When the 150-foot masonry boiler chimney at Oak Park and River Forest High School was completed sometime in 1922, Ernest Hemingway was traveling Europe as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. He had graduated from OPRF five years earlier, in 1917, in time to experience World War I up close and painful through a shrapnel wound.
The chimney was built on top of the school’s northwest wing, which was added in response to a post-WWI population boom in Oak Park, according to a local history of the school.
In the 93 years that have passed since it first went up, the chimney has become as much a fixture of OPRF’s identity as its most famous native son, albeit much less conspicuous.
It’s been quietly in the background of Tabula photos and grainy aerial images for the majority of the 20th century like a rocket frozen in takeoff, a steady sign both of the school’s march of progress and it’s incredibly rich past. But for people who frequent the school on a regular basis, the chimney is likely to be more of an afterthought than a monument.
“One of the committee members of the Historic Preservation Commission said that she has dropped her daughter off for four years and never noticed it,” said Robert Zummallen, OPRF’s supervisor of construction.
Zummallen has a decade of familiarity with the mammoth structure, which hasn’t been used since 1996. The top 50-foot portion of the chimney is cracking, the mortar missing, and the structure increasingly unsound.
“If we don’t do something by next summer, whether demolish it or restore it, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, adding that he has a faint fear of bricks falling from the structure.
In some ways the cracked bricks are a metaphor for progress and the resulting obsolescence. The chimney was built when the country was more reliant on coal production.
“When they built this originally, they built it high to get the coal up in the atmosphere so it could disburse and wouldn’t be in their eyes,” Zummallen said. “Of course, later on, that was found to be not true.”
In 1973, the march of progress changed course and so did the high school, switching from coal to natural gas. For the next several decades, the chimney served as an unnecessary 150-foot trip for the school’s gas emissions until a much more compact and efficient heating plant was installed in 2006 — rendering the chimney a completely functionless, but expensive, feature of the high school campus.
Now Zummallen and other key staff members, like OPRF’s business administrator Tod Altenburg, want the chimney gone. According to a memo prepared by the two men for the board’s finance committee, the estimated cost of restoring the chimney is $825,000 while it would cost an estimated $335,000 to demolish it.
In May, Zummallen met with the Oak Park Historic Preservation Commission’s five-member architectural review committee to discuss the chimney’s condition. OPRF is located within the Frank Lloyd Wright Historic Preservation District, so any changes to the building’s structure need to go through an extensive approval process.
“The high school met with the commission’s architecture review committee and there was some feedback,” said Doug Karre, the village’s urban planner and a historic preservation specialist.
“The high school is an institutional building and there was discussion about whether the chimney might be an important characteristic and defining feature of the building,” Karre said. “Although it’s not part of the original section of the high school, it is part of the historic fabric of the building, so there were some opinions [on the committee] that it might be worth saving.”
But Zummallen noted that the masonry chimney’s architectural and historical integrity have already been compromised. In 1988, he said, vertical pilaster supports, which aren’t original to the structure, were added to the top of the chimney as part of renovations.
“As an exterior part of the building, the chimney does have some significance,” Zummallen said. “But it’s not all original and at some point it’s going to need to be renovated again. The cost of renovations isn’t a one-time tax burden.”
At a May 28 meeting, Zummallen and Altenburg presented their case before the D200 board without any real opposition to their proposal for demolition. The board approved the allocation of $250,000 toward either repairing or demolishing the chimney.
When Zummallen began to describe how, exactly, the demolition process worked, one board member came up with an idea that might allow preserving the past.
“To demolish it, they’d set hydraulic scaffolding up at the top of it and they’d actually drop the bricks inside the chimney,” Zummallen said during an interview before the May 28 meeting. “The bricks would fall all the way to the bottom. At the end of the day, there’s a door down there and they’d take everything out by hand in wheelbarrows to the freight elevator, out to the loading dock and onto trucks.”
“Can we sell the bricks as mementos?” said board member Tom Cofsky, eliciting a collective aha from his colleagues.
