So long, St. Paschal: Oak Brook friary starts to come down

Good bones weren't enough to keep the former St. Paschal friary standing.

The three-story, 100,000-square-foot mammoth near 31st Street and Route 83 in Oak Brook was an architecturally lauded structure known for its castle-like facade and ornate design. In recent years, it had gained notoriety as the battleground for the DuPage Housing Authority that wanted to turn it into a low-income senior living facility and Oak Brook officials who refused to allow it.

Today, it's slowly being reduced to rubble.

Workers began chipping away at the long-abandoned Catholic priests' residence on Friday. A towering crane with a massive mechanical claw was busy shredding apart a nearby garage as recyclable materials were stripped out of the main building and left in sorted piles for transport elsewhere.

With every tug and rip, it becomes more and more apparent why the building is being razed. Black mold and other signs of rot from nearly two decades of neglect have taken their toll. Like a cancerous tumor left to fester, the friary degenerated from the inside out.

The property is still owned by the DuPage County Forest Preserve District, which has agreed to sell the 6.2-acre parcel to the housing authority for roughly $300,000. At one time, both agencies hoped to salvage the structure.

"Through extended litigation with Oak Brook, the building kept deteriorating," said Justin Frederick, the forest preserve's director of land management.

The housing authority first approached the forest preserve about selling the property in 1999. An agreement was struck, but when plans were submitted to Oak Brook in 2002, they were denied. The housing authority and forest preserve sued Oak Brook, and after a series of convoluted legal wranglings, a federal judge in 2008 ordered Oak Brook to grant permits and licenses to make the 50-unit facility a reality.

By then it was too late, said John Day, president of the housing authority.

"In reality it would have been nice to do something with the structure, but with the roof and other things in there, more and more costs became associated with it," he said.

Tearing it down doesn't come cheap either. The forest preserve set aside $700,000 for the demolition work, and the housing authority will have to pay for that if it ever takes custody of the property. The process is expected to take months.

Oak Brook officials said they are not aware of any plans to build on the site once the friary is demolished.

Day said he has had discussions about designs for a new facility at the site, but nothing formal. Housing authority officials believe the judge's ruling to let the agency build a 50-unit facility still stands.

"We've done some rough things, but nothing highly detailed," he said. "No money has changed hands yet."

Frederick said the cost of the demolition was offset somewhat by the contractor's ability to salvage some of the materials inside and outside the structure.

In the meantime, once the building is gone, the forest preserve will plant native seed on the topsoil, making it a natural area adjacent to a forest preserve dog park and the Mayslake Forest Preserve/Peabody Estate property it was connected to.

The whole property used to be owned by coal magnate Francis Peabody, who died shortly after his stately mansion was constructed on the sprawling property. The family sold the land in the 1920s to an order of Franciscan priests who built a chapel and the friary and used the house as a retreat center until interest waned. The priests eventually sold the entire property to the forest preserve in the early 1990s as part of a voter-approved $18 million borrowing plan. The district is still renovating Peabody's former mansion through grants and donations. That building is used for a variety of educational and social functions.

Day said the decision to demolish the former friary was difficult but necessary.

"It's truly a unique structure," he said. "That's a building that predates the village of Oak Brook."