Capturing famed Chatham cleaners is a point of pride for some artists

Chicago visual artist Brandon Breaux was in New York City this week when he heard Pride Cleaners, a Chatham architectural icon and the neighborhood dry cleaners of his youth, closed late last month.

"That makes you think, 'What is going to happen to this building?'" Breaux, 43, said. "It looks like a UFO. When they designed this building, it was an ambitious thing. The roof pitch is crazy. Everything about it is inspired."

And inspirational, for some artists.

In 2022, Breaux created a well-received and visually powerful work depicting the daringly modernist 1959 dry cleaners at 79th Street and St. Lawrence Avenue, showing its slanted roof and multicolored exterior electric sign.

The word "Dignity" rises behind the building like the sun.

"I've always been inspired by the building and the sign," Breaux said. "It tells the South Side story."

Take a quick trip through social media and you'll see a host of visual artists, photographers and others whose work showcases the building.

And no wonder. Pride Cleaners represents the kind of attention-grabbing roadside modernism that can be seen in places like Palm Springs, California, and not often in broad shouldered Chicago.

A building like that is bound to fire-up an artist's imagination.

Chicago graphic artist and illustrator Steve Shanabruch has also captured the cleaners. He even created an entire typeface based on the seven different mod letters on the Pride Cleaners' sign.

"The combination of the sign and the building" is attractive, Shanabruch said. "It's like — amazing."

Design that inspires

Breaux said he discovered the cleaners while growing up in the Chatham area. The hard-to-miss building helped him find his way around the neighborhood.

He began doing paintings of the building in 2016, when he was invited to create an exhibition of his work.

"I was struggling with these ideas of using notable landmarks and notable sculptures like The Bean," Breaux said. "But what I really relied on was my perspective of Chicago from my vantage point. And Pride Cleaners was one of the first pieces I did."

Don Hammontree, who lives in Salem, Massachusetts, but spent the 1990s in Chicago, painted Pride Cleaners in ink and bright acrylics after reading a book that featured the building.

"I’ve taken a liking to futuristic architecture over the years, particularly mid-century modern," he said. "And between the colorful signage and the general look of the place, I decided to do a painting of it."

Meanwhile, the font Shanabruch derived from the Pride Cleaners sign is a clever tribute to another design aspect of the building.

"It's pretty geometric," he said of the sign's letters. "You could pretty much guess what other letters will look like just based off of the letters that are included there. It was a fun challenge for me."

‘I hope it stays’

Built in 1959 and designed by Chicago architect Gerald Siegwart, Pride Cleaners closed on Feb. 28 after its newest owners shut down the business following just seven months of ownership.

The building's future is uncertain. But if there's any building in Chicago — any building at all — that cries out for reuse and protected landmark status, it's this one.

That includes the sign, which must be restored and remain right there in the parking lot along 79th Street.

Anything less would be an utter disservice to this historic building and the neighborhood and city in which it sits.

"I hope it stays there," Breaux said. "And it gets reused in some way that allows it to be there."