In the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s far west side, Wight’s team used sledgehammers to kick off a major performing arts center renovation project for client Catalyst Circle Rock. The K-8 charter school partners with local nonprofit organizations, including the Chicago Children’s Choir and Ravinia Festival, to provide a fine arts enrichment program for students. Wight’s assignment is to transform an auditorium that has been mothballed since 1973 into the new Kehrein Center for The Arts. The new space will seat 1,000 for performances by student groups, including the largest African American elementary school orchestra in the U.S. The building is slated for completion in late 2018.

On Chicago’s south side, Wight recently joined with students and officials at De La Salle Institute to mark the launch of an athletic field renovation project. Located three blocks from U.S. Cellular Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, De La Salle Institute is operated by the Archdiocese of Chicago. Using its integrated Design & Delivery model, Wight will design and provide construction management services to create a multipurpose turf field and spectator seating for this historic school. The project is scheduled for completion in August 2018.

Another groundbreaking took place for an addition at Downers Grove Grade School District 58’s Lester School in Chicago’s western suburbs. The new space will form three classrooms, ADA-compliant bathroom and a flexible resource space at the elementary school, which has been at capacity for several years. The project is slated for completion in time for the 2018-2019 school year.

The fourth project getting started is a renovation of Hadley Junior High School, also in Chicago’s western suburbs. This revamp for Glen Ellyn Elementary District 41 will provide highly needed additional classroom space for music programs and flexible learning spaces. The district has accommodated overflow by using portable classrooms for many years. The expanded school will open its doors to students for the 2019-2020 school year.

Launched in 1939, Chicago-based Wight & Company is a pioneer of integrated design and delivery, and one of America’s most-established planning, architecture, engineering, construction, and transportation and infrastructure services firms.

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And by “mass,” that’s in the ballpark (or should that be “memorial” park?) of 38,000 bodies interred on the grounds between 1855 and 1912, according to Curbed. To quote young Carol Anne from the movie, “They’re here!” But developers don’t know exactly where within the site’s 320 acres.

Bodies were uncovered by developers as recently as 1989 when workers found remains when laying pipe for a condominium complex. Now, the prospect of unearthing additional deceased is a grim reality facing the proposed $70 million high school project for the Dunning community on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

The proposed three-story brick building would accommodate about 1,100 students and alleviate overcrowding at nearby Taft High School. As for when a student body will replace the dead bodies on the property, milestones are still being discussed. At a presentation in October 2017, Chicago Public Schools demographics director Jim Dispensa alluded to the “archeological concerns” that plague the project and how the city might manage them.

The city’s Public Building Commission dug trenches through the site of the school, studied archeologists’ maps and used radar technology to search for human remains, according to spokesman Bryant Payne. They also drew up a five-page list of “archaeological protocols,” instructing workers remove and relocate any remains they find. — Curbed

Fortunately, the Northwest Chicago Historical Society unearthed a map drawn in the 1990s by a Chicago-Read Mental Hospital administrator that marks where human remains are located, which should prove a boon to workers tasked with removing the bodies. Whether or not the dead can be identified is another story.

Historian Mounted Massive Dunning Identification Project

Barry Fleig, a former cemetery chairman of the Chicago Genealogical Society, spearheaded efforts to identify Dunning’s buried and released a database in 2014, reported DNAInfo, a Chicago news service. As gallant as the attempt was painstaking, Fleig’s efforts only yielded a database of 8,000 names at the time of that report, though the project has continued. Records show that by 1890, Cook County was burying about a thousand bodies on the site every year, but matching death certificates to the deceased is an onerous prospect.

“These are the people who fell through the cracks,” Fleig told the Chicago Tribune when the database was first made available. “These poor people were forgotten, but they don’t have to be forgotten anymore.”

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Maple School, a middle school in the Northbrook/Glenview School District 30 (comprised of three schools in the Northbrook, Ill., and Glenview, Ill., suburbs of Chicago) was built in 1949. For context, Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” was published the same year Maple School opened.

Fortunately, citizens in the district approved a referendum last year to design a modern middle school to replace the aging facility, which currently accommodates approximately 410 students. Maple School will receive a contemporary makeover with construction scheduled to begin next month. 

A new $40.6 million facility will be built on the former athletic fields east of the existing school and will replace the original structure. The antiquated school was overdue for a refresh and “meeting the needs of 21st century education,” Superintendent Brian Wegley opined to the Chicago Tribune. 

The school’s revamped design was completed in December 2017, and the project went out to bid in late January 2018. Construction manager Nicholas & Associates, Inc., a full-service contractor based in Mt. Prospect, Ill., put together a construction package for approval at the district’s upcoming Board of Education last week. The plan is for the new facility to be completed in June 2019, with plenty of time to prep for the 2019-2020 school year.

Key to the new design is an emphasis on STEM education modalities with three labs (with gas and water hookups) available to the sixth, seventh and eighth grades. The new school will also have a “cafetorium,” a portmanteau that seems to combine “cafeteria” and “auditorium.” The structure will be available for dining as well as assemblies that can host the entire student body.

A groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for early April.

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