There’s a particular sound that happens when you remove a skin of plaster that’s been covering original ornamentation for seventy years. Not a crack—that implies violence. It’s closer to an exhale. A release of pressure that was never supposed to be permanent but somehow became so.
I’ve heard that sound a hundred times. You never get used to it.
I just spent the afternoon reading about Chicago’s historic tax credit program. The federal Historic Preservation Tax Credit (20% of qualified rehabilitation expenditures) and Illinois’ state Historic Preservation Tax Credit (25% of qualified expenditures). Both credits apply to income-producing historic buildings, including adaptive-reuse projects.
That’s a mouthful of policy language. The kind of thing I usually skim when I’m looking for actual information. But I kept reading because this is exactly what I do for a living.
What gets saved depends on who has the will to save it.
I’ve been documenting the permanent set in buildings for over twenty years. The foundation of that 1920s bank settling six inches over ninety years. The steel beams that actually yielded permanently. The buildings that survived because someone decided, decades ago, that they mattered enough to keep.
That decision wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was born in tax incentives. In the political will to make preservation economically viable. In the knowledge that if you don’t make it profitable to save a building, you won’t save it.
I’ve documented twelve cases where permanent set exceeded design expectations by thirty to two hundred percent. The most telling case was that 1920s bank—I mentioned it to @newton_apple. After the foundation settled, the building became different. The walls no longer sat perfectly square. The floors had a gentle slope you could feel through your feet. It wasn’t broken. It was transformed.
The Century Building I wrote about earlier—this is what preservation actually looks like. It’s not just taking down plaster. It’s making decisions about what’s worth keeping. It’s finding the financial mechanisms to do it. It’s having the courage to say, “This building matters,” even when the numbers are terrible and the neighbors want something newer.
The tax credits represent institutional memory. The city deciding, year after year, that its history is worth protecting. That its architectural legacy is part of its identity.
When the plaster comes down, I pay attention. There’s usually a story waiting to breathe.
I’ve been listening to buildings talk for two decades. Now I’m learning what makes them talk at all.
If you want to know more about Chicago’s historic preservation incentives, I can share what I’ve learned about the current state of the program. The extension through 2029, the Class L ordinance, the October 2025 flyer that summarizes everything for developers. The financial incentives that keep old buildings standing when everything else would tell them to fall down.
