In 1984, Tomas Ramirez left his decidedly ethnic, blue-collar Pilsen neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side as the first of his family to go off to college. The son of an immigrant Mexican meat cutter, he did so in a rather spectacular fashion. He went to Yale University for an undergraduate degree, then to Harvard University Law School.
As soon as he arrived at Yale, Ramirez says, he was stung by something he never had experienced before. He says he felt patronized by some of the other freshmen. He was typecast as a Latino token, an affirmative-action kid who, if he worked hard and scrambled, might somehow survive the considerable academic rigor at Yale with a “C” average.
Despite the patronizing smiles, Ramirez was not at all intimidated by Yale. He had just been graduated from St. Ignatius College Prep, 1076 W. Roosevelt Rd., almost legendary in Chicago as a great school in a bad neighborhood. In an era of school reform and debate over school voucher systems to cure a desperately ill tax-supported city school system, places like St. Ignatius are being looked at closely as models for the future.
“I was right at home with the rigor of the curriculum and the amount and quality of work I had to do at Yale,” says Ramirez, now an attorney at Rodriguez & Villalobos, a premier Latino law firm. “From day one I felt as comfortable there as guys who came from Andover and Exeter. For me, high school had been harder than my freshman year in college.
“I think some of the parents and kids in my college freshman class were surprised four years later when they saw me walking across the stage, graduating from Yale with honors.”
Celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, St. Ignatius has been educating the children of millionaires and mayors alongside the children of immigrant meat cutters since 1870. That was the year Rev. Arnold Damen, a crafty, entrepreneurial Dutch-born Jesuit missionary with a gift for fundraising and an eye for good architecture, opened the school.
Now the school is a treasured 20th Century urban incongruity, a great, classical college-preparatory school in the inner city. Its building is a showpiece, a well-maintained, elegant architectural landmark, one of the few major buildings to survive the 1871 Chicago Fire. It sits unscathed still by graffiti or vandalism on a street lined with gray and gritty public housing.
A steady stream of Mercedeses, Cadillacs, Lexuses and Lincolns pulls up in front of the school daily, dropping off children from some of the most wealthy and powerful families in the city and suburbs. But they have to wait their turns in line with a lot of buses, battered Chevies and mini-vans; those drop-off kids come from orphanages, housing projects and middle-class city and suburban households struggling to come up with the school’s $5,290 tuition.
One of the big draws to the school is that because of an unusually demanding curriculum, a diploma from St. Ignatius gets real respect in college admissions offices. It has eased many thousands of St. Ignatius grads into their colleges of first choice.
However, when graduates, whether from the 1920s, the 1960s or last year, speak of the school, they talk more about values they carried away from St. Ignatius than about scholastic achievement.
The Jesuit approach is to lead individuals to discover their own sense of self-worth by making them see and respect the worthiness of others. Every student every year gets a good dose of community service, such as manning soup kitchens or tutoring minority kids in housing projects, through class assignments and service clubs.
All students are required to participate every year in a series of retreats up to four days long. Small groups of students, overseen by adults, are pushed to explore their understanding of religion and the world. In the process, they are given some perspective on problems common to one another’s lives and how to deal with difficulties in their own lives, all as a way of appreciating one another.
“It changed me as a person. I went from being a quiet, reserved kid to an assertive, confident, goal-oriented one,” Ramirez says of his days at St. Ignatius. He went there after being encouraged to take the entrance exam by an 8th grade teacher at the public school he attended in Pilsen. Just making the cut and being admitted was a giant ego boost, he says.
“From my first day as a freshman at St. Ignatius,” Ramirez says, “I never questioned myself, nor did anybody else question if I ‘belonged’ there. You were allowed to achieve on your own merits. I never felt out of place or second class. There were no issues of race or class. I never heard affirmative-action accusations until I got to Yale and Harvard.”
Ramirez received help financially to meet the tuition costs. Successful alumni and admirers of the school have been extremely loyal. Some of them each year cover tuition costs of needy kids through a sponsorship program, or they contribute to the school’s $4.6 million scholarship fund, the largest high school endowment in the state.
Such help is kept very confidential, but if anybody knew about it in Ramirez’s case, he certainly wasn’t stigmatized. He was voted Junior of the Year by the faculty and, as a senior, elected Ignatian of the year by the students.
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Ramirez’s experience is not an unusual one for St. Ignatius, which was founded with the idea of becoming a stepping- stone to success for immigrant and impoverished kids. The school’s history abounds with even more dramatic turns of fate, such as that of Robbie Perkins.
An African-American 14-year-old abandoned by his family in New Orleans in the late 1970s, Perkins made his way to Chicago, determined to get a good education, though he was alone and homeless.
“I always thought it was more important for me to find the best high school than to find a place to live,” says Perkins. “I knew a good education was my way out of the streets, and everybody said St. Ignatius was the best education in Chicago.”
St. Ignatius not only accepted him, it found him a home in an orphanage. He became co-class student council president and yearbook editor, and he graduated in the top 10 percent of his class. He sailed through Stanford University, stopped off for two years of service in the Peace Corps, then got his master’s degree in business administration at Harvard before going to work as an electronics executive in California, where he lives today.
Horace Mann, the 19th Century educational philosopher who championed the idea of the American “common school,” probably would be delighted with St. Ignatius in 1995. Though he had public, tax-supported schools in mind, Mann pressed for educating children of bank presidents side by side with children of bank janitors to assure equality of opportunity and to foster social harmony.
The 1,260 students at St. Ignatius this year represent 53 city ZIP codes and 37 suburbs. Probably no other high school in Illinois has so many commuter students. As a group, this year 68 percent of them are white, 14 percent black, 9 per cent each Hispanic or Asian, and 1 percent Native American .
One sock doesn’t fit all,” says Rev. Donald Rowe, another crafty, entrepreneurial Jesuit with a gift for fundraising and an eye for good architecture. Rowe has been president of St. Ignatius and its undisputed leader since 1981.
“Education has to be student-centered. It has to focus on the individualism of the child,” he says. “With so many children here, I don’t know all of them personally by name. My job is to know the ones who are struggling, making sure they get help and that their problems get some attention.
“I can tell you, though, each child here is greeted on a first-name basis by adults at least six times a day. The kids here know that they belong to a community, that people here know them and care about them. But that is nothing new. You hear people who were here in the 1920s say the same.”
Lanky and professorial behind horn-rimmed glasses, Rowe already was acutely aware of St. Ignatius’ rich history when he was named its president. At the time, he was teaching art history and architectural history at Loyola University Chicago, which was itself a spin-off from St. Ignatius shortly after the turn of the century.
Because of the neighborhood, archdiocesan leaders and Jesuit administrators on several occasions came close to shutting the school down and moving it to more a more genteel area. Rowe himself considered tearing it down shortly after he arrived. For decades his predecessors had spent the school’s money on education, letting the building fall into disrepair.
“Once you make the decision to restore an old building, as we did,” says Rowe, “you become responsible for one of the most important structures in the city. You can’t just hang false ceilings and put up wallboard to cover over what was there originally. That would be like taking a Shakespeare poem and cutting out all the hard words.”
To restore the building to its original grandeur, Rowe needed money. He got it by tapping into the reservoir of loyalty of St. Ignatius’ old grads. It turned out to be deep, indeed.
Rowe approached such men as James McLaughlin, a 1932 graduate whose mother came to the school to get help to pay off the $100 tuition. McLaughlin eventually retired as president of United Parcel Service. When Rowe started schmoozing with him about remembering the old school, he responded with $4 million in gifts.
“I wish my mother had just paid the whole thing in cash,” Rowe says McLaughlin now good-naturedly complains, “because the interest on the balance has become ridiculous.”
As money became available, Rowe carefully restored the old building room by room. It took a dozen years, but now it is almost complete. The results are spectacular. The room containing the original library and natural history museum must rank as one of the most beautiful interior spaces in the city. The hallways, lined with old class pictures, are suffused with memories of horse-and-buggy times and black-robed priests.
The place has an air of a museum about it, with brass plaques everywhere, commemorating donors and their generosity. Even rehabilitated window casements are likely to have three or four small plates acknowledging smaller donors who made the renovation possible.
In the bargain, Rowe has increased the size of the campus from the two acres the original building sits on to 19 acres, mostly to accommodate athletic fields, parking lots and a park used by nearby public housing residents. But immediately next to the school he also is putting up two major new wings.
One will house fine arts and music workrooms and the school’s first theater, one whose design Rowe has taken pains to ensure will recall the old Garrick Theater, torn down in 1961. The other wing will hold the school’s cafeteria, an exact reproduction of the dining room of the second Palmer House hotel, torn down in 1925. The wing will also hold gymnasium spaces, one of which will reproduce the vaulted interior trains concourse of Union Station, torn down in the 1960s.
The exterior design of the buildings, when done, will look as old as the original buildings, complete with corbeled and soldiered brickwork not much used in construction since the 1870s. It helps that the contractors, brothers Matthew and Daniel Walsh of Walsh Construction Co. of Illinois, are, respectively, 1964 and 1965 graduates.
Rowe, an unabashed architecture buff, says the careful restoration of the old buildings and the painstaking fidelity of the design of the new ones to the old fits well with the school’s philosophy.
“Most schools are built for blind children,” he says, “stark, banal cement blocks. What a dumb, savage idea. The costs aren’t much different doing it the way we are; it just takes a little more time and planning to do it right–but then you’ve got something.
“A building can be an educational tool, giving children a sensitivity to beauty and history. Children more than ever need a sense of belonging to something that is good and ongoing. They come here and there is a sense of history and a sense of place, and they begin to feel ‘I belong here–it’s my school.’ We tell them this is so as many times and ways we can, because it is important.”
When the two new buildings are completed this spring, at a cost of $9 million, much of the interior space will be unusable and remain so for several years. Rowe hasn’t yet been able to find the $4 million needed to finish the insides.
“You go out on the limb a bit, and take some calculated risks, but the interiors will be done as we raise the money,” he says. “It will come.”
If that approach to capital planning seems a bit eccentric for these days, Father Damen, the school’s founder, would have understood perfectly what Rowe is doing.
Damen was one of the city’s earliest visionary builders, which is why the city has an avenue named for him. He was sent in 1857 to establish the first Jesuit presence in Chicago by establishing a new parish. He astonished onlookers by choosing a mostly empty prairie patch a mile from the nearest houses, building what was then the third largest house of prayer in America, the grandly Gothic Holy Family Church.
“I shall not go to the people,” Damen wrote, ignoring his critics, “I shall draw the people to me.”
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