A wronged Wright on Chicago's West Side could receive long-needed repairs
The Walser House — a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed residence in the Austin neighborhood — is finally in line to receive the urgent repairs the historic but dilapidated home has needed for years.
The bank holding the mortgage on the vacant 122-year-old home at 42 N. Central Ave. told Cook County Circuit Judge Lisa Ann Marino earlier this month that it would begin repairing the house to correct a raft of long-standing building code violations.
Preservationists see the move as a critical first step toward the early Wright home being saved and reused.
"[The home] is a valuable part of history, and the thought of it degrading any further and being put at risk of being torn down would be tragic," said Darnell Shields, executive director of the community group Austin Coming Together.
Shields' organization, along with the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, Landmarks Illinois, and Preservation Chicago, have been advocating for the home for the last several years.
Built in 1903 for printing executive Joseph Jacob Walser Jr., the stucco home came relatively early in Wright's career.
Its strong horizontal lines, overhanging eaves and bands of windows would later become trademarks of his larger and more celebrated Prairie School work, such as the K. C. DeRhodes House, built in South Bend, Indiana, in 1906; the Barton House, in Buffalo, New York, in 1904; and the Emil Bach House, 7415 N. Sheridan Road, from 1915.
The Walser House was built four years after Austin, once a stand-alone suburb, was annexed by the city of Chicago. It's a mile east of the village of Oak Park, home of the world's largest collection of Wright-designed houses.
John H. Waters, preservation programs director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, said the home is among Wright's first attempts to build moderately priced, well-designed residences.
"So [after Walser] you have [Wright's] American System-Built houses of the nineteen-teens and then ultimately the Usonians in the '30s, '40s and '50s," he said. "So that thread is very important.
But even with that history, the home stood in disrepair for decades. Its last owner died in 2019.
The nightmarish list of needed repairs includes rotting wood, cracked and failing exterior stucco, exposed structural elements, a deteriorating roof and chimney — and much more.
A status hearing on the repairs is scheduled for April 1. And on top of that, in a separate court, the house is in foreclosure — saddled with a reverse mortgage that exceeds the value of the home.
The Austin neighborhood group and the Wright organization hope the home ultimately can be placed in the hands of a nonprofit that can raise the millions needed to restore the house and convert it to public use.
Shields said his group wants to own the home and convert it into community spaces, meeting rooms and tourism purposes.
"Our organization is very interested in acquiring the property via donation so that we can work with the conservancy and work with the community to restore it and repurpose it," Shields said.