Work starts on the $1.2 million restoration of landmark Pullman church's troubled but iconic bell tower

The city-funded $1.2 million restoration of the crumbling bell tower of Pullman's historic 144-year-old Greenstone United Methodist Church is now set to begin after a five-year delay.

A team from Berglund Construction began surrounding the landmark church's 92-foot tower with scaffolding and swing stages this month.

The equipment will allow workers to get close enough to document, remove and restore the building's distinctive, but weathered, green serpentine stone cladding.

The project is the first substantial exterior repair the building has seen since its 1882 construction.

"I'm just so thrilled to have it kicking off," Greenstone's pastor, the Rev. Luther Mason, said. "It's been a long time."

The church, at 11211 S. St. Lawrence Ave., in the Pullman National Historical Park, was awarded a $1 million grant to restore the tower in 2021, through the Chicago Department of Planning and Development's Adopt-a-Landmark program.

Pullman Ald. Anthony Beale (9th) and Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) tabled the City Council's approval of the funds over Beale's concerns of the congregation's financial viability. But the cash was finally released last year with a $200,000 bump-up.

The work will involve the painstaking removal of all of the tower's weathered stone, down to the structure's brick substrate, architect Nicole Declet, senior associate at the engineering firm Wiss Janney Elstner, said.

Under an agreement with the city, 25% of the original serpentine will be returned to the tower. The rest will be replaced with cast stone that will be designed to resemble the original cladding, Declet said.

"If we find something that's still sound, then perhaps that can be installed near the base of the tower, [closer to public view] or on other areas of the building," she said.

The city's landmarks officials and the National Park Service will watch over the restoration process.

"Once you provide that you have a good alternative material you can replace [the original material] with, and you provide the color mock-ups and the material properties, they're usually amenable to accepting a substitute material," Declet said.

"I can't wait to see what this new stone looks like," Mason said. "People will say, 'Hey, this is what this place looked like in 1882 when we didn't have color pictures of it,' you know?"

Greenstone is the work of Solon Beman, the architect railroad car manufacturer George Pullman hired to design the entirety of what was then a factory town outside Chicago's southern border on the west banks of Lake Calumet.

Most of the buildings and employee Beman designed were built of red brick made from the clay around Lake Calumet.

But Greenstone's skin had a longer trip. The cladding came from a now-defunct quarry in Pennsylvania. It's Pullman's only green building.

"Serpentine — it's not a great material for exterior application," Declet said. "It's very porous; it's susceptible to freeze/thaw cycles."

The restoration begins just after Gov. JB Pritzker's February announcement that Pullman's 145-year-old vacant Hotel Florence, 11111 S. Forrestville Ave., its annex and a former Pullman factory building to the north will be the subject of a $100 million revitalization effort.

Declet said the tower restoration could be completed around December.

"I think this will be a good sign for the community," Ed Torrez, president of Arda, a restoration architecture firm that is working with Greenstone. "Pullman's just had so much going on — of positive progress, with the [creation of the] national park and the state is going to be doing the hotel. And now we have this."