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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