A historic 125-year-old home in Riverside Lawn, described by former owner Judy Koessel as “waiting to be saved,” burned down early Thursday morning.
But the house was one of nearly two dozen located in a floodplain, and in 2016 the Cook County Land Bank Authority slated it for demolition. The land bank was required to conduct an architectural survey before destroying the homes, and Koessel’s home, at 3744 Stanley Ave., was determined to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. At one point a county official even told Koessel in an e-mail that the home could be used as a “Forest Preserve house or office.” The demolition was put on hold.
“We did a cost-benefit analysis of relocation and determined it wasn’t feasible with the cost of land and moving,” he said.
(Story continues below.)
Because the house wasn’t receiving electricity, the pumps Koessel used to keep it from flooding weren’t running.
“They’d say, ‘Judy, it gets rocking and rolling in that house so crazy sometimes that we’re, like, afraid to live [here] anymore,’ so I wanted it torn down so that these people, my neighbors, could feel safe again,” she said.
