Though the old Cook County Hospital building sits empty, surrounded by a chain-link fence, preservation groups are working to ensure it won't stay that way for much longer.
“Whenever you lose something of that historical importance, you’re losing a part of your history,” says Jonathan Fine, executive director of Preservation Chicago.
“Here you had this magnificent architecture for the poorest of the poor, so that tells you about the mindset for social services at a time when Jane Addams was still living.”
Cook County commissioners are considering renovating County Hospital, vacant since 2002, and turning the hulking structure into office space for the county health system’s administration. But the price tag - $107 million – has leaders of the county’s health system providing lukewarm support for the plan.
The health system administrative offices are currently housed in a building tagged for demolition.
In December, health board members agreed to move into any building the county could provide, but expressed reservations about using County Hospital.
“We are saving something that the architectural community thinks is worth saving. I don’t think it has anything to do with the Cook County Health and Hospitals System, and I think we are just wasting $24 million to preserve” it, said Commissioner Jerry Butler at the health board’s December meeting.
Still, preservationists like Fine are cautiously optimistic county commissioners will approve the rehab plan next month. The County Board’s construction committee will debate the issue March 2.
“It just seemed like such a no-brainer to us that this was the logical reuse,” Fine says. “Nobody ever proposed reusing it for medical purposes.”
A study commissioned by the county found converting the building to office space made the most sense.
And reusing historic hospitals to house modern facilities has proven to be popular in recent years. In 1999, online retailer Amazon.com moved into a rehabbed hospital built in the 1930s in Seattle. Adidas moved its headquarters into an old Portland hospital built in the 1960s. The Veterans Administration moved its offices into a Beaux Arts-style hospital in Tennessee, built in 1905.
“If Amazon.com, which is hardly a fuddy-duddy organization, is willing to move into an old hospital building … why would somebody else have problems with it?” asks James Peters, executive director of Landmarks Illinois. “It’s just misperceptions about what you can get out of an old building.”
County Hospital was designed in the classic Beaux Arts style by Paul Gerhardt and Richard Schmidt, the same architects responsible for City Hall. Peters says it’s part of an architectural renaissance that defined the city’s architecture in the 20th Century. He points to the Field Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Union Station and the demolished Chicago Stadium as other examples of the style.
“That was the style during that period for great examples of public buildings, buildings that were supposed to stand the test of time,” Peters says. They were built “to make a statement: Here is something that’s supposed to last for the ages.”
But it’s unlikely the hospital would be torn down. It survived one motion to raze it in 2003, and the cost of bringing it down today would be about $3 million. It would cost $85 million to construct a new building.
While the renovation is estimated to cost about $20 million more than that, Peters says a rehab would take a year less than new construction.
And, others argue, you can’t put a price tag on history.
“Sometimes buildings are more than just an icon for how they appear on the outside,” says Joe Antunovich, an architect and a member of the Landmarks Illinois board. “It’s what the building meant for the culture, what it meant to the citizens...
"These great old hospitals at our urban core, they stayed there through the test of time, and they deserve that place in our culture."
Windy Citizen 