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By Nuha Abdessalam
Villager Contributor
The Beverly Arts Center once held dance classes in a former funeral parlor. It rented the space down 111th Street and put in a floor.
The BAC didn’t have its own building then. It operated out of Morgan Park Academy, where there was a theater, a couple of classrooms and space for art exhibits. MPA students used the building during the day. The Beverly Theatre Guild performed there. Children put on shows.
There were classes in painting, sketching, sculpture, dance, acting and needlework.
Why did Beverly/Morgan Park need an arts center in the first place?
“Because it didn’t have one,” Pat McGrail said.
The Beverly Arts Center was founded in 1967. Eleanor Pillsbury and Alice Baer were among the people who pushed to create it. Arthur Baer was involved, too, and McGrail remembers David Jones, then headmaster of Morgan Park Academy, supporting the idea of an arts center for the community.
“The ladies were the pushers,” McGrail said of Pillsbury and Baer.
McGrail came along later. She had already volunteered at the BAC when she remembers seeing two openings advertised in 1981.
The BAC needed a manager. Ridge Historical Society needed a costume curator.
McGrail applied for both. She got both.
Her daughter Connie was one of the kids growing up around the BAC. She performed in shows from about age 6 into her teenage years.
At the time, Connie said, taking those kinds of classes could otherwise mean heading downtown.
“You provided it in your backyard,” she said.
People came from outside the neighborhood, too. McGrail remembers the BAC drawing families from surrounding communities for art, theater, dance and other programs.
“To me, that was vital,” McGrail said.
Not everything happening there was homegrown.
Connie remembers brothers Frank and Malachy McCourt bringing “A Couple of Blaguards” to the BAC in the 1980s. The two-man show debuted in 1985. Frank McCourt later won a Pulitzer Prize for “Angela’s Ashes.”
Connie remembers Malachy as the louder one.
“He was very funny and very boisterous,” she said.
Other theater companies from around Chicago came for performances, including groups from the North Side.
Dining Tables on the Stage
McGrail helped organize a women’s auxiliary that ran an annual auction. People donated services, White Sox and Cubs tickets and furniture from Beverly/Morgan Park homes.
Connie remembers dining room tables and chairs sitting on the stage.
The auction started around 9 a.m. Saturday and could go until 5 p.m.
On Sunday, whatever hadn’t sold got a “second chance.”
The BAC also held an annual art fair on the Morgan Park Academy grounds. Artists applied, their work was judged and people came to see it and buy it.
McGrail still remembers what everyone worried about.
The weather.
“It was always fingers crossed that the weather would be OK,” she said.
The building at Morgan Park Academy was much smaller than what the BAC people know today. It belonged to the academy, not the arts center.
McGrail eventually retired, but it didn’t quite stick. Connie said her mother was asked back more than once when successors didn’t work out.
“I retired about three times,” McGrail said.
By the time the BAC moved into its current home at 111th Street and Western Avenue in 2002, she was done.
When asked what she remembered about that move, McGrail laughed.
“That was someone else’s problem.”
One Of the Kids
Dr. Carla Carter remembers the old BAC for a different reason.
She was one of the kids.
Carter took classes there when she was little. She doesn’t remember exactly how old she was, but she remembers the Morgan Park Academy building and driving past it with her family.
Now she is the BAC’s executive director.
Today, the arts center offers theater, dance, visual arts, exhibitions and classes, along with arts programming that reaches the area’s schools. Carter said its community theater program can be traced back to the earlier years.
COVID-19 tested whether people would keep coming.
The BAC moved classes online, and federal assistance helped keep teaching artists working, Carter said.
The tougher stretch came afterward.
Carter said 2022 to 2024 was especially difficult because people were still deciding whether they wanted to come back.
“That was the hardest part,” she said.
Carter stepped into leadership in 2024.
The Path Forward
Funding and sustainability remain concerns. Carter said families are also smaller than the ones that once formed much of the BAC’s base.
“You think about some of the families that were the backbone of Beverly Arts Center,” Carter said. “They had seven kids, eight kids, nine kids. What stands out the most is that it’s withstood 60 years.”
The BAC will mark its 60th anniversary in 2027. Carter said the organization is working on plans that look back at the people who built it while also looking ahead.
More information is expected around the start of the BAC’s new fiscal year in September, with larger anniversary plans expected to be announced in January.
“It’s an intentional third space that brings people together,” Carter said. “I want to see other little girls that drive past or see me in this position and say, ‘That’s possible.’”
She was asked what Pillsbury, the Baers and the others who helped start the BAC might recognize if they walked through it today.
The building would be different. So would the families coming through it.
But maybe not the noise.
“Rarely do I step into the hallways or the lobbies, and we’re not laughing, smiling, singing,” Carter said. “You hear kids’ laughter. You hear families talking and the buzz.”
