On Central Avenue on Chicago's West Side, stands a house with a damaged roof and broken windows. From the sidewalk, it could pass for one of the many tired buildings in the Austin neighborhood. Inside, a brick fireplace has stood for more than 120 years. Its bricks were made in the early 1900s, and bricks like these are very hard to find today. The architect was Frank Lloyd Wright.
In Turkish, we have one word for that part of a home: "ocak." It means the hearth, the place where the fire is kept. It also means the family itself, a line that continues from one generation to the next. When we say someone's ocak is still smoking, we mean the house is alive, and someone is still there to tend the fire. Reading about the J.J. Walser House this summer, I could not stop thinking about that word.
Horizontal lines
Wright designed the house in 1903 for J.J. Walser. It is one of his first Prairie-style homes, and experts count it among the finest examples of the style. The Prairie style was Wright's answer to the tall, boxed-in Victorian houses of his time. He brought the roofs down low, pushed the eaves out past the walls and let one room flow into the next. Darnell Shields, who now leads the effort to restore the house, put it simply during a tour with WTTW News: stand at one end and you can see through the living room and the dining room all the way to the backyard. In 1903, that was close to a revolution.
As an engineer, I am drawn to that horizontal line. Wright's houses make no attempt to rise above the land. They lie down on it, as if they intend to stay. The hearth sits at the center, and the rest of the house gathers around it.
The Walser House is one of only five surviving standalone Wright homes within Chicago's city limits, and the only Wright-designed single-family home on the West Side. The city named it a landmark in 1984, and it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Titles like these protect a building on paper. They do nothing for a leaking roof.
When fire goes out
For more than half a century, the house stayed with one family. Anne Teague, its longtime owner, died in 2019, and the house slid into foreclosure and years of uncertainty. In January, Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored company that backs home mortgages, bought it at a foreclosure sale, and in April it passed to a Chicago nonprofit that works to save distressed properties. By then, Landmarks Illinois had already placed it on its 2025 list of the 10 most endangered historic places in the state.
This is how many old houses die. They rarely fall in one night. Paperwork and unpaid bills pile up, while rain pouring through a broken window wears them down over years. Shields told the Chicago Tribune that the house risked being torn down, or ending up with a private investor who had no interest in what the community wanted for that stretch of Central Avenue.
In June, a local nonprofit called Austin Coming Together bought the house. The recorded price was $125,000 (TL 6.17 million), but a grant from the city's Troubled Buildings Initiative meant the group paid only about $65,000. A building by an architect whom people cross oceans to see changed hands for roughly what a family might spend on a few years of rent in Chicago.
Neighborhood claims its house
Shields grew up in Austin. For him, the house is an investment in the neighborhood that raised him. Directly across the street stands the former Robert Emmet Elementary School, which closed in 2013. Austin Coming Together, working with the Westside Health Authority, turned that building into the Aspire Center, a hub for job training, small business programs and community gatherings. Wright's house faces a school the neighborhood has already brought back once.
The road ahead is long. Keeping the house standing through the winter could cost between $275,000 and $575,000, and a full restoration is estimated at $2.5 million to $3.5 million. The group wants to decide the house's future together with residents, but the direction is clear: a gathering place more than a museum, with forums, seminars and programs that introduce local students to preservation, history and architecture.
When a WTTW reporter asked what he hoped residents would feel once the work was done, Shields did not hesitate. He wants someone from Austin to point at the house one day and say, "Hey, that's in my neighborhood. I live on that block." In his telling, people should come from all over the world to see it.
I have written before about belonging in American cities. That one sentence says in a few words what I have spent whole columns trying to explain. Housing, jobs and transit keep a neighborhood alive. It also needs places people can point to and call their own.
The volunteers of Oak Park
Just across Austin Boulevard, in the village of Oak Park, stand Wright's own home and studio. On Sept. 17, about 20 people began an eight-week training there to become volunteer interpreters for the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, leading visitors through the house and telling them about Wright.
Among them was Marie Olmos, who grew up in Belgium among museums and historic buildings. When she moved to Chicago, she found that architecture was the most interesting thing about her new city. Looking for new ways to spend her time, she went back to that old passion and volunteered at an open house, where one thing led to another.
Reading her story, I recognized something of myself. Coming from another country, learning the history of a city and then telling it to others may be one of the most patient ways of belonging to a place. Volunteers have given tours here since 1974, and Conor Jansen, who coordinates them for the Trust, says both guides and guests come from every walk of life: architects, interior designers and people who simply love Chicago history.
3 houses, 1 city
More than 400 of Wright's buildings still stand across 35 states. Put three of the Chicago-area ones side by side and a pattern appears. The home and studio in Oak Park are a living museum, full of trained guides and busy tours. The Robie House in Hyde Park is among the most famous modern houses in the world. The Walser House in Austin came from the same hand in the same era, yet it spent years close to being forgotten. One signature, three very different fates.
Left to itself, heritage tends to follow money and attention. What makes the Austin story worth telling is that a neighborhood is trying to change that pattern by its own decision. The neighborhood did not wait for someone else to save its Wright house. It bought the house and chose to light the fire itself.
Reading these stories, I kept thinking of the Ottoman konaks of Anatolia. In Safranbolu and Göynük, careful restoration has brought many of them back to life. Across the rest of Anatolia, thousands more are still waiting for someone to light their hearth again. In Türkiye, we often treat restoration as the work of the state or the municipality. When the job is done, the house becomes a museum, and sometimes its door closes again. Austin is asking a different question: once the house is standing, who will sit by the hearth?
Austin has the bricks. From what I have read, it also has the people to tend the fire. A house becomes a home again when people gather around it. In Turkish, we would say its ocak is smoking once more.