The sun sizzles, curling against the Dolton pavement as I round the corner on Manor Avenue, onto the 200 block of East 141st Place. Sherry Newsome sits on her stoop, the garden beds beyond its wrought iron railing brimming and lush. Her daughter has just pulled into the driveway. She parks and slides the door of her van open so she can sit on the bench seat, her legs dangling out.

“Do you know what time she gets here?” I ask from the sidewalk, second-guessing my thick denim shirt in this mid-June humidity. I tug at the collar.

“She’s usually here by noon. Sometimes earlier, if there’s a lot of people,” Sherry tells me, nodding to the empty police SUV across the street, in front of what had been, until recently, a nondescript midcentury brick cottage.

It’s quiet. In the stillness of the heat, flies buzz. The occasional car whizzes down Indiana Avenue, a few yards away. I hear the gentle rumble of a car starting up the street. A kid laughing.

“What happened to the blessings?” I ask.

Sherry’s daughter shakes her head. “Too loud and too early.”

Donna Sagna-Davis, who lives next door to the house we’re all now staring at, has taken it upon herself to create a kind of ad hoc welcome center, playing blessings from YouTube on a loop through her window. But without the breeze, and with the heat wave, everything — and everyone — feels a little more on edge. Or at least I am as I get back into my car to try to find a cup of coffee and kill some time. 

When I return, after a tepid hour in a Dunkin’ Donuts with broken AC, a black SUV is parked, facing the wrong way, in front of the police vehicle. Inside the black SUV, Officer Latonya Ruffin checks her phone, glances out her tinted window. They’ll be here soon. The first ones always seem to arrive before noon. Throughout the day, more arrive in groups of two or three, like the couple who rode a tandem from Beverly. People from the city stop by, but also people from everywhere. A teacher came from Clarion, around 80 miles west of here. A journalist from Italy showed up one day.

They don’t do much, mostly stand in the front yard quietly. Sometimes they’ll sit on the stoop. Early on, one woman climbed the steps, placed her hand on the red front door, and prayed for a miracle. 

The house that sits quietly at 212 East 141st Place isn’t impressive. The roof’s shingles are peeling and in dire need of replacing. The unpainted, unsanded wooden front railing is abrasively new, the stamp from the lumberyard still visible. The concrete steps, also new, have started accumulating objects: rosaries, unlit candles, apples that are now browning. A silver crucifix rests on the windowsill. 

Built in 1949, the house was bought that year by a family called the Prevosts. Louis Prevost was a navy man, fresh from the European front. His wife, Mildred, was a librarian. In quick succession, they had three boys: Louis, John, and Robert. The neighborhood was lively and a short distance from St. Mary of the Assumption in Riverdale, where the family attended Mass. 

In 1990, Mildred died from cancer. Six years later, the family sold the house; the kids had already left. The youngest, Robert, was a missionary in Peru. When Pawel Radzik bought the house in 2024 for $66,000, it had already been through four different owners since the Prevosts. He gutted the place, putting in a new kitchen and flooring and replacing the original windows with vinyl double-pane ones. The house needed work — years earlier, the next-door neighbors caught folks selling drugs in the gangway — but by January it was ready to be listed for an optimistic $219,000, which Radzik later dropped to $199,900. No one was interested. Not even with its brand-new quartz countertops. 

After a potential sale fell through in April, Radzik took the house off the market. Three days after he relisted it on May 5, the youngest Prevost boy, known to his friends as Bob or Bobby, walked out onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. The house on East 141st Place, still empty, was no longer an unassuming flip. It was the house that raised a pope.

The eyes of the wiry middle-aged man from Texas grow wider as he walks briskly up the sidewalk toward the house, where I’m trying to read what’s inscribed on a small wooden cross that’s been left on the concrete steps (“Jesus — I Trust in You”). “An American pope,” he whispers. “Can you believe it?” In Chicago for a previously planned trip, he had gotten in his rental car and driven here. “Just to see if I could find it,” he says, then lifts up his phone to take a selfie in front of the house. 

There’s the gentle ding of an open car door, followed by a high, cheer-filled voice: “You can get closer!” Officer Ruffin is leaning out of the driver’s side, her foot on the lawn. Even though she spends most of her workday sitting in an unmarked police vehicle, her uniform is pressed and impeccable. Not a strand of hair out of place, her nails painted bright orange. “You can go around back,” she says, waving toward the side of the house. She smiles and slides back into the car, its tinted window rolled up.

Ruffin sits and watches, making herself known only when she wants to, which is often. She gets out of the car to help take a group picture; rolls down the window to ask where people are from. When it’s quiet, she listens to music and checks in on her mom. Within the span of a few weeks, Ruffin became the unofficial greeter of Dolton’s first unofficial pilgrimage site. 

There’s no precedent for something like this. No one really knows what to do with the childhood home of a newly elected American pope: not the eager but cautious outsiders who venture into Dolton to get a glimpse of the Prevosts’ old house, nor the village itself.

Almost immediately after Pope Leo XIV’s ascension, the house was swarmed with visitors; in quick order, Ruffin, a four-year veteran of the Dolton Police Department, was assigned to her post. Each morning, the marked squad vehicle that’s parked nightly in front of the home of Dolton’s new mayor, Jason House, is moved to 212 East 141st Place. Ruffin arrives around 11 a.m., sometimes earlier, in the unmarked SUV to begin her watch. She might head back to the station when there’s a lull or they need her for something, but Monday through Friday, until 6 p.m., this is her assignment.

Ruffin doesn’t miss having a regular patrol — she likes this style of community policing, talking with people, hearing their stories. There’s something about the house that inspires people to share. Most of the time, Ruffin is the one who listens.

Sometimes the conversation turns to the future of the house. “The archdiocese is getting involved,” a man named Michael Kelly says. “At least that’s what I read.” He’s wearing a red cycling kit, and a bike rests on his leg. Another visitor, Dennis Menke from Champaign, is looking at the walnut tree in the backyard. “I think he’ll really bring people back to Jesus,” he murmurs, kicking the uneven turf before ambling back to the front of the house. 

As people come and go, I lean against the SUV and talk with Ruffin. “Someone told me the pope’s coming here in September,” she says, nodding. Someone also told her that investors bought up all the abandoned properties on the block. The neighbors tell her they don’t know what’s going to happen to them. The guy across the street has been there for three years — Ruffin says he told her he’ll move if the money is good enough. People tell Ruffin a lot of things. She has a knack for making people feel comfortable. 

Originally, Ruffin wanted to be a pediatric nurse — “I love babies and seniors,” she says — but she fell into law enforcement instead. Police work is not the same as her first passion, but it’s not entirely different. She still gets to work with people and play some small part in making the world a better place. Sometimes there’s overlap, days when she works side by side with medical professionals. “We’re all first responders anyways,” Ruffin observes, almost as an afterthought, as if to say, Whatever happens, happens. You work with what you’ve got, you stop trying to anticipate the unexpected. A would-be nurse ends up a cop, guarding the childhood home of the first American pope. And as people can’t help but notice, a village disgraced is miraculously sanctified. 

A breeze cuts through the heat as a crew of roofers shouts over the mechanical pumpft, pumpft, pumpft of the staple guns. It’s the first day of July, and a fleet of vans and flatbed trucks with supplies is parked in front of the pope’s old house. A small crowd gathers on the front yard, spilling onto the street. The Dolton police car is swallowed by a collection of men in navy blue polo shirts with Windy City Construction Group emblems. 

The roof of the house has been torn off; ropes and pulleys are quickly being assembled to send up fresh shingles. One of the guys in the polo shirts approaches me, smiling. He’s Frank Gomez, vice president of sales operations. They’ve come in from Berwyn to donate a new roof. Gino Ferrari, the firm’s president, is friends with Radzik’s real estate agent, Steve Budzik. Ferrari contacted him to see if they could help out. They’ve done a lot of work in Dolton.

In front of the house, a large wooden sign with a portrait of the pope has just been installed. “Every Great Story Has a Strong Foundation — A Roof for the Pope’s Roots,” it reads. “A Gift from Windy City Construction Group.” I see Ferrari posing for a picture with his young son, who wears the same shirt as his dad, only smaller. Thanks to the company’s well-honed PR machine, iPhones are hurrying to capture content as a drone flies overhead. Gomez tells me that news crews will begin to arrive shortly. Ruffin is running late. 

Dolton has been a familiar destination for news crews in recent years, before Robert Prevost became Pope Leo XIV. When Prevost and his brothers played on this block, Dolton was a typical postwar south suburb, courting blue-collar, middle-class white families. But by 2021, decades of corruption and disinvestment, coupled with white flight and steep property tax increases, had left the village rundown and in need of a savior. Tiffany Henyard, elected that year as the first woman and youngest mayor in Dolton’s history, campaigned on promises to revive the city. In the four years that followed, the self-professed “people’s mayor” overpromised and overspent, using intimidation to quiet critics and political opponents. As the money flowed out, nothing seemed to change in the village. In fact, things got worse. The police force shrank, and a portion of what was left became Henyard’s security detail. Roads became potholed, sewers overflowed. 

By 2024, the FBI had opened an investigation into Henyard’s alleged financial misconduct. That same year, the Dolton Board of Trustees hired former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to investigate more alleged misuse of public funds. Delivered in January, her damning report found “consistent mismanagement of village finances through excessive spending on nonessential goods and services” and “systematic attempts” by the mayor and her subordinates to “hide the true financial condition” of Dolton. According to the report, in April 2022, Dolton’s general fund was in the black, with a balance of $5.61 million; by May 2024, that had turned into a $3.65 million deficit. (Henyard has consistently denied any fiscal mismanagement.) Adding fuel to the fiasco: Two days after Lightfoot delivered her report, Henyard jumped into the middle of a brawl that broke out during a board meeting in Thornton Township, which contains Dolton. The Jerry Springer–like video went viral, turning Dolton into a national laughingstock.

In February, Henyard lost the Democratic primary in a landslide, ending her contentious bid for reelection. And on May 5, the same day the pope’s house went back on the market, House, who had been a village trustee, was sworn in as the new mayor. 

“We were in hell, and now we’re in heaven,” says Phyllis Praski with a shrug as she wipes down bottles at 14136 Lounge, a small, dimly lit bar next to Dolton’s village hall that takes its name from its street number on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Her parents bought the bar sometime in the ’70s, serving beef and chili to workers who stopped by after their shifts at the local factories, and Praski took it over in 2006 following their deaths. A collection of hand-drawn logos covers the wall next to the bar: the Cubs, the White Sox, the Bears, the Blackhawks. In the corner, the light from a bank of digital slot machines quietly pulses hot red, neon pink, electric yellow.

In Praski’s telling, Mayor Henyard didn’t like her, didn’t like how the bar’s clientele was critical of her administration. In 2022, Henyard scheduled the village’s annual car show to be held right in front of 14136. It was impossible for people to get to the bar, even harder to leave. Praski says she went outside and tried to talk with Henyard, but the mayor ignored her. Praski’s glad to have all that behind her. Besides, things are quieter now. Her regulars aren’t drinking as much as they used to, and she’s OK with that. It’s better for their health. At 81 years old, Praski wants the business, but she doesn’t need the drama. She just wants to stay afloat. 

Praski’s normally stern face softens, breaking into a soft smile, when she thinks about the pope growing up in Dolton. She can’t help it. Even if the house’s interior isn’t anything like it was when he lived here, it was where he grew up. Nothing can take that away. Still, she’s bemused by the fascination with the house, by the steady stream of visitors who want to be close to something he may have touched. “You could probably just go down the street to a lawn he probably walked on,” she says wryly. “Rub your butt on the grass.” 

Back on East 141st Place, Ruffin arrives a few minutes past 11 a.m. There’s no place to park. She pulls her SUV next to a line of trucks and gets out, the engine still idling. “Whoever owns these vehicles needs to move them,” she shouts over the steady rhythm of pumpfts of the staple guns. A group of cyclists from the Loop pedals up to the house and begins cooing in admiration. Ruffin glances sideways at the sign with the pope’s picture. “Opportunistic,” she mutters, shaking her head.

Radzik, the property’s owner, is a few houses down, talking with someone on the phone. He’s distracted, glancing toward the house, toward the small crowd of people on its front lawn. It’s been a long seven weeks with the dangling promise of a big payout. After the papal election, Radzik once again took the house off the market. What he owned was now priceless, and there was no clear path on what should happen next. On May 15, he and Budzik, his real estate agent, put the house up for sale at a private auction. What people would be willing to pay for the pope’s house was anyone’s guess — why not let the highest bidder decide? The auction house they chose, Paramount Realty USA, had sold President Donald Trump’s childhood home in 2017. The starting bid for this one was $250,000, and rumors of what people were offering were rampant. The bids were sealed, so it’s all conjecture, but Ruffin heard there were people willing to pay more than $1 million.

The Village of Dolton wanted the house, too. On May 20, the village announced that it was planning on acquiring the property, either by negotiating with Radzik or strong-arming him. Burt Odelson, the village attorney, sent a letter to Misha Haghani, the CEO and founder of Paramount Realty USA: “Please inform any prospective buyers that their ‘purchase’ may only be temporary since the Village intended to begin the eminent domain process very shortly,” he wrote. Dolton had come out swinging, legal gray area be damned. 

“The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that we have the right to take private property as long as there’s just and fair use for it as a public space,” Odelson told me over the phone. He was referring to Kelo v. City of New London, a landmark Connecticut case that affirmed a municipality’s right to seize private land as part of economic development. But still, the move felt all too familiar. Play nice or else. 

The letter worked. The auction, originally set to end June 18, was extended another month to give the village more time to negotiate with Radzik. Odelson and I spoke the morning of July 1, right before I drove to Dolton, and I could practically hear him smiling over the phone. A deal was very close, he said. Radzik didn’t want the expense and drawn-out timeline that come with taking things to court. But while the lawyers work things out, the question of who should own the house remains.

As the roofers staple in the new shingles, Radzik makes his move. He walks quickly through the fray, hoping to leave without anyone noticing. Budzik, who started granting interviews and taking media requests almost immediately after the pope was elected, is absent. Ruffin observed him mowing the lawn sometime in May but hasn’t seen him since. The grass is beginning to look overgrown. 

The bike tires pop over the gravel before coming to a slow stop next to the front of Ruffin’s SUV. “You think the pope prayed every time the train went by?” Kelvin White asks as he sits on a low-slung BMX, his smile wide. White watches the work being done at the house, following the men with his eyes as they scale the roof. A few years ago, he bought a house nearby, on East 140th Place. At the time, he wondered if he’d made a bad choice, coming to this neighborhood. Among other things, he never saw cops on patrol. He nods to the parked police vehicle. But now, he says, “It’s the closest thing to Jesus to live here.” 

Half an hour later, Dane Placko, a reporter from Fox 32, pulls up. It’s not quite noon, and the front half of the roof is nearly done. But Placko’s not here for the roof. “I just came from the mayor’s office,” he tells Ruffin after she waves him over. “There’s some big news being made about the house.” He recognizes her. In 2022, Ruffin ran for Cook County sheriff, but she never made it onto the ballot. Tom Dart, the incumbent, pushed to have her disqualified for running under a name different from her voter registration. Ruffin ended up suing him along with election officials. In April, she unsuccessfully ran for office again, this time for the Country Club Hills City Council. 

Ruffin is familiar with Placko. He’s well known around Dolton. “He was on Tiffany like white on rice,” says James Ferrell, a media director for the village, who is standing by Ruffin. She’d called him when she saw the roof going up. There seems to be an expectation from the village that he capture footage of things like this, even though he doesn’t always know when they’re happening. Ferrell is used to moving quickly. Like Ruffin, he’s a holdover from the Henyard administration, and he was the guy the mayor would call whenever she wanted to do a quick photo op around town. Like at the new ice-skating rink, or when the village was trimming trees. And Placko usually wasn’t far behind: In 2023, when Henyard went door to door with a crew of police officers and firefighters giving out water during a heat wave, the Fox reporter was there too, trying to get a comment about her bloated police-force security detail. 

Placko has now returned to his car to get ready for his live segment at noon, which he’ll film in front of the house. Ferrell and Ruffin are catching up, but soon he needs to get back to set up for a special board meeting. “Do you know what it’s about? What makes this so special?” Ruffin asks. Ferrell shakes his head. 

Ferrell is anticipating that in a week or so, he’ll get word that they’re moving him to part-time. Nothing’s official yet, but the village has no money. “It’s the way of the world,” he says. Ferrell’s not bitter. More resigned. Exhausted maybe. It’s been a long year. Ruffin is still trying to figure out where the village funds went. “Tiffany didn’t spend the money. She got grants,” she says, repeating claims Henyard made. (Never mind that $3.65 million deficit.) “So where’s the money?” 

Praski, the bartender, has also heard about the grants. She says she was supposed to get a portion of a federal grant that Henyard applied for on behalf of small business owners during the COVID-19 pandemic. Praski doesn’t give specifics, but a key finding from Lightfoot’s investigation was that the approximately $3 million in grants Dolton received from the American Rescue Plan Act wasn’t tracked and reported as required by law; some of the money wasn’t even spent. Praski says someone told her she would be getting $5,000. The check never showed up. “Lost in the mail, I guess,” she says. 

I ask Ferrell how he’ll feel if village officials tell him they don’t have the money to keep him full-time but can come up with enough to purchase the house. “What’s going to happen is going to happen,” he says. He just wants to keep his health insurance.

“There’s really no money?” Ruffin asks with a sigh.

A couple of weeks earlier, Lavell Redmond, a former village employee, filed a motion to block the village’s purchase of the property. If Dolton, citing lack of funds, couldn’t settle the wrongful termination lawsuit he brought against it, how could it afford to buy this house? Even though the motion was quickly dismissed, the question still hangs in the air. Almost like Redmond wasn’t afraid to say out loud what everyone else was thinking. 

Over on the sidewalk, Placko is doing a run-through of his report before going live. Word of why Placko is here has started to circulate through the group of people gathered on the lawn. “Dane said they’re not going to have to go to court to get the house,” Ruffin informed Ferrell earlier. “How the hell did they pull off that magic trick?” said Ferrell, looking incredulous. “Somebody gave us some money,” said Ruffin, shaking her head. “You ever hear ‘Money talks’?”

Across the railroad tracks, at 14136 Lounge, Praski watches the live broadcast with her feet up on the bar. She thinks this latest development is a good thing. It’s a long road ahead, to get Dolton back on its feet, but at least the village is trying. 

Later that night at the special board meeting, where it’s officially announced that the trustees will approve the purchase of the house, no one tries to hide that this is poor timing for Dolton’s financial situation. Wintrust has given the village a loan for the purchase — “with good terms,” as Odelson told me earlier in the day, emphasizing that it won’t impact Dolton’s budget. 

But at the board meeting, citizens express concern over what could happen if the village defaults. Where will it get the money to keep up with the maintenance of the house? By the time the trustees are called to vote, though, any concern has been tempered by a low-buzz excitement. This is an opportunity: economic growth, new business development, chances for grants at the state and federal levels. Last year, 170,000 people visited the museum dedicated to Pope John Paul II’s birthplace in the small Polish town of Wadowice. Since it opened in 1984, it’s been a main driver of local tourism, which has become the bedrock of that town’s economy. Perhaps this is what will save Dolton.

Right before the vote, Mayor House addresses the audience. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says, pressing his finger into the table with each syllable, his voice measured but firm. “We can either seize this moment and move it forward, or we let that moment go to an investor.” He’s not pleading with the village — the decision has already been made — but he’s asking everyone to understand. And to join him in this moment that he holds forth like an offering. The village has already lost so much: its industry, its economic engine, its reputation. Have faith in us, he seems to say. Dolton can’t afford to lose this, too. 

The roof is halfway done. The crew slides off it to take their lunch break in the backyard. At last, there’s silence. But only for a moment. The window next door scratches open for the first time in a week, and the blessings begin their steady loop. Ruffin was worried about Sagna-Davis, but it looks like she was just out of town. Her son, a kid around 14 years old, unfolds a six-foot table in front of their stoop. Then he goes back inside and brings out a small box with a slit in the top and places it in the center of the table. On the front of the box he tapes a sign: “Prayer Requests.” A sense of peace seems to have returned to the street. The fight is over. The village will own the house, one with a new roof. 

A few weeks later, I return to East 141st Place. The city has closed on the house. The sale price was $375,000. Not quite the seven figures that people were speculating, but Radzik still comes out of it with a nice profit. (Praski thinks the town overpaid.) Ruffin sits in her car watching village engineer Scott Gilmore walk around the property with a couple of guys who are installing security alarms. He’s planning on replacing the wooden railing with one that’s wrought iron and installing a special gate with a cross. Sooner rather than later, they’ll also replace the chainlink fence in the back.

Gilmore grew up in Dolton. Dated a girl who lived a block from the Prevosts, but he never met them. “This was our old stomping ground,” he says, looking down the street. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, now lined with boarded-up buildings, once bustled with activity. Praski’s parents slung chili in their bar, and people came from all over for the parades that Dolton was known for.

I look at the house. People want things to change, but also, in some small way, to go back to the way they were. The way things were when a boy named Bobby Prevost made his way across the tracks to attend Mass before school. 

There are signs that even as the dust that was kicked up by the village’s recent past settles, things are still messy. Ruffin called to tell me that the mayor’s office doesn’t want her to talk to the press anymore. I’ve heard that village employees are putting in resignations. Others are waiting to see what happens. Alliances are shifting, but the game feels the same in Dolton. At least the village got the house.

Harper Municipal Center, once Dolton’s village hall, sits near the railroad junction that cuts through town. In its vestibule, bankers boxes are stacked and falling over. Loose papers cover the floor. In the waning heat of a late afternoon, I give the door handle a shake, find it’s locked, and walk back down the cracked concrete steps. The building no longer represents the central seat of Dolton’s government, but still cuts a stately shape against the blue sky of a warm summer day, as it always has since the 1890s.

In front of the municipal center, I see a small monument from 1976, commemorating the U.S. bicentennial. Affixed to a stone bell is a brass sign, patinaed from age. “Let us be proud of those who have made the past and of those who are making the present,” the first half reads. As a midsummer storm rolls in, a train begins to slowly stretch its way along a track curving west toward the quiet house with a new roof on a winding street where the hope of a village rests. “And let us give fair warning to those in the future,” the sign continues. “To despise not the day of small beginnings.”