The Preston Bradley Center
941 W. Lawrence Avenue, Chicago, IL 60640 (Uptown)
The building, designed by J.E.O. Pridmore in 1925, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022. Now called the Preston Bradley Center, this six-floor building includes a 1,300-seat auditorium with two balconies and a large stage. For a half-century, it was home to The Peoples Church of Chicago, described in a 1924 news article as “one of the most largely attended liberal churches in the world.”
An oft-repeated story makes the claim that Reverend Preston Bradley, then a student, earned a suspension from the Moody Bible Institute after he was spotted leaving a movie theater and smoking a cigar. Fine with Bradley, apparently. According to Martin E. Marty, writing the Encylopedia of Chicago entry, Preston early on rejected the fundamentalism (and indeed all Christian orthodoxy) he was taught as a student at Moody. He adopted what he called “Christian Unitarianism” and developed it as a form of “liberal religious humanism.”
Though the Peoples Church was founded in the 1880s, its influence was greatest beginning in 1912 under Bradley’s leadership. Bradley nurtured the church into a major Chicago institution with, at its peak, four thousand followers. The Peoples Church was the first church in Chicago, and one of the first in America, to regularly broadcast services. First broadcast in 1924 over WQJ, the show eventually moved to WLS. Bradley’s radio ministry drew several million listeners each week, with reports of as many as five million.
Bradley, who authored a dozen books, wrote in 1962’s Along the Way, “From the beginning the people of every race, creed, and color have been invited. We never had the problems which have arisen so recently in the matter of segregation or integration. Long before any of the organizations now working diligently on these matters had been organized our church was open as the sky.”
Bradley chose not to have a pulpit, but instead spoke from a lectern. To one side was a bust of Abraham Lincoln, to the other a bust of the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Originally, above the choir, were written in gold the words of William Ellery Channing, “Live a life of faith and hope. Believe in the mighty power of truth and love.” Bradley was technically a preacher, but more so played the role of orator, maybe lecturer. Bradley maintained a demanding schedule. Behind the scenes, Bradley’s influence, especially in Chicago, grew, and he counted among his close friends Jane Addams, Carl Sandburg, and John Altgeld. He marched with Addams for women’s rights and loudly opposed the Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1920s had more than a million members.
Bradley considered himself a man of the common people. “I wanted to help people,” he wrote, “help people meet the problems of everyday life, help people to live creative, positive, happy lives.”
Bradley was scriptwriter Irna Phillips’ inspiration for the soap opera Guiding Light. Phillips, then 19, listened to Bradley’s triumph-over-tragedy sermons while she was unwed and pregnant (the father abandoned her), all the way through the still-born birth and its aftermath. Bradley was the model for Reverend Doctor John Ruthledge, minister of the Little Church of Five Points in the fictional Midwestern town of Springfield. Ruthledge left a lamp, a “guiding light,” burning in his study as a beacon for those who needed help. The plots often revolved around Ruthledge’s friends and family enlisting his aide. It started in Chicago in 1937 as a 15-minute radio drama. In 1952, with the advent of television, the cast performed the same scripts for both TV and radio. Guiding Light aired for 72 years, ending in 2009, making it the longest running television show of all time. Phillips wrote and created many of the first American soap operas, including Another World, The Edge of Night, and As the World Turns.
According to Daniel Ross Chandl’s scholarly essay, “Preston Bradley: Preaching and Storytelling,” Bradley broke ground as a religious orator. He wrote, “Bradley’s extensive vocabulary, almost continuous reading in varied literature, and poetic command of the English language, permitted him to employ dramatic storytelling. He could transport an immediate audience into a visualized or conjectured environment.” He even incorporated book reviews into his sermons. Preston shared his pulpit with other great orators, including Clarence Darrow, who argued in favor of evolution in the Scopes trial, four times.
Bradley served on the Chicago Public Library board for a half century, and advised President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who appointed him to the commission which founded the United Nations. His Peoples Church saw rapid decline after he ended his long service there in 1976. Urban flight caused membership to decrease dramatically, and the Peoples Church very nearly had to close its doors. Instead, it became affiliated with the United Church of Christ while still maintaining its ties to the Unitarian Universalist Association. The church for many years leased space to R.E.S.T. (Residents for Effective Shelter Transitions), the largest homeless shelter on the North Side. The church ran a meals program that served lunch four times a week to 150-200 people in need, and held an annual Labor Day Picnic and Christmas Dinner for the homeless that each served five to six hundred people.
In 2023, the historical church and social services building was sold to Daniel Ivankovich, who turned the building into an entertainment and community center. The centerpiece of the revived Preston Bradley Center will be the ground-floor auditorium, the Lawrence Theater. Ivankovich said the theater will fill a mid-sized venue niche in Uptown and Chicago, with the rest of the 58,000 square foot space to be used as a community center in support of physical and behavioral health services; it will also offer art and music education programs. The Peoples Church will also retain a presence in the building.
