St. Ignatius College Prep

When the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 burned to within a block of St. Ignatius College Prep, the one-year-old building survived, then immediately opened its doors to house orphans and displaced families. Founded in 1869 by Dutch Jesuit missionary Fr. Arnold Damen, the school’s main building became one of only five existing Chicago structures to predate the fire.

Two decades later, St. Ignatius purchased the original Crookes tubes from the 1893 Columbian Exposition and used them to conduct the first demonstration of X-rays in Chicago (and possibly in the entire United States) on February 25, 1896, just two months after X-rays were discovered. The breakthrough allowed doctors to see inside the human body without surgery for the first time in history.

In 1887, The Brunswick Company built a room to house the St. Ignatius natural history museum, one of the largest collections of natural specimens in Chicago at the time. Though the collection was ultimately relocated to the Field Museum, the Brunswick Room, featuring elaborate cabinets and woodworking, is still used as an event and study space today.

St. Ignatius was founded to provide a classical education rooted in the Jesuit tradition to students from grade school to college. The collegiate division was ultimately relocated to Rogers Park and became Loyola University in the 1910s and 20s. In 1979, the school welcomed its first class of young women to 1076 W. Roosevelt Rd.

Today, around 1,400 students attend one of the preeminent Catholic high schools in the United States, studying in the same halls that have educated students for over 150 years. Students still pore over books in the Brunswick Room – a room so carefully preserved that it serves as a daily reminder that buildings this beautiful, and this stubborn, outlast everything but the students who fill them.