Buy Tickets $20 General Public || $15 for Members

Architects Adler & Sullivan designed notable buildings across Chicago and the Midwest, but it’s their skyscrapers in downtown Chicago that have received the most attention. Lesser known is Adler & Sullivan’s work on Chicago’s south and west sides—including churches, synagogues, warehouses, offices, and houses. These buildings—and the neighborhoods where they were built—are the focus of tonight’s program. Economist Amber Hendley, artist Tonika Johnson, and preservationist Bonnie McDonald will examine the architecture and social fabric of south and west side Chicago neighborhoods at the turn of the 20^th century.

These were neighborhoods that were fundamentally altered by racist and mid-century contract buying and redlining — the discriminatory housing practices that saw so many families displaced and buildings torn down. How do Adler & Sullivan’s demolished buildings figure into the fraught history of segregation and housing in Chicago and how we can embrace historic preservation as a tool to maintain cultural memory, support families, and ensure neighborhood vitality?

Program ticket does not include same-day museum admission.

About the Speakers:

Amber S. Hendley is a passionate researcher, educator, and activist. In June 2021, she co-authored Public Housing Authority Homeownership Programs: Scaling Up a Powerful Yet Underutilized Tool to Restore Wealth Building Opportunities, a report that focuses on the opportunities, barriers, and impacts of public housing authority homeownership programs as they relate to Black voucher holders. In May 2019, The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts, a publication she co-authored that quantified the amount legally and unjustly extracted from the Black community in Chicago through predatory residential contract selling during the Second Great Migration, was released at a Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago symposium.

Tonika Johnson is a photographer, social justice artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood. Her work, including that through her Folded Map Project™ and her new Inequity for Sale project, reveals injustices and inequities in real estate and land use practices, including historic preservation, and encourages us to reevaluate and create positive change.

Bonnie McDonald aspires to shape preservation into a more relevant and just practice. As President and CEO of Landmarks Illinois, Bonnie advances the vision, mission and programs of Illinois’ only statewide preservation nonprofit organization. Her transformative thinking about preservation has led Landmarks Illinois to focus its work on people and their important connection to historic places. She’s currently spearheading the organization’s evolution to enhance its relevance to more people and to create a national model for justice, equity, inclusion and diversity in preservation practice. From 2018-2021, Bonnie served as board chair of the National Preservation Partners Network, the national nonprofit representing preservation organizations, and she is proud to have been awarded the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship in 2020 to complete her work on The Relevancy Project. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot appointed Bonnie co-chair of the Chicago Monuments Project in 2020 to help lead a truth and racial reckoning process in the city around problematic artworks.

Image credit: Richard Nickel Archive, Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

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Tags: Amber S. Hendley, Bonnie McDonald, Chicago, Illinois, Near North Side, The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Tonika Johnson, What Use Are Old Buildings? Historic Preservation in 2022