurt Ms. Berron at all,” Bernstein said. “She can live there if she wants, and we offered to buy her at twice the value of her unit.”
In 2016, the Alphawood Foundation, which was founded by Eychaner, created the Alphawood Gallery. The inaugural exhibition was “Art AIDS America Chicago,” which looked at how artists responded to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The gallery moved to 659 W. Wrightwood in 2018, into a conversion of a four-story, 1929-30 apartment building designed by celebrated Japanese architect Tadao Ando, and took the address as its current name. The boutique museum specializes in Asian and socially engaged art and architecture, particularly work dealing with LGBTQ+ issues.
Starting in early March, the museum began construction on a three-story, 10,000 square-foot satellite structure at 673 W. Wrightwood, on the site of two former 19th-century residences. In between the current museum and this expansion sits Eychaner’s home – the latter buildings also designed by Ando.
Details about the new structure remain sketchy, including the timeline and how it will be used. “There are, at this moment, no finalized building plans,” said Chirag Badlani, executive director of the Alphawood Foundation. “There is no building permit filed. The only thing we have done so far is file the foundation permit and that particular work has been going on on the site. But the building design itself is sort of an on-going, iterative process.”
Mariah Keller, executive director of Wrightwood 659, said the institution has ideas of how the new structure will be used but no firm plans. “We see it as a parallel structure.” she said, “that will be programmed similarly to 659 – probably – but will allow for long-term installations, things like that, that we generally are not able to do in 659.”
Beyond the legal matters in this lawsuit, this dispute points to broader issues surrounding the suitability of museums to residential neighborhoods.
Perhaps the most infamous clash between residents and a neighborhood museum took place in the 1990s in conjunction with the Barnes Foundation, a celebrated repository of a world-class collection of 20th-century art in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion. It led to the township imposing tight restrictions on the number of visitors, and those limits were one of the factors in the museum’s controversial decision to decamp to downtown Philadelphia in 2012.
In December 2020, former South Side Ald. Sophia King proposed a Chicago ordinance that would restrict the conversion of residences into cultural institutions, but it was opposed by artists, preservationists and other community leaders and did not pass.
In a statement released at the time, King said she was not trying to “stop, inhibit or deter” such projects, but she believed it was important that neighborhoods where projects were proposed should have a say in their development and there should be some controls.
It is unclear how such an ordinance might have affected Wrightwood 659, which is housed in a converted residential building. Its attorneys say that the museum has received no complaints from neighborhood residents about the expansion, except for Berron.
And at least so far, the Park West Neighborhood Association has voiced no concerns about Wrightwood’s expansion or its acquisitions of properties in the neighborhood.
Jared Dittman, a resident who was suggested as a contact by Wrightwood representatives, voiced strong approval for the museum and its mission. “I always viewed it as a really big positive,” he said. “It’s been good for the neighborhood.”
He and his family lived within a block or so of the museum for nine years, and now reside less than a half mile away. In 2021, they moved into a condo at 675 W. Wrightwood, and sold the unit to Eychaner entities last summer after learning of the impending construction. Dittman described the transaction as “fair and honest.”
Berron also saw the original museum as a plus for the neighborhood, but now she is concerned about Eychaner and his acquisition of properties. She worries that her building will ultimately be torn down.
But Matt Klepper, the other attorney representing the associated Wrightwood entities, denies that claim. “If we were to buy Ms. Berron’s unit,” he said, “we would simply own all three units in a condo building that would remain a condo building.”
Bernstein said his side has offered her $2 million. She now says she would settle for $2.7 million, enough to cover some of attorney fees and money she put in to renovate her unit starting in 2017.
Berron and her attorneys filed emergency motions eight and six weeks ago for temporary restraining orders because of safety concerns surrounding the construction project, and Cook County Judge Joel Chupack denied both in a four-page order issued in late May.
However the dispute turns out, Berron does not believe there will be any true victory for her. “There’s no good outcome in any of this,” she said. “There’s no winning. I’m not winning anything. All I’m doing is standing up for myself.”