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St. Thomas Church and Convent

20th-century Roman Catholic church buildings in the United StatesChicago building and structure stubsChurches on the National Register of Historic Places in IllinoisCook County, Illinois Registered Historic Place stubsHyde Park, Chicago
Illinois religious building and structure stubsMidwestern United States church stubsProperties of religious function on the National Register of Historic Places in ChicagoRoman Catholic churches completed in 1919Roman Catholic churches in Chicago
20111110 St. Thomas Church and Convent
20111110 St. Thomas Church and Convent

St. Thomas the Apostle Church is a historic site at 5472 S. Kimbark Avenue in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois, at 55th Street. A Roman Catholic church of the Archdiocese of Chicago, it was built in 1922 and opened in 1925 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. It was designed by Barry Byrne, who was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and incorporated elements from Wright's Prairie School of design and from the modernist movement. Byrne had previously built the convent at St. Thomas Apostle in 1919. It was built during a period of liturgical renewal that was just reaching the U.S. It is often cited as anticipating the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council by some 40 years due to its projecting altar and lack of interior columns.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article St. Thomas Church and Convent (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

St. Thomas Church and Convent
South Kimbark Avenue, Chicago

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Latitude Longitude
N 41.795555555556 ° E -87.595277777778 °
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South Kimbark Avenue
60637 Chicago
Illinois, United States
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20111110 St. Thomas Church and Convent
20111110 St. Thomas Church and Convent
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Hyde Park–Kenwood Historic District
Hyde Park–Kenwood Historic District

Hyde Park–Kenwood Historic District is the name of the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) district on the South Side of Chicago that includes parts of the Hyde Park and Kenwood community areas of Chicago, Illinois. The northern part of this district overlaps with the officially designated Chicago Landmark Kenwood District. This northern part of the Hyde Park–Kenwood Historic District contains the Chicago home of Barack Obama. The entire district was added to the NRHP on February 14, 1979, and expanded on August 16, 1984, and May 16, 1986. The district is bounded to the north, south, east and west, respectively by 47th Street, 59th Street, Lake Park Avenue and Cottage Groves Avenue. Despite the large amount of property associated with the University of Chicago, the Hyde Park–Kenwood Historic District is mostly residential. The district is considered to be significant for its architecture and education.Among the Hyde Park–Kenwood Historic District's contributing properties are numerous NRHP listings in Hyde Park: Frank R. Lillie House, Isidore H. Heller House, Amos Jerome Snell Hall and Charles Hitchcock Hall, Arthur H. Compton House, Chicago Pile-1, St. Thomas Church and Convent, Frederick C. Robie House, George Herbert Jones Laboratory and Robert A. Millikan House. No NRHP listings from Kenwood are within the historic districts boundaries. The NRHP-listed University Apartments are also within the district. Additionally, Chicago Pile-1 and Robie House, which are in the district, are two of the four Chicago Registered Historic Places from the original October 15, 1966 NRHP list.

First Unitarian Church of Chicago
First Unitarian Church of Chicago

The First Unitarian Church of Chicago is a Unitarian Universalist ("UU") church in Chicago, Illinois. Unitarians do not have a common creed and include people with a wide variety of personal beliefs, and include atheists, agnostics, deists, monotheists, pantheists, polytheists, pagans, as well as other belief systems.One of the oldest churches in Chicago, First Unitarian Chicago was founded July 29, 1836 and is currently located at 5650 S. Woodlawn Avenue. Its founding was in part the result of a small group of Chicago Unitarians with the minister Charles Follen. Its first building was constructed in 1841 on what is now the site of the Picasso statue in Daley Plaza. The building, twice enlarged before it burned down, held the first church bell in Chicago placed there in January 1845.In June 1862 the building was lost to fire, the congregation temporarily worshiped in St. Paul's Universalist Church until the new church building was completed and the first service was help November 22, 1863.In 1873 a new church building was constructed at the corner of 23rd and Michigan. And in 1897 a mission chapel to the University of Chicago was built at 57th and Woodlawn in Hyde Park, Chicago. In 1909, the 23rd ave building was sold and the congregation moved to the university chapel. A new edifice was built in 1925 in an English perpendicular Gothic style, a gift of church member and Illinois US Representative Morton D. Hull whose ashes now rest in the crypt below the building. A crypt for cinerary urns (a Columbarium) below the nave was the first crypt for ashes in the city. It was designed intentionally to serve the neighborhood and city, not just members of the church. The 1931 building had a belltower featuring multiple floors, on top of which was added a steeple. The steeple was repaired in the 1990s, and removed in 2002 due to failing structure. This was not the first time the tower of a church building had incurred a cost to the society. After the Church of the Messiah was built in 1864, the tower on that building settled. As a result, it had to be taken down and entirely rebuilt along with the front of the church at a cost of $15,000.In 1956, the Chicago Children's Choir was founded in the church by assistant minister Christopher Moore.