The final act of Chicago’s Damen Silos, star of movies, hip-hop videos and architectural photography

When the amateur architectural photographer Deborah Mercer learned that the Damen Silos would soon be demolished, she decided to go capture them while she still could.

“Went to pay my respects to the Damen Silos, soon to be demolished due to the owner’s lack of imagination,” Mercer wrote on BlueSky, a social media platform where she frequently posts her photos of historic Chicago buildings.

For some in the city’s cultural community, the demolition of the historic grain silos represents a visual gut-punch. The structures — icons of urban decay as they sat empty for nearly five decades — have been a popular backdrop for filmmakers, musicians and skyline photographers and served as a canvas for many graffiti artists who ignored the “No Trespassing” signs. The silos even appeared in the 2014 movie Transformers: Age of Extinction.

As demolition crews started work last week, the concrete surfaces were adorned with faces and stylized signatures, including “SERK,” a moniker often seen on Chicago walls.

The silos had a starring role on screens as recently as last fall, when the local group Blue Collar Rock Stars posted a music video they’d filmed at the site. “Sneaking into an abandoned industrial ruin on my day off, to shoot a guerilla-style Hip Hop video with my friends? That’s how I feel alive,” the video’s director, Rob Walker, wrote on YouTube.

Other people are less sentimental about these derelict grain elevators, which have stood vacant since 1977 on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal’s south bank just east of Damen Avenue. “It’s been sitting there like an eyesore,” said Hai Lam, an Oak Park artist who was visiting the nearby Canalport Riverwalk Park on Thursday morning.

Whether you think of them as eyesores or historically significant structures, the Damen Silos will soon vanish from the Southwest Side’s skyline. By the end of last week, a squat building along Damen Avenue had been reduced to rubble. Heneghan Wrecking’s crews were working next to the tall silos, where the noise of a jackhammer rang out. Workers sprayed water to prevent clouds of dust from filling the air.

“We are extremely disappointed about the demolition,” said Kate Eakin, managing director of the McKinley Park Development Council. “It represents a gross lack of imagination about what the site could be, as well as failures of government at several levels to communicate with each other.” Eakin’s local neighborhood group hoped to see the site transformed into a music venue and park that could host festivals. Other grain silos have been repurposed in similar ways: An art museum fills a former silo in South Africa, while Minneapolis left a silo standing in the middle of a popular tourism district.

“This could have been a festival ground for so many of these concerts that absorb our neighborhood parks for weeks on end during the summer,” said Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago, a group that pushed for the concept.

But Michael Tadin Jr., whose MAT Limited Partnership bought the 23-acre property for $6.5 million when the state of Illinois put it up for auction in 2022, is moving ahead with the demolition. Tadin, whose family is in the construction and asphalt business, told the Chicago Sun-Times last week that he was still considering options for the site’s redevelopment. However, the cost of preserving the historical structures, he said, wasn’t practical.

Miller said Preservation Chicago teamed up with a land trust, the Chicago Park District and developer Blue Star Properties, which had separately bid for the site, to try purchasing the site from Tadin, but they failed to reach a deal.

“That could have been an amazing transformational project for the McKinley Park community, probably equivalent to what Millennium Park did for downtown Chicago,” Miller said.

“The Damen Silos are among the last remaining reminders of the agricultural trade that literally built the city,” said Tom Leslie, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Losing the Damen Silos means yet another lost opportunity to celebrate the city’s history as the center of agricultural trade.”

Beyond the controversy over whether to preserve the buildings, neighbors have worried about the pollution that could result from destroying them, fearing a repeat of the 2020 smokestack demolition that left Little Village covered in dust. City officials said they’ve taken steps to prevent such problems this time. “The demolition of this entire site will be mechanical demolition; NO explosives will be used,” a joint FAQ document from the Department of Buildings and the Chicago Department of Public Health reads. It includes contact information that people can use to report concerns.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also involved, working to protect the nearby waterways. Tadin signed an agreement with the Army Corps and Illinois Historic Preservation officials to install a publicly accessible riverwalk on the site, along with historic markers memorializing the silos which will incorporate salvaged materials from the structures.

“While those conditions are not enough, each of them started with neighbors,” said Eakin of the McKinley Park Development Council. “So, we have had an impact.”

Mercer, the architectural photographer, quoted Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” to explain why she believed these abandoned old grain elevators should be saved.

“If we are going to remember the Chicago that Sandburg describes in his poem, the Chicago of the past that led to the Chicago of today, we must save some of these industrial buildings,” she said.

“As far as the Damen Silos go, they represent the ‘stacker of wheat, player with railroads, and nation’s freight handler,’ all in one location,” she added. “The site represents such a good opportunity to pay tribute to the City of the Big Shoulders.”

Robert Loerzel is a journalist based in Chicago.