The Historical Society of Oak Park-River Forest hopes it has found its new home, but realizes its fate is in the Oak Park village board’s hands.
The nonprofit is one of a handful of groups sizing up the old fire station at the corner of Lombard Avenue and Lake Street. Built in 1898 as the Cicero Township Fire Station #2, the building now houses offices for the Department of Public Works.
But a new public works building on South Boulevard a half-block away is expected to be finished, and this building would be empty by the fall, said Village Manager Tom Barwin.
The park district and other departments in village hall (clerk’s office, adjudication and fire/rescue) also expressed interest in the building, Barwin said. Gary Balling, parks executive director, said the park district is no longer interested because the space is too small.
But it’s not just an office building for the Historical Society, said Executive Director Frank Lipo.
“Offices can be a lot of places, but there’s only one that has these historical characteristics,” Lipo said. The building is the oldest public structure in the village and has ties to Oak Park’s early history as well as its more recent redefining days from the Open Housing movement of the 1960s.
A home for the Historical Society-which Lipo cautions is in the early stages of investigation and ultimately for the village board to decide-would benefit both the community and the society, Lipo said. The society would raise funds to renovate historical elements, now missing from the building’s Richardson Romanesque facade, and become a model of adaptive reuse. If it’s just an office building, why bother? Lipo said.
And the move would allow the organization to continue its growth and expansion.
A tenant of the park district-owned Pleasant Home since 1970, starting in a single room, the Historical Society has never had the space to fulfill parts of its mission, including being a museum for local history.
“There’s not a place to tell the community’s stories,” he said. “Right now, people see great things when they come to Oak Park. But they don’t get an overview.”
The society now has 5,000 square feet of space, but it is second-floor space that’s broken up into a lot of smaller rooms. The two-story fire station has 2,800 square feet on each floor, plus approximately 2,000 square feet of storage space in the back, Lipo said. Long-term plans could even include building an updated archival building to the east, where records could be saved in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment.
Lipo sees an opportunity for a public/private partnership with the village to serve as a repository for the records it’s required to keep.
Added museum space could mean more programming, more space and better visibility, which would improve its function as a research center and as an archive, Lipo said.
Barwin plans to bring a discussion of the use of the space to the village board as early as March.
Village President David Pope would not discuss his thoughts about the proposal until it comes before the board, but said, “The history of the community is obviously one of our fundamental building blocks and something that we need to appropriately acknowledge and showcase.”
But he said the first step is for the board to develop a plan for how it will evaluate proposed uses for the building.
And, he said, before the Historical Society’s proposal is given serious consideration, the board might want to wait to get feedback from a planned study of heritage tourism in Oak Park that should produce recommendations for how the village could “best showcase” its historical assets. Funding for the study is provided in this year’s budget, but the study has not begun.
Asked whether the east Lake Street site would give the Historical Society the best exposure, Lipo said it would be a destination in a village that’s easily traversed. The site is only a few blocks from Ridgeland Common, where the village’s shuttle stops.
The building is already off the tax rolls, an important consideration for the society in its search for a new home, Lipo said. The village would likely retain ownership of the building, officials said.
Lipo and Historical Society backers pushed in January 2004 for the village to give it space in the Downtown Oak Park Drechsler Building, just east of the new Eleven 20 Club building that houses Lane Bryant and Bar Louie. At a testy meeting, proponents held “HISTORY MATTERS!” signs, urging the board to give the society a new home. That space is empty today.
Pope, then a trustee, said at the time that with competing priorities, “the economic reality is one that we have to consider.”
That reality was the equivalent of $250 per household in Oak Park. “Who writes checks of that size to the Historical Society?” Pope said at the time.