Tri-Taylor

Look at the 1500 block of west Jackson Boulevard. Notre Dame de Chicago Church. The Vietnam Survivors Memorial. All are here today because of...

Lavicka's greatest fight—the one that consumed much of the 1990s—was the struggle to preserve the Maxwell Street peddlers' district, near Halsted and Roosevelt. He lost to a conglomeration of the powerful led by the second Mayor Daley and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Mr. Lavicka helped co-fund the 1970s preservationist movement for urban pioneering of the 1500 block of West Jackson Boulevard, now listed as a national landmark on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 2010, while renovating the Gut Heil Haus, a turn-of-the-century fortress-like building that formerly was a German Social and Athletic Club at 2431 W. Roosevelt Road, Lavicka slept in the property at night armed with a baseball bat to guard its beautiful interior appointments.

...to the spirited renovation of a dozen churches, including the Church of the Epiphany, at Ashland and Adams, Holy Family Church on the Near West Side, and St. Mary’s of the Angels...

...solution? Buy the mansion, hire a crew to move the building around the corner to Adams and Laflin, where Lavicka poured a new concrete foundation, anchored the property there and proceeded to renovate...

...renovation ventures was his plan to save the landmark Raber House, an 1860s mansion at 5760 S. Lafayette Ave. The plan called for renovating the mansion and transforming it into a boutique winery and...

...on the 60-foot-long backdrop wall of the garden at Andrew Jackson Language Academy, 1340 W. Harrison. The sculpture features three 6-foot tall flowers of marble and onyx, three Carrara white...

...Lavicka and his late wife, Alys, began rehabbing a slouching 19th century mansion in the 1500 block of West Jackson Boulevard in the early 1970s, staking a claim on an urban frontier that had been abandoned...