A building can reveal the aspirations and struggles of its inhabitants. Buildings are also barometers of demographic change. That’s what I discovered in researching the history of my great-grandparents’ former hardware store in Chicago.
Peder Ørts Jensen and Anne Kjestine Brandt emigrated from Denmark in 1891 and were married the following year. Four of their six children died young. The eldest surviving child, my grandmother Christine, was a teenager in 1909 when the family bought the dwelling at 6410 South Ashland Avenue in Chicago’s West Englewood neighborhood. They expanded the building two years later, opening a hardware store on the street level and living in the apartment above.
A photo, possibly taken during World War I when nativist sentiment ran high, shows my great-grandmother standing in front of the store. The awning advertises an Americanized name, “Peter O. Jensen”; in the upstairs window, two American flags are prominently displayed.
According to a story passed down to my father, bandits once robbed the store after locking my great-grandmother in the cellar. My grandmother Christine was likely not at home because she worked weekdays as a secretary for the Wrigley chewing gum company.
In 1920, the Jensens moved their store to a bigger building a block north at 6341 Ashland Avenue. (That structure was razed to make a parking lot for the Ashland/63rd elevated train station, which opened in 1969.)
Scandinavians like my Jensen forebears were among West Englewood’s earliest immigrant residents. A city almanac from 1926 shows that the neighborhood had a branch of the Walhalla Danish Society. But other immigrant groups, including Italians and Irish, soon vied for space.
An Irish immigrant, Mary Mulryan Dalton, was the owner of 6410 Ashland in 1951 when the building made news because of two backyard bombings that happened just three weeks apart. In the second incident, she was at home in the upstairs apartment when a blast shattered the windows. After a police investigation found that the downstairs tenant, the Consolidated Veterans Club, was a possible front for gambling, she obtained a court order canceling the club’s lease.
But Mrs. Dalton, who was recently widowed, soon regretted the loss of the $200 monthly rental income. When she asked the court’s permission for the club to stay another month, neighbors were incensed. A telephone caller threatened her: “Get those people out of there or you’ll be killed.” She apparently complied because the controversy disappeared from the news.
In searching the history of the Dalton family, I found a connection to my own city of Indianapolis. It was there that Mary Mulryan (a native of County Galway, Ireland) met Michael Dalton at a house party. The two were married at SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral in 1916. After their move to Chicago, Michael served the city as a police officer. He and Mary raised five children, one of whom became a Sister of the Holy Cross, taking the religious name Mary Bonaventure.
When Michael died at age 58 in 1951, his funeral mass was held at St. Theodore, the Irish parish (since razed) in West Englewood. Three years later, in another blow to the family, Sister Mary Bonaventure died at St. Patrick’s Convent, Danville, Illinois, at age 37.
The Daltons’ Irish Catholicism and my great-grandparents’ Danish Lutheranism were not the only chapters in 6410 Ashland’s ethnoreligious history. In 1930, West Englewood was 3 percent Black; by 1990, it was 98 percent. The reason was the Great Migration, which brought millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. This transformation gave rise to a new fixture of urban religious life—the storefront church.
I don’t know when 6410 Ashland became a church, but that’s what I found when I visited West Englewood in 2021. The sign painted on the façade advertised “Faith Tabernacle M[issionary] B[aptist] Church” and “Raymond Spaulding, Pastor.”
The attached addition at 6412 Ashland also represented new diversity: it was the office of Chicago alderman Raymond Lopez, a former airline skycap who was the first openly gay Mexican American elected to office in Illinois. Lopez eventually moved his headquarters to a different location.
At my last check of Google Maps, Faith Tabernacle was still in operation. A Bible reference on the church’s sign seemed remarkably apt: “Where we walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). To me, it symbolizes perseverance amid the hardships experienced by the building’s occupants, past and present. All who dwelt in this place had faith they would attain something greater—if not in this life, then in the life to come.
© 2024 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Bibliographical Note
Details gleaned from the Chicago Tribune, the Indianapolis News, and the Suburbanite Economist (Chicago). On the Walhalla Danish Society in West Englewood, see The Chicago Daily News Almanac and Year-Book (1926), 733. On St. Theodore Parish, see Harrison Fillmore, Chicago Catholic Churches: A Sketchbook (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2022), 69. On the demographics of West Englewood, see the article by Franklin Forts in the Encyclopedia of Chicago.