WICKER PARK — A mural honoring a Wicker Park photographer and longtime neighbor will be unveiled next week after it was briefly delayed when it was tagged with graffiti.
Roberto Lopez was a Wicker Park fixture for decades. He took thousands of photographs of businesses and neighbors along Milwaukee Avenue, where he would often drop in on shop owners and artists to chat about the neighborhood.
Lopez died in April 2023 at 74. In a Block Club article last year, neighbors, friends and family remembered him as “an ambassador for Wicker Park” who documented the neighborhood as it became an artist enclave and gentrified.
Lopez’s subjects were the ordinary and extraordinary bits of daily life: workers hanging up a sign, dusk settling over the Wicker Park streetscape, a last-minute secret Rolling Stones show at the Double Door, to name just a few.
“He’s our Vivian Maier,” said Alma Wieser, director of Wicker Park’s Heaven Gallery, where Lopez would come on weekends to visit staff.
Special Service Area No. 33, which is administered by the Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce, commissioned artist Jake Merten to paint a mural of Lopez on a wall of Heaven Gallery’s back deck near the Damen Blue Line station.
The mural was set to be unveiled Tuesday but has been delayed a week after someone tagged it with graffiti, Wieser said.
Organizers will now hold a ribbon-cutting 5 p.m. April 16 at Heaven Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave., which is open to the public.
“I think that him being on that wall, Heaven Gallery being that final resting place, is just very symbolic for us. Because he was here every weekend, so that’s where he’ll live now forever,” Wieser said. “Which makes me feel great because, you know, he contributed so much to the artistic culture of Wicker Park.”
Lopez had a long career in Wicker Park, where he worked for many years as the building manager at the Flat Iron Building, where he also ran a gallery. He also lived for a time at what is now the Robey Hotel and had roots as an activist in the larger West Town and Humboldt Park communities, friends said.
Lopez was like Wicker Park’s version of “Mother Teresa,” longtime friend Arturo Menchaca told Block Club last year. He would do everything from driving kids to the YMCA to buying hot soup for sex workers on North Avenue in the winter, he said.
“He was a person that cared for the community. And if he sees somebody that needed help, he will help,” Menchaca said.
In an interview from 2000 available on YouTube, Lopez showed off one of his favorite photos: the marquee of the surprise Rolling Stones show at the Double Door in 1997, as seen from across the street in the Flat Iron building.
For Lopez, the concert was a full-circle moment and a testament to laying down roots in a community.
“I used to like The Rolling Stones back in the ’60s, and I would do all kinds of crazy things to go and buy a record. So after 30 years of being here, the Rolling Stones showed up right across the street,” he said. “So a lot of things come back to me, in terms of the meaning of things. … It’s one of those things about being in one place for many years.”
Now, one year after he died, Lopez’s life and work will be memorialized permanently in Wicker Park. And once the mural is completed, a sealant will be applied to the surface so any future graffiti can be easily washed off, Merten said.
“We miss him,” Wieser said. “It’s just really meaningful for us to have him there, and for people to ask questions about who” he was.
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