Sentimental Sunday: St. Margaret Mary Window, October 1938

Yesterday I was contacted by Paul Murphy, an alumnus of St. Margaret Mary Catholic School in Chicago who'd read my post about the church and school.  He said,

Recently, one of my classmates sent us a copy of the 1938 parish bulletin which was then called "St. Margaret Mary Window." The parish address on page 1 is "7320 Ellwood Avenue."  Today, there is no Ellwood Avenue in Chicago. Also, I could not find it on a list of  Chicago street name changes since the 19th Century. Could [you] help us solve the mystery?

He sent me a copy of the newsletter.  Here's its header on page 1 - note the address, underlined in red.

I decided to first look at "Locations of Chicago Roman Catholic Churches, 1850-1990" by Jack Bochar, second edition (revised to 1997).  This is a GREAT tool to figure out what church your ancestors may have attended, especially if they were immigrants more likely to belong to a national (ethnic) parish, rather than a territorial parish.  Besides helpful maps (the H-1 below refers to the maps grid), this source usually gives a brief history of the locations of the parish.  I thought perhaps the parish office was located elsewhere.  Note that this document is available in a variety of places, but the copy maintained by the Chicago Archdiocese has fairly up-to-date annotations of changes since 1997.

Here is what it said about St. Margaret Mary (underlined in red):

 "--1921: Church at Chase Ave. between Barton (now Claremont) and Ellsood [sic] (now Oakley) Ave."

I went back to check another great tool, the online list of Chicago street name changes compiled in 1948.   In this guide, a hyphen preceding an entry indicates a former street name. Its new name follows it and the coordinates refer to the new name.

So Ellwood Street addresses between 6800N and 7599N became Oakley Street addresses, apparently sometime after October 16, 1938 (the date of the church newsletter) and 1948.

I was curious what exactly was at 7320 N. Oakley Avenue.  From Google Maps Street View, that address falls where the playground is today on the north side of the current school building.   My guess is that at one point the rectory/office was in that location, probably a house similar to the one next door at 7322 (which was built around 1919).  The address 7320 N. Oakley is actually a separate parcel in the assessor's records, not part of the main church-rectory-school parcel.  Here's the assessor's record for 7320 N. Oakley (photo is from August 5, 2008, the playground was built October 3, 2009, the house at 7322 is on the right):

Below is a map highlighting (in blue) the parcel from the CookViewer, a GIS application.  There's also a small skinny parcel just south of it.

Finally, I decided to check Sanborn maps for the area.  First, I used the awesome Sanborn Map locator on the Chicago In Maps website.  I looked at the Sanborn Maps for the Rogers Park area for 1937 (actually published in 1938) and that map updated in April 1951.

First is the 1937-38 Sanborn Map.  Yellow indicates a wood frame structure, red is brick, and green is an unspecified fireproof materials, often detailed in the image (click on it to make it larger).  You can see here that there is in fact a house (D stands for dwelling) at 7320 N. Oakley (formerly Ellwood). The school building (which also served as a church initially) was constructed in 1924 and the church in 1937 (although it was not completed until 1938).  The wood frame building between them may have been an early church hall or perhaps it was the first church, referred to in Bochar's book as existing in 1924.

Below is the Sanborn Map updated to April 1951.  The old rectory at 7320 N. Oakley is gone.  I would need to look at deed records, but my guess is that the church swapped the north 16 feet or so (on the left on this map) of the lot at 7320 N. Oakley for the 16-foot-wide alley between 7320 and the school.  This created an alley right next to 7320, as pictured on the CookViewer earlier in this post.

The wood frame building between the church and the school has been replaced by the present brick rectory, built in 1948.  Also by this point, the church had purchased the flats at 7325-7327 Claremont and turned it into the convent.

Here is the 1924 building permit for the school:




And here is the 1937 building permit for the church.  Note that the 1924 architect is J[oseph] W[illiam] McCarthy (1884-1965, later of McCarthy, Smith, and Eppig, in 1937), who designed 41 Catholic churches in the Chicago area, as well as schools, hospitals, and convents.

Finally, here is the 1948 building permit for the present-day rectory, designed by the firm Barry & Kay, which included architects Gerald Aloysius Barry (1894-1966) and his son Gerald Ward Barry (1924-2005), who also designed a number of Chicago Catholic churches and other facilities.

So far, I haven't been able to find the building permit for the original rectory at 7320 N. Oakley, the convent at 7325 N. Claremont, nor that wood frame building between the church and the school on the 1937-38 Sanborn Map.

I was pleased to find some references to my family in the church newsletter.  Here is an article my Uncle Bob (Paul Robert Pape Jr., 1926-2008) wrote about a Boy Scout trip:

And here is an article that indicates he was an end on the school's football team.  He would have been in seventh grade in the autumn of 1938:

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