What is the Mysterious School-like Building at 2525 Church Street?
What is the Mysterious School-like Building at 2525 Church Street?
There is not a public school at this location, and never was.
I have received multiple emails about this subject and recently a reader shared a link from the Evanston Nextdoor page.1 Most of them are along the lines of, “Why is District 65 building a new school in the fifth ward when they just built one and nobody uses it?! How wasteful!” - This is absolutely false.
The property referenced is at 2525 Church Street. Until 2016, this property was a very small school and then an adult service program, operated privately by Shore Services., not District 65. According to their history page, the school was opened in 1960;
Shore School was constructed and opened three classrooms and a workshop for 40 youngsters, which included administrative offices for the North Shore Association for Retarded Children at 2525 Church Street in Evanston.
By 2016, Shore had no more use for the building at that location.
In July 2016, the Lois Lloyd Adult Services Program2 moved to its new home on the first floor of the Administration Center in Skokie after a complete gut renovation.
At some point between 2016-2018, ownership of the property transferred to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD). It’s not clear if it was originally owned by the MWRD and leased to Shore or if Shore sold it to them and I don’t think it matters.
Enter the City of Evanston
In 2017, the City of Evanston signed an agreement to supply water to Morton Grove and Niles and needed additional pump facilities.
The pressure that City's Water Plant produces is insufficient to force water to travel through a water main the full distance to these Villages. A water pump station is needed to receive the water and re-pump out at a higher pressure to these communities.
In January 2018 the local alderman, Robin Rue Simmons, moved quickly to promote the project and according to the Roundtable, successfully requested City Council bypass the normal approval process.
Alderman Robin Rue Simmons, whose Fifth Ward includes the McCormick-Church site, asked for suspension of the rules so the matter could be voted on immediately. Under normal rules, an ordinance requires a reading at one meeting then debate and vote at the next. Council regularly suspends those rules, however, to read and vote on an ordinance at a single meeting. Suspension of the rules requires the unanimous vote of Council, and aldermen voted 7-0 to suspend the rules to approve the lease.
The City of Evanston quickly signed the lease with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District for $10 per year in January 2018. They had to tear down the existing building and build their own facilities on the site but not much else, the MWRD had stipulations on how the land could be used, presumably because of the location on the canal.
During this period, there were some discussions of having a splash pad and soccer fields at the location, which resulted in one of the greatest architectural renderings I have ever seen.
Unsurprisingly, the neighbors were unhappy that the Council bypassed all the regular approval processes and by February 2018, neighbors were showing up to meetings pissed.
Residents rose up in opposition to the plans at the Feb. 26 City Council meeting and again at the Feb. 28 Design and Project Review (DAPR) meeting. Many complained about lack of transparency and public notice.
…
Several others criticized the lack of notice. One resident said she did not receive notice until three weeks prior to the meeting. Another said notice at a ward meeting was not sufficient. “A ward meeting is not public notice,” said Carolyn Murray at the Feb. 28 meeting.
The Roundtable documented some other meetings with (rightfully, I would say) unhappy neighbors;
The rowdy crowd shouted him down, with one resident yelling, “Put it in your neighborhood.”
“I’ll take one in my neighborhood,” said Mr. Stein, somewhat drowned out by shouts of “power to the people,” a phrase heard from the crowd repeatedly over the course of the evening.
By March 2018, the matter passed through City Council unopposed and by August 2018, the school building on the site was demolished and a pump house was constructed. Currently at the location (2525 Church St) is a pumping station that looks a like a small school and a gravel parking lot. The splash pad was never completed - the land remains in a 50 year lease with the City of Evanston, not any public school system.
At the end of 2023, the City did engage in a process with a consultant to explore expanding Beck Park onto this property. You can read some of the meeting notes here. The new plans do include a splash pad / water feature at this location, along with the extension of Beck Park to Church Street.
I hesitate to even reference this - I have very strong feelings about Nextdoor as a source of rumors, innuendo, and racism.
They renamed Shore School at 2525 Church Street to the Lois Lloyd Center, in honor of Shore’s founder and inspiration in 2001.