The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Walser House, a dilapidated 123-year-old home in Austin that inspired the architect’s better-known works has now been acquired by the Federal National Mortgage Association.
Fannie Mae received title to the foreclosed property, at 42 N. Central Ave., in December following a court-ordered sale.
“It’s good news now that the building is out of the mess of the foreclosure process, and now we’ve got a clear path to possible ownership for somebody to take this on,” Barbara Gordon, executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, said.
The home was listed for sale on Zillow last week at $350,000. But on Tuesday, the Wright conservancy and the neighborhood group Austin Coming Together — organizations that have been advocating for the home’s preservation — questioned the legitimacy of the listing.
The conservancy removed the listing from its website, Gordon said. The previous version of this column contained the Zillow listing.
“It is not currently for sale and steps have been taken to request removal of an unauthorized online listing. We are completing initial services and debris removal and will then begin preparing the property for listing,” Fannie Mae said in a statement.
“The house is owned by Fannie Mae, which is not currently offering it for sale,” Gordon said. “This fake listing, possibly aiming to defraud a well-intentioned potential purchaser, highlights the critical vulnerability of this important house.”
Still, the home being placed in Fannie Mae’s hands potentially represents the best shot in more than a generation to find a new owner who can restore the landmark two-story stucco home.
The vacant and uninhabitable home needs a $2 million fix-up, and a recent appraisal valued the house at $65,000, the conservancy and the Austin organization said.
Built in 1903 for printing executive Joseph Jacob Walser, the house is important because it brought together in a single design many of the elements Wright would use in later and larger Prairie School commissions.
The home’s strong horizontal lines, deeply overhanging eaves and band of windows on the second floor would find their way in Wright’s more noteworthy homes such as the Emil Bach House, 7415 N. Sheridan Road, built in 1915; South Bend, Indiana’s K.C. DeRhodes House from 1906; and the Barton House, built in Buffalo, New York, in 1904.
The Far West Side home is an official Chicago landmark that’s also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
A new owner looking to repair the home would have to restore the exterior and interior to as close to the original look as possible.
“The landmark designation preserves the [original] design intent, the materials, the special character of the interior,” Gordon said. “That’s something any potential buyer is going to have to understand.”
The Wright conservancy, preservation groups Landmarks Illinois and Preservation Chicago, along with the organization Austin Coming Together have been working in concert to save the home since 2020.
“It’s going to be an expensive house to restore, but I think it’s one really worth restoring,” Preservation Chicago Executive Director Ward Miller said.
Austin Coming Together Executive Director Darnell Shields said his organization had been working to buy the house from the bank that foreclosed on the property.
Shields’s group raised $40 million to convert a closed Chicago Public School at 5500 W. Madison St. — right across the street from the Walser — into the new Aspire Center for Workforce Innovation.
Shields said he still planned to pursue purchasing the house and converting it to community use.
“Until it’s protected, until real development, real stabilization efforts and investment happens, the house is under threat,” Shields said. “And that’s a blemish and a black eye potentially waiting to happen. We’re trying our best to keep that from happening.”
