On Feb. 28, the last orders of crisply pressed dress shirts passed through the doors of 79th Street’s iconic Pride Cleaners. After nearly 70 years cleaning South Siders’ uniforms, sweaters and suits from a building straight out of the futurism of “The Jetsons,” Pride Cleaners closed its doors — leaving its future uncertain.
Pride Cleaners, located at 558 E. 79th St. and designed by architect Gerald Siegwart in 1959, was built during a period when midcentury modern design was used to capture the attention of consumers with shape and flash.
Yet Pride Cleaners, both the angled, parabolic building and the towering, colorful pylon sign out front, captured more than customers. This humble dry cleaner, a de jure Chicago landmark, has been photographed by professionals and amateurs alike; has appeared in books, films and music videos; and has become a keystone in conversations about the significance of Chicago’s South Side to this city’s architectural heritage.
The architecture of Pride Cleaners stands in stark contrast to Chatham’s bungalows and courtyard apartments and the classical revival ornamentation of 79th Street’s commercial thoroughfare. Yet when surveyors evaluated Chatham in the 1980s as a part of the fieldwork conducted for the Chicago Historic Resources Survey (CHRS), they were looking for these traditional architectural elements; midcentury modernism was largely considered too new of a style to be evaluated objectively, so Pride Cleaners was not included.
Nearly 40 years later, Chicago is still using the aging CHRS data as a bellwether for what it considers potentially historic, what is landmark-worthy and what buildings can be torn down or substantially altered as of right without Historic Preservation Commission staff review. The movement and field of preservation and architectural history has since broadened its purview to include the vernacular, the midcentury modern and even the postmodern, yet our data and policies in Chicago remain stuck in the past.
The striking Pride Cleaners sign, original to the site, spells out the word “Pride” in metal letters filled with light bulbs, placed within brightly colored pointed oval lollipops. A metal sign frame below is designed to illuminate the words “shirts laundered” and “cleaners” in neon.
While the city of Chicago amended its municipal code in 2023 to make it easier for property owners to keep and maintain vintage signs such as this one by bypassing select permits and approvals, the cost of maintenance is placed squarely on property owners. The Pride Cleaners sign has been dark for decades, likely the result of the labor of maintaining its complicated mechanics and the expense of repair and upkeep. Yet despite its lack of illumination, the sign remains remarkably intact — for now.
Despite its presence in Chicago pop culture, as an icon of South Side architecture, Pride Cleaners is not a Chicago landmark. Its absence from the Chicago Historic Resources Survey means that the iconic structure could be destroyed as of right — and the highly collectable sign could be dismantled and sold.
A change in use — including a business closure — is always a critical period in the life of a historic place. Preservationists know that swift action often makes a difference in terms of whether historic places have an opportunity for a future. South Siders know that in terms of historic places, there is a paradox between what is worthy of protection, recognition and resources there and what occurs on the North Side or in the Loop. On the South Side, places and spaces with incredible architectural and cultural history are often neglected by absentee owners, who then demolish them for the promise of a project that never materializes beyond creating yet another vacant lot.
In the case of Pride Cleaners, designating the building and the sign together as du jure Chicago landmarks right now, while the site is still intact, guarantees their future and incentivizes their preservation and maintenance — whether that future is adaptive reuse or another 70 years of cleaning shirts.
Elizabeth Blasius, a South Shore resident, is an architectural historian and writer and co-founder of Preservation Futures, an architecture firm focused on historic preservation. She writes a monthly column for MAS Context, a nonprofit architecture and design platform, and is vice chair of the DOCOMOMO US/Chicago board of directors.
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