A Chicago Sojourn

The Terrorists are Clearly Winning

2012-01-20T05:30:00.001-06:00

WHEREAS, The City has determined that it is useful, desirable and necessary that the City acquire for fair market value those four certain parcels of real property located in the vicinity of Midway Airport [including] Midway Parcel 150, commonly known as 5600 - 5608 West 63rd Street...The Parcels are being acquired by the City for public purpose and use, namely, as a Runway Protection Zone or a Runway Safety Area, or both, as recognized by the Federal Aviation Administration ("FAA")...It is hereby determined and declared that it is useful, desirable and necessary that the City acquire the Parcels for public purpose and use in furtherance of the City's ownership and operation of Midway Airport...If the Corporation Counsel is unable to agree with the owner(s) of a Parcel on the purchase price...then the Corporation Counsel may institute and prosecute condemnation proceedings in the name of and on behalf of the City for the purpose of acquiring fee simple title to the Parcel under the City's power of eminent domain.

Did you get all that?

Let me reparse it: the city wants to buy up this building and tear it down.

As first reported by Blair Kamin, this is in the name of creating/expanding a "runway buffer zone" around the south side's Midway Airport.

I am, by my nature, a conservative person, in the purest sense of the word: I believe in conserving things. I believe in using what you have, instead of throwing it out. I believe in adapting, repairing, restoring, re-using. I abhor the waste of physical resources.

When charged with the awesome responsibility of managing a resource as vast as Midway Airport, however, people have an unfortunate tendency to think in grandiose terms. Plans are made by drawing on maps, made from a God's-eye perspective, rather than from the point of view of persons on the ground. If the plan's not big enough, just move some lines, gobble up a little more land. In the so-called City of Big Shoulders, virtually any scheme can be superficially justified by trotting out Daniel Burnham's threadbare aphorism about how one should "make no little plans".

Or maybe I'm looking at it backwards; perhaps this is petty bureaucracy run amuck, an old-fashioned case of government CYA - following the letter of FAA standards, no matter what, because if you don't, someone could come around pointing a finger at you.

Regardless, here is a plan that has certainly stirred my soul, though not for the better.

Midway Airport, like it or not, is located in the city. Not even in the suburbs, but in the city - right in the middle of it. It is landlocked. And like all such institutions, it has a civic responsibility to be a good citizen, to work with what it's got and work with its neighborhood, rather than tossing it out or grabbing up more.

Unleashing the threat of eminent domain upon one's neighbors, regardless of what the FDA recommends, is not being a good neighbor.

The author of the original letter also mentions a fear that a terror attack could be unleashed on the nearby National Guard station from the building's upper windows. I am unable to source this comment; however, if it is true, it is absolutely the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Even if these hypothetical terrorists actually gave a crap about Midway Airport (hint: they don't, especially not with internationally famous O'Hare right up the road), why on earth would they try to attack an obscure National Guard post that nobody can even knows is there? These would have to be the most ineffectual terrorists ever. Even if somebody did want to blow the place up, what's to stop them from just lobbing some grenades over the fence instead?

This is the kind of panic-stricken "thinking" that prevailed in the days after 9/11, when people talked about making skyscrapers airplane-proof. You don't make buildings airplane-proof; you prevent planes from flying into buildings. And you don't tear down the neighborhood to protect it; you adapt your behavior to avoid endangering it.

Gold Coast International Style: Mid 60s

2011-12-05T05:30:00.000-06:00

By the mid-1960s, the hour for Modernism was growing late. High-minded design ideals had largely (ahem) left the building when it came to multi-family residential development - even the city's most expensive and luxurious tower paid little heed to exterior design.

1000 Lake Shore Plaza - Sidney H. Morris & Associates, for Chicago Highrise Corporation, 1963

1000 Lake Shore is a 55-story reinforced concrete building, a tall (590 feet) and slender tower with a low garage box attached to the back, fronting onto Oak Street. The building held 137 apartments, at 2 and 3 apartments per floor.

The garage and the building's spandrels are sheathed in glossy olive green brick that's close to, but not quite a match for, the cladding on the older 1000 Lake Shore Drive building next door, by the same architect and developer.

Left, 1000 Plaza; at right, the older, more textured bricks of 1000 LS Drive.

1000 Lake Shore Plaza, was a big deal in its day. Developed by Harold L. Perlman, the building was widely touted as the tallest reinforced concrete apartment building ever built, as well as Chicago's most expensive and most luxurious residential address. The tower was billed by a book-sized sales brochure that cost some $5 a copy to produce and promised "the right to be pampered with luxuries not available even to Cleopatra".

Ground was broken in January 1964 in a ceremony attended by Mayor Daley. On the building's tall, narrow mechanical penthouse was a transmitter used by the Chicago Educational Television Association's channel WTTW Channel 11, donated rent-free by the building's owners. Drawn by the public generosity, Illinois governor Otto Kerner spoke at the December 28, 1964 topping out ceremony.

Amenities included a 9-hole putting green on the garage roof, which should immediately make clear who the target demographic was. Other luxuries included a pool, sun decks, and a "fine restaurant", commissary, and valet shop on the premises.

Even more than other Lake Shore towers, 1000 Plaza was hyped by its owners: "the most beautiful and spacious apartment in America", for "sophisticated men of affairs", aimed at "136 of Chicagoland's finest families", "rising majestically to become the tallest apartment building in the world." The apartments were "designed to satisfy every fastidious desire". Rents ran as high as $1,400 a month.

It wasn't all talk, either: square footage ranging from 2000 to 3300 sf, they were quite large. It wasn't all talk, either. 9 foot ceilings were provided throughout, as was central air conditioning. Maid service was available. The Otis elevators were listed as the fastest residential elevators ever built. Exterior windows were double paned with a 2" insulating gap with venetian blinds inside. The water supply to the building was softened, "to assist M'Lady in cooking and laundering, and to improve hair and skin care!"

Left, 1000 Plaza; right, 1000 Lake Shore Drive

One item I haven't been able to figure out is the faux double-height space seen above, on the 8th or 9th floor. It corresponds to the top of the garage and presumably contains access to the rooftop putting green space. The balcony space is doubled in height, but the interior floors seem to continue on as normal.

Sheridan-Hollywood Tower - 5650 Sheridan - Loewenberg & Loewenberg 1960

Clad in textured blue brick, the design ideas of this common apartment tower are hardly distinguishable from those of its high-priced cousin at Michigan & Oak Street. The design is an exposed concrete column structure, with glass and brick infill. The major point of interest is the handsome blue brick itself.

Opened in May 1961 as the 5650 Sheridan Road Apartments, the building featured a rooftop sun deck and solarium, still present today. Studio apartments started at $130 and 4-rooms at $165.

The Statesman - 5601 Sheridan, Milton Schwartz & Associates, 1963

Just around the corner geographically, but a world apart in design terms, is the Statesman building - one of the lakefront's finest buildings, in my opinion. The building's profile is wrapped in continuous horizontal bands, broken up into a zig-zag pattern by the projecting balconies. The balcony rails enhance the horizontal motif with their slender horizontal railings.

The ground floor is an odd departure, with a startling driveway and parking ramp that curves up over a ground floor garage entrance. Shoehorned into the tight space, amid descending columns, is a double height glass lobby. Capping off the semi-private spaces is a large full-wrap balcony that extends itself out to become a sun deck, sheltering additional parking spaces.

Above, the building holds 90 condominums, mostly 1- and 2-bedrooms. It was converted from apartments in 1979.

3470 Lake Shore Drive - Raggi & Schoenbrod Inc., 1966

A few miles south, 3470 LSD provides a contrast to show just how artfully the Statesman was handled. This building likewise uses its balconies to powerful effect in creating horizontal banding on its eastern face - but lets the architectural design completely drop on the equally-visible north and south faces.
A powerful composition is left incomplete.

3740 Lake Shore is a 27-story condominium building, opened in May 1967 with one, two and three-bedroom units ranging from $27,000 to $70,000. Amenities include 30-foot long balconies, a 3-story garage in the building's base, and a pool, sauna and "sky lounge" on the tower's roof. Larger units include sunken living rooms, and the building provided an interior decorator to help residents finish out their new homes.

Like so many other Lake Shore skyscrapers, it rose on the site of a Victorian mansion, this one erected by Robert D. Lay, president of the Chicago Athletic Association. Mr. Lay died in 1940; his house became an apartment building, then was wrecked in 1966.

Gold Coast International Style - Early 50s

2011-11-21T05:30:00.005-06:00

There was an all-too-brief period after World War II when Modernism really flourished and flowered in America, from the end of the war into the early 1950s. Unfortunately, it was not a time of significant construction, so buildings from the era are all too rare. Those that were built, however, are often knockouts. Take for example:

3410 N. Lake Shore Drive - Louis R. Solomon & Associates w/ Josef Guivaner, 1950

A stunning and startling composition, easy to miss due to the incongruous white paint scheme it has been saddled with in later years. A bold C-shaped rim of limestone gives the building the appearance of being set within an incomplete picture frame.

When new, the building's visual impact was far greater; the tiles between the raised sections of windows on the front facade were black, and the bricks in the recessed areas were red. At some point, both were painted white, greatly diminishing the intended contrasts of horizontal and vertical elements.

Image from the collection of the University of Michigan, donated by Edward Olencki

3440 Lake Shore was built with 220 rental apartments, ranging from studio units (rents starting at $37.50 per month) to two bedrooms up to $182.50 a month. A second-floor parking garage holds 117 cars.

Architectural Record found the building worthy of notice, publishing a short article in October 1951, and small wonder - this is one of a very few Chicago apartment towers to truly aspire to high Modernism, rather than a localized pastiche.

After holding out for two decades while its neighbors went condo, the building was converted to condominiums in the late 1990s.

3440 Lake Shore Drive Apartments - L.R. Solomon & Associates, 1954

A sibling to its slightly-older neighbor, 3440 directly abuts 3410. Construction began in late 1954 and continued into 1956. Though at a casual glance, one might mistake the two for a single building, 3440 is a far less adventurous building than its neighbor, symmetrical and conventional in its form and massing. It is clad primarily in glass and white brick.

3440 included full air conditioning when built, as well as "Cloric built-in ovens and stainless steel sinks with Formic atops. Magnetic door G-E Refrigerators...Bathrooms by Crane - distinctive colored fixtures accented with matching Ceramic tile. Handsomely mirrored with new Lavinettes." "So advanced it could not have been built before 1955." It was converted to condominiums around 1981.

3180 Lake Shore Drive at Belmont - Shaw, Metz & Dolio, 1953

Begun in 1953, opened by 1955, this building at the corner of Lake Shore and Belmont is the most stridently 50s structure on the lakefront. Geometric details animate its base on all sides, and its color scheme can't be mistaken for any other decade.

3180 N. Lake Shore was converted to condominiums in 1975.

1000 Lake Shore Drive - Sidney H. Morris & Associates, 1953

Begun in April 1953 and opened in mid-1954 after a record-breaking construction pace, 1000 Lake Shore contained 183 apartments when new. 185 cars could park in the garage at the base, which is sheathed in glossy green brick.

The target market was well-to-do, as 6 months' advance rent and a 5-year lease was required to move in. Tenants included the Owings from Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and a president of Borg-Warner. The building cost $4.5 million to construct.

The building reacts intelligently to its site; the south-facing windows are protected from summer sun by continuous concrete shades, which also poke out to provide sheltering roofs for the balconies.) On the north side, it's solid glass.

1000 N. Lake Shore has, relatively speaking, a good side and a bad side - and the good side is largely covered up by its looming neighbor. The building did not include central air conditioning, "for reasons of cost", resulting in a grid of pockmarking AC units sticking out of the facade.

The original windows and mullions are still in place, and are showing their age. The variety of individual window treatments, the aging frames, and the air conditioner units give the north facade a particularly unkempt look today - though it's nothing a smart rehab couldn't fix.

The building took some heat in its own time, too; it was among those cited by a 1955 Architectural Forum article that criticized "an incredible rash of imitations and vulgarizations" of Mies van der Rohe's 1946 Lake Shore Apartments; 1000 Lake Shore was cited in particular for its balconies being too small.

1000 Lake Shore Drive went up on the site of the McCormick mansion, designed by Solon S. Beman. One of the city's most famous mansions, the McCormick Mansion was a center of high society at the turn of the century and a holdout in Victorian formality until the end. The death of its matron, Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick (brother of John D. Rockefeller Jr.), was page one news in 1932. After being foreclosed and sold at auction, the house became the private Bateman School for a number of years, until owner Metropolitan Life Insurance booted the school out and sold it to a consortium, which demolished the mansion in 1953. Construction on the high rise began immediately.

Numerous articles and letters lament the passing of the old mansions of Lake Shore Drive - but quite a few feature articles also celebrated the new elegance of living in these clean, spacious, airy and modern apartments, which offered spectacular views of the lake and the city, day and night. The Living section in the Tribune featured quite a few of the apartments' interior decorations, and the vividly described colors make one ache for color photographs: "a turquoise sofa is dramatized against a navy wall" in one; in another, "splashes of briliant color, beginning with the floor carpeting of broad off-white and lilac horizontal stripes."

The building also includes a stylized sculpture by California sculptor Bernard Rosenthal, representing the African Gold Coast, unveiled on the day of the building's topping out.

Gold Coast International Style - Twin Towers

2011-11-14T05:30:00.010-06:00

Continuing an exploration of the Midcentury Modern apartment towers along Chicago's lakefront.

Lake View Towers - 4550 North Clarendon Avenue - 1970

A scheme used several times along the lakefront involves a pair of similar or identical high-rise towers, with a low-lying lobby connecting them. The lobby often opens onto a drop-off driveway, usually has a doorman or security worker, and typically serves as a point of architectural elaboration. Some contain large-scale artwork.

Hollywood Towers North - 5701 North Sheridan - Solomon, Cordwell and Associates, 1961

This type of planning keeps a lot of open air on the site, allowing tall towers to retain a view, and fits with the Midcentury trend toward "towers in the park" - a fitting scheme so close to the lake. These buildings made spectacular lakefront views available to thousands of families.

3950 N. Lake Shore Drive - Shaw, Metz & Dolio, 1955

Builders John J. Mack and Raymond Sher broke ground in March 1955 for what was then Chicago's largest apartment building, with 23 floors, 662 apartments and a projected cost of $10 million. The building is precisely contemporary with downtown's Prudential, the first tall building to go up downtown since the Depression.

Features included a 400 parking space garage, 10 high speed elevators, and gas range kitchens. Occupancy began in June 1956 and by December the buildings were more than 2/3 filled; it was heavily favored by young families, with rents running from $140 to $235 per month. A 37-person cleaning staff kept the building running, vacuuming corridor carpets daily, constantly cleaning the 6,000 windows, and hauling out two tons of garbage daily.

It's only clearly visible from the air, but the structure is not symmetrical - the southern tower is offset from the other two, pushed slightly east.

Vacant at the time of construction, the land had 20 years prior been home to the mansion of Countess Sarah Victoria Cavicchia.

I must here humbly submit a correction: when I briefly wrote about this building last year, I misread an article about 1550 Lake Shore as being about this building instead. 3950 did not, to the best of my knowledge, have the rooftop dining and party space that 1550 has. Those wonderful curved penthouses look like they're purely for mechanicals, and the tower rooftops don't appear to have any resident access at all.

3600 Lake Shore Drive at Addison - Shaw Metz & Dolio, Architects, 1959

Twin towers with a vertical emphasis, connected at the base by a common lobby with a landscaped roof. 3600 North Lake Shore is all about rectilinear forms - square tiles, square windows, rectangles of brick outlined by rectangles of stainless steel. Naturally, its two biggest decorative elements are curves - a mesh of steel hoops over the lobby, and the curved front of the porte cochere.

The land was previously home to Issac Miller Hamilton, president of the Federal Life Insurance Company.

Construction on the towers began in April 1959; the buildings opened in June 1960. Its 640 apartments made it the second-largest apartment house in the city. The building, like 3550 just to the south, was a Mack & Sher project. A hair salon named Fred's Coiffures operated in the lobby, along with a small gift shop.

The building's relatively small lake-facing windows apparently generated some controversy and discussion among locals; the smaller windows serve bathrooms, while the larger windows in the center are for the bedrooms. True lake views are intended to be from the south and north facing facades, which are generously glazed. Alfred Shaw explained the decision as a result of his own east-facing windows which required him to draw the blinds every morning.

Apparently geared towards middle-class professionals, the building and its residents made little noise in the headlines during and after its construction.

Shaw Metz & Dolio, the lakefront's most prolific Midcentury architectural firm, formed in 1947 when architect Alfred Shaw withdrew from a previous partnership and allied with structural engineer Carl Metz and electrical & mechanical engineer John Dolio. That same year the firm landed the job of finishing out the interior of the Baha'i House of Worship on the north shore. They firm had a flurry of business in the 1950s as they worked on several large housing projects, downtown buildings, and entered a competition to design St. Peter's Church downtown (their entry did not win.) John Dolio would eventually split off into his own engineering firm, which continued to work with Shaw & Metz.

Much of their work was for developers Mack and Sher, whose portfolio of nearly a dozen major lakefront buildings was run by Lake ShoreManagement Company.

3550 Lake Shore Drive - Loewenberg & Loewenberg, 1961

Just across Addison Street to the south, another building with the same concept - two massive slab towers conjoined by a low-lying lobby - opened in 1962.

Lake Shore Management Company billed it as a "distinctive twin tower architectural masterpiece...providing fabulous views of lake and city", with studio, one and two bedroom apartments.

More on this building's wonderful lobby sculpture here.

Imperial Towers - 4250 N. Marine Drive - L.R. Solomon and J.D. Cordwell & Associates, 1960

Developed by Albert R. Robin, the 29-story Imperial Towers contain 432 apartments per tower. Construction began in 1961; occupancy started in August 1962. It was one of many Chicago projects insured by a section of the national housing act.

The building was marketed as luxury for the budget-conscious, and was intended to attract a mix of older, retired residents and younger families - the owners went so far as to tout a social ambition of giving seniors the choice of "mingling with the younger generations" when and if they chose.

Amenities included an "Olympic" sized rooftop swimming pool over the garage (25 yards, actually, which isn't Olympic sized at all), and several small stores in the lobby including a coffee shop, a beauty salon, Imperial Drug, and the first of several Jewel Pantry stores, high-end groceries in luxury apartment buildings with a large selection of prepared foods, exclusively open to building residents.

The building has a 250 car garage, accessed through a ramp in the courtyard that went right under the lobby. A less-touted feature, detailed in a New York Times article, was that the garage could be "converted into a fall-out shelter" with room for the building's population and hundreds more, equipped with emergency generators, special ventilation, heat, water, light and food. Always reassuring in the Cold War age!

The building converted to condominiums in 1977.

Imperial Towers features a Japanese decorative theme, with what were touted as Japanese gardens in the courtyards as well as on the lobby roof. Like many before them, the developers pulled no punches in describing their building, labeling it "America's most fabulous building" in a 1963 ad.

Gold Coast International Style: White Brick Midcentury

2011-11-07T05:30:00.013-06:00

"We feel it takes the drabness away."

- Architect Alfred Shaw on his white brick buildings, 1965

New York City has, in recent years, been coming to grips with its Midcentury heritage of boxy white-brick high rise apartment buildings, built in the 1950s and 1960s to feed the growing demand for luxury and middle-class apartments. These buildings' cladding was a break from the darker colors used in the past, representing a vision of a cleaner, more modern lifestyle. The movement is described in a couple of New York Times articles:

New Respect for White Brick Buildings

Seeing White Brick Buildings in a New Light

When a friend pointed them out to me, my first thought was, "Huh, I guess it's a New York thing. I never saw buildings like this here."

Well, guess what I saw not a day later as I biked along the lakefront trail?

777 North Michigan Avenue - Shaw Metz & Associates, 1964

909 North Michigan Avenue - Shaw Metz & Associates, 1962

While not a precise stylistic match to the blocky Manhattan buildings (quite a few of the Chicago examples tend toward New Formalism as much as pure International Style), Chicago does indeed have several buildings representing the same ethos, from exactly the same time period.

These buildings share common elements beyond their cladding. All were built with clean modern designs that practically demand a simplified, modern and efficient life. The designs were matched by a host of modern features like central air, electric kitchens, attached indoor parking garages, even security cameras in the lobby that residents could view from their apartments. Most offered luxury amenities like maid service, 24 hour doormen, and rooftop pools and party decks. Circa 1962, these buildings offered the ultimate in urbane luxury living.

1550 N. Lake Shore Drive at North Avenue - Shaw, Metz & Dolio, 1957

Developed by local builders Mack & Sher, this 33-story tower was planned to include "every conceivable luxury", including sizable family rooms. Its distinctive top includes a rooftop dining and party space available to the residents. 180 cars can park in the garage. It was topped out in 1959.

The address continued to appear in society pages with some frequency in the years following its completion.

This building rose on the site of the 1910 Richard T. Crane mansion; Mr. Crane died in 1931 and his widow passed away in 1949. The Gothic mansion was razed in 1955, originally for a parking lot.

3150 N. Lake Shore Drive, Shaw Metz & Dolio, 1961

Opened in August 1963, 3150 Lake Shore was described in Lake Shore Management's glowing prose as "the Crown Jewel of the lakefront!" The 38 story building has 6 elevators, serving only 2 apartments per floor.

The building exhibits a number of curiosities; not least of which is the marked similarity of its massing to its sibling at 1550. Both share a large rooftop mechanical penthouse, artfully designed to cap off the building, rather than left as an unconsidered collection of boxes atop the structure, as has happened so many times elsewhere.

The design also makes the curious choice to have powerful vertical elements on the broad faces, but only horizontal banding on the narrow ends.

The garage is housed in a wonderously pure box of white brick.

3150 LSD was previously the site of a 1919 mansion built by Frank D. Stout, a "capitalist" who made his fortunes in lumber and went on to become director of various banking and railroad enterprises. Mr. Stout died in 1927; his widow passed away a decade later. The mansion became home to the contentious Kenner Hospital, a 65-bed unit, fined in 1948 for operating without a license and repeatedly in the news for its various problems. The Stout mansion was razed in 1959 to make way for the new skyscraper.

3900 N. Lake Shore Drive at Sheridan - Loewenberg & Loewenberg, 1958

3900 Lake Shore broke ground in September 1958, was topped out in November 1959, and opened in 1960. Developed and managed by I. Richard Cobrin, who also did 2970 N. Lake Shore, the building originally contained 240 luxury apartments.

Its construction drew the newspapers' attention thanks to a couple of high-tech innovations that were used. The first was the French-built Benoto caisson digger machine used by Lake States Engineering in preparing the foundations. The "spider-like" machine that could sink caissons down 83 feet to bedrock in about 8 hours, then "walk" away to the next spot when finished; it was also notably quiet. Also of note was an advanced plaster-pumping technique used to send plaster up to the upper floors, where it could be sprayed or hand-troweled onto the walls.

The building was designed by Loewenberg & Loewenberg Architects, a firm founded by Lithuanian-born brothers I.S. Loewenberg and Col. Max L. Loewenberg, and later joined by Max's son James Loewenberg. James, now in his 70s, remains an active developer in Chicago today.

3900 N. Lake Shore was renovated and converted to condominiums in 1977.

1300 Lake Shore Drive - Ezra Gordon, Jack M. Levin & Associates, 1963

Built by developer Ralph W. Applegate (who soon moved into the building, with his adult son living across the hall) 1300 N. Lake Shore was part of the thriving luxury apartment boom of the early 1960s. The 40-story tower strove, along with several of its neighbors up and down the shore, to attract the city's most well-to-do tenants - doctors and lawyers, executive chefs, CEOs and bank chairmen. Construction was underway by mid-1963. A number of society-notable names were soon among the building's tenants; rents could run as high as $1800 a month. The 40th floor contained a large ball room originally known as the 1300 Club.

Crime and fatality followed glamour and riches; one apartment was robbed of $100,000 of jewels in 1964, and another saw the wife of a mobster die in a bedroom fire in 1966. The fire filled the whole building with smoke and forced residents to evacuate. Another resident, apparently despondent over his failing health, leaped from a 14th story balcony later that year.

The asymetrical bits along the roofline are a tri-level penthouse, added during the 1976 conversion of the building to condominiums. It was designed and occupied by Jack Levin, one of the original architects.

It's easy to dismiss 1300 as the quintessential ugly 60s building. Indeed, from a distance, it seems little more than a rote assembly of its parts. Yet if you look closely, you can see what the architects were striving for - elements of geometry appear from the building's spandrels and bay windows, overlapping planes advancing and receding. Even the balcony railings get in on the act, though it's not clear if they are the originals or a more recent addition. The effect does not carry over onto the building as a whole - but to say there is no design here is to speak without looking.

Curiously, Mies Van Der Roes proposed an unbuilt project for the same site in 1956.

A Biker's Guide to Riding Metra

2011-10-31T05:30:00.000-05:00

I've spent much of 2011 taking my bike on Metra trains daily, so I feel qualified to offer up some tips for anyone considering taking a bicycle on Metra:

1) Check the schedule! Before you leave the house, make sure you're heading for a train that allows bikes (basically, everything except morning rush hour heading into town, and evening rush hour heading out of town.)

In particular, make sure it's not a blackout date - Metra is terrible about publicizing bike blackout dates. If you don't do your homework, your only warning will be when the conductor barks "NO BIKES!" at you on the platform, leaving you with only seconds to either lock your bike on the platform and leave without it, or skip the train entirely.

2) Bikes are last on, and last off. Wait till everyone else is on the train before boarding. Wait till everyone else is out of the passenger compartment before rolling out. It's the rules, and it's just plain polite. You're likely to whack someone with a pedal or handlebar if you're in the middle of a crowd of people getting on or off. Don't worry - the train will not leave without you.

3) Have a bungee cord with you. They're incredibly cheap at Target or Walmart. The rules require you to strap your bike to the bottom rails. I see bikers routinely using U-locks, chains, or cloth straps for the same purpose, but it's incredibly awkward and time consuming - particularly annoying when someone else needs to put their bike on top of yours.

4) Unless you're going to the end of the line, stay with your bike. Or at least pay attention to it. People with bikes are constantly getting on and off, all up and down the line. If you reach your stop and haven't been paying attention, you may find another bike on top of yours. Likewise, your bike might end up blocking someone else's.

5) Take 3 seats only - park all the way back. The handicapped/bike/luggage area contains 5 fold-down seats. A bike can easily fit on top of only three of them, if you push it all the way against the compartment wall (toward the door.) It's rude and thoughtless to take up 4 or even 5 seats when three will do the trick - but I see it happen all the time.

6) Don't block the aisle. For better or worse, a lot of people choose to move around and between cars right before reaching a stop. Bikers who have just unstrapped their bike often stand in the middle of the aisle waiting for the train to stop, oblivious to people in the aisle behind them.

7) Listen to the conductor's instructions. On the trains, they are God, and what they say goes. Yes, sometimes some of them are assholes, and that sucks. But arguing with them won't help. Seriously - I've seen it tried.

And while I'm at it, a couple of tips for non-biker passengers:

1) Move for the bikers. If you're in the folding seats, the biker has the right to boot you out. Don't complain, don't grumble, don't be an ass about it - in fact, you shouldn't even have to be asked. There's dozens of seats on every car, but only one place where bikes can go. If you see a bike coming on board, be gracious and move to another seat. Is it fair? I don't know, but that's the chance you took when you sat on the folding seats. There's a sign right there announcing it.

2) Don't hang out in the vestibule. The vestibule is for people getting on and off the train, and you're in the way - especially for people trying to haul a bike out the door.

Purple Hotel on the Wane

2011-10-17T05:30:00.000-05:00

The unmistakable, can't-miss-it building at the corner of Touhy and Lincoln has housed a number of different hotel chains over the decades, but it has long been known by its most obvious description: The Purple Hotel.

March 2006

Planned as the Hyatt-Lincolnwood, the Hyatt House-Chicago broke ground in January 1961, on the site of the Allgauers Fireside restaurant at Lincoln and Touhy, destroyed by fire in 1958. One year later, on January 17, 1962, the Hyatt House opened with a ballroom, conference spaces, an outdoor pool, and a million dollar Ray Foley restaurant. Architects for the hotel were Hausner and Mascal, with Freidman, Alschuler and Sincere designing the restaurant.

April 2008

The place did fine into the 80s, when it was sold by the Hyatt and began a series of name changes. The Purple Hotel monicker was finally made official in 2004 by an independent operator.

Through it all, the Purple Hotel has acquired a rather legendary history in the annals of sleepy Lincolnwood. It was a swinging hot spot in its early days, hosing a variety of performers. In 1983, it was the site of the gangland execution of a mobster. Just a few years ago, convictions were handed down regarding sex parties held at the hotel. And most recently, its rampant building code violations forced the hotel to close in 2007, and have since made it the subject of considerable legal wrangling, as the city of Lincolnwood moves to have it demolished.

April 2008

August 2010

In the meantime, the Purple Hotel has gone downhill, fast. The pool courtyard is choked by weeds growing six feet tall. Windows are broken. Doors are kicked open. Carpets are torn out. The interior partitions are rotting, and mold is reportedly all over the place.

The hotel does have some architectural value, as Lee Bay recently pointed out. The exposed structure gives it a nice rhythm, and those massive windows on the guest rooms just don't get done anymore. A few elements here and there give it some added 60s funk, not least of which are the titular glazed purple bricks themselves.

To make it work as a hotel, an operator would have to think way beyond the norm. This building, hanging out in the middle of nowhere in terms of public transit, amenities and attractions, is a non-starter as a standard hotel. The only hope, marketing-wise, would be to capitalize on the building's funky style and swinging history, and go all-out with a completely crazed renovation. Either total Mid Century classic 1960s style - maybe even a 1950s streamline mode - or else a completely contemporary treatment rendered in shades of purple. Purple neon, purple understair lighting, purple translucent backlit panels, curving purple reception desk, an internally glowing purple bar with bottles lining purple-backlit glass shelves.

Is Lincolnwood ready for an over-the-top celebration of its own history? Somehow I doubt it.

Purple Hotel at American UrbEx blog

Purple Razed? - Lee Bay

The Eyesore That Is the Purple Hotel - Skokie.Patch.com

The Purple Hotel - Global Traveler Blog

Decrepit Purple Hotel Outstays Its Welcome - Sun-Times

Open House Chicago - this weekend!

2011-10-14T20:58:00.001-05:00

Over a hundred buildings are open to the public this weekend as part of Open House Chicago, a city-wide architectural tour. It's free and runs Saturday and Sunday. Don't miss out!

http://www.openhousechicago.org/

Two little theaters

2011-10-10T05:30:00.003-05:00

Two of Chicago's earliest surviving movie theaters - the Park Manor Theater and the New Devon Theater - were built in a similar material palette, a common scheme of white glazed brick with dark green glazed brick trim. It's an often-seen style from the years just before World War I. I will cover it more expansively in a later post; however, in the process of researching these two, I came across so much info that it seemed fair to give them their own separate writeup.

Both were relatively small houses, running what the Tribune referred to as "photo plays". They were built at the declining end of the nickelodeon era, when features were short, admission was five cents, and "talkies" were still over a decade away. These smaller theaters often could not compete against the much larger movie palaces which began appearing only a few years later, though some stayed in business into the 1950s or later.

In Rogers Park, the short-lived New Devon Theater, 1618 W. Devon Avenue, was built in 1912 (previously covered in this post.) Among its earliest listings were the photoplay The Diamond from the Sky, a drama hyped with a full-page ad in the Tribune. The New Devon only lasted a few years as a theater, and housed a series of businesses in the following decades. The first was a Ford auto dealership in the 1920s, the Hughey Motor Company.

The former theater included a residence during the Depression (one tenant died in 1940; another was busted in 1948 for operating gambling equipment in Northbrook), and served as a meeting hall for the 50th Ward Republican Party (where a 1939 speaker histrionically declared that the "New Deal-communist alignment [has] made the Democratic party the party of dept, depression, disorder, and destruction. For many years the democrats have been destroying the country.")

In 1941 it housed the Rogers Park chapter of America First, an anti-war group which had trouble finding lodgings in the area due to landlords' fear of being seen as pro-peace while war raged in Europe. The group had been summarily kicked out of another meeting space after only a few weeks of occupancy, no reasons given.

By 1952, it appears to have been home to Devon-Clark Radio, which changed to Devon-Clark Television by 1954, an electronics store selling Westinghouse electronics, air conditioners ("Sleep in an ice cube on hot muggy nights", only $2.66 a week!) and other goods - though some ads list the address as 1612 Devon, a different building entirely. Want to give them a call to check? The number is Ambassador 2-3081.

The former New Devon Theatre has been the Assyrian American Association since 1963. The one-time competitor that put it out of business, the Ellantee Theater, is visible just down the street and today houses Clark-Devon Hardware.

New Devon Theater at Cinema Treasures

On the south side, the old Park Manor Theater, 321 E. 69th Street, opened in early 1914 and lasted till 1950 as a theater.

Its early screenings in 1914 included serials such as The Adventures of Kathlyn (also showing at the New Devon). A Tribune listing notes the theater among contributors to relief funds in the wake of the Eastland disaster on the Chicago River in 1915; the theater commonly ran the Selig-Tribune newsreel ("The World's Greatest News-Film", according to their ads; again, also showing at the New Devon). A 1970 column and response letter sees old residents of the neighborhood reminiscing about their childhoods, with the Park Manor's nickel-a-show serials and Punch and Judy shows figuring prominently.

In 1937, it was involved in a discrimination suit for refusing to sell tickets to a black couple. In November 1950, the theater was listed for sale and described thus:

378 seats, fully equipped, including $800 popcorn machine; lobby and front need painting, a few seats need repair, otherwise in first class condition. Oil heat, washed air heating and cooling system, double Western Electric sound, new projector head, new strong low intensity arc lamps, rectifiers and Martin converter, new screen...rent $150 per month...a real opportunity for the right party.

Alas, the $800 popcorn machine would not see service here again; the building was home to the Philadelpha Church by 1961, followed by the Grace Eden Church - both African-American congregations, ironically (or perhaps fittingly) enough. At some point during this era, it gained a low-budget but funky Midcentury colored window across its entrance.

In 1961 it served as a back-up site for a "mixed revival" - a racially integrated prayer rally - which was disrupted by mob violence and broken up by police at its original location at the Ogden Theater, ostensibly on grounds of the building being unsafe. Threatened by demolition in 1967, it nonetheless has survived to the present, currently housing the First Born General Assembly Church.

Park Manor Theater at Cinema Treasures

St. Priscilla Catholic Church

2011-10-03T05:30:00.001-05:00

It's nothing mind-blowing from the outside, but if you know how to read your MidCentury vocabulary, you can tell there's going to be great things inside. St. Priscilla Church (6949 W. Addison, 1957) does not disappoint.

The entry hall is a long, narrow rectangular space, which extends beyond the main body of the building to form the baptistry, demarcated only by gates. This thin structure has walls of stained glass on both sides, with bold, flowing abstract designs that alternate large areas of clear glass with color.

The sanctuary is a large space, with high flat ceilings and walls adorned only by flecks of light (an approach used in St. Louis at St. Catherine of Sienna church, among others.)

Below, the stained glass windows continue the same sweeping wave-like forms seen in the chapel.

And the motif culminates in the rear window, where Saint Priscilla herself presides over the sanctuary.

Behind the altar, a massive metal screen rises up to a round skylight.

The sanctuary can be a rather moody place, depending on the time of day and how many lights are left on. But it is always beautiful.

The siting of the church lends it additional presence - it sits at the head of the T-shaped intersection of Addison and Sayre.

A school and newly completed convent already stood on the site in 1956, when Rev. Aloysius Hinterberger led the drive for a new building. Fund raising for the church building began based on a budget of $750,000 (later upped to $900,000). The new building was constructed by Charles B. Johnson & Sons, the general contractor. The new structure was dedicated on Christmas Eve, 1957. Among it better known congregants was builder Albert Schorsch, who developed large swaths of northwestern Chicago.

Today St. Priscilla Catholic Church provides Mass in both English and Polish.

St. Priscilla Church site

Northbrook Part II: Contemporary Modern

2011-09-26T05:30:00.002-05:00

Continuing a look at some of the better buildings in this far-out Chicago suburb.

Northbrook Public Library

It hovers delightfully by day, and glows like a lantern at night. The Northbrook Public Library is the town's most notable "downtown" building, only a block away from the old village center, adjacent to the Postmodern village hall and overlooking a public park.

The top floor reading and stacks room is wonderfully light and airy, with the exposed tube steel structure holding up the roof. The curved pipe trusses blossom from their columns like plant life. The whimsical light fixtures are a rebuke to the older section's staid heritage.

Frye Gillan Molinaro Architects, Ltd. designed this delightful space in 1999. It is an eastward addition to an uninspiring 1960 building, exploding outwards and making you forget all that boring low-budget Miesian repetition. Inside, the two buildings are almost seamlessly joined as one.

It's worth noting at this point that this portion of Northbrook - in and around the "downtown" - is comparatively compact and livable, compared to the surrounding sprawl. The houses are smaller, the lots are smaller, the streets are nicer, and you can walk to the train station, the library, or the small knot of stores. It's a different world from the Northbrook that most people experience, which is on massive arterial roads like Dundee or Lake-Cook.

The Pointe in Highland Park

Maybe better known by their street name - Prairie Court - this cluster of Modernist houses stands along Lake-Cook Road, across from Northbrook Court mall (and technically in Highland Park, but it's all about the same thing.) Two of the planned 17 units remain unbuilt - hit by the recession, perhaps - but the remainder stand in neat rows of gleaming glass and precisely finished concrete.

They feature hugely generous glass walls, built-in balconies with projecting roofs, and punched-opening windows in the concrete walls that are echoed by the low screening wall along Lake Cook Road.

They contain one giant WTF moment: a completely ordinary suburban ranch house that, from all appearances, went up at exactly the same time as all the other houses. Seriously... why would anyone who wanted this house choose to put it here?

3150 Commercial Avenue

This late-1970s warehouse recently got an attention-getting marker tacked on to its front. Those giant pieces of steel aren't holding up anything but a small glass entry canopy, but they definitely make this faceless tilt-up concrete building a lot more interesting.

In the background, a new water tower is under construction; as of this writing, it's just about completed on the outside.

Greek Feast - by Georgie V

This prominent landmark at the corner of Dundee and Pfingston opened in 2010, designed by architect Brett Karson. The stainless-steel-clad cylinder is a stylized version of a gyro roasting on a spit, while the accompanying blue elements recall the colors of the Greek flag. The shallow-pitched roof, with its two intersecting vertical elements, recalls the 1950s atomic ranch homes which dot the nearby side streets.

Much to my amusement, the restaurant has been embroiled in parking lot wars with the shabby strip mall surrounding it. In a place like Northbrook, is parking really so difficult to come by?

Crate and Barrel

Is it fair to include a national chain in a survey of local buildings? Perhaps so, considering their corporate headquarters is just a few miles down the road. Yes or no, the fact remains that Crate and Barrel puts up rather nice buildings, and this outlot structure at Northbrook Court is typically handsome.

Lipson Alport Glass Associates

A startling building on Waukegan Boulevard, home to a package-design company. The visible portion is an addition onto a previously-existing warehouse. Opened in 2003. Architect: Valerio DeWalt Train Associates

The contrast between the solid second story and the entirely glass ground floor would be interesting enough, but the building goes a couple of steps further. The north end floats off the ground, hovering above low-lying drainage areas; together with the south-end offset, it creates the impression of two overlapping bars that have been knocked off-center.

Oh, and the ground floor tilts.

It's not just an illusion; and it is not just the outside. The interior floor, for reasons that Architectural Record left unexplained when they covered this building in May 2004, has a 4-5 degree cant. I cannot imagine how the architect talked the client into this - and I am certain that's how it worked, for no client would request such a thing. "Yeah. We need tilted floors. When I drop a pencil, I wanna see it roll." Clients don't do these things.

Whatever the reason, it sure is a treat to look at, day or night.

Building project portfolio

Parking Meter Wasteland

2011-09-22T05:30:00.001-05:00

I present here a short overview of the strange landscape alternately known as the Parking Meter Zoo and the Parking Meter Wasteland. Though Chicago blog The Expired Meter has already done a fantastic job documenting this surreal story, I have to get my own two bits in, if only to post a few of the unearthly images that have resulted from this strange landscape.

March 2008:

The area in question is on the lower near west side - just north of the Pilsen rail yard embankment, just west of Ashland - in an area adjoining the Illinois Medical District. These utterly empty streets, an urban prairie including Wood Street, Paulina, 13th Street and 14th Street, were a popular parking spot for medical center employees.

Well, you can't have people parking for free, can you?! Fortunately, the local alderman rode to the rescue, having the city install 1200 parking meters on completely empty streets. "Problem" solved - nobody parks there anymore!

March 2009:

Even more meters went in during the months that followed, creating an utterly surreal landscape - hundreds of meters, with no buildings to serve or cars to regulate.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm no advocate for free or cheap parking. "Free" parking is one of the great lies of American development, and a principal generator of sprawl. Parking requires land, infrastructure and maintenance, all of which have economic value - and so you always pay for parking somehow, whether through higher retail costs or higher taxes. "Free" parking is one of those tricky sleights-of-hand that American corporatocracy is so good at - an illusion that helps to diffuse and hide the true costs of the automobile, and thus enables all the attendant damage that has been done to American cities over the decades.

But - the point of a parking meter is to keep traffic moving throughout the day, so that shoppers and people on business can reach local stores and businesses. It's so people don't just plonk their car down all day in a spot that other people need to use.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and speculate that this site does not face that kind of competition.

September 2011:

Now what's this? Where'd the meters go?! Why, they took the thousands of brand-new meters out again... to replace them with the new meter boxes!

But of course, even that may not last, since they're dropping a new CostCo grocery store on part of the site, whose description includes all the vacant land shown here. I seriously doubt Costco will build without a sizable parking lot, and I will be surprised if they don't want to take out at least part of one street.

So let's recap. The city and its parking meter company (LAZ Parking) have:
* Installed thousands of meters on empty land
* Ripped out the meters and installed pay boxes on the still-empty land
* May have ripped out some of the pay boxes to remove the streets they were on

I mean, are they high or what??

By way of history - these empty blocks were chock full of houses (and one large industrial building) a hundred years ago. The near West Side had a rough reputation when the Illinois Medical District was founded in 1941; by the 1960s, eminent domain was being used to gobble up properties in the area. Today, only a few faint foundations remnants and porch stairs remain to indicate that a neighborhood once stood here.

Searching for Architecture in Northbrook

2011-09-19T05:30:00.001-05:00

As a preface to this post, I had written out a fairly long rant about how much I hate suburbs in general, and Northbrook in particular. But my M.O. on this blog is to celebrate, not denigrate, so we'll skip all that and get straight to the point: even a far-flung exurb like Northbrook has its moments.

Part 1: 20th Century Northbrook

Lakeside Congregation for Reform Judaism - Lake-Cook Road

Fitch, Larocca & Carrington Inc., finished 1973 for a congregation dating back to 1954.

Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses - Pfingston and Maria Avenue

A tiny confection rendered in Brutalist language. The building was designed in 1967 by architect Salvatore Balsamo, and built by members of the congregation over the next two years. It's still in use by them today. Having designed it to be built primarily by unskilled labor, Balsamo commented in the 1970 Tribune that "the unions and building department did not bother the workers because the project was a house of worship."

CitiBank - Lake-Cook Road

A giant square roof hovering over a transparent body below. The roof extends to shelter the drive-through ATMs in one unified swoop. The bank building went up in the mid-1970s as home to First Federal of Chicago.

The bank is an outparcel of the adjacent Northbrook Court, a development fought tooth and nail by neighboring Deerfield, but opened nevertheless in 1976. The mall was designed by Architectonics, Inc., who also worked with developer Sears on another mall in Joliet.

Great Lakes Structural Steel
237 Melvin Drive

A plain warehouse with a bold International Style office building up front, built for a company relocating from Skokie. The style has been tweaked a bit, making it a bit more flamboyant than orthodoxy might have allowed - and allowing the original tenant to show off the effectiveness of their signature product. 1969, by the local firm of Alper & Alper.

Ironically, it's now home to HDO Productions - a company that provides large event tents.

AA Service Co. Heating and Cooling - Anthony Trail

This shockingly dramatic arch was once an airport hangar for Sky Harbor Airport. Dating from 1929, it was opened to great aplomb in the days when the Northbrook area was far more sparsely settled. An incredibly stylized club house and control center stood to the south on Dundee Road, but did not survive the Great Depression which closed the airport. Abandoned and vandalized, the clubhouse was torn down in 1939 and the field re-opened as a training center, largely for military pilots. After three decades of use as a popular private airport, Sky Harbor closed in 1973 in the face of rising land values, to be replaced by light industrial development.

The original hangar building was abandoned for a few years but survives to this day, now housing a heating contractor. In an utterly bizarre arrangement, it now has a narrow two-story seafood restaurant tacked on to its side.

The Courts of Northbrook

Opened in 1988, the Courts stand directly west of the shopping mall of nearly the same name. What I like about this place is that it's such a great model for a suburb. It's nothing particularly special or overwrought; and yet, it shows how pleasant a neighborhood can be when the right architectural tools are used to control space. This is not some high-falutin' architect's theoretical experiment - any developer could come up with this place if they put their head to it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for such an enlightened development, this is the work of the Optima Inc. company architect David Hovey.

The enclosed porch is an especially nice touch. What a pleasant place to sit and read on a sunny day!

360-370 Lake Cook Road

Lacking any name, this low, long building hunkers down under its wonderful green metal roof and behind its low brick walls, scowling out at the rushing traffic on Lake-Cook Road. Inside, a pleasant courtyard greets visitors.

And wander around a bit, and you'll find the requisite 1950s ranch houses, still looking fantastic 50 years after they were built.

Following on 1950s houses came 1960s churches.

And the story doesn't stop here... next time we'll look at some more recent additions to the landscape.

No, no, no, no...

2011-09-15T05:30:00.000-05:00

This giant mural of St. Vincent adorns the west face of DePaul University's Francis X. McCabe Hall. It can't be missed if you're riding north on the Red Line.

The mural, titled We Are DePaul 2, was created in 2001 via a composite of 16 repeated images of DePaul students and faculty. But it's not the composition or technical aspects that intrigue me so. No, it's his chagrinned scowl.

St. Vincent looms far larger than life over the Wish soccer field, and his disapproval of DePaul's athletic teams couldn't be clearer. Every time I pass, I imagine just what he's thinking as he glares at the minuscule student athletes below:

"No, no, no, don't pass to him... no, don't go there... no... wrong... wrong... stop... oh good grief... don't kick it - now what're you - now what is that? What do you think you're - you guys... no, no, no, no, NO. That just won't do at all."

A remarkable restoration

2011-09-12T22:06:00.003-05:00

A heartfelt congratulations to the congregants of First Baptist Congregational Church on Chicago's near west side.

This venerable church was damaged in the intense blizzard that struck Chicago in February of this year. Rooftop masonry was dislodged and tumbled to the street - and through the roof, into the sanctuary. The damage to the historic building was considerable, and it was immediately boarded up.

In far too many cases, this would be the beginning of a long, slow decline for such an aged church in an older city neighborhood. In this case, however, quite the opposite happened: insurance, bolstered by donations from an enthusiastic and sizable congregation, covered the damage and spurred additional interior work. The south size of the sanctuary is getting a new roof, a work still in progress, and the organ pipes are still out for repairs.

But the bulk of the interior work is finished; and thus, this Sunday, a mere seven months after the blizzard, churchgoers returned to the sanctuary for services.

And what a sanctuary it is!

First Congregational was begun in 1869 as Union Park Congregational Baptist (architect: Gurdon P. Randall.) It opened in 1871; later that year the Great Chicago Fire burned much of the city to the east (though it never came close to the Union Park area.) Union Park Congregational housed city offices for a time in the fire's aftermath; it would go on to have a long, storied history; in the 20th century, it has been a common stop for visiting presidents.

First Baptist Congregational was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.

Photos of the damage from FBCC's site

Midwest MidCentury fights

2011-07-18T05:30:00.000-05:00

I'm duplicating this post across two blogs, because two parallel battles are being fought right now over MidCentury buildings in Chicago and St. Louis.

In Chicago, a well-publicized fight has been going on for many months over the fate of the Prentice Women's Hospital at Northwestern University Hospital's downtown campus. Prentice is a high-rise building by Bertram Goldberg, the same architect who developed the corn-cob Marina Towers on the Chicago river, and two other complexes in a similar idiom south of downtown. The building has been vacated by Northwestern Hospital, which originally expressed a desire to demolish it, though no plan for using the land has been developed.

In St. Louis, Midtown's "flying saucer" building - originally a gas station, now a Del Taco fast food outlet - has been the center of a much swifter controversy, as the owner announced plans to demolish it and build a new retail building in its place. The St. Louis community immediately rose up in righteous grassroots wrath. Driven by an unholy alliance between MidCentury architectural preservationists and fans of Del Taco chain (a mainstay of late night food, particularly for students at nearby Saint Louis University), the issue has flared across local news and been debated at the level of the city council.

Several interesting parallels stand between these buildings and their champions. Both are from the 1960s, built of concrete, and defined by dramatic cantilevers and round forms. And both lend themselves to diagramatic simplification in the form of the line drawings up above - a simple, clear expression of the buildings' big ideas, a clear illustration of the dramatic simplicity that defines them. Those two drawings summarize one of the big trends in Modernism - simple, bold design moves, with dramatic but carefully considered lines and proportions.

Such representations are eminently useful in getting people to see past the more transitory elements of the buildings. A number of St. Louis residents have commented about bad memories or experiences with Del Taco, and called for demolition - as if the building itself were responsible for the business within it. Likewise, Prentice has the maintenance issues one would expect of any building that's approaching 50 years old, with stained and spalling concrete in need of cleaning and repair.

Finally, both buildings are fine examples of the growing need for Midcentury awareness and preservation. Nobody is building these things anymore - once they're gone, they're gone forever.

A lesson in etiquette

2011-07-17T09:10:00.002-05:00

This is completely off-topic and meta, and I know I shouldn't let this topic bother me so much, so I'll keep it short.

I write this blog for free, for fun, in my spare time, entirely on my own - photographs, research, writing, everything. I try to gather as much info as I can before posting, but I have my limits. If I waited till I'd done an NRHP-level research document, there wouldn't be anything here.

So I get kinda pissed off when a poster who is otherwise giving useful information feels the need to append snotty comments like these:

"Please do your research before posting."

"Three minutes of research would tell you that..."

This is called "being a jerk", and it's rude and unnecessary. For me, it obliterates the pleasure of finding out more about a building, and it rather spoils things for the vast majority of commenters who are playing nice.

Also - it's very easy to find information about something when you already know all about it. Try starting cold sometime, like with nothing but a street address or even less. You'll find it's a lot tougher.

So, in summary, don't be a jerk - to me, to other people online, to other people in real life.

Sorry for the diatribe - back on topic now. Wait'll you see these cool Art Deco churches I've got coming up!

Mucca Pazza at Tour de Fat

2011-07-16T20:13:00.004-05:00

One of Chicago's great cultural treasures, in my irreverent opinion at least, is the band Mucca Pazza. Billing themselves as a "circus-punk marching band", this group of 30 musicians and performers employs all the trappings of a high school marching band, including their own mini-squad of cheerleaders, but with a wild abandon that represents what high school band might have looked like if the teacher had left and never come back, and the most energetic students took over running the show.

Mucca Pazza does indeed march during their shows, and dance, and spin, and run about through the crowd in every direction. At any moment you might get a cheerleader waving pom-pons in your face or a 5-second guitar solo played almost for your exclusive benefit. Some of the musicians wear amplifiers, with helmet-mounted megaphones on their heads, broadcasting their sound in one particular direction, and perhaps sending it to different areas of the crowd like a rotating tornado siren as they turn about. Groups of horn players might position themselves in different areas and play back and forth across the crowd. A trombone player might need the space between you and your neighbor for his instrument's slide. The show you get depends on where you are, and will be different for every member of the audience.

The band's energy is frenetic, and improvisation is everywhere. It's enough to make any standard rock band look dusty and tired.

I happily bought their album, but listening to a recording on speakers cannot remotely compare to the experience of being surrounded by musicians playing their hearts out and having a blast doing it. And there's no cheerleaders, either.

Rogers Park's Metra Murals

2011-06-19T19:56:00.002-05:00

Every time the UP North Metra line embankment crosses a street, there are two ready-made mural canvases in the form of the retaining walls under the bridges. And one of the more delightful outcomes of Rogers Park's recent participatory budgeting has been the addition of some amazing and wonderful murals to the underpasses (though honestly, I might have given higher priority to a weekly power washing of the sidewalks, which are covered in pigeon droppings.)

I made a quick survey this evening of the murals in my neighborhood, most of which are less than two years old.

At Pratt, this work has just appeared within the last month, and is still in progress. The first photo shows it a week ago:

Now its color palette has grown:

Is it going to be 3D? I don't know, but as a child of the 80s, I am pre-programmed to like this particular color palette.

The Pratt bridge itself bears some note. It is the only Metra bridge I know of that retains turn-of-the-century ornamentation:

At Farwell, the northern underpass wall has a two-part mural by two different artists. West of the tracks, a surreal motor encounter, by Dan Bellini:

On the east side, a similarly surreal scene by Jennifer Cronin:

The two scenes are united as the road curves off onto a cliff overlooking the forest.

Next up is my absolute favorite, at Morse, a colorful composition by Molly Zakrajsek and Ann Van Devender:

Each of the large, simple figures is colored not by solid fields but by a delightful profusion of tiny colored figures:

At Lunt, the Rogers Park Metra Station underpass is adorned with a themed pair of murals titled "Diverse Earth".

As underpass murals go, the Lunt Avenue one is getting on in age, and parts have been lost to recent concrete spalling.

At the other end of the Rogers Park station, a series of colored panels with cartoon Cubist faces, by Christopher Royal, decorates the Greenleaf underpass:

On the other side of the same bridge, a stylized street scene by Zsofia Otvos:

Last stop: the Rogers Avenue underpass. On the south side, an older and more traditional painting, without the strong-concept artistic styles of the more recent murals, seemingly done by school kids:

On the north side,another strong-concept work - a series of colored panels, each with a slight pointer allowing the panel to be seen as a speech balloon spoken by a figure in the adjacent panel.

At present, there are only three characters, so I improvised a couple more of my own.

Is it incomplete? Are more figures coming? Or is it simply meant to evoke precisely this sort of interaction with the work?

All these works are somewhat ephemeral and transient. With luck, they may last five or ten years; however, they are doomed to a finite lifespan by both their medium and their setting. Paint fades and peels - but more than that, the concrete on which it sits spalls and crumbles.

The bridges themselves won't last forever, either - they're a hundred years old, and their condition reflects that. These bridges are not part of Metra's current bridge replacement plans (that project stops at Balmoral in Andersonville), but it's a fair bet that once the current project is done (in 2018, according to plans), this batch will be on the table for replacement.

Songs about the death and life of the American city

2011-05-04T22:43:00.003-05:00

A loose list, a set of vague connections, but all powerful in their condemnation of what's happening to our cities. Songs about urban decay, suburban development, architecture, demolition, buildings and food:

* The Pretenders: "My City Was Gone" - the death of Akron, Ohio chronicled in a bitterly angry rock song
* Marvin Gaye: "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"
* Bruce Springsteen: "My City of Ruins" (about his home town of Asbury Park. Later repurposed as a post-9/11 reflection.)
* Stevie Wonder: "Village Ghetto Land"
* Jay Farrar: "Outside the Door", a lament for the lost places and times of St. Louis
* Son Volt: "Way Down Watson" - Farrar & company mourn the death of St. Louis's old Coral Court Motel
* Marah: "This Town" - (semi)closing track from their amazing Kids in Philly disk. Every track evokes the life and times of Philadelphia, none more poignantly than this short reflection. See also "History of Where Someone Has Been Killed", "The Catfisherman", "Christian Street".
* Neko Case: "Thrice All American" - an almost apologetic song about Tacoma, WA
* B.J. Thomas: "Everybody's Out of Town" - recently suggested by a friend. A sardonic take on the abandonment of the inner city.
* Talking Heads: "The Big Country" - David Byrne looks down on the suburbs from an airplane and dryly declares that "I wouldn't live there if you paid me." I hear ya, bro.
* Rush: "Subdivisions" - those long, drawn-out synth notes capture the essential emptiness of growing up in the 'burbs

People might also suggest "Big Yellow Taxi", but it's a bit too chipper for the moods I'm circling around with this set.

Lane Technical High School

2011-04-02T23:26:00.006-05:00

Lane Technical College Prep High School (architect John C. Christensen) is a Gothic icon on Western Avenue, a break from the relentlessly dense and unplanned commercial onslaught that lines Chicago's longest street. Lane Tech occupies a full city block (or more); the building is beautifully and artfully planned, with enormous spacious grounds surrounding an equally enormous building complex. Founded as Albert G. Lane Technical School in 1908, it is the city's largest high school, housing over 4,000 students.

You would never guess at a glance that this building was finished in 1934. The red brick Gothic style was highly out of favor by that point, both from an artistic and economic standpoint, but apparently it was decided to press onwards rather than redo drawings that had been completed several years prior. The result was a building that was out of style before it was even built - but still remains highly impressive today.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the prominent clock tower on the Western Avenue side marks the front of the school, but it doesn't - a look at the building's floor plan shows that the school is actually oriented to the north. Inside the tower is one of the school's many stairwells. The clock itself no longer functions.

On the north side, facing Addison Street, twin towers demarcate the school's primary facade. Between them is nestled the library, a beautiful double-height space with vast north-facing windows that bathe the space in indirect light.

The school's corridors are overwhelmingly long and monotonous, begging the question of how students manage to get from one class to another in the paltry 4 minutes they are alloted.

Though monotonous and monochrome, the hallways are enlivened in a most unusual way. A series of 40 murals, created for the 1933 Century of Progress world's fair, commemorating the contributions of every state in the union to modern technology.

The attitude toward industry and manufacturing in these paintings is startlingly divorced from that of today. Whereas we see factories and refineries as eyesores to be minimized and avoided, these paintings celebrate them as welcome additions to even the most bucolic of landscapes. A steel mill alongside a lake is a thing to be celebrated, not mourned. It's a fitting attitude for a building whose scale is that of a factory, an industrial-sized seat of learning.

Lane's early history is literally written on its walls. In the cafeteria, a small metal plaque notes that the sound system was the gift of the class of '59. Art projects dating back to the 1930s are scattered around the building, including murals in the cafeteria and library, and bas reliefs carved in wood in the library.

The wood reliefs were carefully restored just a few years ago. One, entitled Evolution of the Book, is in a WPA-influenced style similar to the Century of Progress murals. The other, Control of the Elements by Peterpaul Ott, is pure Art Deco - stylized, geometric, streamlined, and utterly amazing. Both were designed by teachers and executed with the help of students.

One of the nearby murals was done by members of the 1942 Mural Club.

Even the utilitarian courtyards are artfully decorated, and used to engender school spirit.

Both the librarian and a security worker I spoke to had glowing praise for the student body - hard workers, disciplined, well behaved, smart. Many are the children of immigrants. A handful were in the library studying on a beautiful Saturday morning.

History of Lane Tech at the school's website

The Murals at the school website

Lane Tech at Wikipedia

Midcentury preservation

2011-02-28T07:28:00.003-06:00

Talk about your perfect storm for losing a piece of architecture! This building on S. State Street has it all: it's in a busy area, it's a retail facade, and it's Midcentury in origin.

It's slated to be remodeled into something forgettable. Blair Kamin wrote a an excellent summation of the who, what, why, and why-it-shouldn't.

Preservation in a global economy

2011-02-27T20:14:00.002-06:00

My interest in historic preservation comes from some fairly simple origins: namely, I have seen far too many beautiful buildings torn down. I see it and I am outraged, because I know we cannot and will not ever build such things again. They cannot be replaced.

"Historic preservation" is a double misnomer, for me personally. I'm rarely interested in buildings as an embodiment of a specific history. If history gives further ammunition for the conservation of a beautiful building, then so be it; but what I'm really and truly interested in is creating and maintaining beautiful urban places. And I don't want to see buildings preserved - locked in amber - but put to new and productive uses. Too often I feel that preservationists looking to save a building float pie-in-the-sky notions of museums, community centers, and other non-enterprises that cost money instead of generating it. I want old buildings to be living parts of the current and future economy.

Lately, over the last year or so, I've often felt a growing sense of helplessness and hopelessness over the fates of countless minor buildings and forgotten neighborhoods, places left behind by the vagaries of progress. I try to envision a future that would return life to these buildings. Amid a struggling economy, a global economic downturn, rising competition from overseas, and an American culture that is both increasingly insular and wracked with paranoid fears over its physical safety, I cannot do it.

If you use Bing.com to take a virtual flight over older city neighborhoods, you'll see a pattern of scale. Everything we build today is gigantic. Gigantic schools go into old neighborhoods, and they're surrounded by tiny little houses on tiny lots. Goliath size vs. fine grain. The notion of acceptable size in America has inflated to the point of ludicrousness. I try to envision a modern chain store adapting to the fine-grained construction of the historic city - a Wal-Mart inserting itself into a dozen side-by-side storefronts. It's a nice fantasy, but try to sell it to corporate reps who are beholden to a particular development model.

It is a sad fact, little recognized but indisputable, that construction is the province of the wealthy. It takes serious money to build or renovate something, even with a heavy investment of sweat equity. And so the poor, or those of simply less-than-average means, wind up with the leftovers and the off-castings of the above-average. Today this means that the jobless are stranded in neighborhoods like this. Tomorrow it might mean that they are living in deteriorating suburban ranch houses. But neither bodes well for the future of surviving buildings in collapsing neighborhoods.

These problems are all interrelated. Overmassive scale, awful places, nemployment, sluggish economy, beauty allowed to rot, people left behind. If all the effort we've expended in the last 60 years in flinging ourselves further and further apart from one another were instead redirected into building up our cities as the dense, beautiful, walkable, humane places they once were on track to becoming, we'd all be better off.

Damen Avenue Churches

2011-01-31T23:35:00.013-06:00

Sometimes I snap a totally random photo, and it winds up haunting and fascinating me for ages afterwards. So it was with a shot of a near west side church I took in 2007, the New Holy Bethel Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God.

I returned a few weeks ago to photograph it more intently. Only when I put the old and new photos side by side did I realize that the building has lost the roof and upper section of its turret. There's been some reroofing work, but the roof - the whole exterior, in fact - is in pretty rough shape. The windows were bricked in long ago, and nearly all the stained glass is gone.

This modest Romanesque church stands at 1960 W. Adams at Damen, right by the United Center, though prior to Chicago's 1909 street renumbering, its address was 739-741 Adams. The founding congregation was the Seventh Evangelical Church, later the Adams Street Society. They erected a building which would commonly be referred to as the Adams Street Church, with a cornerstone date of 1888. (Other articles refer to it as the "Evangelical Church at Adams Street and Robey", Robey being the previous name of Damen until 1927, and the "Adams Street Church". Most of these articles are the planned topics of Sunday sermons at various churches around town, while one describes the departure of one of its first ministers.) From its purchase in 1885, the church property was embroiled in a massive court fight between two factions of the Evangelical Church of North America. The congregation was also involved with the early Temperance movement.

In 1928 it was sold to a Greek Evangelical congregation, the sales posting in the Tribune noting that "many prominent men" went to the church in the past. A 1953 newspaper ad notes that it was then a branch of the Church of God.

New Bethel is one of a string of churches along Damen Avenue:

* West Side Community Church - 1937 W. Adams at Winchster, east of Damen

The cornerstone of St. Paul's Reformed Episcopal Church was laid on February 22, 1886, and services were taking place in the new limestone building by May. Built at a cost of $38,000, it suffered a severe basement fire in December 1886, but quickly rebuilt. In 1950, police were twice called to the premises to break up scuffles that arose over the pastor's attempt to sell the church to the West Community Church, a black congregation, and the previous congregants' refusal to allow the new owners to take possession or enter the building.

* Greater Union Baptist Church - 1956 W. Warren at Damen
William LeBaron Jenney, 1885

This fantastic church building wears some of its history proudly on its facade - a 1950s cornerstone relates that the GUBC was organized 1908, and purchased the building in 1928. Its original builders were the Church of the Redeemer. More on the church building's history can be found on GUBC's website. The exterior features superb terra cotta ornament and stained glass.

* Gospel Temple M.B. Church - 1958 W. Washington Blvd. at Damen

This modest red brick church has a bizarre mansard roof that plunges down between the towers over the entrance. My guess is that there was a much more formal entrance originally, and that this was a way to shoehorn in some office space a long time ago.

It was originally the Church of St. Andrew, dating back to at least 1886.

The thing about these churches is, churches don't just build themselves. For four churches to have gone up on this one little stretch of road, there must have been a sizable population in the area a hundred years ago. Today, there's almost nothing - just vast fields of parking for the United Center.

When planning for the stadium, originally meant to be a new home for the Chicago Bears, began in 1987, much of the area was already vacant land - 73%, according to the stadium architects, a figure that sounds about right based on some skimming of Historic Aerials.com. The area was devastated by the 1968 riots and never recovered.

1972

1988

1998

Stadium plans called for the demolition of over a hundred buildings. Banding together as the Interfaith Organizing Project, several churches in the area led the fight against the monolithic stadium, decrying it as a playground for the suburban rich, and protesting the thousands of elderly and empoverished neighbors that would be displaced.

Plans for a new Bears stadium seem to have quietly died off... only to be revived as an enclosed arena for the Bulls and Blackhawks a few years later. The churches were only able to save themselves; their neighborhood was destroyed. The early newspaper announcement of the stadium plan makes mention of "pedestrian malls", "urban" planning, physical connections to the neighborhood, trees and grassy knolls that would screen the parking lots, economic benefits to the residents of the area - all a hilarious fiction. Destroying the neighborhood was sold as somehow saving it. It's an Orwellian twist of language that continues to be used today by powerful developers who want to get poor people out of their way.

The result - major building survive, while the fine-grained context that gave rise to them, supported and nurtured them, are washed away. 125 years after the West Side was developed, the surreal sight of an urban church in a parking lot is all that remains.

Industrial art

2011-01-16T05:30:00.001-06:00

A friend's blog post from a while back extols the architectural merits of a St. Louis industrial park... then leadingly wonders if there might be any comparably architectural industrial park elsewhere. I haven't managed to find a Chicago counterpart just yet, but I did turn up this place a while back.

This is the building of Continental Electrical Construction Co. at 5900 W. Howard. Though it is otherwise an unremarkable 1960s brown brick office building, its western face bears a mosaic tile mural designed in 1967 by Leo W. Witz, son of the company's founder and its CEO until his retirement in 1973. The mural, titled Shakespeare's The Seven Ages of Man, is accompanied by a small plaque quoting the piece in question.

Common to the era, it's a highly stylized and abstracted work, combining forms, curves and colors with identifiable subject matter. The result works as both an aesthetically pleasing composition and an illustration.

In a nice touch, the false window panels around the corner are filled in with a continuation of the same design.

A brief pause

2010-12-23T19:53:00.003-06:00

I try to keep a regular schedule for posting, but with the holidays underway and family obligations pulling me this way and that, I need to take a short break. I'll be back at it come January.

Till then, thanks to everyone who's been reading (and especially those who have been commenting) this year. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have!

In the mean time, have a few older photos that reflect the current weather.

Public Storage Mutilates for Commerce!

2010-12-20T05:30:00.000-06:00

Y'know what company really hates architecture? Public Storage.

Clark Street, Edgewater

These guys ram their unified corporate paint scheme over every building they get, with a disregard for aesthetics and architectural detail that borders on the criminal.

S. Ashland Avenue

Archer Avenue

N. Broadway, Edgewater

Seriously. It melts my brain.

What crime did these poor warehouse buildings commit to have their ornament slathered over in such a fashion? Who did they offend?

Lakefront towers

2010-12-13T05:30:00.001-06:00

With the weather having taken its inevitable late-fall turn for the crappy, I'd like to skip up and down the lakefront a bit in photographs, and remember both warmer, bluer and greener times, and also some of the lovely highrises that one glimpses while running Lake Shore Drive.

One of the first and most obvious lessons here is the evolution of scale. Just contrast the historicist towers - generally from the 1920s and earlier - with their post-war successors. The size of the latter tends to be hugely inflated.

And yes, the post-war buildings often are a lot uglier. The Modernist ethos of minimalist design soon transmogrified into an ethos of minimal designing. On the flip side, they usually have more generous windows - more light coming in, better views looking out.

But not all pre-war high rises are delicate little flowers! Some are massive chunks of masonry.

3750 N. Lake Shore Drive / 1540 N. LaSalle

The lakefront, being Chicago's greatest amenity, has long attracted its greatest wealth. Apartment houses were dressed up to the nines, as if for a night on the town.

The Belden-Stratford Apartments, a U-shaped Beaux Arts courtyard building with a Second Empire mansard roofline, is one of my favorites.

1922 - Fridstein & Company

Some of the MidCentury buildings are interesting in their own right.

3470 N. Lakeshore Drive - Raggi & Schoenbrod, Inc., 1967

This one, at Sheridan and Bryn Mawr, is one of the finest towers on the lakefront. Its clean horizontal banding make it an outstanding example of International style architecture.

"The Statesman" - 5601 N. Sheridan - Milton Schwartz & Associates, architects, 1964

And this pair of conjoined towers may look like an overmassed monstrosity, but take a longer look. There's a lovely offset grid of windows, and those two mechanical penthouses on top, with their curved brick walls, just make the whole thing come together. The penthouses cap off wide brick bays that act like visual wrapping paper - a pair of bows tying the whole package together.

3950 N. Lake Shore Drive - Shaw, Metz & Dolio, 1957, originally with rooftop dining. Built on the site of 1910 Richard T. Crane mansion.

And whatever you think of it, you surely must admit that it's far better than the dreadful concrete skeleton that stands behind it.

The towers tend to get shorter as one moves further north. Here's a couple of my favorite Rogers Park high rises, long past Lake Shore Drive's end.

The Farcroft - 1337 W. Fargo Avenue - Charles Wheeler Nicol

Learn a bit more about this last one, with its delightful bosses, here.

Lake Street Church, Evanston

2010-12-06T05:30:00.002-06:00

Lake Street Church is Evanston's oldest (designed 1872 by architect Cass Chapman) and, for my money, the most beautiful. It's Victorian Gothic - tall, narrow windows with pointed arches, and a general sense of verticality. The exterior is a simple affair of plaster (not original; when opened, the building's brick walls were exposed), with only a few bits of ornament emerging at the corners.

The simplicity without anticipates the elegance within. The sanctuary is a space defined by dark wood and stained glass in the earth-hued range of tones that inspired both the Prairie and Arts and Crafts movements.

The element that most defines the space is the 2nd-level gallery, which wraps nearly the entire space. According to the head usher, it originally wrapped the entire space until a later remodeling (confirmed by a Tribune article from the building's 1875 opening.)

The head usher shared a couple of other interesting tales. This was the church of Jimmy Carter's daughter, so the President and his wife would occasionally attend services. This would bring the Secret Service pouring in, of course. Being a community church, most of the congregation was recognizable by face to its ushers. A stranger in the gallery turned out to be one of the agents.

Lake Street Church was originally the First Baptist Society of Evanston, organized in 1858. Today the church is the oldest public building in Evanston, and an officially designated city landmark.

A later addition forms a courtyard space north of the sanctuary, and contains offices and meeting rooms. The stone Gothic design works well enough with the older building, but lacks its powerful and charming Victorian verticality.

Mixed Use Midcentury

2010-11-29T05:30:00.000-06:00

New Urbanists like to make a fuss over the notion of a mixed-use building, touting it as a revival of a long-lost art. While the basic, common-sense notion of people living and working in close proximity certainly did fall out of favor in the 1960s through the 1980s, it never really vanished entirely. And at the height of the 1950s suburban building boom, small-scaled mixed use was actually surprisingly common in Chicago's southern and western neighborhoods.

Harlem Avenue

Main Street, Skokie

"Mixed-use" generally implies some combination of office, retail and residential, and that's generally what you'll find on these commercial buildings. Some feature apartments above storefronts, with generous porch space marked by wood or decorative metal railings.

Cermak Avenue

Western Avenue - more photos here

Others feature upstairs space of a less clear nature. Behind those walls could be office space, either separate or joined with the retail space below, or living space.

Bryn Mawr

The most exciting ones share a similar design vocabulary of materials and style, with an emphasis on angles: angled brick wing walls, angled panels of Roman brick with limestone borders, angled wood roof overhangs.

Cermak Avenue

63rd Street - Midway Lounge

63rd Street

You can find a crop of one-story, single use commercial buildings in the same neighborhoods that use the same design vocabulary, with angled sections of facade and roof overhangs, often trimmed in red wood or red Roman brick.

Preservation, Chicago style

2010-11-24T05:30:00.003-06:00

When you land at O'Hare airport and take the intra-airport rail system between terminals, colorful ad strips on the train urge you to come explore the city's architecture. It's a pretty rare city that explicitly promotes its architecture as one of its leading attractions.

You might be surprised, then, at how casually the city throws its built environment away, even today. I'm referring, of course, to the recently announced backpedal by the Daley administration on saving the Prairie-style old Main Building at Michael Reese Hospital. Once heralded as the administration's token gesture toward preservation of the once-dense complex, now it seems that a few break-ins and vandals are the flimsy excuse being used to justify tearing the place down.

It's nauseating, but who can honestly say they're surprised?

Neons I have known

2010-11-22T05:30:00.001-06:00

It's no great secret that historic neon signs are steadily disappearing from the Chicago landscape. The difficulty and cost of maintenance, along with the closing of older independent businesses, are the primary causes. Even when the signs are valued by store owners, sometimes they're impractical to move, maintain or update.

Altered:

Jim Fong Chop Suey, a modest sign on Touhy in West Ridge.

The former Erickson Jeweler sign on Clark Street in Andersonville, now a Potbelly's.

Tasemkin Furniture. Now covered up with generic paneling.

Replaced:

Eden's Liquor on western Devon Avenue

Vanished:

The Washing Well, Clark Street, Rogers Park. Not a neon, but still interesting.

E-Z Credit Wheels, a Western Avenue car dealership

A.E. Meyer Delicatessen, Lincoln Square. The hanging sign has been relocated to the interior of the new store on this site; however, the storefront sign is gone.

Jubilee Gas for Less - this Lincoln Avenue sign has a surviving sister in the lobby of the Chicago History Museum.

DeMar's Coffe Shop Restaurant - Chicago Avenue at Paulina

Standee's Coffee Shop, Edgewater - closed by corporate property managers who did not consider the 60-year-old restaurant "a solid investment". Brilliant!

Gone dark

The "Z" Frank Cheverolet sign is a Western Avenue icon; however, it hasn't been lit since around 2007, when the car dealership relocated. In the press, the owner stated that they'd love to donate or relocate the sign, but that it was just too big to move.

4 Plus 1 again

2010-11-08T05:30:00.003-06:00

I wanted to talk a bit more seriously about the Four Plus One apartment buildings, beyond the level of just fawning over their entry canopies. Four Plus Ones got a bad rap even in their own day, and they aren't much more beloved today. Eventually, residents of Lakeview fought them to a standstill in the early 1970s.

The big concerns about Four Plus Ones were three-fold: insufficient parking, increased density, and a change in the character of the residents. The last charge is the most interesting to me. Opponents maintained that 4-Plus-1 apartments attracted transient types - singles, young men, workers, all of whom had no attachments to the neighorhood and therefore had no incentive to maintain and improve it. It's an interesting argument, but it smacks of NIMBYism. Where else are these apparent undesirables supposed to go? Somewhere else!

As for the parking argument, well... quite a few of these buildings were slotted in between pre-war apartment buildings of equal or greater size - buildings that had no off-street parking at all. Nobody seems to raise an eyebrow at this.

"Cheap construction" was another charge leveled at the 4 Plus 1 (by no less an authority than the AIA Guide to Chicago Architecture). But it's a relative term - brick veneer was never a cheap finishing material, even in the 1960s. And a demolition photo from Forgotten Chicago reveals that concrete block infill was also used, both as as a firebreak between units and also as the structural element of the exterior walls. Today, concrete block with brick facing is the gold standard of bearing wall and light frame construction.

Underneath the brick, these buildings are actually wood-framed; to be sure, concrete framing would have been more pricey, but would it have made any difference to the buildings' appearance? Zoning codes required an upgrade in framing construction above four floors, so it was simple good economics to stop at that level and build in a more affordable material. If they'd been less "cheap", they'd have gone higher, been bigger, and thus amplified the neighbors' other concerns. How this makes the buildings "cheap" - in the derogatory sense, not economic - isn't clear. "Cheaply constructed" seems a pointless slur rooted in aesthetic dislike.

But hey, aesthetics aren't an invalid concern. Apart from their space-age concrete canopies and screen walls, there isn't much to these buildings as seen from the street. And if you didn't like a design once, you're unlikely to like it 50 more times. That's not much of an exaggeration; principal Four-Plus-One architect Jerome Sultan recycled some of his designs to an almost comical extent.

525 Stratford

532 W. Roscoe

540 W. Roscoe

530 W. Aldine

441 W. Barry

528 Oakdale

How to Get to Sesame Street in Chicago

2010-10-31T05:30:00.001-05:00

Every city has them - the day care centers with the window-paintings of popular childrens' cartoon characters, slightly misproportioned, festooning large storefront windows or walls, cheerfully waving at passersby.

These creatures assure us that the place within is welcoming, friendly, comfortable, familiar - all the things a parent would want their children to have while they are away at work.

Their ubiquitous nature says a lot about the commonality of children's television programming. Elmo and Dora the Explorer are popular favorites, though Big Bird remains the king.

Also of note, they're mostly seen in lower-income neighborhoods. I could speculate on a number of possible reasons why - perhaps the TV is a more common babysitter. Maybe there's just less money for decoration. Maybe they're fighting harder against an unpleasant built environment. Maybe these things aren't seen as very classy in higher-income areas, or are prohibited by ordinance. Maybe they just aren't as worried about using trademarked characters. Maybe small daycare centers just aren't as common. But it's all just speculation.

What's remarkable is how universal the artistic style is. There's almost always something a bit... off about the portrayal of Big Bird and company. I've noticed this for years.

The photo above was taken near the boundary between Chicago and Oak Park - right where incomes are starting to rise. And perhaps not coincidentally, it's a rare example of the characters not looking slightly mutated.

And finally.... all I can say here is that Mickey looks awfully excited by Minnie's tush. Yikes!

The coolest city hall ever!

2010-10-25T05:30:00.000-05:00

I was just driving along one day, tooling along minding my own business, when up pops this crazy lookin' thing.

It's a lovely Prairie style building, with the unmistakable fingerprints of Frank Lloyd Wright's idiosyncratic style, the kind that outlasted him and can be seen scattered here and there in Wisconsin. And in fact, it turns out that it was designed by his son, Lloyd Wright, along with his son, Eric Lloyd Wright. (Thanks to Bright Lights, Dim Beauty for having that link handy.)

It's been the the city hall of Maine Township since 1983, but before that it was the Good Shepherd Community Church, begun in 1957 on land set aside by a suburban developer.

I couldn't get inside, of course, but I did manage a tantalizing glimpse through the rear (formerly the front) windows.

The (adorable) Skokie Swift

2010-10-21T05:30:00.002-05:00

I've become fascinated with the oddball of the Chicago Transit Authority's light rail system, the Yellow Line - aka the Skokie Swift. It's such a mismatched, out of place beast that I have to stop and stare every time I come across it.

The trains are just two cars, two lonely little tiny cars rolling along all by themselves like lost sheep, wandering innocently past suburban lawns and parks and back yards and arterial roads. They're so cute! You just want to pinch their little metal cheeks.

Whether it's running at grade between 1950s backyards, flying above a river on a trestle, or roaring through a forest in a below-grade cut, the Yellow Line just leaves me wondering: what is it doing here? What are grungy CTA cars doing out in the June Cleaver suburbia of Skokie? Did they get lost or something??

The Swift is a relic of an aborted idea, back when people and governments hadn't quite completely given up on mass transit. Surely light rail could find a way to work in the suburbs, right? And so this line was activated in the 1960s on 5 miles of semi-abandoned right-of-way that had passed from a defunct private transit company to the CTA. The Skokie Swift served a test bed to see what was possible out in the new suburban frontier. The notion was that a really fast, no-stops, no-frills run from a suburban center into Chicago could be a viable transit model.

And it worked pretty well - better than expected, in fact. Ridership was higher than predicted, enough so that the train still runs every 10 minutes or so daily. But it wasn't such a success that the model was replicated; the Swift remains a one-of-a-kind line in Chicago, rivaled only by the Purple Line for its strange intrusion into suburban woodlands.

Part of the Skokie Swift's fascination is that so many relics of the past remain in place. Much of the western half of the line still passes under the catenary poles that once held overhead wires, used when the line was electrified from above. The lines were taken down when full third-rail service was added in 2004, but the poles remain.

And that little stub at right is the remains of a one-time station platform, now used only as a housing for electrical boxes.

The right of way is also quasi-industrial, lined with huge power lines that give the line a sort of apocalyptic feeling. The train is taking you to wherever it is that all these electrical lines go, and when you get to that ominous, distant place, who knows what fate might befall you? Maybe you'll be made into electricity, too.

When you finally do reach the end of the line, it's a surreal spot - a seemingly random point, surrounded by parking lots and light suburban commercial buildings, not enough to constitute a downtown or village center, or even much of a place at all.

This humble bumper marks the very end of the CTA rail system.

Across the street, the power lines continue their relentless march northward, beckoning for an expansion of the line. That expansion is in the planning phases at present.

The other part of the fascination is, as mentioned, how strangely out of place the Swift is. It's a tiny train running through huge places, running on towering trestles and over hugely busy roads like McCormick. CTA cars mostly run in cramped quarters in the city - tight subway tunnels, or squeezed between residential streets with houses so close that residents can almost touch the track structure from their windows. Their compact, no-nonsense design reflects this, and looks very strange in all the open space of Skokie.

And so the trains just look sort of... lost. I want to call out to the outbound ones: "What's the matter, little fella? You lost? You looking for Chicago? You wanna go the other way!"

I find my feet down on Main Street

2010-10-18T05:30:00.004-05:00

Main Street westward from Evanston has all sorts of interesting things on and around it. My favorite bit may be this trio of buildings in the 3400 block, in Skokie.

They sit in a sea of Midcentury buildings - raised ranches on the surrounding streets, and 1950s shopping strips, with little 1-story commercial buildings like these across the street - the kind with stacked bond Roman brick and big plate glass storefront windows set at a slight angle from the sidewalk.

First is this 2-story building at 3400 W. Main Street, designed as if it were a California ranch house - low pitched roof, overhanging eaves, glassy front walls. The building was finished in 1957, as commercial offices.

Second is this contemporary structure, a modern metal building with a shipping container aesthetic, at 3412 W. Main Street. It's home to a dentist's office. There was a home builder at this address in the 1960s, but I doubt the building is any older than 1985. CityNews dates it to 1991.

The most interesting is 3420 W. Main Street. Tribune ads identify this address in 1963 as home to Palco Builders, who were constructing California-style ranches out west in Lincolnwood and pulling in enough money to show up on the paper's list of million-dollar sellers. By 1966, a tax service had appeared at the same address. Today it's home to the Knowledge Systems Institute.

The building might at first seem to be an ordinary 1960s office building, raised up off the ground on columns, Corbu-style. (Oh, sorry. Pilotis. A piloti is like a column, only it's French.)

But when you look close, you'll find that the entire facade is covered with textile patterned concrete blocks.

If I had to take a stab at the building's parti - the big overriding idea that the designer had in mind - I'd call it a sort of ancient temple that an Alan Quatermain adventurer type (or Indiana Jones, but that character didn't exist in 1963) might stumble across in some South American jungle. Pull the lever, and the stone facade creakingly splits and slides open to reveal the techno-wonderland within! Notice that everything in the facade opening is set back, and it's all glass and metal. There's even a top and bottom "rail" for the "doors" to slide on, visually speaking.

These are the same blocks that I've written about on a couple of occasions. I still haven't discovered where they come from. I have, however, found one other building that makes use of them, out west at 6121 W. Higgins Avenue. Not quite as mind-blowing, but still interesting!

On this 1963 apartment building, they appear as a decorative element on the major facade.

Midcentury craziness

2010-10-14T05:30:00.001-05:00

I wish I had something to say about these apartments. They date from around 1963, they're at 6634 W. 9th Street in Oak Lawn, they're called the the Pavilion Park Condominiums, and that's all I know.

Well, that, and they apparently had a crazy genius mason.

Apart from this one architectural outburst, there's nothing at all remarkable about these buildings. They're utterly plain Midcentury stuff. They don't continue any evident trends on the street or the surrounding neighborhood. They pop up, do their thing, and go away again.

I sure would love to know if this designer did any other work around town!

Alvin Hoffberg's Courtyard Townhouses

2010-10-11T05:30:00.002-05:00

"Every visitor says these are Chicago's most beautiful and unusual town homes." - August 7, 1957 Chicago Tribune classified ad

Midcentury builder Alvin M. Hoffberg brought a unique twist on the townhouse to Chicagoland in the 1950s. The Midcentury townhouse is a rare beast indeed, but it does exist, and Hoffberg planted several variations on a similar theme in Rogers Park and Evanston. He developed a series of one-story rowhouses ranged around a long, narrow courtyard.

Several decorative features make it obvious that these buildings are all by the same builder, but it was a classified ad for 1338 Main Street, shown above, that finally gave me the builder's name.

(Just so we're all on the same footing - a townhouse, in US parlance at least, is the same thing as a rowhouse - an individual dwelling unit that shares party walls on at least one side with another home, but has its own individual entrance at the ground. In the 1950s, "townhouse" probably would have sounded much more cosmopolitan and appealing than "rowhouse", with its connotations of crowded cities and industrial workers' housing.)

1338 Main Street shows up in a delightful little classified ad in the 1954 Tribune, advertised as a group of California-styled ranch townhouses:

"Very de luxe [sic] and unusual, on 1 floor, with full basement and roofed patio. Landscaped and decorated to suit. Tiled Youngstown kitchen, colored fixtures in tiled dual bath. Ample cabinets and wardrobes, many other features. Carpeting, utilities and rumpus room opposite. Fine residential area, close to all transporation, shops, schools and recreation."

Hoffberg went on to use this design in several more locations around Evanston and the far north end of Chicago.

239-45 Custer (Evanston) appears in the classifieds by 1963. Unlike the Main Street group, they're built over a raised basement, which also raises up the courtyard - an extra measure of privacy and separation from the street.

This design pops up several more times around the neighborhood, such as 135 Callan:

135 Callan, Evanston

These were advertised as 5-room townhouses, approaching completion in 1955 with prices ranging from $180 to $195 a month:

"For discriminating people who desire the utmost beauty, privacy and comfort, each a complete de luxe home in a choice residential area clos to shops, express "L", bus and train. Spacious rooms, huge wardrobes, snak bar, dispolsa, and de luxe utilities area few features."

7374-80 and 7382-88 Winchester, named "Park Terrace", stands in Chicago's city limits. Like the Main Street group, 7376 Winchester was advertised in 1959 with an emphasis on its fabulous rumpus room. Alvin M. Hoffberg, builder could be contacted at 6131 N. Sheridan.

A variation on these designs stands nearby in northern Rogers Park, marked by an entry gateway.

This is 7323-29 Damen (or maybe just 7327 N. Damen); at any rate, it's the Park Damen Town Homes. A resident of this site died in 1958; I have to wonder if his home was sold to make way for this building, which a real estate agent lists with a 1960 date of construction (CityNews says 1957, but they can be real wonky sometimes.)

This group has a twin to the east, the Park Patio at 7342-44 and 7346-48 Winchester (where, perhaps not coincidentally, another owner died in 1960.)

Not only does it have the same sloped bay windows as the wood-siding buildings, it's got the same little cutesy development name in the same kind of cutesy font as the Park Terrace up the street.

Hoffberg drew on a very distinct vocabulary of design ideas and facade materials: Flat roofs; picture windows set in square, boxed-out projecting bays or sloping walls, finished in wood siding and usually painted red or brown; rough-faced limestone banding at the windows; small patches of red Roman brick or flagstone; blonde brick.

Hoffberg had a second design, seen above, that was useful for narrower or shallower sites, consisting of a simple twin or duplex design - two houses, 1 party wall. 729-31 Brummel Street, above, is a typical example. The building opened in 1956.

Here's a virtual duplicate at 738-40 Mulford Street:

And another near-duplicate at 238-40 Custer, across the street from one of the courtyard townhouses. This one opened in September 1960, and was constructed by Elston Builders.

And here's the same idea again at 806-08 Mulford Street:

A third variation is a bit more free-form, with no courtyards.

244 Elmwood at Mulford Evanston - appears to have been standing by 1959; possibly by 1956.

700-706 Shaw

Both of these occupy corner sites and are paired with a duplex building, apparently a response to a square site.

"Distinctive 5 room apartments with a distinctive address built for discrminating tastes" -- Tribune classifieds, 1955

Like most developers from the 1950s and 1960s, Alvin Hoffberg wasn't exactly a celebrity figure, so there's not a lot of info about him. Mr. Hoffberg shows up in 1947 as VP and general manager of Leonard W. Besinger & Associates, Inc., working on a group of homes in Park Ridge (bounded by Devon / Talcott / Cumberland / Glenlake / Vine), designed by architects Marin J. Green and William Kotek. Then came his run of indepdent buildings in the mid-1950s. And then, poof, nothing. Silence. Whatever became of Mr. Hoffberg, he didn't make any more headlines after the early 1960s.

There are some other buildings in the area that share similar materials, particularly that rough limestone trim and red Roman brick combo, and some indications that Hoffberg worked with a few other companies.

314-16 Callen, for example is a co-op apartment building that dates to 1954, was put up by the Town Development Co., and was advertised using his distinctive vocabulary.

And 1601-09 W. Lunt, dating from 1964, is credited to Bannon-O'Donnel (realtors or builders, it's not clear), but has all the hallmarks of a Hoffberg design.

And these buildings are right across the street from the Elmwood/Mulford group, and use the exact same materials.

301 Elmwood, Evanston

300 Sherman, Evanston

301 Elmwood detail...

....and a detail from a known Hoffberg design across the street.

"Sensationally different - California one story - designed in the modern trend, for discrminating couples" - Chicago Tribune classified ad, 1955

A stock Moderne design

2010-10-07T05:30:00.019-05:00

Here's a group of Midcentury townhouses, done in a typical Chicago Moderne style. I've found 4 examples around Evanston so far.

801-13 Mulford Street:

142-150 Callan, at Brummel:

143-151 Custer at Brummel, back-to-back with the building on Callan:

1413-23 Main Street, similar in style but definitely the odd man out:

These buildings were presumably part of the post-War construction boom; by 1952, the Callen building was complete and being advertised by The Bills Realty, Inc.

Early Modern / Midcentury Moderne apartments

2010-10-04T05:30:00.005-05:00

Early modernism for the masses took the form of sleek brick boxes, with windows at the corners and raised bands of brick for ornament.

6014-6024 N. California, 1948. The Tribune indicates that this was the George Eisenberg Unit, a "child treatment center" for foster children run by the Jewish Children's Bureau. In later years, the building became an apartment complex. By 2007, when I shot these photos, it was tired, run down and vacant.

With the land slated for a condo product, the building was demolished around 2008. The condos (a sad historicist pastiche compared to this elegantly simple building) never happened, of course.

Granville Gardens, West Ridge - more info here.

Wolcott Gardens - 4901-4959 N. Wolcott Avenue, 1939, architects Michaelsen & Rognstad. This project started as soon as Granville Gardens finished. Like that project, Wolcott Gardens was backed by Federal government loan guarantees.

If you've ever ridden Metra's Union Pacific North line, you've seen the backsides of this complex, which sprawls for an impressive length near the Ravenswood stop.

The courtyards are fenced off, sadly. The buildings are arranged to form a giant U-shape running along the back of the block, with two smaller U-shapes nestled within it - an ingenious layout that takes advantage of the long, narrow, and rectangular site plan.

301-11 Custer, Evanston - a near-total mystery! I can't find it in the city/county database. A classified ad announces the building's opening, with units ready for occupancy in March 1948, also naming the building as the "Custer-Mulford Apartments", at 301 Custer, and operated by Draper and Kramer, Inc.

One other thing about Moderne? It looks GREAT at night.

7375-83 N. Winchester - the Pottawattomie Park Apartments

Four sets of courtyard apartments, in two pairs, sit on the 7600 block of Winchester in Rogers Park. They're all the same design, though the pair on the west side of the street has been badly remangled with super low-budget tack-on metal balconies.

7328-36 N. Winchester

7314-22 N. Winchester - ugh!! Those doors!

On the east side of Winchester, however, the other pair remains gloriously intact, with its thin metal-framed windows still in place.

7363-71 N. Winchester - the Pottawattomie Park Apartments

At the street, the complex features beautiful brickwork, half-turned stacks and raised bands that beautifully complement the corner windows.

The whole group seems to have gone up in 1953, though the Chicago CityNews site is pretty confused, listing one as dating to 1898 (!!) and listing seemingly outdated addresses for the east-side buildings. Plans for the buildings were announced in the Tribune in 1949; they were part of a large group of apartments privately constructed with FHA loans.

Chicago's Midcentury Moderne

2010-09-30T20:37:00.007-05:00

Chicago builders, as I've harped on before, would glom on to just about anything in designing their mass produced buildings. The International Style and Art Moderne were no different; they served as inspiration for a series of buildings across Chicagoland in the 1950s and early 1960s. Combined and agglomerated into the already-developing local builder style, these buildings form a mini-style of their own. Call it Chicago Midcentury Moderne.

This set of photos is all single family houses and small multi-family apartments, but there are also larger apartment buildings in a similar style, which I'll cover in another post. The construction dates are all from the Chicago CityNews site, whose accuracy can be on the variable side - but I'm betting they're all in the right ballpark, at least.

6549 W 28th Street, Berwyn - 1952

2820 W. Glenlake, 1950

2854 W. Berwyn, 1956

2926 W. Fitch, West Ridge - 1944?? I'm not sure I buy that.

5776 W Ainslie at N. Menard Avenue - 1956

9301 S. Winchester, Beverly - 1952

It doesn't seem to be a hugely appreciated genre; there's not a word about any of these buildings online. I've previously photographed a small group of similarly-styled houses in the Fairview neighborhood of Skokie.

2 Moderne houses in Wilmette

2010-09-27T05:30:00.003-05:00

Below are a couple of Art Moderne houses in Wilmette that I stumbled upon in recent months. They're only a mile or so apart in a quiet neighborhood, surrounded by more traditional houses.

Art Moderne is exactly what the name suggests - part Art Deco, part International Style, with some Streamline thrown in, yet not quite any of them. There's ornament, but it's more about abstract patterns and geometry than anything applied or figurative. Curved walls contrast with blocky massing, and focal points are provided by round windows, art glass, or glass block. The style tended to produce rare but lovely houses like these.

1910 Greenwood Avenue, Wilmette - Andrew Rebori, 1936

1708 Lake Avenue, Wilmette - John Burns House, 1937, Roy Walter Stott

See also - a student report from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, featuring a few additional houses of similar vintage and style in the area.

St. Joseph Catholic Church, Wilmette

2010-09-23T05:30:00.004-05:00

A most imposing edifice, towering over the suburban houses and 2-story commercial buildings around it, stands at Lake and Ridge in western Wilmette. St. Joseph Church is that rarest of beasts, a church constructed during the lean years of the 1930s, a time when even the Catholic church slowed its building program.

St. Joseph is unusually tall and imposing. Its most striking feature is the indented front entrance, which looms like a shallow cave sculpted out of a mountainside.

The building is a mild update of traditional church styling. It's historicist in bent, but the influence of Art Deco is inescapable. It's nothing radical or stylized; the Deco is in the details.

The tower, in particular, is faintly reminiscent of Bertram Goodhue's 1922 capitol building for Nebraska.

Inside, St. Joseph is clean and spare. Applied ornament is almost absent.

Angular Deco details can be seen in the hanging lamps, the wall sconces, and the side aisle arches.

The style of the stained glass windows matches the building itself: leaning toward traditional, with inoffensively faint traces of Modernist influence, such as the geometric patterns bordering this window.

St. Joseph was designed by McCarthy, Smith & Eppig, and dedicated in 1939.

And a coda: Across the street, a beautiful associated school building harmonizes with the church's style, and somehow fails to have the sun on it every single time I pass by.

Chicago's Holy Corner

2010-09-20T05:30:00.004-05:00

From the downtown intersection of Clark and Madison, you're within a two minute walk of a Catholic church, a Protestant church, and a Jewish synagogue. And all three are well worth the visit.

First United Methodist Church (The Chicago Temple)

The Chicago Temple is the tallest church building in the world, and the only skyscraper in Chicago with a religious spire. It's a 1922 design by architects Holabird & Roche, in a French Gothic style. When it opened in 1924, it was the city's tallest building.

At ground level, the wood-lined main sanctuary is open for most or all of the day; you can wander in just about any time for a look. (Being downtown, that means there's sometimes a few homeless folks hanging out in the colder months, though the forbidding entrance lobby with its security guard makes it a bit uninviting.)

Those stained glass windows are an illusion - there's no trace of them on the outside of the building, and they remain brightly illuminated day and night.

The stained glass is done in a traditional style, but with some contemporary subject matter, including Jesus blessing the skyline of the city and the highrise itself.

The sanctuary reaches some impressive heights, particularly when you consider the load of an entire skyscraper is carried above it.

But those heights pale compare to those of the Sky Chapel, just below the spire.

Long-planned, the chapel wasn't fitted out until 1952, when a bequest by the widow of the founder of the Walgreens chain made it possible. Despite the changing times, the chapel is fairly conservative in style - though the stained glass continues the theme of bizarre subject matter begun in the sanctuary below.

And once again, just in case you forget where you are...

Chicago Loop Synagogue

This Midcentury confection is slotted neatly into the street wall. Designed by architects Loebl, Schlossman and Benett in 1957, the Loop Synagogue opened its doors in 1958. The building is adorned by a 1969 sculpture entitled "The Hands of Peace" on the outside, by sculptor Henri Azaz, with stylized hands against a background of Hebrew and English letters spelling out a traditional Jewish prayer.

There's a sort of slow, deliberative elegance to this building. You can almost feel the architects pausing contemplatively, stroking their chins in thought perhaps, before finally selecting these wonderful huge wood door paddles.

Beyond those doors lies a simple passageway with offices and other spaces. The main worship space is on the second story.

The beautiful wall of stained glass was designed by American artist Abraham Rattner and installed in 1960. Based on the "let there be light" Torah passage, it depicts an abstract, metaphysical cosmos flecked with ancient Hebrew symbols.

The rest of the space is spare and clean, befitting its Modernist origins.

St. Peter's Church

Wedged between two adjoining buildings, St. Peters Catholic Church gives the impression that it was carved out from a solid rock face. Solid, planar walls contrast startlingly with deeply hewn entrances and window openings, creating one of the best facades in the city. Unlike the contemporaneous Queen of Heaven mausoleum, this 1953 church (architects: Vitzhum and Burns) shows a mix of modern and historical influences.

A three-story high crucafix by Austrian sculptor Arvid Strauss completes this compelling composition.

Like the Chicago Temple, the doors of St. Peter's are always open (again, meaning there's usually a few homeless guys hanging around, along with a smattering of curious tourists and the usual downtown office workers.) The space inside is vast, befitting the epic facade outside. Seemingly every surface is gleaming polished stone.

Deprived of natural light, the designers had to turn to other tricks to give the space a sense of holiness. Illuminated sculpture niches serve in place of stained glass windows, portraying the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

The building's lobby is notable primarily for its wonderfully ornate doors.

If you've walked past this place, take five minutes to duck inside. It's well worth the time.

A history of the church from Heavenly City at Google Books.

The Cubic Zirconium Coast

2010-09-16T05:30:00.010-05:00

The northern reaches of Chicago's lakefront offer relatively affordable lakeside living, via a series of massive highrises that went up in the 1960s along Sheridan Road. One particularly big cluster stands south of Loyola University, where Sheridan meets Granville.

Some of them have their merits. Others... less so.

But at least two are of some interest.

6166 N. Sheridan - the Granville Tower - derives interest from its remarkable zigzag balconies. Modernistic bay windows protrude from the west face, as though the building's framework couldn't quite contain all the activity within. Emporis lists the architect as Seymour S. Goldstein (1920-2006 - the same guy who designed the Second City building and incorporated the salvaged terra cotta from Louis Sullivan's demolished Garrick Theater into it), and notes that all the condos within are two-level units.

Across the street, the El Lago condominiums (6157 N. Sheridan) present a serene, handsomely composed facade to the street... even if the building's broad face is just another sea of undifferentiated brick and glass.

Down at the entrance, a couple of slick little tile mosaics provide some liveliness and color, along with a handsome font for the building's name.

Emporis gives the name of Irving M. Karlin Associates as the architect, and dates the building to 1959. Mr. Karlin lived from 1902 to 1993.

The painted concrete artistry of Jerome Soltan

2010-09-13T05:30:00.004-05:00

6201 N. Kenmore

6011 N. Winthrop

I have a deep, dark, dirty, dangerous secret to share with you all:

I like the Four-Plus-One.

There, I said it! I said it and I'm proud! I'm not taking it back!

5617 N. Kenmore Ave.

5940 Kenmore Avenue - "Thorndale Beach West" - probably Jerome Soltan

Why do I like them? Well, c'mon. How could anybody not like buildings with entrances like these?

1060 W. Hollywood Avenue - Jerome Soltan

6110 N. Kenmore Avenue

6250 N. Kenmore - the same design as 6110 Kenmore

I don't have an architect's name for the vast bulk of these buildings, but when I do, it's almost always Jerome Soltan. Somewhat infamous as the original and most proliferate developer of the Four-Plus-One apartment building, Soltan distinctive style is stamped on nearly every 4-Plus-1 in the area south of Loyola University, where most of these buildings are located. He may or may not have designed them all, but his influence can be seen in every one.

5411 N. Winthrop Avenue

Need I point out the delightful creativity of the entryways? Love 'em or hate 'em, they're certainly expressive.

Obviously, some of them crop up more than once. Soltan wasn't at all ashamed to recycle his designs, just so long as they weren't on the same block.

5620 N. Kenmore - "The Chalet" (of course it is!) - Jerome Soltan

5450 N. Winthrop Ave. - presumably Jerome Soltan again

6134 N. Kenmore Ave

6972 N. Sheridan Road - Jerome Soltan

6246 N. Kenmore - Canisius Hall, Loyola University - again, presumably Jerome Soltan

5851 N. Winthrop

6610-6628 N. Sheridan

6825 N. Sheridan - Jerome Soltan

6307 N. Winthrop Avenue - Xavier Hall, Loyola University

6128 N. Kenmore

6011 N. Kenmore

5953 N. Kenmore (left) and 5949 N. Kenmore (right - "Thorndale Beach East", Jerome Soltan

6030 N. Kenmore

5833 N. Kenmore

Friday Photo Special: Synagogues in the Night

2010-09-10T05:30:00.001-05:00

To all my Jewish friends, acquaintances, co-workers and readers: Happy Rosh Hashana!

In honor of the high holidays, a mini-tour of some Skokie-area synagogues. Most are Midcentury creations, but one is brand new.

Ohel Shalom Torah Center, Touhy at Sacremento - just completed within the last 2 years

Congregation Ezras Israel, Lunt & California, West Ridge, Chicago

Congregation KINS, North Shore & California, West Ridge, Chicago

Congregation A G Beth Israel, Devon west of Lincoln

Iran Hebrew Congregation, Main Street, Skokie

Skokie Central Traditional Congregation, Main Street, Skokie

Beth Emet Synagogue, Dempster at Ridge, Evanston

Loyola says goodbye to an old... friend? Acquaintance, maybe?

2010-09-09T05:30:00.005-05:00

I've seen quite a few campus buildings meet the wrecking ball, mostly at my own alma mater but elsewhere as well. But seldom have I seen a campus demolition greeted with such a quirky, open, mixed bag of emotions as that of Loyola University's Damen Hall.

From the layman's perspective, Damen Hall is the quintessential 1960s building - big, bland, banal, ugly, and horrible. Designed with no operable windows, looming massively over everything around it, utterly bereft of ornament - Damen is a hard building to love. Students and faculty likened it to a radiator, a toaster, and a prison, and it's hard to argue with those assessments. Even I, the all-things-Midcentury guy, never bothered to get a full-body shot of the place in life, only snapping a few details that caught my eye. Demolition prep work is well underway, so it's a bit late now.

But despite its reputation as a monstrous pile of awfulness, Damen's impending demolition has inspired an outpouring of affectionate commentary from the Univesity community.

While the building was still in use, a 3-minute video tour was produced, a sardonic pastiche of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous that manages to be informative, fond, wry and hilarious all at once. The University ran a contest to see who should be the last Loyolan to leave the building and lock its doors. The building has its own Facebook page, lamenting its own impending demolition and missing the days when students filled its corridors and strange elevator system.

Much of this is probably just the result of the building as a shared experience, a minor trial that most students had to endure at some point in their career. But I'd like to think that underneath it all, there's some wisps of appreciation for the building's genuine merits, for it did have a few.

For starters, those marching concrete columns are a powerful statement, and the play of light across them is beautiful. I never saw that massive auditorium, but as shown in the video link above, it's a stunning piece of Midcentury space.

And then there's the front lobby. The lobby and its grand tile mosaic mural was one of my first Midcentury discoveries in Chicago. There wasn't much to the space: the mosaic on one side, two wall of glass on the other, a row of vintage seating that Mies van der Roes would have welcomed on the IIT campus.

"Wonders of Creation" is a 1966 work designed and executed by Melville Philip Steinfels. The mural is a delight, an abstract plunge through the natural sciences as filtered through a 1960s lens.

The mural is gone now, bare concrete block walls left in its wake. It will be relocated to Loyola's medical campus, in the inner southwest suburb of Maywood.

You can see more details of the mosaic, and read the artist's thoughts on the work, in the Loyola Nursing School's Annual 2008 Report. The main Loyola campus, meanwhile, will be diminished for its loss.

A coda: I'm not too keen on the new building that will go up in Damen's place, either; it's a historicist replica that mockingly apes the oldest buildings on campus, rather than bringing any new ideas to the table (this is marketed as "complimenting" the older buildings.) Designed to be ultra-modern in technology and function, it hides those attributes as though they were badges of shame. Resorting to this sort of neo-historicist pastiche, as so many other universities now do, is a sad admission that our age has nothing of substance to say in built form; all we can do is copy ideas from a hundred years ago, badly.

Lincoln Square's house of mystery

2010-09-06T05:30:00.000-05:00

2515 W. Carmen Avenue has intrigued me from the moment I saw it. It's a peculiar little box of a house, a simple rectangle covered in stucco to make a sort of Pueblo Revival style.

Nothing too strange yet... but the house sits next to a huge yard. Most of it is raw dirt under a canopy of trees. It's fenced off for what would be privacy if the fence weren't collapsing at the street.

And then there's the alley building. At first it might seem like an old garage with an apartment above... but there's only one garage. And on the side that faces the yard, there's some sort of strange barbecue pit.

What did this place used to be? When was it built? Who lived there? What was it used for?

A sign on the fence notes that the place is for sale by Sperry Van Ness realtors, though it appears to have changed hands a couple of times in recent years.

Friday Photo Special: Critical Mass, August

2010-09-03T05:30:00.004-05:00

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Critical Mass. This was my second time riding in one, but I'm familiar enough with the dynamic from the LATE Ride and other such events. Inevitably, when you get thousands of bikers riding en masse on city streets, some conflicts with drivers occur.

I don't know if that's good or bad. I can totally sympathize with a bunch of angry, stressed out drivers slogging through traffic, trying to get somewhere, maybe late for a date or a meeting or a train or a flight, and then getting held up through multiple green lights by this mass of bikers going nowhere.

On the flip side... well, how many of these drivers really have somewhere so important to be that it can't wait five minutes? It's a good thing to get pulled out of your little driver world every once in a while. Driving is not the be-all end-all of tasks in life, and cars do not have exclusive rights to public streets.

Anyway, Critical Mass is generally a joyous occasion, full of thousands of happy bikers. At some kind of tipping point, don't sheer numbers give them the right of way?

But if there's one true flaw with Critical Mass, it's that it just doesn't ever stop itself to let some traffic pass. At all. Considering the mass of riders can be strung out for many, many blocks, it's not very fair to drivers to make them sit through the whole thing. It's small wonder that a handful get impatient and start nosing their way into intersections, resulting in the inevitable and pointless confrontations.

All that said? Riding in this enormous group is a heck of a lot of fun.

This was the coolest thing on this ride - a newlywed couple getting their photos made, who happily got out into the middle of the street to mingle with the passing bikers.

Additional photos at my Flickr space.

Aren't you just a little bit curious?

2010-09-02T05:30:00.003-05:00

For years, I held the section of Golf Road that slides under I-90/94 in a degree of reverence. Seen from the highway, it seemed like a little downtown, a place where great and interesting things must surely be happening. What gave it this mythical aura? One and only one building: the Optima Condominiums, a veritable floating city that hovers over this stretch of crowded highway.

I do have to wonder what kind of perverse, photographer-hating architect orients his building so that the best views are from the highway.

But that's no slight against the building's non-highway-facing facades. From almost any angle, Optima Old Orchard Woods is an incredible mass of glass-walled homes, layered and piled upon one another in a magnificent symphony of space and materials. If ever there was a building to convince doubters of the merits of glass facades, this is it. It's a structural feat as well, with cantilevers in every direction and even a massive multi-story bridge in the middle.

The Optima building is in a tense location: on one side, the roaring Edens Expressway, one of the most traffic-choked Interstates in the nation, with the suburban detritus of the Skokie Golf Mills area beyond it. On the other side, a Forest Preserve - undisturbed wildlands coursing like a green river through the suburbs.

Impressive by day, this building truly comes alive at night, with facades that are an ever-shifting checkerboard of light and dark.

Like its cousins in Evanston, the Optima Old Orchard derives much of its sense of place by piling inhabitable spaces one on top of the other. The breezeway roof is a sun balcony. The pool is on the second story and looks over the entry court. Balconies and terraces are everywhere.

With only one small retail store in the base, it's not quite a self-contained city (nor is it terribly urban - there's no rail transit anywhere closeby). But it does a good job of looking like it!

(The title of this blog post, by the way, comes from a rooftop banner which adorned the building for a time. Intended to stir up the interest of potential residents, it instead came across as a plaintive plea for attention, perhaps explaining why it didn't last very long.)

Showing the love for Optima

2010-08-30T05:30:00.002-05:00

Evanston has had a trio of sophisticated, contemporary-styled condominiums go up in the last few years, all of them by the Optima design and development company, with architect David Hovey at the helm. They share a number of traits: a Modernist sensibility that is neither over-the-top nor inhumanely cool; a propensity for glass facades; and the ability to slot neatly into urban lots of virtually any size.

Optima Towers

The best, or at least the most interesting for me, is the Optima Towers building.

Undulating elevations of blue-tinted glass are broken up into a myriad of forms, with bright orange metal balcony railings further enlivening the view. The staggered profile alone is nice, but what really makes this building sing is the multiple layers of space around its base.

Two stories of balconies and dwelling units flare out over the street, hovering above a "wrapper" of stores. Indoor and outdoor spaces interweave, overlap, and all contribute their activity to the atmosphere of the street. This is a wonderful way to build up a street.

In back of the building, the delightful complexity continues, as a narrow slot of space acts as a garden courtyard, with a waterwall fountain in the back. This serene space offers a layer of separation from the bustle of downtown Evanston.

Ironically, despite its name, it's the shortest of the three.

Optima Views

The connection between the Optima Views building and its smaller Towers cousin is obvious. They use exactly the same orange-painted metal balconies, and share a similar aesthetic of carefully angled plans. Optima Views is a much bigger and taller building, however.

This broadside view of the south elevation is not the building's best face. As you move around it, however, different views arise. The building changes shape completely, becoming a slender, jagged monument of glass and concrete.

It was this view that made me wonder if Mr. Hovey was perhaps taking some inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright's Price Tower.

Another point in common with Optima Towers: a slick ability to turn even the most neglected, leftover space into something pleasant and desirable, as with those shadowed corners that became intimate balconies.

The entryway is more straightforward, given the much larger space available to work with.

Optima Horizons

Optima Horizons is a Herculean block of glass and steel, an entire city block of dwellings lifted into the sky. The multiple levels of parking make its porches a bit detached from the city life about them, but it's hard to argue with the notion of a mini-forest 4 stories up in the air. Like much about these buildings, it's just plain cool.

With the largest and most open site of the three, Optima Views also got the biggest entryway.

With so many condos and renovations adding clumsily tacked-on balconies, I have to comment on how much I like the way the Optima buildings handle their outdoor space. Even when the balconies protrude from the building, they never feel like separate, intrusive objects. Quite the contrary: the buildings' compositions would be significantly diminished without them.

Coming up next time: Optima's magnus opus in Skokie.

Where to get your neon

2010-08-23T22:56:00.003-05:00

It's not a sure-fire indicator, but there are very often clues when you're getting close to a neon sign store.

Elaborate and not-especially-necessary neon displays become more common in the storefront windows, the obvious result of good salesmanship from the neighborhood neon shop - in this case, N. Broadway's Neon Express Signs, in Uptown.

Quite a few of these little stores pepper the north side of Chicago, and the smarter ones use their store as a form of advertising, leaving it brightly illuminated at night.

The Independent Neon and Signs neon shop stood on Irving Park, right next to the Brown Line, until its building was demolished fairly recently. They've relocated to a new building on the opposite side of the Brown Line, but sadly their replacement digs aren't as exuberantly marked as the old ones.

Neon Design, Inc. on Ashland puts on a particularly good show inside.

But hands down, the best window display is at The Neon Shop Fishtail on Western Avenue. Not only is their sign the best, they also leave the most signs on at night inside the store. AND they have the most beautiful old storefront, to boot.

An Intaglio Extravaganza

2010-08-19T05:30:00.002-05:00

Last post I mentioned that designers could occasionally go a bit nuts when they got their hands on a pile of Intaglio blocks, right? Well, there's no better example than this former daycare center, on S. Ashland:

This building is made of 1960s details, top to bottom - flagstone at the entry, stainless steel paddle door handles with a snazzy font, blue metal panels, blue glazed brick...

But it's the blocks that put it completely over the top.

And because it just wasn't enough to have vertical stacks of them ringing the entire facade, the north face has a sort of free-form design built into it, made of still more Intaglio glass blocks.

This can't have been in the original design. Even for a loopy building like this one, it just doesn't fit. It's the kind of design an architect doodles on his paper during a boring meeting, not the kind of design that actually makes it onto the building! A real estate site offering the building for sale notes that it was originally a bank, so perhaps this was a drive-up window or something that was later infilled?

After years as a community center and daycare, the place has gone vacant in the last year or so. Weeds are growing out of control in the paved lot and the playground. The real estate firm offering it for sale notes that you can occupy the building or redevelop the whole lot. So... enjoy the place while it lasts, because its future is up in the air.

Intaglio blocks!

2010-08-16T05:30:00.007-05:00

Intaglio glass blocks are the little cousins of the Sculpted Glass Module. Manufacturer Pittsburgh Corning described them in a 1960s catalog as "all-glass units in four distinct patterns featuring a recessed antiqued glass area...outlined with textured gray-colored frit fused into the surface of the glass unit itself" which could be used "to produce dimensional walls with strong textural effects...combining dramatic surface patterns with the richness and beauty of light."

The catalog photo shows the 6 available models - 2 blank infills and four standard patterns.

And Chicago designers loved 'em. Not quite as much as the Sculptured Glass Modules, but still quite a bit.

They even came in totally clear versions, apparently. This three flat near Bryn Mawr and California is the only instance I've found so far.

Their distinctive appearance made them a great advertisement for the local glass block distributors; both the Hardy Glass Block Company and Imperial Glass Block used them in the design of their buildings.

Intaglio blocks could really let a designer go nuts, if he was so inclined.

Or they could be used in a more subdued fashion, as with the Swiss Valley Dairy Products building on western Chicago Avenue:

Intaglios, for whatever reason, aren't as regionally restricted as the glass module blocks; I've seen them in Davenport, Iowa and in Hoboken, New Jersey. And my friends Michael and Lynn located a most impressive example in Trenton, IL.

Paneled Storefronts Again

2010-08-12T05:30:00.003-05:00

Every week on our blog we choose a theme, and then bring you a variety of different buildings on that theme.

This week: revisiting old posts.

Act 2: More 1940s Storefronts.

Sometimes I find that just the very act of posting a blog entry generates more information. Just putting the post out there gets me thinking more about the topic, and maybe I think of a place to research that I missed earlier, or just realize that I need to take a closer look at the building itself. And of course, readers post comments. Sometimes they'll know the answer to a question, or have the architect's name, or - as in this case - they'll know where to look to find more examples of the buildings I've just posted.

Both of these porcelain enamel panel storefronts are near Roscoe Village, and in fact one of them I'd photographed before, and then totally forgotten about it.

The history of this Belmont Avenue storefront can literally be read right off the facade. Currently it's home to a pub called Hungry Brain. Before that, it housed a laundromat, its applied letters leaving faint outlines. Originally, it had an attached neon sign, whose lettering was not legible.

Orange Garden has obviously been a Chinese restaurant for a long time, what with the vintage neon sign. Combined with the stainless steel fluting and the porcelain panels, this storefront's a real winner!

And then, once I started looking for it, I realized that the panels, and the oatmeal texture porcelain enamel in particular, are everywhere. There's a stretch of Broadway where three buildings in a row have paneled storefronts.

One of my favorite Clark Street facades is made of metal panels:

And then there's this spectacular multi-store example on S. State Street:

With its battered neon sign, flaking painted signs, and 1940s-style blue paneled facade, Blue Star Auto Store is worthy of a whole post.

And just to round out the set, here's one more black Vitrolite facade. Belle Kay on Lincoln Avenue is now home to LuLu's vintage clothing store, and a more appropriate reuse I cannot imagine.

And "belle" is indeed the word to describe that angular font.

Vitrolite, sadly, isn't a very good material for meeting the ground. It's a type of glass, and glass snaps and shatters when anything hits it hard enough.

Finally, a quick update on Erickson Jewelers in Andersonville: A banner announces that it will become a Potbelly's location. The metal lettering has been removed to allow replacement of some of the Vitrolite panels. The neon sign has also been removed, hopefully / presumably for repairs. I'm hoping both elements will be coming back. The Intarwebs remain silent on the matter.

Rebecca and Hebe

2010-08-09T05:30:00.004-05:00

Never forget how much you can learn about a thing just by poking around it, inspecting it, examining it up close from every angle. You might even find the solution to a mystery.

So it was when I decided to take a close-up look at some of those weird statues that recently intrigued me. Out near Elston and Montrose, two of the water carrier statues bore the crumbling inscription of Henri Studio, Chicago. Ah hah! Perhaps some trace of this obscure, forgotten studio might yet be found amid the vast informational detritus of the Internet.

Yes, some faint footprints remain!

Henri Studio is, by their own account, a large and very busy cast statuary company, a notion reinforced by their 200+ page catalog. The company was founded 60 years ago by an Italian immigrant from the Tuscany region - just in time to start supplying statuary for the mid-century building boom.

And our lovely lady here with the jug on her back, it turns out, is the Biblical Rebecca, offering water to Abraham's servant. Rebecca at the Well is a subject of statuary and painting with a long, long history.

There doesn't appear to be any precise precedent for the statue's design; as far as I can tell, it's an original work. Furthermore, the statue is far from a clone. Details vary from statue to statue, such as the position of the right arm, or the nature of the vessel in her left hand.

Rebecca's most frequent competitor is Hebe the Cupbearer, a minor Greek goddess whose popularity as a garden statue extends far beyond Chicago.

Just what these two have to do with modern apartment living remains a bit unclear to me, though it's certainly further evidence that Modernism was never some monolith force stamping out all traces of historicism. Heretics remained at large amongst the population, and they were in the garden!

Streamline Theaters

2010-08-05T05:30:00.002-05:00

Today we visit four vintage theaters from the golden era of theater design, all of them beautifully restored in recent years.

Skokie Theater

Our first stop is the humble little Skokie Theater, on Niles Center Road in downtown Skokie. The Art Moderne facade is a later addition to a circa-1916 building. After many years as a movie theater of varied genres, today this little gem serves as a small-scale (140 seats) concert venue.

Of particular interest, the facade shares elements with both the styles I posted last week - the low-budget commercial Deco/Streamline storefronts, and the paneled WW2 storefronts.

Skokie Theater web site

Skokie Theater at Cinema Treasures

Wilmette Theater

Also on the north shore, this little theater is the most humble of the bunch. Its main interest is that it shares the same porcelain enameled panels as most of the 1940s storefronts from last week.

The Wilmette Theater is part of the Metropolitan Block, a World War I-era building that got a partial face lift during the Depression.

Lake Theater

A fully-illuminated theater is something that should be seen by both day and night. Sadly, I haven't made it out to Oak Park in the daylight since finding this remarkable Deco waterfall.

The Lake Theater (on Lake Street, natch) dates from 1936 (architect Thomas W. Lamb). The spectacular marquee remains fully illuminated, as does the vertical theater name sign, which lights up letter by letter, top to bottom, before blinking off again. Inside, the theater has more recently become home to salvaged artifacts from other Chicago theaters that no longer stand.

Lake Theater at Cinema Treasures

Official history at Classic Cinemas

York Theater

The York Theater (York Road, Elmhurst) looks sharp by day... but it's at night that this facade truly comes alive.

Curved neon follows the sensuous lines of the facade, uniting the building and its marquee into a single entity. The structure was only 14 years old in 1938, when architect Roy B. Blass replaced its Spanish-influenced facade with a new, ultra-up-to-date facade in the Art Moderne style.

Like the Lake Theater, the York is owned by the Classic Cinemas company, who have taken superb care of both places and runs on a business model of celebrating historic theater design. Also like the Lake, the York has survived into the present as a viable first-run theater by gobbling up adjacent retail space for conversion to additional theater screens. Combined with the triplexing of the original auditorium, this has brought the York up to a total of nine screens.

If you visit the York and your timing is right, you can also visit the offices of the Theatre Historical Society of America - they're located in an upstairs office right next to the theater.

Official history at Classic Cinemas

York Theater at Cinema Treasures

Art Deco Moralizing

2010-08-02T05:30:00.001-05:00

If you've browsed the spectacular Unexpected Chicagoland (Camilo Jose Vergara and Tim Samuelson), you surely remember the equally spectacular Laramie State Bank of Chicago (architects Meyer & Cook, with the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company, 1927.)

It's a beauty, one of the finest Deco facades you'll find in the city. It's also covered in fine and, to my mind, rather amusing detail.

The theme of the entire facade is "hard work and savings", and the artists laid it on thick and heavy. Across its columns and around its windows, industrial workers labor in factories, surrounded by rivers of coins. Atop the columns, squirrels and bees prepare their hordes for winter, while a wise owl watches in sage approval.

And above the door, a contented family gathers for their meal.

Meanwhile, on the eastern facade, the American eagle sinks its claws into the entire globe. Hard work + savings = American hegemony!

The building is located at 5200 W. Chicago Avenue, most of the way out to Oak Park. This is a pretty hardscrabble neighborhood today, but the building survives as a combination of banquet hall, carryout restaurant, church, and I'm not sure what else.

1940s Storefront Facades

2010-07-29T05:30:00.003-05:00

We cap off our little survey of commercial Art Deco with a style that's not really Deco: the circa-World War II paneled storefront.

Lincoln Tap Room - Lincoln Avenue

Western Automatic Music - Western Avenue

R. V. Kunka Pharmacy - Archer Avenue

This one, on Armitage, actually has more in common with the corner Deco buildings from previous posts. But the colors are more 1940s-style.

Kiltz's Bakery - W. 63rd Street

Kiltz's shares a material and finish style with the next two, a sort of smooth-finished texture with a lumpiness to it. For a while it fooled me into thinking it was terra cotta, but if you walk up and tap it, you'll discover that it's a hollow metal panel with a baked-on coating, presumably a form of porcelain enamel.

Parkway Cleaners and Taylors - Diversey Parkway

Ed & Erv's Centrella Food Mart - Touhy Avenue

Parkway and Ed & Erv's also share enough design elements to make them look like the same designer's work. The white polished cleanliness of the designs is highly fitting for their occupants.

At the other end of the health spectrum, the Rothschild Liquors chain became their own mini-genre of storefront, all paneled in red and finished out with stylish neon signs:

717 East 87th Street

1532 West Chicago Avenue

425 East 63rd Street

A quick Google search turns up two more Rothschild stores with facades of the same vintage, one in red, one in white.

And finally, the black Vitrolite panel storefront, exemplified by two fine northern city storefronts:

Erickson's Jewelers, Clark Street in Andersonville

Paul J. Ouetschke & Co., Lincoln Avenue in Lincoln Square

Unlike the baked metal panels above, Vitrolite is basically a form of glass, about a quarter inch in thickness, and sadly prone to breaking under impact.

And with those dimensional letters, we're clearly on the path to full-blown Midcentury. Bring it on!

Gold-Plated Deco Bits

2010-07-26T05:30:00.004-05:00

You remember these guys from last week, right?

Grand Avenue

Devon Avenue I

Devon Avenue II

The three buildings share more than just a similar design style; they actually have the exact same gold-hued catalog ornament.

Grand Avenue

Devon Avenue I

Devon Avenue II

And they're not alone. Several other Deco buildings were designed by contractors with their finger in the same catalog.

Lawrence Avenue, directly south of the previous two

Bryn Mawr at Sawyer, west of the river

It looks like the supplier made the same ornament in multiple finishes. Consider these two details, the first from the Lawrence Ave. building, the second from another Devon Ave. building:

The two designs are identical, just flipped and rendered in a different finish.

Round Corner Deco

2010-07-22T05:30:00.010-05:00

The Streamline Deco style really lent itself to commercial buildings. They could be built with extremely simple designs, and still be considered stylish and modern.

6747 W. Cermak Road, at Oak Park Avenue

Bryn Mawr, west of Sheridan

2755 W. 63rd Street at California

This one is the most basic model - rectangular blocks with a glazed, colored face, with horizontal banding lines on top and bottom. This model serves on countless storefronts around the city, both on corners and in the middle of the street wall.

Clark Street - Lakeview. Whatever this building may have once been, it's now buried under an awful asphalt shingle mansard roof, except for this forlorn little corner peaking out at the alley.

Here on Chicago Avenue, the worst slipcover job ever has partially given way to reveal the stock Streamline facade beneath.

The same idea was used to greater effect on Devon Avenue, where a corner didn't require the entry to be round.

Devon Avenue

The same model is used on a tiny free-standing building where Grand and Chicago intersect.

And again in a storefront at 6719 Northwest Highway.

On this North Avenue building, the same effect is achieved with metal panels. This building has had a renovation / add-on that really fights against its host building. Apparently, Streamline just doesn't have the same allure as rustic Swiss Alpine.

You could pull the same effect off in concrete or limestone, too:

Simple and Streamline weren't the only word in corner commercial chic, however. The varied vagaries of Art Deco offered an array of options for the shopkeeper willing to spend a bit more on his facade, and there are some beautiful examples here and there.

3001 W. 63rd Street

3324 W. 55th Street

Archer Avenue at Richmond Street

Angley Jangley Deco

2010-07-19T05:30:00.006-05:00

Two handsome Art Deco specimens from out west.

The Medical Arts Building, Oak Park

715 Lake Street is hard to miss if you've visited Oak Park; it's a rare tall building in a low-rise suburb. Architect Roy J. Hotchkiss designed the Deco/Nouveau skyscraper near the end of a highly productive career, in 1929; still in use as office space, it's a contributing member of a National Register district.

It's also quite dramatically illuminated at night.

4500 W. Division

O & G Spring and Wire Forms Specialty Company occupies this low, long factory building, the front facade of a fairly large complex.

The factory's entire facade is nicely decorated with mosaic tile and brick patterns, but it's the entry tower that makes you swerve to the side of the road for a longer look.

Hey.... aren't those the same wall sconces as the Medical Arts Building?

O & G was founded in 1966 by a Polish immigrant and employs about 75 people today. The company made unfortunate headlines in 2008, when a supervisor shot and killed an employee after a quarrel.

The Tribune library archives are not working correctly, or I might have more info on the building itself. But maybe it's enough to just bask in its geometric glory.

Friday Photo Special: The LATE Ride rides again!

2010-07-16T05:30:00.003-05:00

Shots from the 2010 LATE Ride, Saturday night / Sunday morning July 10/11:

I'm not sure how this contraption operated, but it was slow. After I finished the entire ride, and was heading back north on the bike path -- now totally empty -- I passed this crew, still struggling toward downtown, waaaay up north at Montrose. There were 7 of them on the bike, plus a few more festively lit bikers riding with them, so I guess they couldn't have been too lonely.

West on Roosevelt.

North on Halsted.

South on the lake front bike path.

I love the LATE Ride. And it's about the only time I ever see the sun rise over the lake.

More photos here.

The Artist Colonies of Old Town

2010-07-15T05:30:00.000-05:00

Two remarkable enclaves of artistic thought, expression and craft thrived in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood, starting in the 1920s and peaking in the 1950s. Both sprung from the artistic ambitions of prolific artist Edgar Miller, who spent decades carefully crafting his studio and the surrounding properties.

The first and more extensive compound is the Carl Street Studios on W. Burton Place, a single-block street between LaSalle and Wells (it was renamed in the 1930s.) I will not try to explain their architecture or layout; I can hardly claim to understand them myself. Suffice to say that most of the block is involved in Miller's work in some way or other. Several tightly wound buildings somehow squeeze courtyard space onto tiny urban lots, each adorned with sculpture, mosaic tile, woodwork, stained glass and more.

Prairie Style and Art Deco / Streamline are clearly visible influences; on the whole, however, the houses on this block are unique creations.

The second location is on Wells Street, a few blocks above North Avenue. Now housing high-end apartments, it's frustratingly inaccessible, a bit of a walled fortress compound insulated against the bustle of the city. Sporadic bits of tile decoration and two elaborately carved doors hint at the wonders that surely await within.

Turns out, Edgar Miller was professionally involved with another luminous Chicago designer, architect Andrew Rebori. Miller's mini-sculptures line the first-floor cornice of Rebori's Fischer Apartments, nearby on Wells.

The outside of these buildings is a paltry consolation prize compared to the interiors. Interior photos are well worth seeking out - they are stunning indeed.

A full history at Wikipedia: Carl Street Studios

Lawn ornament extreme

2010-07-12T05:30:00.000-05:00

The urge to decorate is, I suspect, fundamental to the human psyche. People like stuff. They like to personalize and elaborate and accumulate. Guys like Mies and Gropius were, truth be told, fighting a losing battle.

Some folks, however, take their decorating more seriously than others. Some lawn decoration is just that, bits of stuff scattered and arranged here and there about the back yard or front lawn. Sometimes, however, it becomes part of the building, as with this whimsically decorated house on Asbury in Evanston.

And sometimes, the decoration can overtake the house entirely, redefining it, as with this building in Ukraine Village.

That's the House of Crosses, alternately know as the "It's what I do" house. Sadly, most of this 20-year accumulation of art was removed in 2007.

For my money, though, nothing quite tops this custom-sculpted facade reworking at 6011 S. Ashland. The building and lot belong to a towing company. How they wound up with such a wonderfully decorated building is a mystery.

Contemporary Infill

2010-07-08T05:30:00.005-05:00

There's often a lot of groaning and moaning about new construction in the city. Pretty much anything that gets built has someone that hates it. Contemporary design gets decried as "awful glass boxes" or "metal and glass monstrosities" (just try Google-searching either phrase.) Sometimes the criticism has real merit, but I've heard such slurs used against buildings that I thought were excellent.

Meanwhile, this stuff is what you get when you don't encourage contemporary modernism. Faux-historicism is rightly denigrated by architectural purists as "watered down" and wishy-washy - even the ardent opponents of glass-box design must realize that there's something unsatisfying about a brick-skinned condo with a few quoins and keystones tacked on.

Consider the two designs above - interesting facade compositions, and wonderful recessed porches, but what's up with the random bits of stone? Is it supposed to be a Pullman row house? Are we meant to take the square columns and thinly banded stone as a contemporary Prairie style? Why the red brick? Is there any actual history of this area using red brick for... well... anything?

To do historicism right takes money and it takes serious architectural intention, neither of which are high on the priority list of your typical city developer. And even if you get it right, you're left with an anomaly, a building out of time, a testimony that we live in a era that has failed to produce a great architectural style of its own.

So, let us celebrate those fleeting moments when the architectural spirit does prevail. Chicago is dotted with infill houses in the truly contemporary style, where buildings become grids, and the grids are then pulled apart, cut open, sliced, diced, turned, flipped, snipped, slipped and zipped. This is architectural play - contemporary architectural design at its best. It takes a committed designer to do it well. Chicago is lucky to have so many excellent examples.

On the bottom, a classic Chicago house, deconstructed. On the top, a Frank Ghery Lite composition.

The classic contemporary modern infill home - a flat front facade seems to have slipped loose from its moorings, leaving an open strip of shadow. This move generates a bit of mystery - what's inside that shadow? What materials are beyond there? Can you occupy that space?

At a glance, a "glass box" - oh, the horror! But just look at how space flows through it. The bedroom is a box within a box, suspended over the living room with its own windows looking out onto the double-height living space that faces the street - and its own curtains to provide privacy when desired. On the right, the staircase seems to rise forever.

Two floating planes and a solid chimney tower make a plan block box into an engaging composition.

Thickened wall planes have become one of the architect's most potent weapons. Somewhere along the line, architects seem to have gotten over their obsession with making walls thinner and thinner... thus liberating them to make the wall into an actual object, or a thing with physical substance - something to contrast with all that glassy openness.

Likewise, the construction of a building as a series of overlapping shapes - interconnected boxes clad in different materials - has become a common form of architectural play.

I'm not normally a big fan of standing seam metal panel as a cladding material. Usually it looks cheap and ugly. Architects give it way too much credit in general; when it's hailed as a material of the future, I find the future to seem very bleak indeed. Here, however, it's brought vividly to life with color, contrasting delightfully with the red brick. Another clever move is changing the directions of the seams to match the colors and harmonize with the window orientation.

Houses of METAL

2010-07-05T05:30:00.001-05:00

Here's a pair of show-stopper houses up in Evanston, at 1216 and 1220 Main Street.

On the right: MetalHOUSE(1), developed by architect Andrew J. Spitz as his own house in 1985.

On the left: MetalHOUSE(2), a recently-constructed successor.

The original house, clad in anodized aluminum, features a live/work studio on the lower floor.

Cool and stylish are the watchwords here. Little details reinforce the whole, such as the gravel sideyard separating the two houses, or the harmonizing house number sign.

I certainly cannot claim to understand or even necessarily agree with the architectural philosophy behind such buildings (nor the erratic nonstandard punctuation, spelling and capitalization that architects are so in love with.) There's definitely an impractical side to constructing things with lots of weird angles and random corners, and my first thought on seeing any such building is, does the roof leak?

But it's a seductive vision. These houses are totally cool to look at and, I'd wager, equally cool to live in. According to the houses' site, they incorporate numerous green design features, including passive solar heating and plenty of natural light. The interior photos show a series of absolutely lovely spaces. And at 25 years old, MetalHouse1 is looking great.

It's hard not to wish for Spitz's vision to consume the entire block. How awesome would it be to drive past an entire row of these confections? It would rock hard. It would be righteous. Possibly even... METAL. \m/