Fire crews responded to a blaze at the long-vacant Paderewski Elementary School building in Little Village Saturday night, sending smoke rising from the roof of a structure that had sat empty for more than a decade and was only months away from a planned redevelopment into affordable housing. Chicago Fire Department crews arrived around 8 p.m. at 2221 S. Lawndale Ave. and worked to ventilate the building as smoke poured from its roof. No injuries were reported.
According to NBC Chicago, the cause of the fire remains under investigation, and local authorities have launched a probe into what sparked the blaze. Video posted to social media showed several fire trucks in the area, and the department's CFDMedia account posted about a still-and-box response in the 2200 block of South Lawndale Avenue. The report, written by NBC Chicago's Izzy Stroobandt, did not specify whether the fire was linked to electrical faults, vagrancy, or any other cause — that determination is still pending.
A School Building With a Complicated History
The fire arrives at a strange turning point for a building that has been empty since May 2013, when the Chicago Board of Education voted to shutter 50 neighborhood schools in what was, at the time, the largest single mass public school closure in United States history, according to WTTW. That round of closures was intended to help eliminate a $1 billion district deficit. Before it closed, more than 98% of Paderewski's students came from low-income families, and the school's principal told DNAinfo it was the only majority African-American school in its 26-school network. Its students were reassigned to Castellanos and Cardenas elementary schools.
In the years since, the empty building became a magnet for exactly the kind of decline that worries neighbors of shuttered schools citywide. Vandals repeatedly stripped the property of copper and electrical materials, Enlace Chicago reported in 2016, even as local aldermen tried to raise funds for its rehabilitation. The Chicago Board of Education placed Paderewski on its surplus real estate sales list back in August 2017, per WTTW, but it took years more for the district to actually secure a buyer.
A Redevelopment Plan Now in Limbo
The building's condition became a real obstacle in 2023, when community coalitions pushed to use the vacant school as temporary housing for newly arrived migrants. City officials rejected that plan after concluding the structure was “not rehabable,” South Side Weekly reported, opting instead for the former Wadsworth Elementary building in Woodlawn. Paderewski's struggles are far from unique — a 10-year retrospective investigation published by WBEZ and Chalkbeat in May 2023 found that more than half of the 46 school buildings closed in 2013 remained completely vacant a decade later.
Just this past January, the Chicago Board of Education approved a plan that finally seemed to chart a path forward for the site, voting to convey the property to developer P3 Markets LLC for $55,500. Board records show the property had been declared unnecessary for administrative or educational use, and P3 Markets beat out two competing proposals from local nonprofits. The company's plan calls for converting the shuttered school into an 86-unit affordable housing development alongside a standalone community center offering childcare services and youth entrepreneurial programs.
The accepted $55,500 bid stands well above an official appraisal commissioned by the Board, which valued the property disposition between $25,000 and $30,000, according to Board records. That appraisal was completed by KMD Valuation Group ahead of the bidding process. Deed restrictions attached to the sale legally bar the site from ever being repurposed as a K-12 charter school or used for the sale or manufacture of alcohol or tobacco products — the kind of restrictive covenant CPS regularly attaches to former school properties to prevent charter competition or non-community uses.
It remains unclear how Saturday's fire will affect the timeline for that redevelopment, or how extensive the damage to the building turned out to be. Those questions, like the cause of the fire itself, are still open as investigators continue their work.
