Joanne Asala of Compass Rose Cultural Crossroads, emailed us to let us know of another great free download that follows on the heels of the wonderful facsimile of the 1925 Balaban & Katz magazine featuring the Uptown Theater that they put up earlier this year.This time it's a facsimile of the 1921 edition of the American Builder magazine devoted to The Work of Walter W. Ahlschlager. Ahlschlager is one of the lesser known Chicago architects responsible for some of our more high-profile buildings, including the Inter-Continental Hotel on North Michigan, with its great carved reliefs and yellow-domed dirigible moaring at the top. He also designed the wildly ornate Uptown Broadway Building, at Broadway and Leland.
The emphasis in the American Builder reproduction is on several then new residential projects such as The Sovereign at Granville and Kenmore, the Parkway and the Webster, with prime of place given to the Sheridan Plaza residential apartment hotel at Sheridan and Wilson. then being completed. There are construction photos, floor plans, shots of various interiors including grand lobbies, and a host of interesting period ads for everything from elevators, to terra cotta ornament, marble, fire escapes - even Dutch Boy paint from the National Lead Company (??!!). It's another great snapshot both of the work and the time, and you can download it in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, for free.
1 comment:
We have one of the only know homes built by Walter W. Ahlschlager in Highland Park, Illinois.
It was built in 1926 at the time he was also working on the Roxy Theatre in NYC. Our beautiful home contains many of the same elements as the Hotel InterContinental in Chicago, such as sculpted plaster walls and the same exact cream colored terazzo window sills on every window in our home (also seen on the sills in the historic tower of the Hotel InterContinental). We have copies of construction liens placed on our home in 1926 showing Walter W. Ahlschlager on the title. It is also on a copy of a building permit we have.
I spoke to Walter Ahlschlager's (elderly) daughter-in-law a couple of years ago in Dallas, she was quite surprised to hear he had done a residential structure since he was very well known for his oppulent movie palaces and other commercial structures. She mentioned that the Ahlschlager family lived in Lake Forest, IL before moving to Dallas.
We believe Walter Ahlschlager may possibly have been friends with the original owner of our home and an officer/engineer from Ft. Sheridan, Mr. Willard Dowd. Pure speculation on our part as we try to figure out why he built this petite palace on Chicago's North Shore.
Post a Comment