The Church on Cornelia and the Problem With Roscoe Village's Median Price
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
A red brick church sits at the corner of Wolcott and Cornelia in Roscoe Village, its stained-glass windows and glass facade cross still intact. It stopped being a church in 1999, when the English Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Ascension sold the building to Joseph Partipilo, an antiques dealer, for $134,500. Partipilo ran Olde Chicago Antiques out of the space for years before eventually moving his business to Avondale and then to Wisconsin. The building he left behind is now a 10,000-square-foot single-family home with five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a nave converted into a living room under 25-foot vaulted ceilings, herringbone quarter-sawn oak floors, and a bell tower you reach by an interior staircase.
It listed this month for $6.5 million. That works out to $650 per square foot.
Compare that to what Roscoe Village is supposedly worth right now. Over the three months ending in August, the neighborhood's median sale price was $937,000, with a median price per square foot around $427, based on 32 recorded sales. The church is asking more than fifty percent above that per-square-foot figure, on a property the Cook County Assessor currently values at $1.82 million for tax purposes, which is barely a quarter of the ask.
None of those numbers are wrong. They're just answering different questions.
Here's the part that doesn't get said out loud enough: Roscoe Village's "median price" is not a stable fact about the neighborhood. It's a snapshot of whatever happened to close in a given window, and that window is small. Thirty-two sales in three months is not a large enough sample to smooth out the effect of a handful of unusual transactions. Pull the same neighborhood from a different data provider or a different month and you'll get a noticeably different number, sometimes 15 to 20 percent off, not because the market moved but because the sample changed.
This matters for anyone pricing off a portal estimate. If you own a classic Victorian two-flat, the median is a reasonable starting point because your home resembles the homes that built it. If you own something that doesn't look like anything else nearby, the median isn't a starting point at all. It's a number from a different market wearing your zip code.
The church is the extreme version of this problem, but it's not an isolated one. Roscoe Village has more of these outlier properties than its "village within the city" reputation suggests, and each one requires the same basic move: setting the neighborhood median aside and building the value from scratch.
Roscoe Village has done this before. The Wahl-Eversharp Building, known locally as the old pencil factory, sat behind what's now the "Welcome to Roscoe Village" sign for decades as an industrial building before it was converted to condo lofts around 1990. At the time, that was also a property with no real comp in the neighborhood. There was no established Roscoe Village loft market to compare it against. Buyers and appraisers had to work out what an industrial-to-residential conversion was worth in a neighborhood that, at that point, hadn't really had one.
That conversion is now considered a settled, desirable part of the neighborhood's housing stock. The same will likely be true of the Cornelia church in a decade. But right now, both properties sit outside whatever the current median is describing, and pricing them by neighborhood average would have gotten the number wrong in either era.
When a property doesn't have three or four recent, similar sales to lean on, the pricing work shifts to three techniques that don't show up in a typical listing conversation:
This is slower and more subjective than pulling three recent sales off the MLS. It's also the only honest way to answer "what is this worth" when the honest answer isn't sitting in a spreadsheet.
The church is the most dramatic example, but the same comp problem shows up in a quieter, more common form: new construction on oversized lots. RiverWard, a collection of 35 new construction row homes along the north branch of the Chicago River near Roscoe Village and west Lakeview, is delivering extra-wide floor plans that didn't exist in this footprint here before. Individual builders are doing the same thing on a smaller scale, going up on 30-foot-wide lots instead of the neighborhood's more typical 25-foot standard, which changes both the square footage and the layout in ways that don't map cleanly onto older housing stock.
The Leigh Marcus Team has listed new construction of this type in Roscoe Village, a six-bedroom home near Hamlin and Fellger Parks built on one of these wider footprints. Other @properties Christie's agents active in the neighborhood, including Danny Glick and Maria DelBoccio, have listed comparable extra-wide new builds recently as well. None of these are as singular as a converted church, but they share the same underlying issue: a 30-foot-wide new construction home with a rooftop deck and a heated three-car garage isn't priced against the neighborhood median any more accurately than the church is. It's priced against a much smaller set of genuinely similar new builds, most of which aren't in Roscoe Village at all.
If your Roscoe Village property doesn't resemble the three-story walkups and classic Victorians that make up most of the neighborhood's sales volume, the practical takeaway is simple: don't anchor your expectations to a portal's median price per square foot, whichever number you happen to see. That figure is describing the middle of the market, and your home isn't in the middle of anything.
Expect the pricing conversation to take longer and involve more research than a straightforward comp pull. Expect a lender's appraiser to have the same problem you do, which means a wider gap between an accepted offer and an appraised value is more likely on unusual properties, and that gap is worth planning for before you're under contract, not after. And expect that the eventual buyer for a church conversion, a factory loft, or an extra-wide new build is not the same buyer shopping the median-priced two-flat down the street. Marketing to that smaller, more specific buyer pool is a different exercise than listing a typical home and waiting for the usual traffic.
If the Cook County Assessor's value is so much lower than the asking price, does that mean the home is overpriced? Not necessarily. Assessed value is calculated for tax purposes using a formula applied broadly across property classes, and it's not designed to capture the market value of a highly unusual conversion. It's a data point, not a ceiling.
Will an atypical property take longer to sell in Roscoe Village? It can, simply because the buyer pool is smaller and more specific. A typical Roscoe Village home might spend 35 days on market. A one-of-a-kind conversion is competing for a different kind of buyer entirely, which changes the timeline math.
Should I get an appraisal before I list an unusual property? Getting ahead of the valuation question, rather than waiting for a buyer's lender to raise it, gives you time to build the case for your price with real research instead of reacting to a low number under contract deadline pressure.
If you own a property in Roscoe Village that doesn't fit neatly into the neighborhood's comp set, whether it's a conversion, a legal multi-unit, or new construction on a wider-than-typical lot, the pricing conversation deserves more than a portal estimate. The Leigh Marcus Team works these harder valuation cases regularly across Chicago's North Side. Book a consultation and let's figure out what your home is actually worth.
2203 W Roscoe St Chicago, IL 60618 30 Green Bay Road Winnetka, IL 60093