NEW DELUXE TRANSIENT ROOMS WITH FREE ADULT MOVIES ... that's what the three-story-tall painted sign promised. It's
faded and peeling now, but the sign's still there, though the
Viceroy Hotel has been closed for nearly a decade.
Long a notorious flophouse and neighborhood locus of prostitution and drug-dealing in the
West Loop section of Chicago's
Near West Side, the Viceroy for decades was the absolute last resort for the down-on-their-luck, available in either twelve-hour or week-long increments. Chicago Journal reporter Mandy Burrell described it as "the most depressing place she'd ever been" when she
very nearly stayed the night there in 2002.
It was the site, too, of
the second murder allegedly committed by
Donald Lang, a "deaf mute who was never taught to read or write or to use the sign language and was unable to communicate with anyone in any language." Charges against him for the first murder had been dismissed in large part
due to uncertainty whether he was competent to stand trial. The
1972 conviction for the second murder was
struck down due to
similar uncertainty, but with the caveat that he was to be
periodically retested to see if he
had become mentally
competent to stand trial. Until then, he would be confined (
for the most part) in a state mental facility. Donald Lang's case would be chronicled in
Dummy, a 1974 book by
Ernest Tidyman (better known for the
John Shaft novels), which was subsequently adapted into a
1979 CBS TV movie starring
LeVar Burton and Paul Sorvino as Lang and his (also deaf) attorney,
Lowell Myers.
A sad, hopeless place by the end of its existence as the Viceroy, but the building didn't start this way, of course.
Built in 1929 as the
Union Park Hotel, touted at the time as a boldly "modernistic" building, its
facade features
intricate brightly colored
terra-cotta in
bold and
colorful geometric
patterns. It's an example of the
"apartment hotel", a form of residential building built in the Roaring Twenties to accommodate single professionals or childless couples who wanted better accommodations than a boarding house or a tenement flat, but couldn't afford or didn't want the expense of a house. These buildings featured small apartments (often furnished with space-saving innovations like the
Murphy Bed) along with some of the services one might expect from a hotel (maid service, bellboy service, porters for groceries or garbage, etc).
One of the Union Park's
first residents was a then-unknown
Gene Autry, who'd just moved to Chicago to
work for WLS on their
National Barn Dance program. Not everyone at the Union Park was as wholesome as Gene Autry, of course, and even in the early, pre-Viceroy days, the Union Park wasn't
free from
scandal.
The Union Park was renamed the Viceroy in 1963, a name change perhaps concomitant with the decline in the hotel's fortunes. At this point many of the factors leading to the decline of the area around it were already in play (the
devastation to
neighborhoods caused by the
construction of the Congress
Expressway a few blocks south,
for example).
The Viceroy finally closed forty years later in 2003. As the neighborhood around it
began to be
redeveloped, the city of Chicago
bought the Viceroy in 2006 for 5.1 million dollars to preserve that space for eventual affordable housing in the future. Despite the building being named a
Chicago landmark (
incredibly comprehensive landmark commission report on the building (PDF)) and being placed on the
National Registry of Historic Places, it took
till last year for
these plans to really get
off the
ground.
The architects for the renovation
describe the project as a "6-story, 90-unit affordable residential and supportive services project and a historic and green rehabilitation." One floor
will be reserved for the women of
Grace House, a halfway house providing support and counseling for women exiting the Illinois prison system.
posted by LMGM at 3:00 AM on February 14 [1 favorite]