Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!

A long while back I wrote briefly about the strange Midcentury 3-flats on Kominsky at 55th Street, with their low-relief sculpture panels in place of the usual glass block over the stairwells.






I was already aware of another set of sculpture plaques just around the corner, a trio of charmingly chintzy "See No Evil" monkeys at 5516 S. Pulaski.






Then I found a third set of plaques, this time on three breezeway apartment buildings on Division near Concordia University:







The name plate above the "Hear No Evil" monkey (7213 W. Division) reads "The Alexandrian", as if someone thought they could convince students they were moving into a Colonial-era Grecian mansion.

This batch definitively ties the first two together, sharing the common background elements of a rising sun and a strange "cobblestone" pattern. The Concordia University set also led me to the story behind the monkey sculptures. And the story is... there is no story.

An article from the Chicago Tribune, dated June 24, 1956, is titled "No Reason, But Monkeys Adorn Dwelling Units". General contractor Angelo Esposito explains that the sculptures were added to the Division Street apartments for no other reason than to generate buzz about the company's latest buildings, and likewise for sculptures added to previous developments. No mention is made of who did the actual designs.

Esposito and Company, Contractors, were headquartered at 1515 N. Harlem Avenue, and got their anonymous sculptor's work on at least one more building, a large breezeway apartment at 1305 N. Harlem Avenue, just south of North Ave:





It may look like a duplicate of the flute player on Komenski, but it's actually a completely new rendering of the exact same pose. Likewise, the Concordia monkeys are completely new sculpts of the same idea used on the Pulaski building.


Other likely Esposito buildings feature geometric abstractions. One can trace a path of repeated design elements from the fourth member of the Komenski/55th group...




...to this 55th Street area 3-flat...



...to another 3-flat around 95th Street.





Past that, it gets more and more dodgy. Did they do "The Treehouse", an apartment at 8101 S. Maryland Ave.? The sculpture and the building do fit the style; notice those gray stone stripes.





How about this 6-flat at 7322 N. Harlem in Niles? Could be, but the connection's more tenuous.




Angelo Esposito's company did not come to a happy end. In 1960 a bankruptcy suit was filed against the builder, and over a dozen buildings in states of partial completion were put in the trusteeship of the court and sold off, including "two 4 story apartments in the 900 block of Pleasant avenue; a completed one storey office building at 6807-09-11 North av.; a partially finished residence at 1115 N. Harlem av.; a completed two story apartment house at 1111 N. Harlem av.; and a completed one story commercial building at 6817 North av." Others included 7026 North Avenue, 1915 Robincrest Lane in Glenview, unnamed properties in Niles, and a partially constructed "mansion" at 936 Ashland Avenue in River Forest, a "stately shell" of a house that quickly became a reputed neighborhood nuisance in its unsecured condition (city inspectors found no particularly egregious conditions at the house.)