Inside St. Stephens (original) (raw)

posted by chicago pop

Back in November 2007, Peter Rossi posted an essay on the empty and deteriorating St. Stephen's Church at 57th and Blackstone.

In response, over the digital transom came an interesting link to a set of photos from someone, then unidentified, who had evidently been inside St. Stephens in November 2003 and had taken about a dozen pictures of it in all its magnificent decrepitude. I'm taking the liberty of posting a few of them here.

For those of you interested in the full set, follow this link, where you will see St. Stephens and much, much, more -- all presented to you courtesy of one Mr. Charles Janda, trained photographer specializing in decaying urban structures, and the challenges of photographing them. It's great, eerie stuff.

I thank Mr. Janda for passing his pics along, together with what I take to be implicit consent to their use on this blog. (Just let me know if you want them pulled).

I hope readers will appreciate these pics for their merit as photographs, but also for what they reveal about just how far gone this building is. Bear in mind these pictures were taken almost 5 years ago.

As Peter Rossi pointed out in a comment to his original post, the building is unheated and is masonry-clad, which is a bad combination in a cold-weather climate. Several broken windows continue to allow the elements full access to the interior.

Absent the sudden appearance of a lunatic philanthropist with a fetish for preserving knock-off greco-roman wedding cakes like this one, in a short time there won't be anything left to preserve here except some interesting graffiti up on the dome.