Catherine Cook School on Schiller Street in Chicago. All photos courtesy of Catherine Cook School.
By Lois Kimmelman, LEED AP
Editor’s note: Read more about historic buildings getting a green makeover on Lois Kimmelman’s website/blog, Historecycle. She promotes restoration and renovation, not demolition.
Historecycle has emerged from fall hibernation with renewed energy, like an aging building newly retrofitted with LED lights. For the past several months, we’ve been Sherlock Holmes-ing a few “mystery” structures we’ve discovered, to dig into their murky past. And the rigorous pursuit of historical data has been like a shot in the arm.
Take, for example, the former B. & B. Shoe Company factory, which dates to at least the 1920s. Located in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood, B. & B.’s workers used sewing machines to turn out footwear by the hundreds, starting most likely in the 1940s. In 1990 the shoe company vacated the premises, and what was then known as the Melrose Cooperative Nursery School moved from its location in the adjacent church to the north into the old factory. By 1992 the three-story brick building had been sold to the current owners and reopened as Catherine Cook School.
School Library at Catherine Cook School.
Today the private school houses students from preschool to eighth grade. In 2004, the school added a Gymnasium connected by a 2nd floor walkway over a former alley, which now serves as a courtyard. In 2014, the footprint of the original building, now called “The Loft,” was doubled by attaching a 25,000-square-foot addition to the west, known as the “New Wing;” it too is a three-story brick structure. The expansion of the school, while keeping the old building at its heart, took advantage of the opportunity to modernize the campus as a whole. A plethora of energy-saving features and other “green” elements were incorporated into the renovation. Now the school is spread over three full floors plus a lower level, and, along with traditional classrooms and the like, sports an IDEA Lab, AV studio, library/gathering space, art gallery, and two rooftop playgrounds.
After turning our magnifying glass on this shoe-factory-turned-school, we can say we know quite a few details about the building and its background. For example:
It was the home of B & B Shoe Co., originally known as the Brovar & Bernstein Shoe Co.
It was built and operated in a city known for the shoe manufacturing business, with big name companies like Florsheim. In Chicago’s Old Town alone, at one time, several shoe factories, like Dr. Scholl’s (Scholl Manufacturing Co.), were literally down the street.
The building had several other uses before it became a school: a furniture finishing operation, an upholstering company, and a toy factory.
In the 1940s and 1950s, work was interrupted by strikes at the factory, including one by the United Shoe Workers and another by CIO shoe workers.
The existing school was named after the former building owner’s mother, Catherine Cook Anagnost, a Greek immigrant to Chicago, who became a civic-minded CPA, attorney, and philanthropist, and who died in 1990.
School plaque from Catherine Cook School.
Yet many questions about the building remain unanswered: What were the circumstances of its design and construction? What was the exact construction date? What kinds of shoes were produced there? Who worked there, and who were its managers through the years? What motivated the laborers to strike? These stones remain unturned, so to speak, despite our having toured the building and contacted historians, archivists, key community representatives, school employees, and knowledgeable parties from the local history museum and two shoe museums, one in Canada and one in New York.
The Catherine Cook School today boasts a blend of old and new, traditional and state-of-the-art. Look up and you’ll find the same exposed wood beams that formed its original skeleton 100 years ago. Look around and you’ll see walls painted with nontoxic paint, and floors covered with carpet tiles certified by the Carpet & Rug Institute (CRI) Green Label Plus program. Walk into a classroom and occupancy sensors automatically turn on the lights, and turn them off again when you leave. Note the “environmentally friendly” linseed oil bulletin boards. Climb the stairs to the roof and an array of solar panels meets your gaze. Thirsty? Top off your water bottle at one of the refilling stations throughout the halls.
Rooftop solar panels at Catherine Cook School.
The M.O. of Catherine Cook School is to encourage students to be innovative, compassionate, and explore new avenues of learning. Where possible, sustainability is embedded into the curriculum, so, for example, in math class students may calculate how much wattage is generated by the rooftop solar panels. Thus it makes sense that the building contains as many green elements as possible.
Note: When Historecycle first visited the building in 2021, there was a small wind turbine on the roof. Roof-mounted wind turbines are still relatively uncommon on city buildings, let alone on top of a school. Unfortunately, the turbine became dislodged a few months later after being struck by lightning, and although no one was injured, the school decided not to replace it. As far as we know, the school’s solar panels and other green features have been a success.