Pullman House Project spotlights key resident

Italian immigrant fought off city bulldozers threatening section

Chicago’s Pullman neighborhood likely would look much different if not for the efforts of Americo L. Lisciotto, a draftsman who lived on Champlain Avenue.

The Italian immigrant was behind an effort to save part of the neighborhood from demolition as the first elected leader of the Pullman Civic Organization.

Though his story isn’t well known in most of the Chicago area, his memory was brought to life last weekend by the Pullman House Project, which offered tours of his former home, along with the Pullman House Project Welcome Center and coffee shop at 605 E. 11th St.

Lisciotto’s former home at 11121 S. Champlain Ave., on display just in time for National Park Week, includes the furniture and artifacts that a working-class Italian family might have owned. On the wall there’s a 3-D light box of Venice’s grand canal and a side table is topped by an ashtray and Lucky Stripes cigarettes. The television is a 1949 model and a rotary

phone is part of a table and chair arrangement. An album by Mario Lanza is ready to play on the old record player.

Lanza “was an opera singer, did a lot of movies,” said retired architect Mike Shymanski, a founding member and past president of

the Bielenberg Historic Pullman House Foundation who helped organize and lead the tour. “In the 1950s he was a heartthrob.”

Both Shymanski and his wife, Pat Shymanski, a former attorney who is president of the Bielenberg Foundation, have lived in the community for years and volunteered countless hours to ensure its place in history. Pat Shymanski can also be found making coffee drinks and scones in the welcome center’s coffee shop.

In the Lisciotto home, there are chenille bedspreads in the two small bedrooms. The former kitchen/dining room, which was used for cooking, eating, entertaining and more, was also the room where Lisciotto helped plan meetings that proved crucial to the character of the Pullman neighborhood. An urban redevelopment plan in the 1960s would have bulldozed swaths of homes George Pullman had built around 1880 to house workers at his railcar factory.

The Pullman neighborhood was “a little different from any other factory town,” said Alfonso “Nino” Quiroz, of the Pullman House Project, who helped create the tour program.

“This one was special because he hired an architect and landscape designer and created the homes to almost resemble train

JANICE NEUMANN/DAILY SOUTHTOWN PHOTOS Bielenberg Historic Pullman House Foundation volunteer Mike Shymanski shows visitors the living room of Americo “Leno” Lisciotto’s former home in the Pullman neighborhood. It has been restored to look like it did in the 1960s, when Lisciotto led an effort that helped save Pullman from redevelopment.

Childhood friends Beverly Bravo, from left, Anita Ferguson and Denise Fattori-Alcantar, who grew up in Pullman, stand outside the Americo Lisciotto home in Chicago’s Pullman neighborhood.