Will Chicago's Landmark Farwell Building be Peeled Like A Grape?

The 600 block of North Michigan Avenue is in for some big changes, some temporary, some grand, and one a potential time bomb that could decimate Chicago's rich architectural legacy.

First the temporary. Just as the leaves turn crimson just before they fall, the building formerly housing the entrance to the Terra Museum of American Art on went red over the last week to house a "pop-up" store for Project Red, the initiative launched by rocker Bono to help bankroll the Global Fund to Fight Aids. The store, which sold merchandise tied in with the campaign, is the subject of an interesting article on this archenewsnow webpage.

The Museum, founded by industrialist Daniel Terra to showcase his extensive collection of American Art, closed in 2004, eight years after Terra's death, following an acrimonious and ultimately unsuccessful battle to move the museum to Washington, D.C. The property was put on the block, and ultimately acquired by Prism Development, which plans to erect The Ritz-Carlton Residences, a 40 story tower designed by architect Lucien Lagrange containing just 86 high-end residences. The building site includes two other parcels. To north, there's a small structure that is best known for being the long-time home of the city's legendary Stuart Brent booksellers. (A Starbucks now claims the space.)

More crucially, another parcel to the south contains the Farwell Building, an officially designated Chicago landmark, a graceful classical 1920's high-rise in Indiana limestone, designed by architect Philip Maher, that is one of the few suriving examples of the kind of elegance that dominated Michigan Avenue before it was overrun by often ghastly new construction such as 600 North Michigan and the Marriott Hotel.

The Farwell is the center of a truly astounding proposal - one that somehow actually made it onto the Commission on Chicago Landmarks' October agenda - calling for the "Proposed dismantlement, demolition and facade reconstruction of the Farwell Building." In plain English, this means that Prism Development is seeking to remove the facades from the Farwell, demolish the building, erect a new structure and face it with the old Farwell facades, which would then have blind windows fronting a parking garage.

It's hard to decide which is more outrageous - that any developer would even attempt such a proposal, or that a Chicago architect of the caliber of Lucien Lagrange, who makes his home in one of the city's few surviving Louis Sullivan buildings, would allow himself to be aligned with such a project. The proposal was yanked from the October Landmarks Commission agenda at the last minute, and is not on the November agenda as currently published. Still, it's inevitable Prism will be back, and this much is certain: if the Commission gives Prism its way, it means the effective end of landmark protection in the city of Chicago.

The Farwell Saga - Episode Four

Scaffolding has gone up around Michigan Avenue's Farwell Building, saved last month when the Commission on Chicago Landmarks voted down a proposal that would have stripped the Farwell's facades, demolished the building, and remounted the facades on a completely new building, all under the name of landmark protection.

Is the scaffolding a ploy in a PR campaign to reverse that vote by persuading the public the building is so unsafe that demolition is the only solution?

Read about what's at stake, and how its shaking down - including project architect Lucien Lagrange's candid discussion about the real reasons behind the developer's push to demolish the Farwell - in ten easy points, here.

Endgame: Is the Fix in for the Farwell?

In January, to general astonishment, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks flashed a bit of backbone and voted down a Planning Department proposal to demolish the landmarked Farwell Building on north Michigan Avenue.

Well, we can't have that, can we?

A special session has been set for 9:00 A.M. on Thursday, March 8th to reverse the January vote. Read all about how power works in this city, including the developers and architects who are cutting the big checks to the local alderman promoting the Farwell's demolition here.

Plan Commission Shows Backbone - Will it Stick or Will it Farwell?

In something of a surprise, the Chicago Plan Commission had a rare show of independence last Thursday when it rejected a Chicago Department of Planning Development-backed proposal, that would have seen the embattled Congress Hotel add five stories above the Harrison Street side of the structure, and one story above the part along the landmarked Michigan Avenue street wall.

The action was not unlike the one last January when the Landmarks Commission rejected another Planning Department initiative to demolish the landmarked Farwell Building on North Michigan Avenue. Opponents won, not because they were in the majority, but because the proposal fell short of a majority. With commission member John Baird absent, the abstention of Ernst C. Wong was enough for the 4 to 3 vote in favor of demolition to fail, because it didn't get a majority vote of those in attendance. That should have been the end of it, but of course, this being Chicago, while preservationists get just shot one at making a building a landmark, developers get to keep re-voting as many times as necessary to get what they want.
The screws were applied to Commission members, and at a special meeting called the following March to reverse the original vote, Edward Torrez was the only commissioner not to fold like a piece of cheap cardboard.

Special meetings of the Commission are rarely, if ever, called to provide emergency protection to a building under immediate threat. They're more commonly a sign that the Commission has been summoned to fulfill its primary, if unwritten, role: to provide cover for a developer wanting to mutilate or demolish another Chicago landmark. There was fear that a hastily scheduled special January 31st session would involve the Commission rubber-stamping the gutting of the landmarked but financially troubled buildings of the Chicago Athletic Club, also a part of the Michigan Avenue street wall, possibly leaving it, a la Farwell, as little more than a facade. That meeting has now been cancelled, and we'll have to await the Commission's February 7th monthly session (the regular January meeting was also cancelled) to see what they have up their sleeve.

Back at the Plan Commission, the alteration of the Congress Hotel, for which Mayor Richard M. Daley has given highly vocal support, had four votes in its favor, and only one against, but because four other members in attendance abstained from voting (now there's a story for an investigative reporter to sink his or her teeth in), the measure failed to obtain the necessary majority.

Normally, you'd think this would be Farwell2 in the making - it shouldn't be too hard to muscle one or two of the abstainers to switch. The situation at the Congress may, however, prove a bit more complicated. There's the bitter, nearly five year-long labor dispute in which the hotel's management - alone among the city's major hotels - has refused to come to terms with striking workers, and the strong opposition of the 2nd ward's recently elected alderman, Robert Fioretti. Fioretti's concerns over the condition of the property were cited by the critical "no" vote, Nancy Pacher, the powerful COO of mega-manager U.S. Equities Realty.

It's doubtful this will be the end of it. Now the Commissioners will be in the unenviable position of having to decide who they're least afraid of offending: the Mayor, the alderman, or organized labor.

According to architectural historian Joseph M. Siry, the Congress debuted on May 1, 1893, opening day for the World's Columbian Exposition, whose hordes of visitors the hotel would help to house. It opened as the Auditorium Annex, to catch the overflow from the wildly successful Auditorium Hotel just across Congress Parkway. The original design by architect Clinton J. Warren was modified by Auditorium Building's architects Adler and Sullivan, brought in as consultants to make the new hotel better mesh visually with its 1886 neighbor. It's the same height as the Auditorium's main block, and is faced in the same Bedford limestone. In 1902, the original Congress Hotel, today the Congress's southern block, was constructed to a design of Holabird and Roche.

The Auditorium Hotel went belly-up in the 1920's; the Congress lives to this day as the Congress Plaza, a hotel of faded grandeur. Despite its prime location near Millennium Park, it offers, according to David Roeder and Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times, "the lowest rental rates downtown, sometimes as little as $79 a night." Pickets at the entrance, no extra charge.

Landmarks Commission Follows Script - Greases Skids for Reese Demolition

As could be expected, on Thursday the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, like Pontius Pilate, washed their hands of responsibility for the fate of the Bauhaus inspired buildings, designed in part by famed German architect Walter Gropius, which have the misfortune of residing on the former Michael Reese Hospital that Mayor Richard M. Daley wants obliterated so he can build an athletes' village for his 2016 Olympics. The Commission was responding to a nomination by activist and scholar Grahm Balkany of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition to place the campus on the National Register of Historic Places.

As reported by the Trib's Blair Kamin, the repulsion was accomplished with such sweet reason - who could object? The boundaries of the nominated district were "poorly drawn" and the individual structures subject to additions and alterations down through the years.

It seems to make sense, until you remember that just two years ago this same commission approved demolishing the landmark Farwell building and replacing it with a completely different building on which the old facades would be pasted, without the commission finding any "structural integrity" issues worth worrying about.

Those with the clout rewrite the rules to their benefit. In the Farwell case, it was a clouted developer basking in the very public favor of city hall. In the case of Michael Reese, it's the seemingly inexhaustible clout of the mayor, himself. So now "structural integrity", later additions to intact buildings, in most cases reversible, has become an immovable obstacle on which the commission justifies its inaction on Michael Reese.

And, of course, the Commission covers itself in the usual dishonest intimations of fair mindedness. Blair actually wrote the following sentence, apparently swallowing the kool-aid whole: "Despite the "no" vote, there was a glimmer of hope for the Gropius coalition when commission members and staff commented publicly that a revised plan might win their support." Both commissioners Phyllis Ellin and director Brian Goeken were quoted as speculating that that an unnamed someone might be able to put together a revised plan that would meet their approval.

Wait a second: as the prime protectors of Chicago's architectural legacy, isn't that their job?

Any third-string reporter could tell you what's really going on here:

1. No matter how important the best of the Michael Reese buildings are, the Commission, under the thumb of its parent, the former city planning and development department, has never had any intention of risking offending the mayor by doing anything to protect any of the modern Reese buildings.
2. Although the threat to the Bauhaus inspired architecture at Reese has been a very public issue since March, there is no evidence that the Commission has ever lifted a finger to consider this issue, despite the fact that all these buildings are in imminent peril of being lost forever.
3. It is only because of the nomination that Balkany filed with the National Register that the Commission was forced to take up the issue of Michael Reese.
4. There is no evidence that the Commission has any intention of moving a muscle to create the kind of alternative plan that would gain the acceptance Ellin and Goecken dangled before our eyes on Thursday.
5. The Commission will do nothing. If forced to do something, it will delay, knowing that if they hold off for just a few months, the campus will be demolished and all issues will be moot. Problem solved!

On a related note, also yesterday, the Sun-Times revealed that the city, in addition to borrowing $85 million to acquire the Michael Reese site, also intends to create a new TIF district that will siphon off at least $100 million in tax revenues from the surrounding neighborhood to co- finance the Olympic Village.

Mayor Daley's 2016 Olympics: the gift that keeps on taking.

Is Landmarks Commission Irrelevant? Session on Michael Reese today will tell.

As time runs out on the historic Bauhaus-inspired campus of Michael Reese Hospital, designed with the direct participation of architect Walter Gropius, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks will consider the fate of the campus at its regular monthly meeting, taking place today, Thursday, August 6th, at 12:45pm at City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle Street, Room 201-A. It is open to the public, and those supporting Chicago architecture are encouraged to attend and to speak out. What's at stake?

Well, the staff of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks does incredible work in researching, documenting and saving essential Chicago architecture. In a rank conflict of interest, however, they are a subsidiary of the Department of Community Development - the former Department of Planning - whose job is promote development, under at the administration of mayor Richard M. Daley, blindly and at almost any cost. The actual commission is a body of well meaning, distinguished Chicagoans appointed by Mayor Daley to make sure that the landmark process is never allowed to become an inconvenience to those plans, no matter how ill-advised.

As a consequence, the Commission has mostly been a rubber stamp, missing in action, on the most contentious and important landmarking issues. In the case of the Farwell Building, it willingly played into the hands of people like Albert Hanna - who's recently got the landmarks law ruled unconstitutional by a hack political judge - when they voted that they saw no difference between a landmarked building, a completely different building constructed on the same site, and the stripped facades of the original landmark pasted onto the new building. The decision was justified as an "exception", but in the law, there are no exceptions, only precedents, and the Farwell vote opened the floodgates to eviscerating the very concept of landmark protection.

Now they're considering Michael Reese. Not because it's right, but because they were forced to. Grahm Balkany, the dedicated scholar behind the Gropius in Chicago Coalition who has been working overtime documenting the Gropius connection to Reese and lobbying tirelessly to save this irreplaceable piece of Chicago's cultural and architectural history, submitted a nomination of Michael Reese to the National Register of Historic Places, which the Chicago commission is forced to consider.
This is another critical vote that will determine whether landmarking will have any meaning in the face of Mayor Daley's Olympic obsession. In the mayor's mind, the 2016 is the highest possible good, and he will ruthlessly sacrifice and destroy anything that stands in his way. We've written extensively about the importance of the campus and its buildings, more recently about how all the memorial plaques throughout the campus have disappeared, as has an important sculpture by Richard Hunt, quite possibly to be sold for scrap. Only days ago, we posted on how the wonderful landscaping on the campus by Hideo Sasaki and Lester Collins has been wantonly destroyed to no good purpose.

If the landmarks commission does not take a stand today, they will be putting their stamp of approval on such destruction. No park, no building, no cityscape will be safe from Daley's scorched earth plans. Where will their loyalty lie? Blindly, to the man who appointed them? Or to their charge as the last and most critical protectors of Chicago's incredible architectural legacy?

Kamin on disappearing landmarks, King on citified suburbs - two great reads

Two great reads worth checking out before they vanish into paid archive hell:

The danger of becoming skin deep - Because I've been sitting on my behind since last March's Chicago Landmark Commission vote approving the demolition of the landmark Farwell Building and pasting its saved/recreated facade onto a completely new building on its former site, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin has beaten me to the punch in taking on the decimation of the idea of landmark preservation under pressure from wealthy and connected developers. Increasingly, landmark buildings are being sliced and diced, stripped of context and laid out in a sort of architectural taxidermy.

Kamin covers both the Farwell, the facadectomy razing a series of historic, landmarked buildings along Chicago's Jewelers Row in order to create the new 59-story Legacy at Millennium Park, and the sad case of Maxwell Street, whose legendary and unruly open air market was destroyed to advance the gentrification of the area around the University of Illinois Chicago campus. A single block was retained, its historic buildings restored and polished to a level that never existed during their long, useful life, leaving behind a leering corpse, as beautiful, perfect and phony as the Main Street at Disneyland. And - wonders of wonders - the Trib actually includes a web gallery of 14 photos, with several comparing the dead and empty avenue that Maxwell Street has become with the anarchic, explosively alive market that it ostensibly commemorates. Kamin also talks about a case of preservation done right, in Burnham, Root and Atwood's 1890's iconic Reliance Building. Read all about it and see the pictures here.

Instant Urbanism - San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King offers up a sterling report on the rise of new suburbs that are less about sprawl and more about emulating traditional center city neighborhoods. "What's emerging," says King, "is a new form of the American Dream -- a new type of landscape where the lines between city and suburb blur in ever more complex ways." He looks at new suburban developments in Denver such as Belmar and Stapleton, the latter built on the site on what was formerly the city's major airport. Alleys replace driveways. Buildings hug the sidewalk. Towers rise. Instant town centers - beautiful downtown Belmar - pop up as if they were pulled out of a box of cracker jack box. Is it a sideshow or the future? Read all about it, hear King talk and see the pictures.

"Stunning" Burnham and Root San Francisco Chronicle Building restoration unveiled

"Stunning"is how San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King describes the restoration of the building Burnham and Root designed for that newspaper in 1890. This is what it originally looked like, in a historic postcard that appears on the Curbed SF website.

According to King, the four-story clock story, ballyhooed by the paper as "the only bronze one in the United States", lasted only to 1905, when it was set ablaze by skyrockets set off by supporters celebrating the re-election of Mayor Eugene Schmitz, who the Chronicle had opposed, as they paraded past its offices. The next year was even worse. The building survived the Great San Francisco earthquake, but a fire broke out in the top floor, sending the heavy typesetting equipment plunging all the way through to the basement.

In the 1960's, long after the Chronicle moved to a new location in 1924, the old building underwent a disfiguring "modernization" that saw Root's original facades covered over in aluminum and glass. Although I made a point of often visiting Burnham and Root's other San Francisco commission, the 1892 Mills Building, when I lived in the city for a few months in 1982, I can't recall ever even noticing their other treasure, buried beneath all that metal. You can see what that atrocity looked like, and the re-unveiling of Root's original Richardsonian entrance arch, in Curbed/SF's sequence of photos.

Ironically enough, the building is now the Ritz Carlton Club and Residences, fronting for a tower King calls "so uninspired it almost undoes the good work below." Sound familiar? It should, because another Ritz-Carlton Residences is pulling the same trick on Chicago's North Michigan Avenue, where the landmark 1920's Farwell Building is being demolished to provide a staging site for the construction of a new skyscraper for the Ritz-Carlton Residences, after which the flayed skin of the Farwell will be slapped onto a completely new building.

Let's Kill it Twice! Chicago Landmarks Commission Set to Vote (Again) to demolish Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital

click images for larger view

[Update: Monday, January 28, 10:20 a.m.] Read the Save Prentice Coalition's response to the DHED report seeking the demolition of Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital, at the end of this post.

As I've written before, most people think that the job of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks is to safeguard Chicago's precious architectural legacy, and if you look at its long history and list of protected landmarks, as well as the outstanding work done, day in and day out, by the Commission's superb staff, you could be forgiven that conclusion.

In actually, however, the most fundamental role of the Commission is to make sure landmarking never gets in the way of connected developers.  Once upon a time, the Commission fought a long and ugly battle with developer John Buck over the destruction of Mies van der Rohe's Arts Club building for the marzipan nightmare that is 600 North Michigan.  The Commission lost. And it learned its lesson.

Farwell Building

Ever since, whenever there's a true battle for preservation, the odds are the Commission will find some way to be MIA, whether it be the case of the landmark Farwell Building, where the Commission just kept taking votes until it finally did the Daley administration's bidding of allowing the structure to be razed . . .

. . . or the Walter Gropius, Bauhaus inspired buildings of the Michael Reese Hospital campus, which the Commission willfully refused to even consider as Richard J. Daley executed a desperate scorched-earth demolition for a Chicago Olympics that would never be.

Kaplan Pavilion, Michael Reese Hospital

As the battle to save Bertrand Goldberg's landmark Prentice Hospital raged, the Commission did the bidding of new mayor Rahm Emanuel and yanked the matter off of its agenda, and kept it off, for over a year.  During that time, Mayor Emanuel actually counseled uber-connected, ultra-powerful Northwestern University on how to best counter a pesky, increasingly effective grass-roots campaign to save Prentice, guiding them to a former Emanuel operative who launched an astroturf campaign on Northwestern's behalf.

Then, in an act of truly dazzling cynicism, the Commission suddenly scheduled Prentice on its December agenda and in a matter of minutes unanimously granted preliminary landmark designation to Goldberg's masterpiece, and then gave its blessing to the building being destroyed.

A current exhibition at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, Reconsidering an Icon: Creative Conversations about Prentice Women's Hospital, includes a large number of often incredibly detailed alternatives for re-using the hospital building and integrating it into the University's need for a new Research Lab, and architect Jeanne Gang came up with still another compelling proposal for re-use.

image courtesy Studio/Gang, Jay Hoffman

[Update: Monday, January 28, 10:20 a.m.] The Save Prentice Coalition this morning issued its response to the DHED report seeking demolition of Prentice Hospital.  Read it at the end of this post.

They clearly give the lie to the claim that Prentice and future needs can't co-exist in a mutually beneficial way, but Northwestern can't be bothered.  Why should they, when they have the Mayor of Chicago firmly in their back pocket, cheerleading their fervent but ultimately specious mantra, “Goldberg must be destroyed!”

Court challenges have resulted in a stay in demolition, with preservationists having to refile their lawsuit - and have it accepted by Circuit Court Judge Neil Cohen - by a date in early in February to keep the bulldozers at bay.  

In preparation for that event, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks is set to again vote for Prentice's demolition at their next regular monthly meeting February 7th.  “God is in the details”, someone once said, probably while puffing on a good cigar, and it's telling that while the Commission's agendas have always been signed by secretary and long-time commissioner John Baird, February's Prentice-killing agenda is signed by a new secretary, Ex-Officio member and Housing and Economic Development head Andrew Mooney, lest anyone be the least bit confused as to who's really running things over there.

The court has intimated that the Commission voting for landmark designation and then voting against landmark designation in immediate succession just might be a violation of what the landmarks ordinance intended when it talked about open public process, so now we have this new charade in which the Commission will vote to rescind designation again, this coming February 7th.  Zero public hearings have been held, but now there's an entire month between the vote to designate and a vote to revoke designation, so we've made it all look legit, right Judge Cohen?

As usual, the draft resolution re-condemning Prentice to the dust reads as it were written by Northwestern itself.  You can check it all out for yourself here.

The Save Prentice coalition's response, after the break . . .

Natural Order Restored - The Farwell is Toast

In a a dazzling display of raw political power and overwhelming self-deception, The Society for the Protection of Wealthy Developers, formerly known as the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, voted this morning to demolish the landmark Farwell Building on North Michigan and remount the surviving elements of its facade on a new structure.
Voting in favor the motion were Chairman David Mosena, John Baird, Lori Healey, Lisa Willis, Ernest C. Wong, Phyllis Ellin, Christopher R. Reed and Ben Weese. The sole commissioner not to drink the Kool-Aid and voting no was Edward I. Torrez. The other commissioners kept repeating the mantra of "This is not a precedent. This is not a precedent" as if trying to convince themselves that it could actually be true.

More to come

One More Farwell Update

For the moment, at least, it's official. The proposal to demolish the landmark Farwell Building was defeated at a Commission on Chicago Landmarks meeting today. The votes of the individual commissionser were as follow:

Yes - David Mosena (Chairman)
Yes - Lori T Healy (Chicago Commissioner of Planning and Development)
Yes - Ben Weese
Yes - Christopher R. Reed
No - Phyllis Ellin
No - Edward I Torrez
No - Lisa Willis
Abstain - Ernest C. Wong
The ninth member of the Commission, real estate legend John Baird, did not attend today's session.

We'll publish more details of the meeting, including the comments of individual commissioners explaining the reasons for their votes, and some suggestions as to where to go from here, sometime over the next week.

For now, here's link to the Chicago Tribune, which was quick to post the news of the vote on its website (including - it's a miracle! - an actual rendering of the proposed project), both a straight report by Johnathon E. Briggs, and an analysis by Trib architecture critic Blair Kamin, who captured the surprise and shock that accompanied the vote in his lead:

Pigs flew. When Chicago's landmarks commission stiffened its spine Thursday and throttled a plan for a spectacularly ill-conceived act of architectural taxidermy, the vote was a stunner.

Proposal to Demolish Farwell Fails

In a major upset, at this afternoon's session of the Chicago Landmarks Commission, a proposal to strip the landmark Farwell building of its facade, demolish the building, and reinstall the facade on another structure appears to have failed. Chairman David Mosena announced the final vote as 4 in favor of the proposal, 3 against, and 1 abstention. He announced that the motion failed, and called on a representative from the city's Corporate Counsel office, who reaffirmed that the majority of all commissioners was required. Including the abstaining commissioner, eight were present. There was no majority, and so the motion failed. We will keep you on top of how this plays out.

Junkspace Museum on Mag Mile: Victory Monument for The Architecture of the Age of the Supply Chain

And you thought the Verizon store was bad?

This is the rendering accompanying a Saturday report by the Trib's Gregory Karp on the 60,000 square-foot Chicago flagship store for Japanese retailer Uniqlo. This is the latest addition to 830 North Michigan, just north of the Water Tower.  And this, again courtesy of the Trib, is where we started, back in 1949.

Believe it or not, this is the same building as in the rendering.  It's been a long trip.

Mies van der Rohe saw his architecture as the expression of the industrial epoch of his time.  As Miesian minimalism evolved, however, the great tsunami of construction bearing his influence, if not his approval ("What went wrong?" he asked near the end.  "We showed them how to do it.") became an expression of a much larger movement, the Age of the Supply Chain, which stretches all the way back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  Its core values are the creation of wealth through the mass manufacture and distribution of cheap goods through consolidation, standardization and the minimizing of human labor.

And so Mies's elegant towers grew into glass box office warehouses, huge floor plates, hermetically sealed, going from offices, to cubicles to extruded benches to cram the largest numbers of workers into the least volume of space.  The elegant department stores that let consumers feel they were part of the elevated classes were killed off by big-box retailers, massive warehouses with bare metal shelving and product stacked on pallets.  Local stores that were pillars of the community are replaced by standardized, numbered outlets of huge national chains. Bricks-and-mortar retailers across entire categories - books, records, video rentals and the like - were all but wiped out by on-line behemoths, Amazon above all, as the physical product is replaced by streaming digital files.  To paraphrase Keynes, "We are all warehouses now."

click images for larger view

There are exceptions - Target's rescue of Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott store is a prime example - but they are exceptions, a boutique cream-off-the-top to the larger world of supply-chain consumption.  The evolution of North Michigan Avenue is a prime example.

After the opening of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, the former Pine Street became the city's premiere upscale shopping street, with retailers flocking to the lower floors of a succession of 1920's classically-styled Art Deco buildings, personified by architect Philip Maher's 1928 Chicago's Woman's Athletic Club.

 That wasn't enough, however, for real estate developer Arthur Rubloff, who was determined to take it to the next level, turning Michigan Avenue into the "Mag Mile".

As described in a 1947 Chicago Tribune report . . . 

The over-all architectural plan for the "mile" proposes medium-height buildings on Michigan Avenue for shops and stores and taller structures at the rear for office buildings, hotels and apartment buildings.  Landscaped promenades would run between the avenue buildings and the taller structures, enhancing the "openness" of the development and avoiding the "canyons" of the closely built downtown section.

 Rubloff said more than $25,000,000 in private capital has been earmarked so far for the various projects.

The Great Fire-surviving Chicago Water Tower would get to stay, within what would be the Mag Mile's only real public square, but . . . 

The city's pumping station on the east side of the avenue would be replaced by a civic hall of music, a landscaped outdoor swimming pool-skating rink, and a subterrean parking garage for 1,500 cars. Another underground parking area for 3,000 cars is suggested for construction under the lake shore playground, extending eastward from the armory [current site of the Museum of Contemporary Art] on Chicago Avenue to Lake Shore Drive.

"All plans for development of the area," Rubloff says, "hinge upon provision of adequate parking space."

And the building that is to be Uniqlo's new Chicago flagship was where Rubloff's first began to become reality.  On January 5th of 1947, the Tribune reported . . .

Alfred Shaw, of Shaw, Naess and Murphy, Chicago architects and engineers, has been comissioned by Bonwit-Teller, Inc. of New York City, to design the new store of that organization to be built at the northwest corner of N. Michigan av. and E. Pearson st.

The 45,000 foot site, purchased for $575,000, included the old Senator Charles Farwell home and stables, which evolved into apartments in which a young Bertrand Goldberg made his home in what the architect described as commune-like conditions.

John and Charles Farwell mansions, behind Water Tower, along Pearson;
image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

Shaw said Walter Hoving, whose corporation owned Bonwit-Teller, Inc., told him he wanted the new store building to be the finest of its kind in the country . . ."It will be six stories and probably will cost about 2 million dollars", Shaw said.  "Completely air conditioned, lighted by the newest methods, and equipped with the latest in modern merchandising, it will be an outstanding addition to the city's retail store facilities"  The exterior probably will be of Indiana limestone to harmonize with buildings to the north and west.

When excavation began the previous December, the AP reported that . . .

Instead of the usual show windows, frontage on both streets will be covered with plate glass, enabling passersby to look directly into the main floor.  There will be no street displays of merchandise.

The actual building, as shown in a Chicago Tribune illustration shown near the top of this post, seemed to have dropped the continuous plate glass, but was still the epitome of restrained elegance when it opened on August 24, 1949.   An extensive history on the indispensable website Forgotten Chicago says the windows had white marble surrounds.  The selling areas were more like salons, with merchandise displayed sparingly, as if it consisted of museum pieces.  All but four of the fitting rooms that lined the perimeter of the second floor had windows overlooking Michigan Avenue or the Water Tower.

When the John Hancock Center was completed just up the street, Bonwits moved to a new flagship there in 1969.  It's been pretty much downhill for its former store ever since.  An additional floor was added, and the building reconfigured by Solomon Cordwell Buenz into a fairly brutal concrete box, with a continuous skylight and a sequence of squared buttresses at the top.  West coast high-fashion retailer I. Magnin became the new anchor tenant in 1971.  I Magnin was purchased and run into the ground by Macy's, which closed the store in 1992.  Bonwit Teller was sold for $100 million to an Australian corporation in 1987, which quickly ran it into the ground with a misguided expansion effort that resulted in liquidation of the chain and closing of the John Hancock store in 1990.

Michigan Avenue retailers fought the coming of discounter Filene's Basement to the upper floors of 830 North Michigan, fearing its impact on the street.  They lost. In addition to Filene's, a Borders book superstore took over the lower floors.  On the lowest two floors, Shaw's original facade with its large central window on Pearson was replaced with a continuous curtain wall putting the Borders interior on full public display.  It wasn't long before all the other area bookstores - Kroch and Brentano's, Waterstones, Rizzoli - were out of business.  Borders, itself, proved less the wave of the future than a big-bang blowout death of the bookstore.  The chain was eventually liquidated and closed its Michigan Avenue store early in 2011.  Filene's was eventually liquidated and closed up shop early in 2012.  All that liquidation - it sounds a bit like a series of Stalinist purges.

The fears of those traditional Michigan Avenue retailers were fully justified.  The death of Borders and Filenes haven't stopped fast fashion discounters from taking over the Mag Mile.  A Zara flagship had already opened on Michigan a few blocks down in 2009.  The Borders space was taken over the Topshop in 2011.  An H&M outlet opened just a few doors north in a space originally occupied by FAO Schwarz.  And now there's Uniqlo. 

Nabbing Uniqlo for its upper-floor space represents a major coup for General Growth Properties, which in 2013 purchased the entire building, which also houses Columbia Sportswear and a Ghiradelli Chocolate shop, for $166 million, when nearly half of its 126,000 square feet of space was empty.  The General Growth folk must have treated themselves to a really expensive lunch the day they unloaded that second-class space to Uniqlo.

Uniqlo, of course, is determined to make it first class space.  USA CEO Larry Meyer is quoted as saying "We're spending a fortune" to get it all ready for the October 23rd opening deadline. The company is a leader in what is called fast fashion retailing, getting designs to market quickly, using the most innovative supply chain techniques.  The company also talks of reconceptualizing interactive purchasing in a way that revives bricks-and-mortar retailing.  Shoppers will be encouraged to use the Uniqlo smartphone app while shopping in the store.

Founder Tadashi Yanai built the Uniqlo chain - and a $24 billion fortune that's made him the richest man in Japan - out of his father's suit business, opened in 1949 in Yamaguchi.  The first Uniqlo store opened in Hiroshima in 1984.  In Japan, the chain became known more for cheap prices than quality or fashion.   For its global expansion, Uniqlo is working to make itself not just cheap, but cool.

In a Wall Street Journal interview, Uniqlo U.K. CEO Takao Kuwahara commented "Our competitor is Apple.  At Apple, as at Uniqlo, the customer service and the customer experience is all important. "

For its design director, Uniqlo brought in Naoki Takizawa, former head designer at Issye Miyake.  In an interview for a 2012 Fast Company profile of Uniqlo, his vision seems Miesian-minimalist.  "The only things that stay are the things you need: it has to protect you from the rain, and the heat has to escape"

According to a Huffington Post report, Uniqlo's emphasis on standardization is relentless.  Employees must dress entirely in black, pass a garment folding test, memorize "Six Standard Phrases" and hand back credit backs with both hands.  Each store should look the same.  All displays must run from light to dark.

The number of styles is minimized - fabric over fashion - creating the kind of huge orders that give Uniqlo added leverage when negotiating with suppliers.  No seasonal fashion themes, increasing product shelf life.  Instead, color choices are maximized - 50 colors of men's socks.

We've yet to set the interior of Uniqlo's Chicago flagship, but it won't be hard for it be an improvement.  The Tribune report describes the multi-story escalator whisking shoppers to their store  in just 85 seconds as "a signature element of Uniqlo stores", but in reality it's an ongoing necessity.  For previous tenant Filene's, 830 North Michigan was their "Basement" in the sky, hard-to-rent upper floor space connected to Michigan Avenue via a sliver of a ground floor entrance, just wide enough to accommodate escalators and elevator.

Uniqlo's most visible contribution to the Chicago architecture is glazing over the upper floors of 830 North Michigan, giving the store maximum presence in the view down the Mag Mile past the Water Tower.  If the actual facade is anything like the rendering, the design doesn't seem to have a brain in its head, other than a few massively overdeveloped cells devoted to Sellah, Sellah, Sellah.  What was once one of the most elegant buildings on the Mag Mile has devolved into a chaotic series of stackables, each going their own way: the dark facades of Topshop, the hyperactive glazed cells of Uniqlo, and the lingering remnants of SCB's buttresses.

Every last inch of Shaw's original design has been destroyed.  In place of a graceful expression of upper-crust elegance, we have a Screaming Mimi pastiche.  Uniqlo built its huge Tokyo flagship in the dense Ginza district, with its blazing Times Square signage, and it's bringing the same kind of energy to the Michigan Avenue.

Things change.  Although exuberance isn't really a substitute for quality, these are the choices we made, and here are the results. They have their own attraction. Few will remember, much less miss, what was lost.  Welcome to the new Fab Mile, at the junction of Times Square and Blade Runner.

Read More:

Lump of Coal in Chicago Architecture's Holiday Stocking: Verizon lands with a Thud on the Mag Mile

Addendum:  Uniqlo and supply chain labor

One thing we haven't discussed is the role of supply chain process design in growing a company like Uniqlo.  To keep costs low, manufacturers roam from country to country in search of the cheapest labor.  Bad things often happen.

When it comes to issues of social responsibility, Uniqlo has often chosen to go its own way.  It initially declined to sign the Bangladesh Safety Accord, committing 80 major manufacturers to standards of safety and fairness after a 2012 garment factory fire in Dhaka killed over 100 workers, with another 1,000+ perishing in a Dhaka factory building collapse the next year.  (Fast Retailing is now listed among the companies on the Accord's signatories page.)

Uniqlo CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) has its own extensive website, with increasingly lengthy and detailed annual reports. In search of lower labor costs, the company's manufacturing has spread from China to lower-wage states such as Vietnam (52 cents an hour wages in the city, 36 cents rural), and to Bangladesh (21 cents an hour).

from Uniqlo CSR report

For fiscal 2011, Uniqlo inspections found major to severe labor violations in 82 of the 188 factories monitored, with a goal of 100% compliance by 2015.  In 2012, when 229 factories were audited, 83 major to severe violations were found.  By 2014, the company was reporting the monitoring of 332 factories, with a total 149 major or serious violations.  Only 7 instances of violations were severe enough for a contract with an individual manufacturer to come under immediate review, and while the report states "Contracts were terminated with factories that showed no improvement", I could find no figure for the number of contracts actually involved.

Uniqlo's manufacturing expanded to Cambodia, In April of this year, the group Human Rights Now reported substandard working conditions there as well.   CSR responded with promises of enhanced workplace monitoring.  It also pledged to improve conditions at its own plants in China, where another NGO, Hong-Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Misbehaviour, documented major workplace violations in a report issued this past January.  Even with all this, third-world manufacturing remains a world where even the definitions of reform seem to infer abuse. Uniqlo's own Cambodia inspection report defines "evidence of long working hours" as "24 consecutive hours of work."

To be sure, these are conditions that are pandemic throughout the entire global garment industry. Especially in the U.S., prosperity is based on exploiting our seemingly insatiable appetite for ever-cheaper goods.  As consumers, we trade free access to low prices for a a committed incuriousity about how the sausage is actually made.

Shocking! Landmark Commission shows some initiative

Although the smart money was that the wheels had been greased for denying landmark protection to the house the legendary preservation activist Richard Nickel made his home for the last three years of his life, before his 1972 death in the demolition rubble of Louis Sullivan's Stock Exchange Building, the Tribune's Blair Kamin reports that the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, by a vote of 7 to 3, yesterday actually overruled staff recommendations not, as usual, to water them down, but to landmark the Nickel House. However, as we learned from the case of the Farwell Building, there's nothing that can't be reversed when the right people tighten the screws, and the landmark designation won't become final until the City Council approves it. But with all the depressing news coming out of Michael Reese Hospital, where the city is frothing at the mouth to wipe out Walter Gropius's architectural legacy in Chicago, the pleasures, however transitory, of a small victory like Thursday's vote are too tempting not to savor. Just don't inhale.

(photograph by Karin Langer courtesy of Preservation Chicago.)
(did I mention we're in the home stretch on the October calendar?)

Onions Awarded, Ammonia Protested, Public Art Celebrated, Reader Sold - A Wednesday Miscellany

DuPage Theater demolition bottoms out Preservation Onions - Enough about recognizing preservation excellence - what about honoring the stinkers? That was the premise behind a recent Landmarks Illinois program where the 100 people in attendance were asked to choose "the stinkiest onion of the bunch", the lowest point in architectural preservation this past year. They picked the March approval for bulldozing the DuPage, one of only two structures in the suburb listed on the National Register. My own choice wasn't even on the list of the nominees: the Commission on Chicago Landmarks vote to demolish an official landmark, the Farwell Building and paste its facades on a completely new building, a precedent that threatens to turn much of Chicago's architectural heritage into a cross between Disneyland and a Potemkin village.

The Save Our Lake Initiative is a petition drive to stop British Petroleum from upping the volume of pollutants it dumps into Lake Michigan from its Whiting, Indiana refinery. The Grant Park Conservancy is pitching in by offering a copy of the petition on its website, in Adobe Acrobat format. The signatures are due by this Friday, at 3 P.M., to be turned in at the Daley Bicentennial Fieldhouse, 337 East Randolph.

Goodbye Roosevelt Collection, Hello, Public Art - Friends of Downtown has changed its July program, to be offered this Thursday at 12:15 in the Millennium Room of the Chicago Cultural Center. Nathan Mason, curator of special projects for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, will lecture on the wealth of public art in downtown Chicago.

Chicago Reader Sold - word came this afternoon that the Chicago Reader, which carries the blame for making my career writing on architecture possible, has been sold to Creative Loafing, Inc., which publishes alternative weeklies under that name in Atlanta, Charlotte, Tampa Bay and Sarasota. The Tampa-based company made Richard Roth, who founded the Reader in 1971, an offer too lucrative to refuse, and while no one can blame Roth for deciding, after 36 years, that it was a good time to move on - in today's web-based world, it's not going to get any easier - it's still a very sad day for Chicago. Staffers (I'm only a grateful occasional freelancer) will get more information about the paper's future direction tomorrow, but a certain amount of economies engineered through national consolidation would appear to be inevitable.

On a parallel note, even as the food court in its former Marshall Fields flagship on State Street was shut down for health code violations, Macy's announced it's closing its Lake Forest store in the Howard Van Doren Shaw designed Market Square.

Prentice on Landmarks Agenda "sometime". So why am I depressed?

Both Deanna Issacs of the Chicago Reader and Ron Grossman of the Chicago Tribune report that at Thursday's meeting of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, chairman Rafel Leon said Prentice will be on their agenda by the end of the year. 

This should be a major victory.  Why does it smell to me like a death knell?

Consider:
1.  Issacs uses the phrase, "will be on the commission's agenda"; Grossman "will address the issue". If "address the issue" is what Leon actually said, it leaves open the possibility of something short of normal consideration.
2. Leon's statement was a stratagem to preface his announcement that he would again forbid any discussion of Prentice at Thursday's meeting.
3. No date for discussion has been announced.  Why?  If you're going to do it, why play games about when?
4. Explaining why Prentice was yanked off the agenda in June of 2011, Leon said, according to Grossman, "Mayor (Rahm) Emanuel was in office less than two weeks"  This is contradicted by a June 2, 2011 report where the Trib's Blaim Kamin wrote  . . .

Jonathan Fine, executive director of Preservation Chicago, said he got a call from Chicago's landmarks chief, Brian Goeken, at 10 a.m. informing him of the news. Fine said Goeken told him that Northwestern University requested that old Prentice be taken off the agenda.

5.  Grossman quotes Leon again claiming that the Commission, Northwestern and preservationists have been working behind the scenes, but a Tuesday report by Grossman quoted Landmarks Illinois President Bonnie McDonald that there was only one such meeting, over a year ago, and that Northwestern continues to refuse to consider alternatives to demolition.
6.  Grossman also reports that the manager of Purple Strategies Chicago office, Chris Mather, is a former Rahm Emanuel press spokesperson.
7.  42nd Ward alderman Brendan Reilly again on Thursday declined to take a stand on Prentice.

Brendan Reilly has surprised me before, when in 2008 he announced a deal that sidetracked Northwestern University from its stated intention of demolishing Jarvis Hunt's Lake Shore Athletic Club for a Lucien Lagrange highrise.

I'd like to be surprised again, but what I'm seeing in all the points above is that the fix is in.  All those "behind the scenes" meetings which McDonald denies really took place probably did take place.  Preservationists were not invited, and the agenda was not how to save Prentice, but to how best spin its destruction.

When Rahm Emanuel rebuilt the Landmarks Commission with his own six appointees, none were architects.  The closest he got was the re-appointment of the extraordinarily talented landscape architect Ernest Wong. who, the last time the Commission was faced with a contentious issue - all the way back in 2008 - abstained from the vote that defeated a proposal to demolish the landmark Farwell Building, and then when the matter was brought up again two months later, was one of three commissioners to change their vote to "Yes" to sanction demolition.

Emanuel's other appointments were a former alderman, a former assessor, a professor of obstetrics and a restaurateur.

Right now, here's what I'm thinking.  The reason that Prentice has been kept off the Landmarks Commission agenda is because Emanuel didn't have the votes.  Using the Landmark's ordinance criteria for qualifying for landmark designation, Prentice is close to a slam dunk, and with the grassroots effort to save Prentice in full flower, commissioners would have a hard time to vote, in good conscience, against preserving it.

I'm thinking that in those fifteen months of delay, the city has been working with Northwestern to provide cover for Prentice's destruction. 

I would not like to be a member of the landmarks commission right now.  My bet is that the screws are being put to those people big time.  The massive PR campaign being mounted by Northwestern (in Grossman's report, a "city hall source" makes a point of declaring they've gotten 1,200 emails and letters from that campaign) is diverting attention from what should be the legal focus (does or does not Prentice Hospital qualify for landmark protection) to absurd but time-tested apple-pie contentions that if Prentice isn't destroyed, jobs will vanish, Northwestern's new research center will evaporate, and thousands will die from cures never found.

And when - and only when - they know they have enough commissioners in their pocket, the city will put Prentice on the Landmarks agenda, and Leon will preside over a meeting in which landmark designation is defeated.  The Commission on Chicago Landmarks will again prove itself an empty shell, and reveal that it's purpose is not to save landmarks, but to provide cover for their destruction.

I want badly to be proven wrong. 

A Modest Proposal: Abolish the Commission on Chicago Landmarks

Hear me out.

In November, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks was presented with a report calling on them to rescind the preliminary landmark designation they had given

Christopher Reed

Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Hospital earlier in the same meeting.  Then, the Commission had voted unanimously to designate Prentice.  Only minutes later, all of those same commissioners completely reversed course and voted to de-designate.  All but one, Commissioner Christopher Reed.

Well, we can't have that, can we? Reed is now gone.  At the beginning of yesterday's monthly meeting, Chairman Rafael Leon announced that Reed had resigned, along with long-time Commission member and Chicago real estate legend John Baird.  Baird was also the Commission's Secretary, and it was announced, in a rare display of honesty, that the new Secretary will be Andrew Mooney, an ex officio Commission member who, as Commissioner of Housing and Economic Development, is actually the person calling the shots.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel thinks so little of the Commission's importance that he could only be

bothered to fill one of the two vacancies.  The sole new Commissioner is Victor Ignacio Dziekiewicz, whose name is misspelled “Dzlekiewicz” on the Commission's own website. If you were a cynic, you might be tempted to suspect that the primary attraction of the appointee was a name that placates two of the city's key ethnic constituencies - Hispanics and Poles - in a single person.  (Actually, Dziekiewicz was born in Argentina.)  To Emanuel's credit, Dziekiewicz is an architect, which makes him a lonely exception among the mayor's appointments to a Commission whose mission is all about architecture.  Dziekiewicz's firm DesignBridge, has done work on four schools for UNO, the politically connected - and increasingly controversial - operator of Chicago charter schools.  (Six degrees of Juan Rangel?)

continue reading A Modest Proposal . . . 

A final roll of Kodachrome captures a lost Chicago landmark

click images for larger view (strongly recommended)

On December 30th, Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, processed its final roll of Kodachrome film.  It was the last lab in the world to process the distinctive film stock whose vivid colors defined, for most of its 75 year life, the look of America's captured family memories.

About two weeks later, our correspondent Andy Pierce received his own package from Dwyane's - the prints of his last roll of undeveloped Kodachrome film.  Andy had actually forgotten what was on it, and so he was pleasantly surprised to find out they were of the now lost Hotel LaSalle Garage, now the site of the distinctively-trussed residential tower whose name takes the address of the garage: 215 West Washington.  Andy has graciously given us permission to share some of his striking, evocative photos of this distinctive work of Chicago architecture.

In the summer of 1918, the editor of the trade journal Hotel Monthly found himself "driven up what had every appearance of a mountain road, which rose in a spiral to the top of a five-story building."

The road is cement paved, ten feet wide, the spiral about 70 feet in diameter, and rising twelve feet to the floor; the grade one in twenty, or five per cent.  About every 200 feet the road emerges onto the garage floor, where it is widened and level for the space between entrance and exit to the enclosed spiral.  The driver tooted his horn to signal before entering or leaving each floor, the same as he would if turning a sharp corner on a mountain road.  It took only about a minute to negotiate the hill between the ground and the fifth floor.  An elevator large enough to take the biggest touring car is available for bringing the cars down.  This elevator shaft rises inside the spiral roadway.

The detail of the above description is almost comic.  Hadn't this guy ever seen

a parking garage before?

The answer, of course, is no, probably not.  This was the dawn of the automobile age, which more than any other factor, utterly transformed the American landscape and the urban experience.  The spiral he saw was probably the first of its kind.

When the LaSalle Hotel, designed by Holabird and Roche, opened in 1909, horses and stables still held their own in the streets of the city.  The 22-story-high, 1,000 room hotel was a true steel-framed skyscraper, but the Beaux Arts influence of the 1893 World's Fair still held sway.  The swank LaSalle was built to host presidents - both Taft Coolidge stayed here - and above and below 11 floors of Chicago School-like brick curtain wall enclosing the tight honeycomb of guest rooms, French Second Empire was chosen as the most appropriate design mode.  A massive Mansard roof capped the building's crown.

When, less than a decade later, it came time to accommodate not only guests but their automobiles as well, Holabird and Roche were called upon again, this time to design a parking garage about a block and a half from the hotel.  The garage tracked its guest the same way as the hotel, using the recently developed "room rack" system of ledger cards, one for each compartment, but since the inhabitants of the garage were not people but their machines, the facades of the garage echoed, not the hotel's overstuffed ostentation, but the clean lines of a classic Loop office building..  As described by the AIA Guide to Chicago:

 . .  . there is  nothing conventional  about the way the fifteen narrow bays  with their sash windows alternate with  the vigorous uninterrupted piers.    The wonderful rhythm is enhanced by the use of black Roman bricks as striping in the red facade and by crisply detailed spandrel panels.  A stringcourse above the shops and a well-proportioned cornice contain the design.

The AIA called it an "uncelebrated gem."  The city called it road kill.  Preservationists lobbied energetically to save it.  The staff of the Landmarks Commission prepared a report documenting its value.  Then the usual developers dance began.  Delay followed delay, as the owner resisted and allowed the building to continue to rot, so by the time the Planning Department brought down its heavy hand in November of 2004 to smash the Commission's efforts, all the parties that had actively abetted the garage's deterioration could shed crocodile tears, "Boo hoo, boo hoo.  Maybe it was worth saving, but golly gee, it's falling apart and now we have no choice but to gird our loins and let it die."  Rinse and repeat. (See: the Farwell Building and Van Osdel's 1894 YMCA Hotel.)

When Andy Pierce took the Kodachrome shots you see here, the building was already something of a spectre.  Somehow I doubt "1950's rec room" was the original style.

. . . although the locksmith's shack with the "Wanted" posters was actually a rather charming addition.

You could see that the place was already living on borrowed time.

 

. . . which became even more clear after it had been emptied out just before demolition.

 

 

With their faded Kodachrome palette, Andy's shots seem to capture the aura of the 21 grams - the supposed  weight of the soul - lingering in the air, invisible but insistent, for those last few heartbeats before the thing dissolves before your eyes and vanishes forever.