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!

Chicago Main News Stand

The Chicago Main Newsstand in Evanston is a real oddity, a little mutant of a Modern building. At first glimpse, it seems easy enough to suss out -- it's a classically Modern 1950s building, now and perhaps always functioning as a news stand, complete with a vintage neon sign on top, and thin sans-serif fonts announcing its purpose on the side.



But it's too perfect. There's no sign of aging at all. Those thick window mullions are not very 1950s. And the interior uses varnished wood trim and exposed ductwork. No MidCentury architect would dare leave ductwork exposed, no more than they would walk out their front door without a pair of pants on. No, that interior, at the very least, is from the 1980s or later.



Turns out, the stand originally went up in the 1940s. Named for the streets upon whose intersection it stands, the Chicago-Main Newsstand operated until 1993 as a mainstay of Chicago readers from across the region. After years of neglect following its closure, it came close to demolition in 2000, but was spared. In 2001, it re-opened after an intense renovation that included an entirely new roof and structure, relaying of the north and south walls, and the restoration of the original neon sign, which glows to the delight of sign fans across the city.



Today, the City Newsstand sells "60 newspapers and 6,000 magazines", according to its web site. And it looks pretty cool, a beautiful modern box glowing in the night and gleaming in the day.

Friday Photo Special: Greek Statues again

Wouldn't you know it? The very day the post on Midcentury Grecian statues goes up, I happen to make it back out to the O'Hare neighborhood, where the whole thing started. Here's a few closeups of the strange and intriguing chunks of statuary that inhabit the courtyards of this 1960s neighborhood.





Some are weathered, and some are well-loved and even decorated with flowers. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was realizing that some of them had been painted.





Not all of these things are centrally placed. Some of them look like they were just stuck any old place.







But THIS one, by contrast... it not only occupies the focal point of its courtyard, but it was also meant to be lit up in blue, red, green and yellow beams of light. Brilliant! Brilliantly tacky, actually, but still brilliant. I simply must come back after dark.

Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!

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






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






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







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

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

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

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





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


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




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



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





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





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




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

Greece in a Box

While photographing the northeast corner of my much-beloved O'Hare neighborhood, I started to noticed something funny. An inordinate number of the 1960s apartment buildings prominently featured a Classical-styled sculpture hanging out in front of them. It was one of those shocking little moments when you realize that you've somehow not seen something even though it was right in front of you the whole time.











(That last photo, by the way, is a building I didn't share earlier, a Midcentury courtyard apartment with a bizarre Frankenstein mish-mash of parts, including a Classical pediment next to a two-story asphalt-shingled mansard roof, wood siding, brick siding, picture windows and tacked-on balconies. Yikes!)


A skim through my considerable photo archive turned up quite a few more of these lawn sculptures scattered around the city.


W. Gunnison









The garden statues don't appear to be recent add-ons. Sometimes, the building itself is designed to accomodate some kind of decoration. And a couple of designs (the water-carrier with a vase on her shoulder, and another water carrier holding a single smaller jug) show up in front of multiple buildings, making it more likely to be of the same vintage as the buildings themselves.

The question remains, then: What the hell?? Were Chicago builders trying to convince their clients that they were actually living in some sort of new American acropolis by dropping a bit of Greek lawn art in front of it?

Well, maybe. Mid-Century builders were not at all hesitant to slap on anything that they felt created a resonant image with home buyers and renters. The western frontier and the colonial era are both well-represented in Chicago's 1960s style. So why not add in some Grecian statuary? Was America not the modern living embodiment of Greek ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality?

And a statue, unlike a fountain, doesn't require any messy, expensive pipes.

Still, it's another one of those strange convergences. How was it that so many buildings wound up with the same statues?