Up Top Building at Altgeld Gardens, Chicago
Once the shopping and organizing hub of Altgeld Gardens, the long-vacant Up Top Building is planned for restoration and expansion by By...
Watchlist Blog
Altgeld Gardens’ Up Top Building advances as a youth center
Plan Commission approval moves a long-vacant Keck & Keck commercial building toward a $23.3 million after-school center rooted in Altgeld Gardens' architectural and organizing history.
June 29, 2026
Up Top Building at Altgeld Gardens, Chicago
Updated 2026
The Up Top Building reuse preserves its modernist shell and community memorial passage while adding a gym and youth programming to the last vacant building in Altgeld Gardens.
The Up Top Building at Altgeld Gardens has moved closer to active community use. Chicago's Plan Commission approved a roughly $23.3 million conversion that would restore the historic commercial building as an after-school center for By The Hand Club For Kids.
The project carries more than a vacant-building question. The Keck & Keck structure was a neighborhood hub, stands within a foundational environmental-justice landscape, and contains a passage residents use as a memorial for victims of gun violence.
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The reuse must preserve both a modernist building and the meanings residents placed inside it.
What The Commission Approved
Present Future Architects' plan restores the two connected structures, reopens storefront windows, encloses the passage as a memorial lobby, and adds a double-height gym.
By The Hand Club For Kids would operate the center, returning youth services and daily activity to a building that once anchored commerce within Altgeld Gardens.
Why The Memorial Changes The Design
The passage is not empty circulation space. Residents transformed it into a memorial, so the approved project must carry community memory through construction rather than treating preservation as facade work alone.
The building's environmental-justice history creates a similar obligation. New programming should acknowledge the organizing associated with Hazel Johnson and the industrial conditions surrounding the community.
What To Watch Next
City Council action, final financing, construction contracts, and a detailed memorial plan are the next milestones.
The finished project should be judged by resident access, long-term operating support, preservation of the Keck & Keck form, and whether community history remains visible inside the new institution.