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One of Katherine Hodges’s earliest urbex adventures occurred with a Meetup group called Chicago in Decay, which organized an expedition to the old Brach’s candy factory. On the floor below there’s evidence of Saint Laurence’s late-in-life transformation into an African-American Catholic church: a bulletin featuring a black Jesus. “This is just so beautiful,” Holubow says, setting up his tripod in front of the battered organ in the balcony.

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Rain begins to fall, leaking through Saint Laurence’s broken windows and dripping down the church’s fractured columns. “There’s a large cultural history being erased,” he says.

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It’s an opportunity, he says, to witness the struggle between the temporal and the eternal, a house of God being corroded by earthly forces perhaps more powerful than religion: racial conflict and the free market. In the stillness of the deserted building, Holubow ruminates on his fascination with empty churches. Soon these will be ripped down by the backhoe sitting idle outside. But there’s remaining beauty too: frescoes, at Sistine height, depict myriad angels and the Last Supper. The walls are peeling, the confessional doors have been stripped away, and the pews are a heap of boards.

It’s five in the afternoon, and the forsaken church is lit only by a declining sun, glowing weakly through the windows. The 33-year-old is fully equipped for urbex: he’s wearing hiking boots and canvas cargo pants, to avoid cutting his legs on fencing or other jagged surfaces he carries a tripod his backpack contains his Canon 5D-MK II and a headlamp, for the inevitable tenebrous spaces. Reaching an open window, he hoists himself up, climbs through, and drops into a vestibule. Saint Laurence’s front doors are sealed with no trespassing stickers, so Holubow heads around the back, plodding across a jumble of bricks-all that remains of the church rectory. In 2012, for instance, a 16-year-old north-side boy, Jose Morales, was killed when he fell through a ceiling at the old Ravenswood Hospital. But poking around crumbling architecture can prove fatal. Of course, the activity is discouraged by building owners and is the scourge of security guards, which is all part of the thrill.

A cross between housebreakers and historians, urban explorers have their own guidebook ( Access All Areas by the late Ninjalicious), their own publication (the zine Infiltration), and their own online hubs (Chicago Urban Explorers on Facebook and Chicagoland Urbex Photography on ). In addition to Chicago, the other “urbex” hubs are Detroit and Gary, places where fabulous manufacturing wealth paid for Gothic or art deco landmarks that were left to rot when the manufacturing disappeared. This pursuit is particularly midwestern, made possible by the factory closings of the 1980s and the blight that followed. The stunning Romanesque building is also a magnet for urban explorers, who infiltrate abandoned churches, hospitals, schools, theaters, and factories, photograph the remains, and post the pictures online. Now Saint Laurence’s faithful consist of scrappers and graffiti taggers.

Built in 1911 for the Irish of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, the church began to empty out in the 1950s, and was finally deconsecrated in 2002 the mostly Protestant blacks who had moved into the neighborhood couldn’t provide the members or the money to keep it open. Saint Laurence Catholic Church, which began its life at 71st and Dorchester as a monument to God, is ending it as a monument to white flight.

7/28: Lawyers for Social Justice Reception.

Urban explorer 2011 online series#

Sommelier Series (paid sponsored content).