The Humboldt Park neighborhood’s Division Street is one of the city’s liveliest thoroughfares, with restaurants, public art, and people celebrating the community’s Puerto Rican heritage.
You’d might expect the street’s vibe to come to a halt, or at least take a rest, at Division and Richmond, the site of a new community health center, a building type which tends to produce functional structures that fade into the background.
But that’s not the case — not at all — with the Humboldt Park Health Wellness Center, which opened in January at 2933 W. Division St.
The $30 million facility takes what you’d normally find in a neighborhood center like this — exercise spaces, an indoor running track, a swimming pool and a community room — and places them in a beautiful, ribbon-twirl of a building that seeks to honor the historic street and the community’s Puerto Rican flavor.
“The design was informed by history, culture, and a strong sense of place, making it more than just a structure,” said the center’s Colombian-born Chicago architect, Juan Gabriel Moreno, president and founder of JGMA Architects.
“It is a representation of community pride and resilience.”
One of the center’s most striking features is its cladding, composed of iridescent aluminum composite panels of greens and blues — a color scheme that nods to historic Humboldt Park right across Division Street and to the tones of the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea.
“We wanted to create something that is impressive, that represents the respect that we have for the community and for the people — regardless of what income level they are, or what ethnicity they are,” said José Sánchez, president and CEO of Humboldt Park Health, which owns and operates the center.
A ‘deeply connected’ building
The three-story building’s skin and curves grab the eye. But the facility is also glassy enough to reveal the functions and activities inside, adding a bit of kinetic visual energy to the structure.
For now, the building’s swoopy windows, though impressive-looking, are unadorned and unfinished. Moreno said perforated screens will go over the outside of the glass in upcoming months.
And it’s especially nice that the center is virtually all-glass at sidewalk level, giving the building a weightlessness while the movement behind glazing helps enliven Division Street.
I like this: The building’s corner main entrance is right by a Division Street bus stop. It’s a small gesture, but one that shows respect for those getting to the facility by public transit.
Moreno is particularly good at designing visually-arresting neighborhood health care facilities, as his Esperanza Health Center, built in 2020 at 4700 S. California Ave., alone attests.
The Humboldt Park Health organization is the current name for what was Norwegian American Hospital, a health care operator that’s been in the Humboldt Park neighborhood — and reflected the community’s former ethnic makeup — since 1894.
Sanchez changed the hospital’s name in 2021 after taking the helm of the institution and embraced the neighborhood’s Puerto Rican roots — and the center’s proximity to the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture, 3015 W. Division St., and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, 2532 W. Division.
“Our building is right in the middle,” he said. “So we felt we had the elements of bringing to this a level of synergy that makes some sense.”
Then there’s the 207-acre Humboldt Park — one of the city’s best — at Division Street and Sacramento Avenue, designed by William Le Baron Jenney in the 1870s, with later editions made by Jens Jensen.
Moreno said the center was designed to be “deeply connected” to the park and the boulevard system that connects that big green space to the city. And the connection isn’t just a philosophical one: In addition to facing the park, an outdoor rooftop terrace overlooks the historic greenspace.
Health center shows ‘the power of architecture’
The center was partially funded by a $19 million state grant and $2.5 million that came from the city during former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s tenure.
And the building’s good looks are more than skin-deep. Inside features colorful spaces that include a club for kids, lecture spaces and community rooms.
There are also murals on the first floor created by artists from the community. And the center’s grand, open lobby staircase is a pure showstopper — a spectre in blue that unspools from the top of the building down to the first floor.
Sanchez said the building is the first project in a master plan developed by Humboldt Park Health that will also include affordable housing in the neighborhood.
The aim of all this is to improve health outcomes for Humboldt Park residents, Sanchez said.
And let’s be honest: If it all works out, the efforts could act as a needed bulwark against the development and rising housing costs that threaten to drive out the Puerto Rican residents and culture of the Humboldt Park neighborhood — just as it happened in Lincoln Park in the 1960s and 1970s.
“One of the things that we wanted to do is to keep the legacy population of this community here and restrain the gentrification that has already taken place,” Sánchez said. “We don’t want to displace [that] community.”
Meanwhile, the center is a solid reminder of the merits of building good architecture in the city’s neighborhoods, not just downtown and in well-off communities.
And that a health care building would attempt to accomplish this — all the better, in my book.
“The project underscores the critical need for equitable health care access, especially in a community that was disproportionately impacted by the pandemic,” Moreno said. “Beyond health, this project is a statement about the power of architecture to uplift and transform communities.”
Lee Bey is the Sun-Times architecture critic and a member of the Editorial Board.
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