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Our Lady of Tepeyac, Chicago


Fortune Restoration has worked with Our Lady of Tepeyac in Chicago on multiple occasions over the last 20 years. Fortune Restoration’s interior and exterior painting services were called upon to help transform the building that was once St. Casmir Church on the Southside of Chicago into the beautiful parish of Our Lady of Tepeyac. Fortune Restoration has also been a tuckpoint contractor, completing various exterior Church masonry projects for the Church. From interior plaster work, to helping with colors and ways to highlight sacred features around the church interior, Fortune Restoration’s work with Our Lady of Tepeyac did not end there. Fortune Restoration was hired again, 10 years later, as an exterior paint contractor to restore the exterior Church painting and woodwork of the original windows and trim to both the church and parish office.

Our Lady of Tepeyac High School is a Roman Catholic girls’ secondary school deeply rooted in the Little Village neighborhood that, without regard to ability to pay or immediate preparedness for high school study, provides a multicultural educational experience developing each young woman to her full intellectual and spiritual potential in an environment that values learning linked to faith, family, and community.

The red brick building on Whipple Street began as St. Casimir, a parochial elementary school, in 1904. It served the southwest Chicago community comprising both Polish and Lithuanian immigrants at the time. The Sisters of the Resurrection administered the school and lived on the fourth floor until most of the floor was destroyed by fire in 1933. In 1927, the new school building on Albany Ave was completed and became the new home of St. Casimir Elementary School, now Our Lady of Tepeyac Elementary School. The original building became home for St. Casimir’s new high school. Both schools served Chicago’s Polish community through a rapid demographic shift beginning in the 1970s, which saw an influx of Mexican immigrants seeking opportunity.

In 1990, St. Ludmila and St. Casimir parishes merged and adopted the new name of Our Lady of Tepeyac, reflecting the now dominant Latino-American presence in the Little Village neighborhood. Also at that time, Catholic schools were no longer required to serve families only within their parish boundaries, a policy change which brought students to Our Lady of Tepeyac from all over Chicago. The last of the Sisters of the Resurrection who worked in the building was Sr. Katheryn Wojcik, principal of the high school until 2003, but the Sisters continue to support Our Lady of Tepeyac today.