Rev. George Lane’s legacy teaches the importance of preserving Chicago’s houses of worship

Long before landmark Pilgrim Baptist Church burned down, and decades prior to the recent mass closings of the city’s Catholic church parishes, the Rev. George Lane encouraged people to recognize the architectural importance of Chicago’s houses of worship.

And the Jesuit priest did more than talk.

Lane wrote the informative and respected book, Chicago Churches and Synagogues: An Architectural Pilgrimage in 1981, which documented 125 houses of worship in virtually every corner of the city.

Then, a decade later, he courageously bucked his bosses at the Archdiocese of Chicago and helped lead the fight to save and restore Holy Family, 1080 W. Roosevelt Rd. — the city’s second-oldest church, built in 1857.

Lane, the unofficial patron saint of Chicago’s ecclesiastical architecture, died last month at 89. A memorial mass was said for him last Sunday at Holy Family.

Church home to the O’Learys and the Comiskeys

The neo-Gothic brick and limestone Holy Family church was pretty far gone by the late 1980s. Much of the building had been closed off in 1984 due to its deteriorating condition. By 1987, it was set for demolition.

But Lane saw the church’s architectural and historic value, how the structure — designed by top Chicago architect John Mills Van Osdel — was built for the rapidly growing Irish immigrant population, but also later served the city’s Black and Mexican American populations.

The O’Learys of the Great Chicago Fire fame attended there during the church’s early years. So did the Comiskeys.

The only way to save the building was to find $1 million to fix it. Lane and the Holy Family Preservation Society raised $700,000 by the fall of 1990, but needed $300,000 more by the end of the year.

Lane and the society took their appeal national, and wound up on various media outlets including CNN and the New York Times. They also held a five-day prayer vigil on the steps of the battered edifice — and also inside the church on the vigil’s final day.

It worked. On New Year’s Day 1991, Lane announced the group had the $1 million in hand, and restoration work that took a decade to complete began.

A ‘dedicated advocate’

Landmarks Illinois honored Lane with the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Preservation Award in 2009, rightfully calling the priest “one of the most dedicated advocates for church architecture and preservation in Chicago.”

And his work at Holy Family provides a much-needed blueprint for preserving important church architecture today.

First off, he and the Holy Family Preservation Society worked overtime to draw public attention to the church’s condition at the time, then made it clear what would happen to the building — and what would be lost both historically and architecturally if structure were to be wrecked.

As a result, their call to save Holy Family went viral 30 years before viral was a ‘thing.’

These are all important steps in fighting against the forces of age, fire and neglect that continue to claim so many of the city’s fine old houses of worship.

Preservation in Chicago can be a tough, and occasional heart-breaking business. The city has a terrible habit of embarrassing its fine architecture in order to hold it still long enough for bulldozers to arrive.

But thankfully, there was Lane and others like him who sound the alarm and ride to the rescue whenever a good building is either unrecognized or under threat.

And Chicago is better off as a result.

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