On Sundays, when the temperature is above freezing, you can hear bright songs echoing through the air for several blocks around 87th Street and S. Burley Avenue in South Chicago.
This is because in the parking lot next to a desert velodrome, a motorcycle trail, up to 80 cars filled with faithful from Pilgrim Baptist Church in South Chicago gather. A few months break for the worst of winter in Chicago.
During these services, preachers and singers take turns in the pulpit at the back of a truck, and congregation members sit in their cars and honk their horns instead of shouting “hallelujah. “
And it all resonates in the neighborhood, the COVID-19 era of church bells ringing before worship.
Next to the church parking lot is a sloping oval on a 544-foot-long motorcycle path. The South Chicago Velodrome was built in 2011 and closed five years later. The track is chipped and cracked. The undergrowth fills much of the inner box and the parking lot around it is damaged and misered.
This is the moment when the site has been abandoned. The motorcycle trail built on a small part of the former US Steel South Works, a 430-acre scar on the southeast side of town. At its peak, giant metal generators hired 20,000 people. ; closed 1992 for good.
The gigantic lakeside plot had been empty for two decades when, in 2011, developer McCaffery Interests implemented plans to make South Lake Shore Drive larger in two miles through assets and create a new expanding community called Lakeside. The developer organized a three-day music with Dave Matthews Band on the assets in July 2011.
Also that year, an entrepreneur and motorcycle racer named Emanuele Bianchi led an organization that sought to build a motorcycle event campus on a small component of the South Works field. The $40 million to $45 million plan once included a covered velodrome and other tracks. for mountain biking and BMX competition.
But five years later, all that had been built on the site was the outdoor velodrome, and never enough cash was raised. McCaffery’s progression plan was also decided for the larger site, as was the next plan. closed in 2016, had remained empty and unused for years.
THEN COVID-19 arrested the devotees and the Reverend Corwin Lasenthrough, pastor of the Baptist Church of Pilgrims, arranged with the owners of the velodrome site to organize the devotees through the car.
The congregation is 104 years old. In the 1980 film Blues Brothers, Triple Rock Baptist Church, presided over by James Brown as the Reverend Cleophus James, modeled after his sanctuary. With those many years in South Chicago, Pilgrim Baptist has survived many adjustments in the neighborhood.
“The motorcycle trail was not crossed or for others in the community,” Lasenthrough said, adding that he felt “blessed” to use it to allow the church to meet safely.
Dennis Rodkin is a real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and Reset for the donor “What’s That Building?”.