Thieves who pried loose bronze lettering from Unity Temple in Oak Park — possibly hoping to sell the metal as scrap — have done more than financial damage to the building, a beloved legacy of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
“It’s disgusting,” said Emily Roth, executive director of the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation. “When you look at the building, there are still shadows where the letters used to be. It just feels like a horrible violation of the building.”
The letters formed most of the dedication “For the Worship of God and the Service of Man,” which met guests twice, once at each of the two entrances to the concrete temple, built between 1906 and 1908 and designated a national historic landmark in 1971. Sometime late Tuesday or early Wednesday, someone stripped about 50 letters from the building at 875 Lake St., police said.
Gunny Harboe, president of Harboe Architects, which did some recent restoration work at the temple and has worked on other Wright buildings, said that anything in or on the temple is of historical importance.
“The building is extremely significant,” he said. “It’s very disheartening that somebody would do something like that.”
The initial police report said the loss of the letters is estimated at $80,000, Roth said, “but for the community, they are priceless.”
Roth said it’s unclear if the foundation will replace the letters with exact replicas in bronze or with ersatz copies made of a cheaper material that looks like bronze but is less likely to get stolen. The foundation just finished about $500,000 in restoration work to the south end of the building, she said, and “we are in the very early stages of figuring out what to do next” to repair the damage.
Harboe said he doubts there would be much profit in thieves selling the letters for scrap.
“The true value is not the material, that’s the irony of it,” Harboe said. “The only way it would have any real value is if you told someone it was from Frank Lloyd Wright, (but) then you would know where it was from.”
Carl Williams, owner of American Scrap Metal in Addison, said high-quality bronze sells for $2.50 to $2.60 a pound.
However, he said reputable scrapping companies have procedures to ensure they are not taking stolen materials. His company takes a driver’s license, vehicle registration and a picture of all materials to help police trace the seller of any ill-gotten materials. Something like century-old bronze letters would raise suspicion and cause the company to call police immediately, he said.
The industry has tightened up since a few years ago, when people would steal manhole covers to sell for scrap and some companies would take them with no questions asked, Williams said.
Now, “nobody wants to lose their business over a couple hundred dollars,” he said.
jjaworski@tribune.com
