Austin Coming Together, a West Side community organization, announced Wednesday that it purchased the J.J. Walser House at 42 N. Central Ave., a Prairie Style home Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1903 for the Austin real estate developer for whom the house is named.
The house is the only single-family home Wright designed on Chicago’s West Side. It was designated a Chicago city landmark in 1984 but had fallen into severe disrepair in the years since. The property became subject to foreclosure proceedings after its longtime owner died in 2019, and preservation groups had listed it among the city’s most endangered buildings.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the house sold for $125,000. The nonprofit is now planning a restoration project that officials said is expected to cost millions of dollars.
“The J.J. Walser House is part of Austin’s story, and we believe its next chapter should be shaped by the people who call this community home,” Darnell Shields, executive director of Austin Coming Together, said in a statement.
MSI previously reported that Canada launched a crowd-funded restoration of its long-vacant prime ministerial residence, 24 Sussex Drive, a separate instance of efforts to rescue historically significant but deteriorated buildings through community-led preservation efforts.
The house, among several Wright-designed homes in the Chicago area, had sat vacant and deteriorating for years. Preservation advocates had expressed concern that without intervention the structure could be lost entirely. The building was included on Landmark Illinois’s 2025 list of most endangered historic sites in the state.
Austin Coming Together, a community-based nonprofit that works on economic development, education, and housing issues in the Austin neighborhood, has not yet announced a timeline for the restoration work or disclosed how it plans to raise the full restoration budget.