Bronzeville home where Mayor Harold Washington lived as a child goes up for sale
By Dennis Rodkin
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Credit: Coldwell Banker Realty
October 07, 2024 02:15 PM UPDATED 20 HOURS AGO
A Bronzeville greystone that was the home of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington for five years of his childhood is for sale for the first time in decades, in need of extensive interior rehab.
The asking price is $715,000 for the seven-bedroom house built in about 1894 on what was then called Grand Boulevard but was later renamed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The house has a castle-like facade with a tower, finials and crenellations, and inside are vintage wood details including fireplace mantels, pocket doors, wainscoting and built-in china cabinets.
But the kitchen, baths and utilities are aged and need to be replaced, said Paulette Edwards, a Coldwell Banker Realty agent who’s representing the property along with Sybil Martin of the same brokerage.
Credit: Coldwell Banker Realty
Bringing the house up to date would cost around $300,000, Edwards estimates, making a buyer’s total investment around $1 million. “And that’s a price we’ve been seeing on King Drive,” Edwards said. Three new-construction greystones on the street sold in 2023 and this year for $1.15 million to $1.35 million.
That trio lacked the momentous provenance that this bedraggled $715,000 listing has.
“It’s a piece of Chicago history,” Edwards said. Washington, who was elected to seats in both houses of the Illinois Legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives over the course of 18 years, was elected mayor of Chicago in 1983.
“He was so influential, politically and socially,” Edwards said. “I would love to see somebody bring this house that he lived in back to life.”
Credit: Coldwell Banker Realty
Washington was 6 years old in 1928 when he, his brother Edward and their father, Roy L. Washington, moved into the greystone, which was owned by Roy’s widowed friend Virginia Davis, according to “Harold, the People’s Mayor.” The biography of Chicago’s first Black mayor was published by Dempsey Travis in 1989, six years after Washington died in office.
Roy Washington, an attorney and minister, had custody of the two boys after a split that year with their mother, Bertha. Two other siblings went to live with grandparents. Roy sent Harold and Edward to St. Benedict the Moor, a boarding school in Milwaukee, but when they were at home with their father, Travis wrote, “young Harold spent evenings looking out of his second-floor bedroom window” watching white patrons in fancy dress get out of their limousines to enter the Grand Terrace ballroom on the other side of the broad boulevard.
In 1933, Roy Washington and his sons moved to another apartment, a mile away on Vincennes Avenue, according to Travis’ book.
Credit: Coldwell Banker Realty
The house is now owned by a family trust based in Skokie, according to the Cook County clerk’s and treasurer’s offices. No phone or email information is available for the trust, and Edwards declined to provide a connection. She said the present owners are third-generation owners, and that the property has been in the family’s hands for about 50 years.
Edwards said she does not know how long the building has been unoccupied.
Preserved in part by disuse are the marble floor in the foyer, the ornate wood trim of the staircase (although caution tape prevents use of the stairs), glass-doored bookcases that flank the living room’s pillared fireplace, and leaded glass doors in the dining room’s china cabinet.
Also in the dining room, a mural of trees covers the walls above the wainscoting, and original gold tile in the fireplace mantel is all intact.
Credit: Coldwell Banker Realty
“There’s so much potential in there,” Edwards said.
Other rooms have fireplaces, doors, cabinets and other original wood trim but with peeling walls and torn-up floors.
There are two second-floor front rooms that might be the one Travis describes a young Harold peering out from — a very small one and a far larger one with a bay of three windows, a fireplace and built-in dresser drawers.
The larger of the two rooms is the last photo below this story.
Credit: Coldwell Banker Realty
By Dennis Rodkin
Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.