The smell of smoke was heavy on the air for miles around on the morning of October 7, 2015. Neighbors awoke to the news that the Shrine of Christ the King, 6401 S. Woodlawn Ave., had suffered a devastating fire – the second in the history of the building. When the hoses were packed up, the walls were still standing, but this pillar of the Woodlawn community faced an uncertain future. Members and neighbors are now fighting for its future. Learn why the building is worth saving, and what you can do to help.

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Around the turn of the last century, it became a trend among wealthy industrialists to provide planned housing for workers – an effort to Americanize and “civilize” new immigrants and maintain tight control over the labor force. George Pullman famously pioneered the approach in the South Side neighborhood that bears his name today. Experimental cast-in-place concrete houses were built for steel mill workers in Gary, Indiana. And in nearby East Chicago, Clayton Mark sought to create an idyllic and uplifting village for his own mill workers – at least, as idyllic and uplifting a village as can exist surrounded on all sides by heavy industrial plant. That place is now known as Marktown, a verdant postage stamp of a neighborhood just south of the intersection of 129th Street and Dickey Road, and its future is very much in question.

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St. Laurence, at the western edge of South Shore, has stood as a landmark in the community since 1911. When it was built, more than a decade before the real estate boom that saw South Shore become a truly urban neighborhood, it served the small railroad suburb known as Parkside.

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