Rogers Park's Metra Murals

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.

Capital-M Modernism in Rogers Park

Granville Gardens


It's always nice when the AIA Guide to Chicago notes a building I'm interested in, since that means most of the legwork (who, when, what style, original use, for what client) is already done. However, you'd think guys as educated and smart as the authors would, in a city like Chicago, know better than to tempt fate with statements like the following:

"Amazingly, the entire complex is in close to original condition."

Granted, it's been 17 years since those words were published in the first edition copy of the Guide, in reference to Rogers Park's Granville Gardens apartments. But sure enough, when I first paid a visit to photograph the Moderne garden apartment complex, there was construction work underway in the courtyards. On a recent repeat visit, I discovered that the interior courtyards were being converted into parking lots. Augh!!





To be fair, the lots appear thoughtfully designed, retaining the two mature trees in the center of each of the two courtyards as well as a sizable band of grass around them. And hey, parking lots can always be removed. In theory.



Granville Garden - now partially renamed Granville Court Apartments - stands amid the sides streets between Peterson and Devon, on the corner of Hoyne and Granville. It's a complex of 14 buildings, connected by open terraces in groups of three and four, and arranged around the two courtyards. It's a lovely, thoughtful way to manage housing, dense but not crowded.







The buildings went up as a privately financed venture under government insurance and supervision, in a time when not much was being built in Chicago or elsewhere. The architects were Rissman & Hirschfeld, the year was 1938, and the styling is Moderne, with prominent corner windows and thin mullions which (knock on wood) still remain intact. For now. Architectural interest is provided by brick banding at the exterior corners, curved concrete entry canopies with scalloped edges, glass block and curved walls in the entry foyers, and the stepped massing of the buildings. Look close at the entryways and you may find some surprisingly sleek original door hardware still in place.




Winchester-Hood Garden Homes


Granville Gardens are not the only early Modernist housing development in Rogers Park, nor even the only one in this neighborhood. Just down the street is an even bigger complex, occupying parts of four contiguous, partially-developed city blocks. The Winchester-Hood Garden Homes were built from 1948 to 1951, to the designs of Holsman, Holsman, Klekamp and Taylor.



HHK&T liked their angles. Not only do short angled bay windows form the buildings' most distinctive feature, but the site plans place nearly all of them at slight angles to the streets and to each other. The four block plans are all different, as none of the available parcels were the same shape and size. The result is a delightful variety in the resulting garden spaces between buildings, with no two alike. Meandering sidewalks lead through the buildings and to their doors.



The buildings themselves are almost Spartanly simple, though many feature three sculptured designs piercing the walls of their stairwells. The three sculptures - stylized versions of Zodiac figures Aeries, Pisces, and Capricorn - were designed by architect Coder Taylor. Each is only semi-solid, allowing light from the stairwell to illuminate its outlines at night.







The resulting effect in the evening, of lantern-like lights filtering from the buildings, the curving paths, and the mature trees, is like walking through some celebratory forest village.



Winchester-Hood has a near-twin down on the south side, the Parkway Gardens apartments at 6415 S. Calumet. Fenced off, surrounded by parking, and in a generally rough section of town, it's not nearly as inviting. I have yet to photograph it.


Lunt Lake Apartments


HHK&T were busy after World War II. In addition to Winchester-Hood and Parkway Gardens, they acted as consulting firm to Mies van der Rhohe's famous Lake Shore Apartments. And in 1948, the firm designed a second Rogers Park complex, the Lake Lunt Apartments.





Consisting of three buildings on a single large lot, Lunt Lake stands on one of the many dead-end street stubs east of Sheridan, that end at the lakefront. Lunt Lake isn't as bucolic as its sister development, but its structures are cut from the same cloth.

One might expect a U-shaped arrangement facing the lake, but instead the buildings are simply arranged in a line along the street, doing little to take advantage of the lakefront location. Only one receives lake views. These structures also lack the the fascinating stairwell sculptures of the other complex, and the view of them from lakeside is a bit underwhelming.





Lunt-Lake was finished at a cost of $1,000,000 - quite a steal for putting up three buildings! Lunt-Lake and Winchester-Hood were both featured in Architectural Forum of January 1950, which noted the unusual brickwork. Designated "rowlock bond", it was combined with poured, steel reinforced concrete to create a very thin, strong bearing wall.

Today, the buildings look as good as new. May they remain unblemished for another 60 years to come!