Illinois Tech Seeks to Commemorate Little-Known Historical Landmarks on Campus Through New Course

The first Black female suffrage club in Chicago. An arcade containing one of the first Black-owned banks, founded when Chicago’s African American community had limited access to resources. A row of lively jazz and blues clubs, near a church many believe to be the birthplace of Gospel music.

All of these things once existed on or were directly adjacent to the Illinois Tech campus. But there’s little evidence of them, beyond simple markers. In some cases, not even that.

And so a course highlighting these sites of commemoration—in which students will explore local history, how it affected the community, and how it should be memorialized in or with future architecture—will be offered again in the spring 2025 semester.

“Last year, students [of the course] were astounded by the significance of histories that they didn’t know existed on campus—of which there is no evidence,” says Ron Henderson, a professor and former director of the College of Architecture’s Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program who will help teach the popular course’s second offering this spring.

Henderson and other researchers—including some former students—have already identified several dozen sites of historical and cultural significance on the campus. Of particular interest in the original 2024 course was the Alpha Suffrage Club, once located at the corner of 31st and State Streets. The club, founded by Ida B. Wells and two white colleagues, was a powerful civic organization attended by African American women who had been excluded from national suffrage organizations.

Students in the course’s first offering were tasked with designing a workable memorial for the site. One design, a collection of lifelike sculptures of women standing in a grassy median, looking at the exact spot where club once stood, drew particular praise from instructors.

“There exist a billion different markers that nobody visits. The seminar explored how to breathe life into them, looking at ways of storytelling and providing history in a way that is accessible,” says Alicia Bunton, Illinois Tech’s assistant vice president of community affairs who is an expert on Bronzeville history and a co-designer of the course.

This year, rather than focus on one site, students will help identify some of the dozens of other historical sites on Illinois Tech’s Bronzeville campus and explore how they would commemorate them.

“As a landscape architect, I recognize that the sites that we work with all have existing natural and cultural histories, and that we must be quite careful to not erase these histories under the pretense of progress or technology or ideology,” says Henderson. “The ways that we can give voice to ancestors, both human and non-human—trees, people, events, buildings—is first to acknowledge their existence and secondly to try to discover a spatial or material expression of them in our current society.”

There are plenty of sites to choose from.

One hundred years ago, the blues and jazz clubs along both 35th and State Streets created an active, influential district for American music known as The Stroll. The Pilgrim Baptist Church, of which a stone skeleton still stands at 33rd Street and Indiana Avenue, is considered by many to be the birthplace of Gospel music in the 1930s. And the former Cafe de Champion at 41 West 31st Street, founded by Jack Johnson, the world’s first Black heavyweight boxing champion, was one of the city’s few interracial night clubs.

There was also an amusement park called Joyland at 33rd Street and Wabash Avenue, built to offer a child-friendly alternative to all those nightclubs. And Binga Bank, the Black-owned corner tenant of an arcade once located in the spot where Michael Paul Galvin Tower now stands.

Some university-tied sites, Henderson adds, include the first private nuclear reactor in the world.

“The cool thing I have found about landscape architecture students is they’re preservationists, and their goal is not just to make things look pretty, whether it’s researching a particular plant or tree that once lived at a particular location. They’ll make sure that’s incorporated into their design for that project,” says Bunton. “And they’re also the group that is way more committed to getting community feedback in their project.”

Still, Henderson says the course is open to all students, not just those studying architecture. In 2025 the course will be jointly taught by Davey Friday (M.L.A./M.Arch. ’22), who designed the university’s Budburst Garden at Nate Thomas Memorial Meadow.

Photo: Rendition of a proposed commemoration sculpture for the Alpha Suffrage Club by student Jorge Mayorga (M.Arch./MLA ’24)