For more than a century, the east end of what is now the Logan Square Boulevards Landmark District has been anchored by St. John Berchmans Catholic Church, whose school, convent, rectory and church stretch along the entire block between Campbell and Maplewood Avenues on the south side of the Boulevard. The parish’s four buildings were designed over a period of about 20 years by a single architect, John G. Steinbach, of the Chicago firm of Worthmann & Steinbach. The result is an architecturally harmonious block that warrants a closer look.
The Worthmann & Steinbach partnership was active in Chicago from 1903 through 1928. The firm is best remembered for its design of large and elaborate churches in the Chicago area for Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic and Lutheran clients. In 1920, John G. Steinbach received a special papal blessing in recognition of his works, which included Loyola University in Rogers Park and the now-closed St. Hyacinth School at Wolfram Street and Lawndale Avenue in the nearby Avondale neighborhood. A nearby example of Worthmann & Steinbach’s residential work can be found at 2555 West Logan Boulevard.
Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1908.
Not surprisingly, the focal point of the St. John Berchmans Church campus is the church itself, a monumental structure at the southeast corner of Maplewood Avenue and Logan Boulevard. The oldest of the four parish buildings, this Spanish Romanesque structure was designed by Steinbach in 1906. Steinbach deftly combined yellow and cream pressed brick and limestone to create visual depth and architectural detail. The cream and yellow bricks provide color contrast, while brick and limestone complement each other in color, texture and size. The result is a work that has grace and aesthetic appeal, notwithstanding its overall massiveness.
The body of the church is yellow brick set on top of a limestone block foundation. (1) Windows are set on stone sills and rounded cut stone outlines the windows and arched niches. The broad limestone sill below the rose window extends to wrap around the brick pilasters and towers at the façade’s east and west corners. (2)
The square, flat-roofed tower (3) on the Maplewood corner of the church rises to the eaves of the roof. This tower houses the church bells, with an oculus detail disguising the louvered openings of the belfry. The church’s bells were silent for decades after the mechanism broke down in the 1930s. It wasn’t until Logan Square Preservation spearheaded a funding drive with St. John Berchmans in 2017 that the bells were finally repaired and brought back into service.
The tower on the east side of the church is shorter and narrower than the bell tower, with a gabled roof and statuary niche that echo some of the façade’s roofline detail. Each tower has two windows resting on the limestone band, while at the first-floor level, the bell tower’s three arched niches contrast with the simple window in the east tower. Rather than being a distracting lack of symmetry, the differences between the towers adds visual interest and allows for a transition in scale from church to rectory.
KEY ARCHITECTURAL FEATURES:
- Contrasting yellow brick on limestone foundation
- Sill wrapping around pilasters
- Flat-roofed west tower
- Gabled roof on east tower
- Arched window tops on limestone sills
- Rose window
Arches (5) defined by cream brick laid in header and soldier courses produce a dentil effect around the windows. Cream brick is also used in relief to create a simple horizontal line along the Maplewood side of the church and rectangular designs under the stained-glass windows. The bell tower and front of the church are graced with a more elaborate ribbon, with courses of cream brick framing cross shapes set against the yellow background. Several niches and a series of small brick arches under the roofline cornices provide further architectural interest.
The grand stairway to the church entrance was reconfigured in 1949, adding the graceful stone railings that reach out toward the boulevard and provide a sense of welcome and focus as they draw people into the church.
The stained-glass windows (6) were designed and fabricated by the John J. Kinsella Company. Kinsella followed the style of the Munich School, which emerged in Bavaria in the 1800s and is characterized by the painting of layers of color on larger pieces of glass to create such details as facial features, folds of fabric and scenic backgrounds, before being trimmed to follow the overall design and fit into the window’s frames. This can be compared with the Tiffany-style glass found in some Logan Square residences, which uses smaller pieces of colored glass, laid individually to create a scene or design.
The large rose window (6) over the entrance depicts St. John Berchmans as a teacher of school children, and is the only window with a distinctively Belgian theme. The west transept, visible from Maplewood Avenue, depicts the Last Supper, while the window in the east transept is a scene of the Great Flood, with a rainbow over Noah’s ark. Such a prominently placed Old Testament scene is rare in Catholic churches, but it may have had special meaning for the Belgian community, whose low country homeland was constantly threatened by the sea.
The nighttime exterior lighting of the front of the church improves the visibility of the rose window from the street. But the windows are best viewed from inside the sanctuary — especially those on the east side, which are partially blocked from view by the other buildings.
The rectory was enlarged and remodeled in 1925. It retained the original details in the foundation, doorway and window-framing pilasters, while replacing stone window lintels with brick and adding a flat-roofed second story with echoes of the church’s brick relief work. The addition to the building’s east side introduced complementary new elements including a triangular pediment and limestone coping. The most significant details are the squares defined by soldier courses and stacked bond courses of yellow brick, which are inlaid with small multi-colored squares and limestone accents.
Dedicated in September 1925, the yellow-brick school presents a simpler version of the new rectory design details. Brick pilasters create a columnar effect and outline wall sections, while the school’s central doorway and the center window in each wall segment are defined by bricked arches to complement the church’s Romanesque architecture. A version of the inlaid squares with stone accents is also present. Round stone finials that were part of the original design are long gone, probably due to upkeep costs and safety concerns.
The convent, dedicated in 1930, was the last of Steinbach’s buildings for St. John Berchmans, and it provides an effective link between the two buildings. The convent’s foundation and front entrance repeat the same details as the rectory. It also has the same roofline, with its east and west ends repeating the triangular pediments and inlays of the rectory’s east addition. The stone sills and trim beneath the convent’s second-floor windows provide a further architectural link to the rectory, despite the convent’s simpler fenestration.
The Maplewood Neighborhood
What is now Logan Boulevard began 150 years ago as the east leg of Humboldt Boulevard from Logan Square east to Western Avenue and then a short connection to Diversey Parkway. It is part of the “Emerald Necklace” of boulevards created in 1870 to surround the city and connect parks from the South Side through the West Side to the North Side. A viable route to finish the system at Lincoln Park and the lakefront could never be secured.
Part of the area located between Rockwell Street and Western, from Fullerton Avenue to Diversey, was subdivided into lots in 1873 under a plat recorded as the “Albert Crosby and Others Subdivision.” By 1880, the neighborhood was being marketed as the Suburb of Maplewood. It could be reached easily by train from downtown Chicago.
In 1890, the City substantially expanded its corporate limits, annexing territory to the north, west and far south, including all of what was then Jefferson Township. With that annexation, Maplewood and today’s Logan Square Boulevards District became part of Chicago. It took another 20 years for the area to take the street names and numbers that are used today.
One of the people involved in the marketing of Maplewood was William E. Irwin, who, in 1896, announced the opening of a real estate office at 1603 Milwaukee: “making a specialty of property in the northwest division and Maplewood.”
Irwin owned several parcels on the south side of the boulevard between Campbell and Maplewood, including his home at then 1874-76 Humboldt, where he lived with wife, Elizabeth, a daughter, son-in-law Henry Nagel, and a granddaughter. Henry Nagel was the oldest son of Ella Nagel, a widow who owned the property next door at 1870 Humboldt. She lived there with Henry’s three younger siblings. The remaining parcels on the block’s northeast corner had an address of 1858 Humboldt, though they were unimproved. Their owner, Sarah A. Higgins, held the vacant property as an investment in Maplewood, and she owned various lots all the way to the Square. All of these parcels were eventually bought by St. John Berchmans for its church, rectory, convent and school.
Chicago Street Renumbering
Effective September 1, 1909, all street addresses in Chicago were required to follow the city’s new numbering grid, with State Street the baseline between east and west, and Madison Street the baseline between north and south. Renumbering had a significant impact on Humboldt Boulevard.
Instead of beginning with No. 1 at North Avenue and ascending until the boulevard terminated, addresses along its north-south sections ascended from No. 1600 at North. Building numbers along the east-west segment that is now Logan Boulevard reversed course, ending at No. 3200 at Kedzie Avenue. Even 1910 U.S. Census workers were confused along that stretch. They listed some residents as living on Humboldt and some as living on Logan.
Decades later, there was an effort to finally standardize street names. That work remedied one of the persistent citywide problems recognized as far back as the 1890 annexations. At one time, there were multiple Humboldt Avenues and Humboldt Streets; eight Maple Streets, two Maplewood Avenues, and one Maplewood Place; and three Logan Streets, one Logan Avenue, and one Logan Place.
History of the Parish Buildings
St. John Berchmans had its origins in 1903, when the Catholic Archbishop of Chicago, responding to requests from Chicago’s Belgian community, directed Fr. John DeSchryver, a Belgian Jesuit priest who taught at St. Ignatius College, to establish a national parish for Belgian immigrants. Many lived and worked on the northwest side and some 75 families made up the new parish.
On October 8, 1904, the Archdiocese paid $4,500 to purchase five unimproved lots at the southeast corner of Maplewood Avenue and then-Humboldt Boulevard. The following September, Fr. DeSchryver announced the new parish to the Belgian community. The parish was to be called St. John Berchmans, after the Belgian saint who was a Jesuit seminarian when he died in 1621 at the age of 22. According to the building permit, issued in the spring of 1906, the new church would measure 60 feet by 118 feet and cost $40,000. The cornerstone ceremony took place to much fanfare on August 26, 1906.
But it was the rectory, not the church, that was the first building John Steinbach designed for the new parish. In the fall of 1905, he obtained a permit to build a one-story pressed brick and stone rectory directly to the east of the new church site (now No. 2517). The cost of the 30-foot by 35-foot rectory was listed as $3,500.
Typical of the construction of ethnic parishes, Belgian tradesmen lent their talents to building their new church, yielding both cost savings and pride of place. Two such tradesmen were the general contractor for the church, Antoine Del Fosse, who lived on the boulevard east of the site, and mason E. Veermesch, who built the rectory.
After the successful launch of the parish, another Belgian priest, Fr. Julius DeVos, was named pastor in January 1907. By that time, the rectory was ready for occupancy. The church was still under construction, but once the basement of the church could be occupied, Fr. DeVos held services there while construction continued upstairs.
The church was dedicated on December 15, 1907. A photograph of the church and rectory from that day shows that details such as stair railings and stained glass were yet to be done. This is no surprise, as it often takes years to complete every detail of a church. In fact, most new parishes founded in the same era as St. John Berchmans started with a modest building that combined church, school, and parish hall in a single, modest structure. A bigger church and other buildings would be built later, as resources and parish membership grew.
The Belgian community took a different approach with St. John Berchmans, starting with a very modest rectory and a grand church. Still, it took another 15 years to complete the church’s interior; the stained-glass windows were added in 1921 and the marble main altar was dedicated in 1922. By that time, St. John Berchmans was no longer an ethnic parish.
Despite its dedication, the Belgian community wasn’t large enough to sustain the parish on its own, so in 1916, Archbishop Mundelein established geographic boundaries for the parish, carving territory from the older, larger St. Sylvester parish. Though St. John Berchmans thus became what is known as a territorial parish, many Belgian parishioners still lived in the neighborhood. The parish remained at the center of the Chicago’s Belgian-Catholic community, as evidenced by its 1932 Silver Jubilee booklet, which was written in Flemish.
Completed St. John Berchmans Parish buildings, 1932
St. John Berchmans school began in 1907, when a group of Dominican sisters from Springfield, Ky. responded to a request from the pastor. The first convent was located in the existing frame house, which still stands next to the rectory today. When the parish purchased the property from the widow Nagel for $6,500 the following year, she had the brick two-flat at 3004 West Logan built for her family.
The nuns lived on the second floor and held classes on the first floor until the hall in the basement of the church was partitioned to create classrooms. By the time of the 1910 U.S. Census, the five nuns occupied the entire house, with the principal listed as the head of household and the other nuns identified as “inmates.”
On June 20, 1916, the parish paid $17,500 to buy the remaining 4½ lots at the southwest corner of Campbell and Logan to build a school. The property included the home of William and Elizabeth Irwin at No. 2509, and they moved just around the corner to 2511 North Maplewood.
Construction of the new school was postponed for several years for lack of funds; the parish needed to rebound following World War I and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. In the early 1920s, Fr. DeVos launched a fundraising drive, and the parish again engaged the architectural services of John Steinbach. The cornerstone was laid in 1924, and the new school opened for classes in September of 1925.
The first classes were held only on the second floor, while the first floor served as a parish hall. By 1927, classrooms on both floors were needed due to growing enrollment. The school eventually became so overcrowded that in 1957, the parish began construction on a new school building to hold the upper grades at the northwest corner of Maplewood and Altgeld Avenues.
The final work designed for the parish by Steinbach was a new convent, which replaced the repurposed frame house at No. 2513. The convent was completed in 1927 and dedicated in 1930 in conjunction with the parish’s Silver Jubilee. This largely completed the four-building campus along Logan Boulevard, at least for a while.
The parish built a significant addition to the church in 1949 at a total cost of $250,000. The construction was the culmination of years of preparation during which the parish purchased two lots on Maplewood to the south of the alley behind the church, and acquired the connecting alley after it was vacated pursuant to a 1946 city ordinance.
The exterior of the 1949 addition copied the church’s original brick and stone design and, as noted earlier, also included modification of the stairs and railings at the main entrance. The expansion enlarged the sanctuary and sacristy spaces. The sanctuary was lengthened and the ceiling was raised and vaulted to match the nave. This required the removal of a mural over the original sanctuary and the stained-glass triptych behind the altar. Two panels of the triptych were relocated within the church, and two stained-glass clerestory windows were added to each side of the expansion.
For more than 100 years, the parish of St. John Berchmans has been an integral part of the Logan Square community. Reflecting the constantly evolving ethnic make-up of the neighborhood, its parishioners and programs shifted over the years from being predominantly Belgian to German to Polish to Latino. Throughout, parishioners worked diligently to preserve their beautiful church, rectory, convent and school buildings. They stand as an historical and architectural landmark on what has been referred to as Logan Boulevard’s “Golden Block.”
