Modernist 79th Street dry cleaners featured in film "Ali" and Chance the Rapper's video set to close

Pride Cleaners is a Space Age spectacle in Chatham, with its radically tilted concrete roof and colorful freestanding Vegas-style sign beckoning customers — and devotees of modernist architecture — for nearly 70 years.

But if you've got some clothes to pick up, or just want to catch a glimpse of the Postwar graphics inside, you'd better make it quick. The shop is scheduled to close Friday.

There is no new owner on deck to take over Pride Cleaners, 558 E. 79th St., meaning there will be one less place for South Siders to get their clothes dry cleaned and tailored. And the closure also creates an uncertain future for one of Chicago's most unique modernist sites: an absolute showstopper of a building with its original sign — neither of which are under city landmark protection.

"We are on the verge of losing [an unofficial] historical landmark," Ald. William Hall (6th) said. "An economic engine, of sorts. And also on the verge of losing a part of our history."

Built in 1959, Pride Cleaners was designed by Chicago architect Gerald Siegwart. The space race and postwar modernism were shaping nearly every element of U.S. design then, from tailfins rising from the rear decks of automobiles to the shape of household furnishings and, of course, architecture.

At Pride, Siegwart designed a building with a self-supporting hyperbolic paraboloid concrete roof that created an interior free of columns. Chicago largely is a flat-topped city, but Siegwart's roof starts at ground level at two anchor points then shoots heavenward at a radical angle. The design choice gives the cleaners building a base that is almost entirely glass.

Then there's the finishing touch: a parking lot sign that features the cleaner's name on electrified, lozenge-shape letters done-up in Pop Art colors.

The building and its electric sign — winking and blinking in all its glory — can been seen in the 2001 film "Ali." Will Smith, portraying the boxer, is driving past the cleaners when passersby tell him Malcolm X has been killed. And the cleaners exterior and sign appear in Chance the Rapper's 2025 music video for the tune "Ride."

"Very few commercial neighborhood buildings in our city capture that mid-century spirit and commands one's attention like Pride Cleaners," Preservation Chicago Executive Director Ward Miller said. "The building is reminiscent of futuristic Googie architecture, often seen in cities like Los Angeles but with few surviving examples in Chicago."

Pride customer Freddie Macklin, who learned of the cleaners' closing when he visited Thursday, said, "The building is alright to me."

Pride's manager, who asked not to be named, said the new owners — out-of-towners who bought the business last year — told her two weeks ago the Chatham mainstay would be closing.

"How can you leave something like this?" she said. "Just leave it and abandon it. It broke my heart when they told me."

Here's where it gets a bit complex.

The mortgage note on the building is not held by the out-of-towners but by the structure's long-time owner Greg Ehman and his brother. The new owners bought the building from the Ehmans last July — taking over from the then-current operator — and were making mortgage payments to the brothers under an agreement.

"So he's there not — what — seven months and he decides it's not working out, and he's just closing up," Ehman said. "I mean, that cleaners has been there forever — the sign outside the building. It's literally [an unofficial] Chicago landmark on the South Side. If that building goes vacant, it's just going to be a shame. If he walks away, who knows what's going to happen with it?"

Ehman said he will try to find a new owner for Pride. It might also be a good time for the city's Department of Planning and Development to wade in and help find new owners and seek landmarks status for this very special building and sign.

Hall said he wants to see the building reused before a landmark designation is pursued.

"I'd like to see another cleaners there," he said. "You know, what good is a relic without revenue."