Under the Skin, or, How We Had to Destroy History to Replicate It

 Often, a building is most interesting, reveals its truest self, not when it's completed, but when it's under construction.

Such is the case with The Lake, at Wells and Superior, a private club that Crain's Chicago Business's John Schroyer reports is scheduled to open this fall.

It's the site of two historic Chicago buildings, constructed just after the Great Fire of 1871, that the Landmarks Commission deigned not to protect, ostensibly because they had been substantially altered from their initial design. 720 North Wells was built in 1872 by German immigrant and brewer Conrad Seipp, a saloon on the ground floor, offices on the second, a Swedish social hall on the third. A cast iron arcade graced the Wells Street side.  (Siepp died in 1890, the Depression killed off the brewery, and a third-generation offspring has now bought back the name and restarted the brewery.)

photo courtesy Jordan Mozer

As Wells evolved into a trendy street of art galleries and restaurants that came to known as River North, 720 opened as the nightclub Cairo in 1988, to a glam redesign by Jordan Mozer that included a zigzag bar, gold walls and coal shafts converted into intimate two-person nooks. Chicago writer Achy Obeys wrote how "Snakes of sweaty people crawled up and down the labyrinth stairs; the elevator was a hot box of bodies."  Including mine, when I was under the influence of a free spirit who set me bar-hopping just for privilege of tagging along.

Cairo was hot, hot, hot, and then, in the way of all things, not.  It became, for a time, Club 720.  Eventually, Chicago sommelier Alpana Singh and her partners took over it in 2012 and remade it into The Boarding House, a restaurant Chicago Magazine's Jeff Ruby labeled a "glitz-o-rama" as he drooled over the dishes offered up by Quebec chef Christian Gosselin.  The place had "the unmistakable sparkle and swagger of an eventual Chicago classic."  And then, not.  In 2018, months after Singh had sold off her stake, The Boarding House closed, owing their landlord $117,000 in back rent.

And there 720 stood, empty and decaying for the next seven years, the 9,000 wineglasses that made up the chandelier over the bar still glinting faintly through the darkened windows, right up until the building was smashed to dust the summer of 2024.

720, and its companion 1870's building on Superior that was home to a Jets Pizza, were acquired in 2019 for $4,300,000.  Despite the efforts of Preservation Chicago, a demolition permit was issued.

The late classicist architect Robert A.M. Stern was enlisted to design, with GREC architects, a new building to house The Lake, an exclusive social club that's the creation of Krehbiel family heir Liam Krehbiel, head of Topograhy, described as "an early-stage hospitality company developing and operating a collection of luxurious hotels and clubs."

Topography was founded in Chicago in 2021.  It began when Liam's billionaire dad Fred Krehbiel of Molex fame bought a historic Irish estate with a 19th century manor house and, over a decade, restored and expanded it into the luxury Ballyfin resort, which opened in 2011 and later served as a honeymoon outpost for Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.  Molex was sold to the infamous Koch Brothers in 2015.  After Fred died in 2021, Liam took over Ballyfin and founded Topography.  Shortly after, Topography acquired the 137 acre Wisconsin campus of the former George Williams College, near the Yerkes Observatory, and is in the process of transforming it into The Preserve at Williams Bay, a 68-key ultra-luxury resort with a 90-acre conservation easement on a portion of the golf course, hotel rooms in the lodge plus free-standing cottages.

For something claiming to be opening in September, there's little information out there on the The Lake.  If you have to ask, you're not in their target group?  Nuveen Green Capital talks about a "$27,500,000 financing package" for an upscale yet unpretentious members only destination." 

Just last month, The Lake, which describes itself on Linkedin as "For the discerningly fun" began posting for positions such as Executive Chef and Director of Food and Beverages.  Three days ago, they added Restaurant Manager and Sous Chef. "The club will offer three distinct restaurants, including a French-inspired brasserie, a British American restaurant, and an Italian trattoria... two cocktail bars, a members' wine cellar, a roof terrace, three guest rooms, and a small spa."

There's no small irony in Nuveen describing The Lake as designed to "foster community while preserving the neighborhood's rich architectural history" where "preserving" meant destroying actual historic buildings for a Disneyfied replica.  And that's why the current state is no fascinating.  You should take a look, although since I took these pictures over a week ago, and the applique facade may already be going up.

Right now, The Lake has the look of a medieval battlement, heavy walls of concrete block, opaque embrasure-like windows with plastic fill and blue-tape outlines.  Still awaiting its fancy, civilizing cover, it can be seen for what it really is under the skin.  Not a fair analogy, to be sure - the current incarnation is domestic, polite, and welcoming to all those with the cash - but I realized what it reminds me of is those hulking armories 19th century millionaires built to protect themselves from the feared, if imaginary, attacks of the lower classes.  Subtext.

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Should the Republic Stand - Somewhere Else?

Remember when they first announced Millennium Park, when it was going to be topping over the unsightly Metra tracks with a gracious new greenspace?  And how then Cindy Pritzker got involved, John Bryan came in to raise the bucks, and Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, and Frank Gehry were brought in to make Millennium Park the most spectacular urban park of the new century?

Could we revive just a little bit of that spirit for the Statue of the Republic, a diminished replica of Daniel Chester French's sculpture for the 1893 World's Columbia Exposition?  Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey reports it's in for a much-needed re-gilding, but why stop there?

Illustration courtesy World's Fair Chicago 1893

Originally, The Republic, 65-feet-tall, dominated the vista from the 1893 Fair's domed Administration Building across the Great Basic to an eastern terminus with a casino, harbor and pier extending 2,500 feet into Lake Michigan.  It was meant to symbolize national unity.  Remember that?

Like almost the entire rest of the Fair, the colossus was never built to last, constructed of plaster staff sprayed over a metal skeleton.  After the Fair's closing, The Republic stood watch over an increasingly bleak landscape as a series of fires destroyed its massive buildings.  The grand statue was allowed to decay, becoming stained, its gilding stolen and losing an arm, until in 1896 the South Park board secretly ordered one of their engineers to burn it down at break of day.

Illustration courtesy World's Fair Chicago 1893

Over two decades later, in 1915, the corporation that ran the Fair still had leftover funds in the bank and, closing out the books, $48,000 of that was donated to the B.F. Ferguson Fund, created to promote public sculpture in the city.  It was the fund's second commission, after Lorado Taft's The Fountain of the Great Lakes, which still stands in the Art Institute's south garden.

Funded by that bequest, a bronze replica of The Republic - at 24 feet, downsized to a third of the original's height - was cast from a surviving plaster maquette.  The pedestal was designed by architect Henry Bacon.  It was dedicated May 11, 1918, the 25th anniversary of the opening of the 1893 Fair.  Unlike the original, it was fully gilded, although time and wear since the last restoration in 1992 has made it look like it's developed a serious skin condition.

It's where it is because it was placed at the site of the 1893 Fair's Administration Building, but all vestiges of the significance of that location have long since been effaced.  Today, The Republic is marooned between a golf course and a marina, in an isolated part of Jackson Park that's essentially a traffic circle, cars rushing past on Hayes Drive, and visible only in a small, immediate vicinity.  With the Obama Presidential Center opening this summer, that's no longer good enough.

An argument can be made that it's pretty cool just to unexpectedly stumble upon The Republic on a walk through the park, but in both size and artistry, it's meant to be a marker, not an oversight.  It should be moved.

Where?  Where it's no longer half-hidden, but allowed to terminate the vista from the south of the east lagoon, along Wooded Island and the Osaka Garden, to the soon-to-be-re-opened south entrance of the Museum of Science and Industry, which, although substantially rebuilt, still has much of its original grandeur from 1893.  Such a relocation would emulate the way the original Republic anchored one end of the 1893 Fair's Grand Basin.  It could be placed on land, or on a small island constructed for the purpose in the lagoon itself.

Ideally, The Republic would be re-cast to its original height, but Chicago has apparently grown too small for such ambition.  We can't even fix the nearby, historic Clarence Darrow bridge, which has been allowed to sit closed and rotting since 2012, while empty promises of something soon being done go unfulfilled year after year.

Clarence Darrow Bridge, Burnham & Root, 1880

According to Lee Bey, the re-gilding has a price tag of a cool million.  Anything more ambitious may sound unattainable, until you consider Science and Industry secured a $10 million grant from the Driehaus Foundation to fund the re-opening of the south entrance facing Columbia Basin.  And would it be rude to mention the Obama Presidential Center is coming in around $850 million?

A repaired and re-opened Darrow Bridge and a recast, re-gilded, relocated Republic would complete the current renewal of Jackson Park.  Surely, somewhere, we still have enough civic pride left for that?

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When a Museum Devours its Own: The Mortal Threat to Adler & Sullivan's Stock Exchange Trading Room

Eric Allix Rogers photo, courtesy Preservation Chicago

Here's the thing.  Great art museums are both amazing treasures and amoral empires.  Just ask countries like Benin, or Jewish families whose ancestor's art was looted by the Nazis.

To paraphrase George Carlin, erecting massive calling-card buildings lets museums find more space to display their ever-expanding stash of stuff.  Perhaps more importantly, they're a great way to rope in mega-donors, who gain far more lasting notoriety from having their names on a new wing than they ever could from even the most grandiloquent mausoleum.

Sometimes, however, unchecked ambition can tempt these esthetic empires into releasing their inner Mr. Hyde.  This week, Preservation Chicago announced Adler & Sullivan's Stock Exchange Trading Room as one of their Seven Most Endangered places for 2026.  Only hours later, The Art Institute of Chicago confirmed to Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey that they were, indeed, contemplating ridding itself of the Trading Room to make way for their wet dream of another mega-wing.

Turns out Preservation Chicago learned of this possibility a year ago, and decided not to go public with the news on the chance the museum might, by way of extended contemplation, come to its senses and let a putrid idea die a natural death.  Instead, spurred by a $75 million gift last year to jump-start a new building program, it's apparently blossomed into an idée fixe.

Put simply, this is nuts.  Suicidally, reputation-killing nuts.

First, some background: Adler & Sullivan's 1894 Stock Exchange was one of the greatest structures of the First Chicago School.  Despite that, despite being fully rented, and being the subject of an intense preservation battle, it was cleared for demolition, destroyed in 1972, and replaced by 30 N. LaSalle, a glass tower whose only distinction was that, after opening, some of its windows started popping out and crashing to the ground.  Most recently, it was used to grow vegetables.

As the bulldozers begin to circle, renowned Chicago photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel became obsessed with the keeping the memory of the building's beauty alive by salvaging as much of its striking ornament as possible.  The Trading Room was a particular revelation.

"I think it is sort of like a holy room," Nickel is quoted as saving in Richard Cahan's moving biography, They All Fall Down. "The more you are in here the more you are in awe of it."

As recounted by Cahan, when the Trading Room's drop ceiling was removed, the original design was revealed for the first time since a Depression-era modernization . . .

... with the gold-leafed column capitals, leaded art glass, and carbon filiament lamps showing, the room looked like it had when it was first built.

"Why do we just save the pieces?  Why don't we save the whole room?" Nickel asked.

His young co-worker - and, on this project, his boss - John Vinci thought the idea was insane, but soon came around.  "I was sick and tired of saving bits and pieces."

image courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

The task was Herculean.  A double-height room, 100 by 75 feet, richly ornamented.  Intricate, beautiful wall stenciling.  Gold-leaf capitals.  Hundreds of art glass skylights.  The often damaged originals were carefully removed; the entire room meticulously notated.

For Richard Nickel, the Stock Exchange building brought him to the point of despair and exhaustion.  Then it killed him.  Early in 1972, a portion of the Trading Room collapsed and crushed him, ending his life even as it secured his legend.

The restoration and reinstallation at the Art Institute was an equally rigorous task.  As team leader John Vinci told Betty J. Blum for an oral history ...

we had to recreate everything below the drop ceiling including the baseboard and wainscot.

Recreating the stencils was especially arduous, "52 distinct hues in muted tones of gold, green and yellow."

John Vinci photograph, courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

John Vinci photograph, courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

In another oral history with Blum, architect Walter Netsch, who designed the building that would house the Trading Room, recalled thinking, "Wouldn't it make a great trustees' room ... I received a very recriminatory comment from Mary Block saying, 'Walter do you realize there are so many colors in that room, what can I choose to wear?'" Eventually, said Netsch, "the Art Institute was happy because they have this money-making spot to rent and show off."

image courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

An early champion of the project, Art Institute curator David Hanks, called the original Trading Room "a work of art as important as any work at the art museum."  In 1977 the restored room was unveiled to great acclaim.  Then New Yotk Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger judged it "one of the finest interiors created before the turn of the century,"

John Vinci photograph, courtesy Eric J. Nordstrom

Back in 1894, the shimmering beauty of the Trading Room was probably visible for only a few months before unruly use and an endless procession of insensitive retrofits trashed it.  Restored and recreated, its splendor has endured, largely pristine, for just short of fifty years. The Art Institute raises the prospect of demolishing and reconstructing the Trading Room - AGAIN!!! - at some player-to-be-named-later somewhere else. Puh-leeze. The original project cost $1.5 million, back when that was real money.  Who is this Daddy Warbucks waiting in the wings to repeat the process at today's prices?

If the Commission on Chicago Landmarks is to rescue their recently compromised status as an entity promiscuously designating mediocre buildings like 30 North LaSalle just so connected developers can fleece taxpayers for massive tax breaks, they need to landmark the Trading Room, the Stock Exchange arch, and, possibly, McKinlock Court.  They need to be the antidote detoxing the Edward Hyde-like impulses two-facing the outwardly respectable alter ego of the civic jewel known as the Art Institute of Chicago. 

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It's Personal: Two Macabre Dances, a Half Century Apart

Steppenwolf Theatre is in the midst of an extended run of "The Dance of Death", August Strindberg's astringent 1900 play about an aged/aging couple's abusive - if entertaining - relationship, trapped - or volunteered - within a bleak, combative marriage that seems to anticipate the landscapes of everything from Beckett to Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff, 

It's a vivid, superbly acted production, and it put me in mind the last time I encountered this play.  It was 1970, and the family had decided to make spring vacation trip to Washington, D.C.  On a day when my sister accompanied my dad on a trip to the Government Printing Office. GPO's Chicago operation, in the massive old Post Office with the Eisenhower Expressway running through it, was where my Dad spent pretty much his entire working life, printing what he called "The Synopsis" but was officially The Federal Register, thick daily volumes on cheap paper listing all federal government rules, notices and regulations

https://nationalacademy.emuseum.com/objects/10768/arena-stage

My mom chose instead to take in a matinee at the Arena Stage, and that seemed the better bet to me. Harry Weese was the architect, beating out 50 others, for the octagon Arena Stage, completed in 1961.  It was reportedly just the second theater-in-the-round ever built.  Arena Stage has a history of important productions, invlufinh The Great White Hope with James Earl Jones as boxer Jack Johnson, which made Arena Stage the first regional theater to have a production transfer to Broadway.

Credit: Archive of Affinities on tumbler

For a 17-year-old whose previous exposure to theatre, ourtesy of my grandmother, was watching from high up in the balcony the residents of River City running across the Schubert Theatre stage in frantic search for Harold Hill in the road production of The Music Man, with Forrest Tucker, it was a bit of a shock.

First, in this intimate space, the actors weren't a hundred feet away, but right in your face.  And these weren't the Iowa innocents of Meredith Wilson's classic, but a deliberately nasty bunch, a married couple in constant, acidulous battle.  It was theatre as car wreck - Strindberg's expert theatrics and often hilarious lines meant, no matter how appalling, even shocking, you couldn't look away. I didn't understand a lot of it, but the observed strains in my own parents' marriage made it weirdly resonant.

The combatants in this production,as a younger-than-his-role Edgar, was Rip Torn, the outstanding character actor whose memorable performances ranged from a Face in the Crowd to Men in Black and 30 Rock, and as his wife Alice, the luminous Viveca Lindfors, who had starred in a 1956 revival of Strindberg's play Miss Julie..  The pivotal role of Kurt, the long absent visitor that basically puts everything in motion, was played by Mitchell Ryan, the square-jawed actor who would go on to a long career in film and television.

The play was directed by Alfred Ryder, better known as a ubiquitous actor with over 100 credits on IMDB, who was The Arena Stage's longtime resident director.  Others in the cast were Julie Garfield, daughter of John, and Robert Walden, later Joe Rossi on Lou Grant, as the battling couple's children, and, as "Sentry", Richard Sanders, who would gain immortality as the nerdy, perpetually bandaged Les Nessman on WKRP in Cincinnati. The Arena Stage's PR guy was Alton Miller, who would go on to become Chicago Mayor Harold Washington's press secretary.  

The production was generously received, and so a transfer to Broadway was mounted.  The role of "Sentry" remained, but the kids were ditched. (Strindberg wrote a Dance I and a Dance II; adaptations draw from both.) Michael Strong (104 IMDB credits) took over the role of Kurt.  The revival opened at the Ritz Theatre April 28, 1971. The New York Times all-powerful theatre critic Clive Barnes judged it as needing "more style and less heat" and it closed after five performances.  Torn would return multiple times, but neither Lindfors nor Ryder would return to Broadway again.

The current Steppenwolf revival is grounded by Collette Pollard's spectacular set, which covers the edges of the stage in rocks to emulate the shore of the island where the action takes place.  The one-set living room is the well of an abandoned prison turned domicile, which is both a striking backdrop and an invidious, claustrophobic metaphor for self-incarceration within a viperous marriage.  

The 2014 version of Strindberg's masterpiece written by Conor McPherson is clear and true, blowing off the dust and making the dialogue fresh and immediate. Yasen Peyankov's direction keeps the elements of comedy, tragedy, and shock in suitably unstable balance.

Steppenwolf Theatre photo, Michael Brosilow

The performances - Cliff Chamberlain as eviscerated visitor Kurt, Steppenwolf veteran Jeff Perry as the Captain, and Law & Order's Kathryn Erbe' as Alice - are superlative, evoking laughs, dread, and terror in eloquent equal measure.  You won't find a better night in the theatre, and you have through March 22nd to see it.

Steppenwolf Theatre photo, Michael Brosilow

I think I understood at least a little more than I did back in 1970, almost ruefully aware of how time curdles, and early innocence more complicated than it seemed at the time.

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From the Arena Stage playbill, an interview with Mr. Strindberg