About the Eugene S. Pike House Foundation
The Eugene S. Pike House Foundation is a not-for-profit organization founded for the purpose of raising funds, awareness, and engagement in an effort to rehabilitate the historic Eugene S. Pike House, located at 1826 W. 91st St., Chicago, on the grounds of the Dan Ryan Woods Forest Preserve (Cook County). The Tudor Revival house was designed by noted architect Harry Hale Waterman and built in 1894 for Eugene S. Pike, a prominent real estate developer and financier who helped to rebuild the city of Chicago following the Great Chicago Fire. The house, originally known as Pike’s Gardener’s Cottage, has been part of the Dan Ryan Wood since 1921. Since 1976 it has been a contributing building in the Ridge Historic District, one of the largest urban districts on the National Register of Historic Places. For many years the house was used as the Dan Ryan Woods Watchman’s Residence, but since 2015 it has been vacant and declining. Through local efforts led by the Ridge Historical Society-Beverly Area Planning Association Historic Buildings Committee, the Eugene S. Pike House was declared one of Illinois’ Most Endangered Historic Places by Landmarks Illinois in 2022. This status prompted the formation of the Eugene S. Pike House Foundation and the commitment to making a plan for saving, rehabbing, and turning the house over for use by the Beverly Area Arts Alliance as a Community Cultural Arts Center, serving a wide circle of southside communities that use the Dan Ryan Woods.
About the Beverly Area Arts Alliance
The Beverly Area Arts Alliance cultivates collaboration between artists and community members to foster Beverly/Morgan Park as a diverse hub of culture and creativity on Chicago’s far South Side and as a vibrant place to live and do business. The Alliance began in 2014 as a small group of area artists and arts professionals who loved the “Village in the city” charm of Beverly/Morgan Park and settled here to raise their families, but found themselves often leaving the neighborhood for art, culture and creative community. After planning the first Beverly Art Walk in 2014, this group of volunteers formed a board of directors and three years later formally established the Beverly Area Arts Alliance as a 501c3.
Beverly and Morgan Park are among the few racially and economically integrated communities in the City of Chicago. The Alliance embraces and cultivates the diversity of our community, creating programming and welcoming spaces for people from various backgrounds and generations to come together through art exhibitions, live music, storytelling, artist talks, performances and workshops in various sites throughout the community. In the last ten years, the Alliance has organized more than 200 events throughout the neighborhood, featuring hundreds of artists and joyfully bringing together thousands of people of all ages. We believe our ongoing success demonstrates that the Alliance is fulfilling a need for creativity and community on the South Side. Through this collaboration with the Eugene S. Pike House foundation, the Pike House would become a site for artist residencies, exhibitions and other events to enhance the cultural life of the community.
About the Eugene S. Pike House
The Eugene S. Pike House is of historical and architectural importance to the Beverly/Morgan Park community, the City of Chicago and the state of Illinois. The late 19th-century home is part of the National Register of Historic Places Ridge Historic District and was designed by noted architect Harry Hale Waterman and built for Pike and his family in 1894. Waterman had worked in Joseph Lyman Silsbee’s office with preeminent prairie school architects Frank Lloyd Wright and George Maher. Eugene S. Pike was a prominent Chicago real estate developer and financier, as well as a leader in rebuilding the city following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Originally part of Pike’s private estate at the edge of the woods, the house and 32-acre grounds were purchased by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County in 1921 and was used as a watchman’s residence. The home has sat empty since 2015 and its condition has declined because of a lack of funds for its repair.