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A great city scales. While it makes its mark most often at the mega end of the scale - Willis Tower, O'Hare, Millennium Park - it doesn't really work unless it bores down to the small detail of a single block.
click images for larger view
An example of which can be seen in the photo above, taken in 2007, of Chicago's last complete wood block alley, located between State and Astor, just south of the Cardinal's mansion and coach house on North Avenue. It was built between October 29 and November 23rd of 1909, when wood paving was still an option for city streets and alleys, including in the Loop. Wood blocks treated with creosote, a coal-tar derivative that kept out moisture, were created in batches of up to 30,000, and could be had for $4.74 per square yard. In the city of London in only one year, just one company laid down 370,000 square yards of wood paving, including in such major locations as Leicester Square.
All of Chicago's wood-paved streets are long gone. The alley off of Astor was placed on the National Register in 2002. The registration form contains an exhaustive history of both the alley and of the rise and fall of wood pavers.
At the time of the 1871 Chicago Fire, 37 of the city's 61 miles of improved streets were paved with wood. Although the paving was said to have fueled the fire, an 1872 report concluded, "The wooden block pavement, although considerably damaged on all the streets where it was laid, withstood the fire much better than was expected." By 1891, 62% of Chicago's 774 miles of improved streets were paved with wood. Although the use of stone for paving was judged superior and longer-lasting, wood endured because it was a plentiful and it was cheap - it could be had at about 1/3 of the cost of stone. Over time, however, as Chicago exhausted the forests of the Midwest, the price of lumber increased, and by the time the Astor alley was created, the use of wood for paving was already in steep decline. By 1934, the cost of a wood paved street was actually higher than than of asphalt, and only 400 yards of creosote pavers were deployed that year. To put that in current perspective, Chicago currently has 1,900 miles of public alleys, with 3,500 acres of surfacing.
Restoring the alley off Astor became a long-term project, championed by former 43rd ward alderman Vi Daley, and Maureen O'Brien and the Gold Coast Neighbors of Chicago. Their cause was taken up Chicago Department of Transportation Project Director of Streetscape and Sustainable Design Janet Attarian, who with co-workers and compatriots formed the band of "Blockheads" who taught themselves everything there was to know of the snares and challenges of wood paving in the 21st century.
At this Saturday's ribbon-cutting ceremony, Attarian gave a fascinating account of the long, laborious process of figuring out how to restore a wood paved alley, which you can see in the video below, starting at about 1:50 in. "Where do I get wood blocks? Well, nobody's making wood blocks. No one's installing wood blocks."
The alley is 18 feet wide, and 919 square yards, with blocks that are four inches deep, by four inches wide and in sizes of 6, 8 and 10 inches in length. The original pavers were cedar blocks, treated with creosote, set in tar and gravel. To her surprise, Attarian found that the original base was of concrete, "not in that bad a shape concrete"
Attarian found only one company, Kaswell Flooring Systems in Massachusetts, still making the wooden blocks, but not for exterior use. (Check out their website for a wealth of great historical information on the use of wood paving.) Today, wood blocks are used as distinctive elements for interior design, and on factory floors, where they absorb grease. But when Attarian tested the blocks, they shrank and distorted within months. Making them usable by treating them with creosote was out. As a known carcinogen, it's now a banned substance. And the type of old-growth cedar used originally is no longer available.
After a long search - for a while the only alternative seemed to be a wood found in virgin rain forest - she found the ideal replacement wood: black locust, an "incredibly hard, incredibly stable wood that doesn't absorb moisture very well or very quickly . . . it turns out that it's sort of a scrap wood down in Pennsylvania - invasive weed trees." So the supplier of the black locust was put in touch with the manufacturer to create the new pavers.
The entrance section of the alley off of State Parkway is now the "piece of the historical alley that we salvaged and sort of concentrated . . . the wood is exceptionally beautiful."
The new alley of black locust pavers stretches to Astor. As opposed to the original tar and gravel, the new pavers are set in sand. Unlike the original alley, the restoration includes concrete bands to help keep the pavers in place. The pavers use the heart wood cores of the trees, making for striking patterns.
The original cost of the alley was $3,346.96 in 1909 dollars. According to the price list that the City of Chicago distributes to alderman, the cost of repaving a block of alley with concrete is $95,000. Non-concrete paving goes for $26,500 for the first block and $37,500 for each subsequent block. To repave to adhere to the city's Green Alley initiative, which replaces expensive storm sewer connections with a permeable paving that allows water to soak into the soil or infiltration basins, and uses a light, reflective surface to reflect solar heat, the cost per block is $125,000. According to an article in Skyline, the cost for restoring the Astor Street alley was $400,000, paid for out of an alderman's annual allotment of $1.35 million for ward projects they select.
Is it worth it? In these days of budget cuts and layoffs, with libraries cutting hours, and police and fire stations consolidating, it's tempting to say no, but down that sackcloth-and-ashes path lies a dull, dead city, where beauty becomes an extravagance, and living, a bargain-basement slog. If everyone did their job right, the beautiful wood alley off of Astor could last another 100 years, and $4,000 per annum seems a reasonable price to to secure this irreplaceable part of Chicago history.
At first glance, the stop architectural historian Sally Kalmbach was making on her tour of the mansions of Astor Street seemed a bit mundane - a slightly ramshackle cobblestone alley, just behind the Cardinal's Mansion on North Avenue. A closer look, however, revealed what Kalmbach described as one of the very last instances of a street or alley paved with cedar block. Over a century ago, cedar enjoyed a short-lived boom in improving urban thoroughfares. In 1871, it was the step up from dirt and gravel, Detroit resident Mark Flanigan patented a method for paving streets with cedar. At the time, wood was plentiful. In the 1880's, as the vast forests of Wisconsin and Michigan were being harvested to the point of decimation, over 2 billion board feet of lumber was making its way through Chicago every year. By 1900, 749 of Chicago's 2790 miles of streets had been paved with cedar blocks, accounting for over 60% of the city's improved streets.
Much of that wood, however, was old and rotting. Cedar block's dirty little secret was that, while inexpensive, it wasn't very durable, especially under the weight of the new steel-wheeled vehicles. As early as 1881, Mayor Carter H. Harrison was proclaiming:
"I believe the wooden period for street paving should pass away from Chicago. Our central and heavily trafficked streets need something more durable than sappy pine, or cedar blocks cut from burnt-over swamps. Granite and Medina sandstone can be had without stint."
Brick paving was introduced in the early 1890's, with asphalt gaining predominance in the 1920's, with the coming of the automobile.
So we are left with this physical footnote, good workingman's cedar finding its last refuge in an alley steps from the palaces of the wealthy. It probably won't endure much longer. Check it out while you can.
As reported in Preservation Chicago's latest newsletter, two Chicago buildings are coming down or experiencing massive alterations right now. Neither one is an officially designated landmark, but both contain huge chunks of Chicago history. And both were rooted in music.
Theodore Thomas House - image courtesy Preservation Chicago
I missed photographing the first, at 52 East Bellevue Place. To put a twist on Churchill's famous quote, it could said to be a demonstration of how, “We make our buildings. And then they unmake us.” It was the longtime home of Theodore Thomas, and it was here that he died. Beginning in 1855, Thomas had an astonishing career barnstorming the country conducting the Theodore Thomas Orchestra. “I would go to hell if they gave me a permanent orchestra,” he was famously to have said, and in 1891, Chicago obliged him, creating the Chicago orchestra under his leadership.
The Auditorium (click images for larger view)
Thomas conducted in the newly opened Auditorium Theater, designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, but it was not a happy domicile. First, although the acoustics of the theater were legendary, the lack of any kind of shell made them less favorable to symphonic music than for opera. And the thing was just too damn big - 4,000 seats! - leaving the developing ensemble to play concerts to demoralizing, half-full houses.
And if that weren't enough, the building assaulted him. In October of 1899, as Thomas was conducting a rehearsal, a heavy bolt fell from the rafters 75 feet down onto his head. The wound was just a graze, but then the bolt rebounded from the floor to make a deep cut over Thomas's left eye. He was picked up by his players and loaded into a carriage to recover at his Bellevue mansion. Thomas's tireless strength and good health - he could send an entire table shaking just by bringing his finder down hard on its surface - began a slow decline.
Early into the new century, the Orchestral association
commissioned architect Daniel Burnham to build the ensemble its own
home a couple blocks north on Michigan Avenue.
Orchestra Hall (now Symphony Hall)
In addition to his duties with the orchestra at the Auditorium, Thomas made time to monitor the progress at the new Orchestra Hall each day. The Tribune reported that after a private rehearsal on December 7th, 1904, Thomas told the directors, “The greatest possible success has been achieved in
Theodore Thomas
the construction of the hall from the point of acoustics. The quality of the tones is beyond all expectations.”
In actual fact, Orchestra Hall's acoustics would provide enduringly problematic, undergoing a series of largely unsuccessful architectural interventions down through the decades. But that's a story for another time. In what now could later be seen as a ominous foreshadowing, the story in the Trib just beneath the one on Thomas bore the headline, “Deride Pneumonia 'Gold Cure'.”
The hall's dedication on December 14th was a civic triumph. Thomas walked onto the stage to a great ovation, and then to still another after the speech making, which he avoided having to respond to only by tapping his baton and launching into the overture to Tannhäuser.
Despite the formal opening, the building was really not finished. It was drafty and dusty. For fourteen years, Thomas had never missed a concert or public rehearsal. On Christmas eve, he conducted what would be his last concert with the orchestra. On the morning of his next rehearsal, he found himself too weak to rise from the breakfast table.
It was originally diagnosed as a bad cold, but by New Year's, Thomas took a turn for the worse, to pneumonia, and then spinal meningitis. Strychnine and oxygen were administered, but in spite (or because?) of this, a newspaper headline reported “Thomas' Life in Balance” but that he was “still alive at 2:30 a.m.” At 5:30 a.m., on January 4th, he died in his house on Bellevue. He left behind a music collection valued at $300,000 - in 1905 dollars - and the institution that today endures as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
The Thomas House on Monday
I'm not quite sure what's going on at the house now. The permit reads . . .
Removal of plumbing fixtures, ductwork, and non load bearing partition walls to existing 3 story single family masonry building for exploratory purposes as per plans . . .
Is it being demolished or retrofitted? What's clear is that its graceful facade is being ripped off, the building gutted, the history erased. Thomas lives on in the Theodore Thomas Memorial, The Spirit of Music by Albin Polasek and Howard van Doren Shaw, in Grant Park at Michigan and Balbo.
The second lost building will be easier to miss. It sits in the 400 block of North Carpenter, the kind of exhausted-looking buildings we see all over, until one day we happen to notice they're gone. Even the tree in front of the house seems terminally distressed. Its West Town neighborhood is at once derelict and gentrifying. It's a trend that stands only to accelerate when thousands of Google employees move into the former Fulton Market Cold Storage Building, just a few blocks to the south, being reconstructed into a massive office complex.
Look closely at those ornamental brackets under the eaves, however, and you realize the abject frame building at 456 North Carpenter actually has a rather extraordinary history, and we're indebted to University of Pennsylvania graduate Matthew W. Wicklund for uncovering it, in a rather splendid history of the houses and its times, which you can read here.
Wicklund calls the building the Russell-Dyhrenfurth House It's a survivor of the Great Chicago Fire. When it was constructed in 1855 to a design by architect William Belden Olmstead it was at the edge of Chicago's original 1837 boundaries, in a largely unpopulated area. Only six other structures stood on the block, and only one on the block across the street.
rendering of original house, from the Wicklund report
The house is of balloon-frame construction, the skeletal structural system often credited as the precursor to Chicago's classic steel-framed skyscrapers. It was built, suitably enough, for John Russell, who had made his fortune milling lumber. A substantial addition was built at the back of house in the 1860's. Also in that decade, the push for less sickening sanitation resulted in a sewer line being constructed along Carpenter, raising the street grade by five feet and requiring an English basement to be constructed to elevate the house to the sidewalk's new level.
from the Wickland report
As the area became increasingly industrial, Russell and his family moved out in 1867, and in 1875 the house was acquired by Julius Dyhrenfurth, a Prussian immigrant, and a violinist who first came to
Julius Dyrenfurth
America in 1837 for an orchestral tour that was a critical, but not economic success.
When Dyhrenfurth moved his family to Chicago permanently in 1846, he took the lesson of that tour and got a job not as a musician but as a bank clerk, developing innovative accounting methods soon adopted by other Chicago banks. Still, music will out, and in 1850 Dyhrenfurth founded the Chicago Philharmonic Society, composed primarily of countrymen fleeing the 1848 German Revolution. For the second season, Dyhrenfurth began selling subscriptions to the Philharmonic's concerts, another innovation that was a way of securing a regular stream of revenue for performing arts organization often ruined by variations in single-ticket sales.
When he was wiped out in the '57 panic, however, Dyrenfurth learned his lesson for good, and switched from music to founding a series of very successful trade schools and business colleges.
The neighborhood around 456 North Carpenter continue to grow more industrial, with the Chicago and Northwestern railroad viaduct cutting through the community just south of Hubbard, much as, to a far larger scale of destruction, the Kennedy Expressway would cut through to the north in the 1950's.
After the Great Fire of 1871, wood construction was proscribed by law, and a pair of handsome brick townhomes were erected just to the south of 456, setting a new style and standard. When the Dyrenfurth family moved out in 1879, the house, like many others in the area, was subdivided into five rental apartments, serving tradesmen who were first Norwegian or Swedish, and then primarily Italian.
In 1926, alterations were made to the house, including the addition what is now a truly frightening garage at the rear of the property.
In the 1950's, the neighborhood became largely Puerto Rican. The Montes family bought the house, and three generations lived there, until they finally sold it in 2014. Although as you walk down Carpenter and nearby streets, you'll find any number of frame houses renovated to a modern luster, this is not to be 456's fate. It has been judged irremediable, and is about to be demolished, to be replaced by a four to five unit structure more attuned to the area's upscaling economics. A Tesla dealership is just across the alley.
If I told you that Amazon.com and Wal-Mart are mere retreads, you might be skeptical. Yet over a century ago, just one company perfected the underlying ideas that each of these corporations have leveraged to unprecedented power. That company was Sears, Roebuck. Looking at the hapless wreck that is today's Sears after having been “kidnapped by K-Mart” in a 2004 merger, it is easy to forget that, for the better part of the 20th century, it was among the world's most admired and emulated companies.
And if you're up to a little archeology, you can reconstruct for yourself the empire of Sears through the mortal remains of its architecture, in a collection of historic buildings in North Lawndale. The collective memory they contain underscores the fallacy of breaking of modern history into various ‘ages’ - the industrial age, the post industrial, the age of capital, the age of data, etc. In point of fact, stretching back to the moment when mechanical manufacturing first began to displace human labor, we remain within the epic sweep of a single continuous movement: the Age of the Supply Chain.
The Age of the Supply Chain has four basic pillars: automation, standardization, consolidation and, lastly, innovation, in support of the first three. The effects on human beings is variable - they can be liberating or enslaving, degrading or ennobling - but the underlying dynamic is indomitable: producing ever more goods and services with an ever decreasing component of human labor.
The massive complex Sears built around Homan and Arthington in the first decade of the 20th
Century was an explosive punctuation point in the timeline of the Age of the Supply Chain. Its sheer scale and volcanic energy was as destructive and transformative as a meteor reshaping a terrain as it slams into the earth. Today, that once decisive moment is long dispersed, implied by the void where the massive two-block long Merchandise Building once stood, its small, tall tower, still standing in surreal isolation, looking almost like a toy. Some surviving buildings have been repurposed. Others, abandoned and rotting, are like deposed monarchs who have lost their kingdom and now walk the streets seeking alms.
A Brief History of Sears
Railroads - and the way they could
condense time and distance - were the life force of the rise of the Era of the Supply Chain, and they ran deep in the DNA of Sears. Richard
Warren Sears was a stationmaster for the Minneapolis and St. Louis
Railroad. A commodities trader on the side, he came across a shipment
of watches that had been refused by the recipient. He bought the lot at
deep discount, and resold it for a handsome profit, sending samples to
the other station agents down the road and enlisting them as his agents. Within six months, his new
venture had netted him $5,000.
Sears moved to Minneapolis, hired watchmaker Alvah Curtis Roebuck and
founded what would become Sears, Roebuck and Company. After sell-offs,
failures and restarts, Sears hired a young Julius Rosenwald, who
had been introduced to him by a Rosenwald brother-in-law who had made a
killing after securing the exclusive soft drink franchise at the 1893 World's
Columbia Exposition. If Sears and Roebuck were Wozniak and Wayne,
Rosenwald was the company's Steve Jobs, the visionary who would revolutionize mail order. And after that, the iPhone to Rosenwald's iPod, a Robert E Wood, who came to Sears from Montgomery Wards after he became restless with the older company's stagnation, would take Sears towards still one more revolution, this time in retail.
former Sears Warehouse on Fulton Street
By
1895, sales had doubled to $745,000, and the companies 80 employees
worked in four different buildings around Fulton and Desplaines.
Sears did the marketing, Rosenwald, strategy and reforming the company's chaotic administration. Inspired by the mail order business A. Montgomery Ward had
created, he expanded the Sears catalog. It took until 1900 for Sears to overtake Wards in sales - over $10,000,000, By 1901, there were 2,500 employees, and by 1904, it was clear Sears had outgrown its Fulton Market location. Express companies handling shipments threatened to cut the company off, as the ever-increasing stream of wagons were now jamming the streets to the point of paralysis.
The New City Rises
In 1904, Rosenwald
acquired a huge, 41.6 acre tract of land, 537 feet wide and a
half-mile long, five miles west of the Loop, in North Lawndale, described
as “one of the best residence districts of our city.” Rosenwald
enlisted the architectural firm of Nimmons and Fellows, which had
designed his own home on south Ellis, to create a massive complex that
would cost $5 million and house over 9,500 employees. E.C. and R.N.
Shankland were the structural engineers, Thompson-Starrett of New York the contractors.
The site was nestled deeply within Chicago's intricate matrix of rails. For commuters, the Garfield Park branch
of the West Side Elevated ran in an alley a block to the north,
between Harrison and Flournoy, with stations both at Kedzie to the
east, and St. Louis to the west. Within the Sears site, St Louis was
eliminated as a street to provide an uninterrupted sweep for the
sprawling new complex. For freight, the Baltimore and Ohio's Altenheim
subdivision ran at the southern end of the site, connecting the old
Grand Central Depot downtown to the Belt Line Railroad at Chicago's
western edge and beyond, giving Sears access to trains from 30 different
railroads.
On January 24, 1905, construction began,
employing 7,000 workers and artisans. Each day, 60 freight car loads of
materials were delivered to the site - 30 of brick, 20 of lumber, and
10 of sand, cement, crushed stone and other material. 23 million bricks
were used. On one single day, 353,000 bricks were laid.
Sears Power House under construction
The massive Merchandise Building was of timber-frame construction, and the order for yellow pine timber - so slow to combust that it was said to be given a higher rating from insurance underwriters than even concrete - was reportedly the
largest in history. Over 13 million board feet would go
into the buildings, exhausting the capacities of 75 mills in four
different states. Four million board feet were used just for the forms for the 1563 belled caisson foundations drilled down
40 to 90 feet deep. There were nearly 3 million board feet of maple flooring. Up to 7 million board feet were stored on the site at a
given time.
The Tower itself, 50-foot square and 240 feet high, was of steel construction, and completely fireproof, as on the floor just below the spacious, two-level observation floor at the top, were three massive tanks holding 200,000 gallons of water. That room is now empty, but you can still see the outline of the tanks impressed on the concrete floor. Other floors in the tower were taken up with testing laboratories for the company's products.
The
Merchandise Building was completed in October, and on January 15, 2005,
the entire complex was turned over to Sears. Within a week, over 200 wagons had completed the move from the company's previous Fulton Market home.
The
cost was $4,282,000. Factoring in equipment brought the price tag up to $5.6 million. The 366,234 square
feet of ground area was packed with nearly 2 million square feet of
floor space and a total enclosure of nearly 25 million cubic feet. The
Merchandise building was 1,100 feet long, built around a central open
court 230 by 80 feet. At the rear were two annex buildings, and between
them a large rail depot, 60 feet wide, designed to handle up to 200 cars a day brought
in and out of position by electric engines. There were two sets of
switches, one for incoming freight and one for outgoing.
The Supply Chain Explicated: Architectural Fulfillment
Department of Interior, Cut-a-way Axonometric of Merchandise Building
56 different departments were set up within the Merchandise Building, fire walls with double fire doors dividing the building into 12,000-square-foot bays, columns placed at 14-foot centers. The structure and its furnishings were engineered to make order fulfillment relentlessly efficient, a precise science. Two systems - one for bringing goods in, the other for shipping them out - intertwined in a way to insure the “incoming system never interrupts outgoing.” The processing of incoming goods began along the outer edge of the building and moved in, to the appropriate department in the warehouse, where they were stored according to their catalog number. The processing of outgoing orders, received via pneumatic tube from the Administration building, started from the center of the Merchandise Building and moved outward.
A series of
seven spiral chutes, eight feet in diameter, brought merchandise down from the higher
floors in
baskets, using centrifugal force to regulate the speed so that “even
glass wares will go down without breaking.” Items came down onto conveyor belts that ran around
all four sides of the internal court, to be sorted by clerks and placed on another conveyor belt headed to whichever of the three shipping rooms - for mail, for express, or for freight - was indicated on the routing ticket. There the items were placed in a basket marked by order number. The baskets were placed on long rows of shelves until everything required for a given order was collected, at which point it was sent down a slide to a packer, who quickly determined the size box was required, called out its number, and was handed the appropriate container. Empty boxes were brought in overhead, via another system of conveyors.
Orders ran as high as 40,000 a
day, each with one to twenty items. Smaller products were processed in the Merchandise
building, bulkier items and pre-packaged products such as groceries were
handled in the annexes. All order were shipped within 24 hours of receipt.
Across the street, the new power plant had a 6,000 horsepower capacity,
with three giant generators and a massive steam turbine. Subterranean
tunnels were the nervous system of the complex,
bringing both power and water, and tickets and orders via
the pneumatic tubes. Next door to the power plant was the steel-framed Administration Building, originally two stories, containing executive offices and clerical operations.
postcard image courtesy The Chuckman Collection
By 1920, after the structure had been expanded to five stories, fifty 16 to 17 year-old girls opened the up to 180,000 letters received each day. There were 500 typists, and operators at 12 addressograph machines were kept busy preparing mailing labels for 65 million catalogs.
The building had five separate restaurants, and their 100 workers could feed 8,400 employees in an hour and 20 minutes.
image courtesy The Chuckman Collection
To the west of the Administration Building was the Printing Building, of timber framed construction. At its peak, 23 rotary presses produced 40 tons of promotional material a day, including two million catalogs, each of which ran over 1,000 pages and weighed four pounds. The typesetting department, alone, employed 300 workers.
The complex had its own post office, hospital, and in-house medical
staff, a recreation room, a room circulating books from the Chicago Public Library, even its own fire station.
Image courtesy of The Chuckman Collection
Across the street, a 100-foot-long, Doric-styled Pergola fronted a
sunken garden, complete with a lake stocked with goldfish and three
fountains, “so that our employees may be attracted out of doors during
the noon recess, because a change of environment and attractive
surroundings send them back to work again greatly refreshed and
forgetful of the little annoyances of the morning.”
All the buildings were faced in dark red brick with trim supplied by the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company.
As architects Nimmons and Fellows wrote for Architectural Record . . .
Given the material at hand for construction and the structural features for decoration, the brick and terra architecture of Tuscany naturally suggested itself as appropriate . . . [and] suggested the addition of color for backgrounds to accent such decoration. Consequently, the lunettes and frieze of the Merchandise Tower are of glazed blue terra cotta; also the backgrounds of the book marks which decorate the Printing Building and also discs of the Power House are of white and blue glazed terra cotta.
The frieze of the Administration Building is developed but not copied from the scheme of marble inlay of San Miniato at Florence. Decorated moldings were avoided on account on expanse and the ornamentation was so concentrated as to obtain the greatest value possible. The sills and lintels were necessarily of terra cotta, used as fireproof covering for the steel, and these are made the chief features in the decoration; consequently, the horizontal lines are emphasized.
The only places where an elaborate treatment in composition was permitted were the top of the tower and its entrance and the main entrances and vestibule of the Administration Building. When one considers that over seventy-five hundred employees pass through these entrances many times each day, the money spent to make them attractive is well invested.
A quarter-century before, in 1881, George Pullman had built a company town just south of Chicago so large and so impressive that it became a global tourist attraction, and a popular side trip for visitors to the 1893 World's
Columbian Exposition. Now, Sears put it into the shadows. “I believe,”
remarked one observer, “you could bundle the entire Pullman plant,
including not only the factories but the workingmen's houses, the town
market and the theater, into the single Merchandise Building of Sears,
Roebuck and Company and still not fill it.”
image courtesy of The Chuckman Collection
Reaching out to the consumers in small towns and rural areas, Sears offered an alternative that would wipe out the traditional general store with wider selection and often dramatically cheaper prices. The creation of the parcel post system in 1913 further decreased Sears' cost of shipping and made its products affordable to additional consumers. By 1914, sales passed $100 million; by 1919, $234 million, with profits of $18 million.
The Second Revolution: The World's Greatest Retailer
On February 2, 1925, under the direction of Robert E. Wood, Sears opened its first retail store in the Merchandise Building, setting the stage for Sears becoming the Wal-Mart of its day. A second store - which survives to this day - opened in 1928 at Lawrence and Winchester, followed by a growing list of locations in Chicago and beyond. The first year, less than 5% of sales came from retail; by 1931, retail represented half of the company's sales. In 1932, Sears spent a million dollars to make William LeBaron Jenney's landmark 1891 Second Leiter Building its State Street flagship.
More decisively than their downtown locations, which the company shared with old-line department stores conceived back in the time of the horse-and-buggy, Sears new locations grabbed hold of the emerging economy of the car, opening stores in outlying areas with easy access to automobiles. In 1928, Sears began selling tires and auto accessories under a new brand, Allstate, which, three years later, started on the path to becoming one of the country's largest insurers. Over time, Sears became not just a retailer, but a manufacturer of many of the products they sold, creating major brands such as Kenmore applicances, Craftsmen tools, Coldspot refrigerators, which the company brought in noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy to style.
On April 12, 1924, Sears grabbed hold of a revolutionary new marketing medium - radio - through the creation of station WLS (‘World's Largest Store’), broadcasting from the top of the Homan Street tower. A week later, it aired the first edition of National Barn Dance, a country music program that soon became phenomenally popular, most particularly with the rural listeners who were key Sears customers.
Sears' low prices allowed the company to thrive even during the Great Depression. By 1937, sales
had topped half a billion dollars. In 1942, Sears opened a store in Havana, and put itself on the road to becoming a retail powerhouse, not just in the U.S., but throughout the America's. By 1947, sales topped $4 billion. $5.00 out of every $100 spent in the U.S. on general merchandise wound up in Sears cash registers.
Sears created its own real estate division, Homart Development, which was a key player in the boom in shopping malls in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, guaranteeing the store a place next to the most prestigious department stores in every city. In 1964, Sears surpassed A&P grocery stores to become, like Wal-Mart today, the world's largest retailer. In 1973, it had 837 retail stores, 12 catalog plants, and sales over $11 billion. It proclaimed its greatness by building the world's tallest building, Sears Tower, even as it was all about to unravel.
Decline and Fall, Sears and North Lawndale
It had been a long time coming. In the decades after the 1906 completion of the new Sears complex, population in North Lawndale more than doubled, becoming, especially, a center of life for Russian Jews, with the Jewish population hitting 65,000 by 1946. Then the neighborhood was hit - hard - by the white flight of the 1950's. By 1960, 91% of the residents were Afro-American. As population boomed, the housing stock came under increasing pressure. Density increased, the population grew poorer, but no new housing was constructed, and the existing stock was often allowed to decay. Martin Luther King Jr. came to live in North Lawndale for a time in 1966 to bring attention to the substandard conditions.
And then, in 1968 after King's assassination, riots broke out, and fires were set throughout the neighborhood, destroying residences and much of the white-owned commercial district on Roosevelt. Owners could no longer get insurance, and North Lawndale went into a calamitous free-fall. The very next year, Sears announced it would build a sparkling new skyscrapers that would allow it to flee the neighborhood, leaving behind in North Lawndale a wasteland that it now made even more desperate.
Even as it moved into its shiny headquarters, Sears was a company beginning to lose its way. It let new mass merchandisers like Target, K-Mart and, ultimately and most fatally, Wal-Mart catch it unawares. Instead of the innovation and vision of Sears, Rosenwald and Wood, the company suffered through holding-ground managements whose brightest ideas seemed to short-sighted cost-cutting and shaking down governments for tax breaks and financial rebates. Growth stalled, sales slumped.
In 1987, operations at the Merchandise Building ceased. A once great company made the news only for its latest failures. Merged in 1993 with a K-Mart one analyst recently called “terminally challenged”, Sears survives less as a retailer than as a real estate play. In 1990's, it closed out its holdings in North Lawndale. In 1994, it sold off the original Sears Tower, and the Merchandise Building was demolished. Around the same time, another massive Sears complex - a 1920 facility in Philadelphia clearly modeled after Chicago, right down to the central clock tower - was wired with 15,000 pounds of explosives and within mere seconds 25,000,000 cubic feet of construction was reduced to rubble.
In a bit of poetic justice, its former North Lawndale site is actually faring a good bit better than Sears, itself, right now. In 1989, developer Charles Shaw began work with new mayor Richard M. Daley to develop a plan to reinvigorate the neighborhood, rebranding it as ‘Homan Square’. The five-stage plan, calling for the construction of 600 new housing units and redevelopment of the old Sears structures, met with fierce opposition from distrustful community residents fearing being forced out by gentrification.
Shaw died in 2006, and many of the more ambitious aspects of his plan, including converting the 1949 Allstate Building into 238 condos, never got off the ground. Still, there's clearly a new vitality in North Lawndale today.
Streets of old brick and greystone houses look fresh and enduring. The Homan Square Community center opened in 2001. On a former parking lot behind the Pergola, new homes were constructed. In all, over 200 housing units have been added to the community. In 2007, a new school, Holy Family Lutheran, was constructed on the cleared site west of the old tower, and in 2009, Henry Ford Academy opened in the old Power House building.
The Afterlife: Road's end along The Age of the Supply Chain
For most corporations, it's one great idea and out. Sears had two, and could have had more, if their institutional memory had endured rather than simply been discarded. Sears stop publishing their "big book" catalog in 1993. The next year, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com. As Sears started with watches, Bezos started with books, both of them on their way to phenomenal success through a general merchandise catalog, differing only in the way they reached their customers. If an entrepreneurial character had survived at Sears, it might have seen that the answer was moving their catalog - and their amazing fulfillment system - to the internet. Instead of creating Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos might have followed Sears, Rosenwald and Wood in the line of great Sears Roebuck presidents, and Chicago would have been at the center of it, rather than shuffled off to the sidelines. The great Merchandise Building, already paid for, would have found new life as a booming, integral piece in the new hyper-efficient supply chain. That's not the way the world works, of course, but it's still a highly pleasurable - and informative - alternative reality to contemplate.
Instead, when you walk down Arthington today, you feel the unease of the gravesite. The monuments survive; the inhabitation does not. The unease is felt not only through the absence of people but, appropriately for a company that built its success on the automobile, the absence of cars. Sprawling surface lots and multi-story garages, all completely empty.
Large structures - the Allstate, the Printing Building - abandoned. The restored buildings are beautiful but eerily silent. You stand in the lovely Pergola, looking across the garden to the Administration Building, and you have a sense of a once great purpose, now vanished except for the structures it excreted
You stand before the great Tower, now so isolated as to appear stripped naked, and you try to imagine the life it once sustained, the streams of hopeful young women passing through its doors.
image courtesy The Chuckman Collection
You walk just to the south of the Merchandise Building, mingling with the spectators ringing the huge athletic field where a football game is taking place.
You see them watching, laughing, flirting. Some of the men, and especially one young woman seems to see you, seems to be trying to make sense of the strange jeans and sweatshirt you're wearing so different from their own more modest and quaintly formal attire. You can hear but barely the sound of the game and the chatter of the spectators, just beneath the threshhold of comprehension, a butterfly-wings aural blur.
When you walk amidst the surviving buildings on the silent streets, you want to see the ghosts, the ghosts of those who spent so much of their lives here, who gave these buildings meaning. You want them to fill the empty sidewalks once again so you can walk in their midst, to fill in the blanks the now disused buildings have left behind, to experience the vitality and lifeforce that created these coral reefs of the urban experience.
The ghosts linger. They clearly have something to say to us, something
important, not for them, but for us. They try to speak to us, but their words, like their presence, are as elusive as a mirage. In the unnatural silence, we struggle to
hear what they have to say.
Note: This article draws on many sources, but here are three of the most important:
Historic American Buildings Survey
is an absolutely invaluable account on the Sears complex, its origins
and history, as well as its condition in 1994, the year the report was
issued, just before the Merchandise Building was demolished. The report
includes hundreds of historic and current photographs and drawings.
The 1906 Architectural Record also includes two separate accounts of the complex. Designing a Great Mercantile Plant, June, 1906, beginning on page 403, Nimmons and Fellows identified as the authors, with numerous photographs.
