Division Street YMCA/Wendy's, Chicago

Kind of a utilitarian brick box, architecturally speaking I don’t think this is that much of a loss—if you’re that desperate to see a Robert C. Berlin-designed YMCA, Chicago still has at least four—but the Division Street YMCA was once a community anchor where tens of thousands of people learned to swim, stayed healthy, and found flexible short-term housing. Now, it’s 80% parking lot and 20% fast food drive through—there’s my beef. 

Opened in 1910 with money donated by Chicago department store mogul William A. Wieboldt, the Division Street Y closed in 1981 and was demolished soon after. The state of the site today hints at a win-win solution to Chicago’s housing shortage and budget woes: whereas the Wendy’s houses no one and pays a paltry $45k in annual property taxes, the apartment tower next door—an early transit-oriented development project from the 2010s, built on the site of a Pizza Hut—contains 99 homes and pays more than $500k a year in property taxes. 

So, what’s changed? Well, everything. The building next to the YMCA on Division, the Crown Theatre, was demolished in 1963 (ironically, demolished by the YMCA). The row of two-three flats barely visible down Marshfield on the right side of the postcard were also all demolished for parking, except lone survivor 1101 N. Marshfield all the way at the corner with Haddon. 

Growing rapidly in the early 1900s, the Young Men’s Christian Association of Chicago kicked off a fundraising drive to finance construction of a clutch of new facilities, with sizable contributions from recognizable local names like Shedd, Lawson, Field, and McCormick. Wicker Park was Wieboldt territory—William A. Wieboldt opened his first store in the neighborhood in the 1880s before it grew into a local department store chain—so he donated $100k to support the construction of a YMCA branch on Division Street. 

William A. Wieboldt and the YMCA had an architect in common, Robert C. Berlin. Berlin designed Wieboldt’s mansion on Deming Place in Lincoln Park in the 1880s, and he did the West Side YMCA dormitory that opened in 1907 (the Wieboldt House and the West Side YMCA on Monroe are both still there). With the organization and the biggest donor both at least a bit comfortable with him, the YMCA hired Berlin to design the Division Street Y in 1909. Capitalizing on the trust from his work here and on the West Side YMCA, Berlin would design at least five other YMCA/YWCA facilities across Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s, including the Wabash YMCA, the YMCA Hotel on Wabash in the South Loop, and the McCormick YWCA (demolished). 

Berlin’s Division St. Y was a functional, Classical Revival-inflected masonry cube. One of the largest YMCA’s in the city when it opened, it housed a gym, a running track, a pool, four lanes of bowling, a billiards room, and a cafeteria. Author Nelson Algren worked out here, actor and Olympian Johnny Weissmuller swam here, and this was the original home gym for bodybuilders Bob Gadja and Sergio Oliva. Hundreds of thousands more took swimming lessons, attended after-school activities, or took classes here—reflecting Division Street’s position as Chicago’s Polish Broadway, there were regular Polish-language classes and activities here. 

The Division Street Y also had more than 200 beds, organized in single, double, and dorm-style rooms, that provided short and medium-term lodging. While it appears it never really developed the permanent SRO resident population that other Chicago YMCA’s housed, tens of thousands of people lived here for weeks or months at a time, flexibly and affordably—at least into the 1960s, the cost to rent a single room for a month never exceeded $500 in 2024 dollars (and the dorms and doubles were even cheaper). 

The YMCA of Metro Chicago renovated the Division Street Y twice, in 1942 and 1959-1960. The YMCA is partially responsible for how empty this block became—the Wieboldt Foundation donated the building directly to the east, the Crown Theatre, to the Division YMCA in 1960 in celebration of its 50th year, and the YMCA demolished the old theater in 1963 to use the land as a playlot. Over the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, they also collected and demolished the two-three flats to the south to add parking. 

The Division YMCA opened with 500 members in 1910 and boasted 2,750 by 1945. By the late 1970s, though, the building was aging and the population of the West Town Community Area (which contains Wicker Park) had lost nearly 100,000 people from its 1930 peak. The YMCA of Metro Chicago was also in flux—in a five year stretch they sold off the massive YMCA Hotel on Wabash and closed branches in Ravenswood and Hyde Park. Citing energy costs, maintenance challenges, and the opening of a new YMCA at New City, the Division Street YMCA closed in 1981 with minimal fuss (seriously, there appears to have been basically zero media coverage). The building was demolished soon after closing, and Wendy’s bought the site in 1985. 

Of course, by the 1990s Wicker Park was buzzing, with capital and the educated class flowing back into the neighborhood after decades of disinvestment—if the Division Street YMCA had hung on for another decade or so it’s easy to imagine it being repurposed into something at least marginally more productive and alive than a Wendy’s drive through. 

We can even look at two peers designed by Robert C. Berlin at roughly the same time as an example. Only a couple years after his work on the Division Street Y, Berlin designed the Eleanor Club at Leavitt and Pierce in Wicker Park, which is now the Winston Manor Nursing Home. The West Side YMCA on Monroe, which Berlin designed in stages from 1907 to 1915, is now the Duncan— designated a Chicago landmark in 2018, the 260-unit adaptive reuse apartment development opened in 2020. 

The apartment tower next door, designed by Wheeler Kearns and opened in 2014, hopefully hints at the future of this site. Replacing a Pizza Hut with a 99 unit building, Chicago’s first transit-oriented development ordinance helped get 1611 W. Division built—steps from the Blue Line and three of the CTA’s busiest buses, it has zero parking spaces for residents. This drove a certain type of person insane, “they’re ruining the neighborhood! It’s too hard to find parking already!”. Those people were, predictably, completely wrong—and it’s even a great example of how we can make Chicago better for its residents by addressing the housing shortage and better redistributing the property tax load. While this parking lot with a Wendy’s pays the city $45k a year in property taxes, the large apartment building next door pays $537k, and the Duncan, the Berlin-designed YMCA on Monroe—sort of a “what could have been” for the Division Street Y—pays $500k. Someone redevelop this Wendy’s, please.

Further reading:

• Landmark Designation Report for the West Side YMCA/YWCA, designed by Robert C. Berlin

Eve of Destruction - Chicago Reader

East Village Goldblatt’s: landmark or dust?

Chicago ReaderElana Seifert

Crown Theatre in Chicago, IL - Cinema Treasures

This nearly 1,460-seat theater was opened August 29, 1909, in the Wicker Park neighborhood, on Noble Square. Its auditorium contained a stage, balc…

Cinema Treasures

A bunch of random stuff I found interesting:

• a Tolstoy celebration held at the YMCA in 1927 where Jane Addams spoke covered by the Rassvet Russian-language newspaper
• a Division St. YMCA t-shirt
• an ad in the Polish Daily Zgoda in 1967 for a Polish bible school in the YMCA
• the first women to get diplomas from this YMCA in 1931 when they finally started allowing women
• the Y's work combating gangs is lauded in 1935
• old swimmer
• 1945 member drive
• Polish school ad from 1918.

The 1909 building permit.

Some of the ads touting rooms to rent at the Division St. YMCA—I used these numbers to populate that graph.

This is where I took the present-day photo from.