The J.J. Walser House at 42 N. Central Ave. in Austin is in need of a savior. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1903, the home is an early example of Wright’s Prairie Style. The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy is working with members of the Austin community to save the house and ensure its survival.
Designed for printing company executive Jospeh Jacob Walser, the home is one of only five existing Wright-designed Prairie structures in Chicago. It is the only Wright-designed single-family home on the West Side.
Decades ago, the home was the focus of preservation efforts. The most recent owners, Anne and Hurly Teague, purchased the house in 1970, and Hurley, a contractor, worked to stabilize the home. Prior to their purchase, the art glass windows were removed and sold, a rear addition was completed in the 1950’s and sometime prior to that, porches flanking the front room were enclosed.
The home was named a Chicago Landmark in 1984, a designation that prohibits demolition and requires approval for exterior changes. In 2013, the home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
According to John Waters, Preservation Programs Manager at the Conservancy, the home has been on the Conservancy’s radar for quite a while. In 2017, the Conservancy visited the home to meet with then-widowed Anne Teague and brought in Wiss, Janney, Elstner to prepare a pro-bono detailed condition assessment of the home. In 2018, they shared this report with Teague, and in 2019, the Conservancy visited the home with contractors to assess a leaking roof.
Waters praised the Teagues’ stewardship of the home.
“The house would not be there today if the Teague family hadn’t owned it for fifty years,” he said.
He added that it is not infrequent to encounter preservation obstacles when elderly owners are living in private homes.
“There are very limited funding sources for private homes,” he said.
Most Wright homes are privately owned, and while the state offers a tax freeze program for preservation efforts, Waters pointed out that program is most useful in areas such as Oak Park and Lake Forest, where property taxes are high.
Waters said that after Anne Teague died in 2019, conservation efforts hit a few roadblocks, one of which was Covid-19.
“The house was always on our minds,” he said. “We were very worried about it.”
Post-pandemic, the Conservancy learned that Austin Coming Together was working with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning on reinvigorating efforts for the Austin corridor.
These efforts reignited interest in the house, which is one of the few residences left to document the early 1900’s era on Central Avenue.
A reverse mortgage on the home, combined with foreclosure proceedings, are complicating efforts to preserve and make necessary improvements to the house. The tangled financial issues and bank ownership make it challenging to address deterioration accelerated by five years of vacancy.
A recent Crain’s Chicago Business article on the house has bought more interest to the preservation efforts, and Waters said that the Conservancy is working closely with ACT to unravel the legal and financial situation and determine how to preserve the home.
He stressed that the home is very significant in the Wright canon. It’s a smaller version of some Prairie designs that Wright would go on to build elsewhere. The co-axial design allowed for flow of light and air.
“It’s a small house with lots of room in it, something Wright was so good at,” he said.
Waters, who has been in the house many times, described its state.
“Much of the original fabric is there. There is stuff to restore. But, there’s basically a hole in the roof. Our goal is to get access to the house, so to speak, so we could get that temporarily covered.”
He estimated that shoring up the home and getting it stabilized would cost approximately $500,000 and said that rough estimate doesn’t cover the costs of restoration of the entire home.
Waters said that the Walser House is on the agenda for the Conservancy’s annual conference in Detroit in the fall, during which they will discuss three Wright homes and consider how their environments and surroundings play into preservation efforts. The other two homes are in areas such as Atherton, California, where development has come to meet the communities, making the land worth more than the house itself.
“This project [the Walser House] is the opposite,” he said.
“Advocacy people always bring up moving a house,” Waters added, “but this house is a part of Austin. It’s just a mile from Unity Temple, but it’s a different world.”
The involvement of ACT is a great boon to the preservation efforts, he added.
While there are a lot of moving parts to saving the house, Waters said he is optimistic that it will be done and thinks that preservation will be aided by interest from the Austin community itself.
“I think this is a house that really captures people’s imaginations, in part because of where it is.”