The Trib has a story on Brian Palm, a photographer who’s volunteered to take photos of buildings that get put on the depressingly long Demolition Delay List. Among other sites, Palm snapped a photo of the old St. Boniface school before it went:

At any point in the 15 years since that was abandoned, the archdiocese could have sold that building (with its arches, high ceilings, and huge south facing windows) to a loft converter for millions. Instead, they let it decay and eventually condemned it, a fate that will likely befall the church as well.

Other pictured buildings include many single-family cottages in fast-gentrifying Lakeview or Bucktown, one handsome three-flat in Lincoln Park, and a neat flats-above-shops across from McCormick Place.

I suppose that the advantage that demolition delay has conferred upon us is that we can at least rush out to see what’s about to be lost before it is. Maybe someone will be adventurous enough to rip out some nice detailing from a condemned building.

(There are some misleading bits on Palm’s site, though; for instance, the First Unitarian Church on Woodlawn in Hyde Park was not demolished, but did lose the copper spire. Sometimes, the text at the demo-delay site isn’t all that clear on those details.)