Part of Bronzeville’s former Wabash YMCA, a historic building known as the birthplace of Black History Month, is being restored thanks to a grant from a federal African American civil rights program.
The $436,375 grant will go to the Renaissance Collaborative, a community-based social services organization headquartered in the former Wabash YMCA. The collaborative was founded in 1992 to save the landmark from being demolished. The grant comes from the Historic Preservation Fund, a federal grant program administered by the National Park Service.
The grant will pay to restore a 1936 mural in the building titled “Mind, Body, Spirit,” painted by Harlem Renaissance artist William Edouard Scott; renovate a gym used by the Harlem Globetrotters; refurbish a pool where countless African Americans learned to swim; and revamp meeting rooms throughout the building.
The renovation is set to begin in August and will take about three months to complete, said Donnie Brown, a development consultant with the Renaissance Collaborative. Most of the recreational areas of the building will remain open, but some areas will be closed during the renovation.
Opened in 1913, the Wabash YMCA offered a sense of hope and community to thousands of Black men who moved to Chicago from the South in search of economic opportunities during the Great Migration, said Lionel Kimble, a history and Africana studies professor at Chicago State University.
“When folks would get off the trains downtown, one of the first places they would come was to the Wabash Y,” Kimble said.
During the first half of the 20th century, the building quickly became a hub of progress and empowerment, serving as a place where African Americans could find jobs and housing while organizing for civil rights and racial justice, Kimble said.
In 1926, historian and activist Carter G. Woodson announced the first Negro History Week to be held on the second week of February at the Wabash YMCA, according to Kimble. The week served as a precursor for Black History Month that would become nationally recognized about 50 years later.
The historical importance of the building as a center for the Black community and its connection to the Great Migration has led to its recognition as a historic landmark.
When the Renaissance Collaborative gained ownership of the building in 1992, staff sought to convert it to housing for the homeless and a space for community programs. After about a decade of restoration projects costing about $11 million, the building reopened in 2000 and was split into a residential section and a recreational section with separate entrances.
The residential section, known as Renaissance Apartments, consists of 101 units of affordable housing and support services for adults who were previously homeless.
Though the federal grant focuses on the recreational portion of the building, Brown said renovation of the residential section of the building will take place as part of a federal program aimed at preserving affordability of the apartments for another 15 years.
The residential renovations will take about a year, but the building will continue to house people during the projects, Brown said.
The announcement of the federal grant comes as some internal changes are happening at the Renaissance Collaborative. The organization on Friday welcomed Oji Eggleston as its new executive director after the retirement of Patricia Abrams, the group’s founding executive director.
Eggleston said he looks forward to taking on the role and ensuring the next 30 years of the organization are as successful as the previous 30 years under Abrams.
“We’ve already started planning. We’ve identified potential partners and vendors to start taking on some of that work,” Eggleston said.
Kimble said he’s excited about the renovations and is grateful for the many Black activists who gathered in the building throughout the decades and worked to advance civil rights.
“We’ll continue to walk in the footsteps of those individuals who did so much for us as Black people and as Black scholars and as a Black community,” Kimble said. “I think it’s important that our children can use some of these things as well.”
