From Dead People to Hardware: Restoration at the Three Arts Club?

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When last we visited the 1914 Holabird and Roche Three Arts Club on Dearborn Parkway. we saw dead people.  Now we see drawer pulls.

The four-story building on North Dearborn Parkway was completed in 1914 to “provide a safe, supporting, and economical residence for young women to study the arts . . . ”  According to Robert Bruegman's invaluable monograph on Holabird and Roche, The Architects and the City, it was the first real work of 27-year-old John A. Holabird, freshly returned from an education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and a grand European tour.

Despite its upscale neighborhood, the Three Arts Club was not a lavish structure.  It was pretty much a large sorority house, completed at a modest cost of $200,000.  Its frame was not of steel, but reinforced concrete, with 110 rooms placed around a central courtyard.

According to Architectural Forum, ”Each studio is provided with running water, so that with a general bath and toilet they may be occupied as bedrooms.  The interior treatment is of the simplest.  The walls are of sand finished plaster with no tint or further treatment and the ceilings are calamined.”

No contemporary artist was burdened in creating the series of reliefs that grace the main facade.  They're actually castings of figures created by sculptor Jean Goujon for the 16th century Fontaine des Innocents in Paris.

photograph: Dada, Wikipedia

Down through the decades, over 13,000 residents passed through the Three Arts Club's doors, until 2003, when financial strains caused the club to evict the last tenants, sell off the building, and convert itself into a grant-making charity.  In the years since, the building has gone through multiple owners and proposals.  It was going to be a 48-root boutique hotel.  It was going to condos.  In 2009, a group of investors wanted to turn the it into a columbarian for up to 15,000 urns.  That idea awakened, not the dead, but the neighbors.  The building remained empty.

Now Curbed Chicago and Crain's Chicago Business are reporting that current owner, DRW Holdings LLC, wants to make the Three Arts Club a showroom outpost for the Restoration Hardware chain, complete with cafe.  The proposal would also encompass restoring windows and terra cotta and making mechanical upgrades to the building, which was designated an official Chicago landmark in 1981.

In addition to getting changes past the Landmarks Commission, hurdles include rezoning and getting necessary support from the community and area's new alderman, Robert Fioretti.  This is an overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, a residential district, so it will be interesting to watch how this plays out.

Read:
Evicted Three Arts Club members may get to return - but only if they're very, very quiet.
Three Arts Club Won't See Dead People

A Theater Vanishes: The Two McClurgs

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A walk down Ohio Street this past week reminded me of something I already pretty much knew:  the McClurg Court Cinemas are gone forever.  They've been closed, of course, for nearly a decade, but you always knew that behind that closed box office, the theater, itself, endured.  Now that original facing, all long Ohio, is in the final stages of being replaced with a new design intended to bring new retail to the complex, including in what is now the gutted space that was once the theatre.

Although state-of-the-art with its 70 mm projection and advanced sound system, the 1,200 seat McClurg Court led an uncharmed life.  It opened in 1971, with a roadshow premiere of Norman Jewison's film version of Fiddler on the Roof, at the very moment that kind of reserved-seat booking - and the long era of new movies opening in exclusive runs in downtown movie palaces -  was already reeling towards extinction.  While Fiddler was a success, it's next two bookings - Man of LaMancha and Lost Horizon - were not.  It's last major hit was Last Tango in Paris, back in 1973.  In 1987, the balcony was split off into two additional theaters.  The main auditorium downstairs, however, remained one of Chicago's largest screens,  It benefited, briefly, from a 1990's fetish for taking 35mm action blockbusters and blowing them up into 70mm prints.

The McClurg remained one of the best places to see films in the city, and one of the last capable of showing 70mm, including the stunning restorations of Lawrence of Arabia, My Fair Lady, and the VistaVision Vertigo.  It did little, however, to arrest the theater's descent into seediness.  The year after the AMC-21 opened a couple of blocks away, the McClurg closed forever. Now, the Music Box is the only Chicago house capable of screening 70mm, but considering the fact that we are probably only months away from never again being able to see so much as one of the entire first century of films projected on the same medium on which it was shot, that may no longer even matter.  We have entered an era where film is dead, and digital projection is the only projection.

In a promotional brochure, the owners of McClurg are indicating they hope the gutted theater space will now become home to a 15,000 square-foot retail anchor, with as many as seven additional stores in a row down Ohio.

Courtesy the Chuckman Collection

The other interesting story about McClurg Court Center is how it links up to one of the greatest - and least known - landmarks in Chicago: Holabird and Roche's McClurg Building on south Wabash.  When McClurg Court Center and its 1075 apartments was sold for $127 million back in 2006, the sale excluded the land beneath the complex.  That land is still owned by the heirs of Alexander C. McClurg, whose history with Chicago goes all the way back to his arrival back in 1859.

Forgotten today, McClurg created not only one of Chicago's most successful bookstores, but the largest book distributor in the west.  He was the first to publish Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan series of adventure novels, and the founder of the late 19th century literary magazine, The Dial.  When McClurg's five-story building at Wabash and Madison burned to the ground on February 12, 1899, at a loss of $500,000, his first impulse was to see this as a good opportunity to retire. Instead, he re-capitalized the business with $600,000 of stock - much of it offered to employees - and he made a new home in a spec office building that had just been built by a Boston developer.

The new Ayer Building at 218 South Wabash was renamed the McClurg Building.  The nine-story structure, designed by architects Holabird and Roche, is a small temple of Chicago architecture, its modernity found in the 9,000 square-feet of glass between spare terra cotta spandrels and columns, engineered to suck every last ray of available sunlight deep into the long, narrow structure.  Like Atwood and Burnham's Reliance Building, now the Hotel Burnham, the McClurg is a classic glass box a half-century before Mies.  Today, decrepit and unloved, it still looks more strikingly modern than the new applique on its namesake brethren a mile to the north

Chicago Streetscene: Nighttime in Venice and Vienna

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A final roll of Kodachrome captures a lost Chicago landmark

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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.