What a Dump! Chicago Just Can't Stop Adding Real Estate

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As best as I can tell, not so much as an inch of Chicago's lakefront has any continuity to its original natural state, its shore was restlessly reshaped to meet the successive needs of explosively compounding metropolis.  Today, you'll find hardly a trace of original sand dune edge or the lowland marshes in which the stinky onions grew wild

Chicago Park District historian Julia Bachrach estimates that over the city's history, over 2,000 acres of new land has been added to the city's lakefront.  In places the today's shoreline is a full half mile east of where the first European explorers had found it.

This is the case with Fullerton Point, an outlet of land where Fullerton Parkway meets the lakefront.  It began its life late in the 19th century as Picnic Island, a tract of land bounded by the lake, the Lincoln Park lagoon to the west, and waterways connecting the two to both the north and south.

from This Haven of Rest and Health

In a time when tuberculosis was an often deadly disease, 1887 saw the creation of the Chicago Daily News Sanitarium, financed by fund drives mounted by the powerful  Chicago newspaper.  For a detailed - and richly illustrated story of the sanitarium, see Cynthia Matthew's This Haven of Rest and Health, published in the Spring 2000 edition of Chicago History, from which the above aerial shot of Picnic Island was taken.

The sanitarium was created to serve the children of Chicago tenements, providing a seasonal refuge from summer's heat and increased pollution.  The original building,  designed by Burnham and Root, was open to lake breezes and constructed on 150 concrete pylons.  A ramp connected it to the mainland, serving both to give its young patients the benefits of the fresh air and keeping them safely isolated from a population fearful of contagion.

In 1914, a larger replacement facility opened on Picnic Island,  Minus its perpendicular entrance wing, sheared off in a later park improvement, this is the structure that still exists today.  Designed by Dwight Perkins in the Prairie Style, with steel arches encased in brick, the facility has 250 basket cribs for babies, and nurseries and other rooms to support the care of older children.  It served more than 30,000 children every summer, until its 1939 closing.

During World War II, the building was used as a USO Center, and was later turned over to Theater on Lake, which has mounted productions in its often steamy, un-airconditioned space since 1952.  Exiled to other venues during the point's reconstruction, Theater on the Lake is scheduled to return a building that will now be fully air-conditioned.

Seen from the south, Fullerton Point provided a visual punctuation point to the lakefront promenade, its trees signaling the season through their change of color.

At the southeast corner of the point was a rough, tumble-of-rocks outcropping with spectacular clear views out to the lake and the city skyline to the south.

That was the past.  This is the future . . .

Since 2000, the Army Corps of Engineers has been in the process of completely rebuilding - and sanitizing - Chicago's lakefront as part of a $300 million shoreline protection project.  19 of the 23 segments of the 9.5 mile project have already been completed.  Last October, ground was broken on the $31.5 million Lake Shoreline Protection Project to expand and stabilize Fullerton Point.

The previous revetment was built between 1910 and 1931 out of wood piles filled with stones.  By the 1950's, the piles had begun to collapse, and record low water levels in 1964 exposed them to the air, accelerating the rot.

As much as a case of its seawalls crumbling, Fullerton Point had come to be seen as a traffic problem.  Increasing pedestrian, skate and bicycle traffic combined to create a choke point where the paths met Lake Shore Drive underpass at Fullerton Parkway.

The solution was to wrap the old point in a new point, adding 5.8 acres of parkland extending about a hundred feet south, allowing for a pair of paths that keep bicycle and foot traffic separate.   The result will be a new, 1,700-foot-long revetment.

This creation of more of Chicago is a spectacle in itself.

According to a report by John Greenfield on StreetsBlog Chicago, the piles are pounded up to 45 feet into the lake bed. Right now, an estuary of "milky turquoise" water - the color coming from sediment - awaits being filled up 80,000 cubic yards of rock and sand to create the new land.

 

 

 

The new seawall will extend the Army Corps infatuation with the stepped expressway school of lakefront promenade design.

Once Chicago's lakefront mostly looked like it does at Promontory Point . . .

While the Corps was hell-bent on making remodeling the lakefront in its cookie-cutter image, they hadn't counted on the orneriness of those contrarian Hyde Parkers, who have mounted a major battle against the generic designs of which The Corps is so fond.

The expressway lakefront, as smooth as a concrete contractor's bottom, continues its Sherman's march down the length of the Chicago lake shore, but Promontory Point is where the forward advance has slowed, if only for a moment.

It's all about efficiency.  The stepped designs are supposed to provide protection against Chicago's increasingly frequent and severe winter storms and the erosion threat they represent.  And to keep the traffic moving.  And there can be no question but that the relentlessly homogeneous promenade has its own beauty, as insipedness magnified to massive scale often does.

Still, you'd like to think that somewhere along Chicago's lakefront, there's still room for a poetic expression of the the rough nature out of which a great city grew.

Chicago Historic Schools: A Great new Website documents over a century of vital buildings and their architects

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I was out in Humboldt Park over the weekend taking pictures of John Ronan's new addition to Erie Elementary Charter School - which I hope to write about tomorrow, in time for the school's Thursday Open Doors Benefit and Open House and Reception -  when, just in the next block, I encountered the splendid 1884-1893 Alexander von Humboldt Elementary . . .

Renovated as recently as 2008, the structure now stands empty, one of the 54 schools closed this year by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.  Searching on Google for more information, I came across this informative history of von Humboldt on Chicago Historic Schools, a site I had never encountered before.

And here's why:  it's brand new, and it's terrific.  A collaboration between Frances O'Cherony Archer, Chicago Park District historian Julia Bachrach, Elizabeth A. Patterson, architect Bill Latoza, supplying many historical images, and the Art Institute's James Iska and Brooke Collins adding contemporary photographs.

A group of passionate historians and architects produced this website; they are not affiliated with Chicago Public Schools.

The schools they document represent some of the most important architecture in the city.  Few may make the standard architectural guidebooks, but they are both very fine buildings in their own right, and the kind of structural anchors that define the character of their respective neighborhoods.  They are time capsules of Chicago's architectural and social history, and Chicago Historic Schools fills out their stories to a depth not previously available.

There's also profiles of  22 school district architects, from the somewhat well known Dwight Perkins, a member of the Steinway Hall gang whose innovative work including such schools as Graeme Stewart, Trumbell and Schurz.  The facade of his former office across the Water Tower survives today as an upscale fashion boutique.  

Far more rare are profiles of 22 school district architects from Louis Sullivan's mentor, John H. Edelmann, to August Bauer, Frederick Baumann, Paul Gerhardt and more. If it consisted of nothing more than these architectural biographies, Chicago Historic Schools would be an invaluable website.

There are currently 24 structures on Chicago Historic Schools, with more to be added in the future.  There are also pages on three lost buildings.   Two of the existing schools on the site - von Humboldt and Perkins's Trumbull - now stand empty as part of this year's great wave of closings.  The advocacy of the “passionate” group producing Chicago Historic Schools  has not only produced a great addition to the record of Chicago's architectural heritage, but their advocacy stands to increase awareness of the irreplaceable value of vital, historic structures that are increasingly being treated as  disposable.

© James Iska

Exiled to Indian Boundary: a Monument to Boodle in Old Chicago

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 Indian Boundary Park is all about things short in duration but long in memory.  In her excellent book, The City in a Garden: A History of Chicago's Parks, Park District historian Julia Bachrach writes: 

Through the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis, the united tribes of Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi ceded a 20-mile swatch of land to the United States government allowing white settlers and fur traders to safely pass through or settle in this area.  The resulting boundary line  cut through what is now Indian Boundary Park in Chicago's West Rogers Park neighborhood. 

That treaty had a shelf life of exactly 17 years.  In 1833, it was unilaterally abrogated and Native Americans forced out.

Flash forward to nearly a century later, when an independent commission began assembling land for Indian Boundary Park.  Designed by Richard F. Gloede, Indian Boundary was a pastoral conception - no baseball diamonds.  Many neighborhood streets - Greenleaf, Lunt, Morse, Estes and Farwell - had already been named for the original 1870's combine that constructed early Rogers Park.  Now, in the boom of the 1920's, a new generation of developers enveloped the  the east and north borders of Indian Boundary with a collection of picturesque apartment complexes such as the Tudor Revival Park Gables and the Jens Jensen-designed Park Castle.

In 1929, architect Clarence Hatzfield again called on Tudor Revival for Indian Boundary's handsome fieldhouse, which soon became a vital cultural center for the community, including being a residency site for the CSO's training ensemble, the Civic Orchestra.  In May of this year, a disastrous fire gutted the fieldhouse.  It's now closed, indefinitely, for repairs.

Indian Boundary's second short-in-duration, long-in-memory moment comes in an easily overlooked lump of stone not far from the fieldhouse.   Atop a couple of squat concrete blocks, you will find the heavily weathered keystone that sculptor A.C. Goddard carved for the Washington Street entrance of architect James J. Egan's City Hall and Courthouse building.

This rockpile was  Chicago's infamous fifth City Hall.  Begun in 1875, it took a full decade to complete.  Along with the adjoining County Building, it came in at an astronomical price tag of $4 to $5 million, no small part of it ascribable to graft.  The structure was a piker compared to New York City's Tweed Courthouse, which took twice as long to build and where the embezzlements of Boss Tweed are said to have been a larger part of the eventual $13 million cost.  In the long run, however, New York came out ahead.   The Tweed Courthouse still stands today as a beloved civic landmark.

new County Building, old City Hall - photograph: Library of Congress

The 1885 City County Building wasn't so lucky.  Its structural deficiencies and the lack of usuable space in its pompous bulk became apparent soon after the opening, and the prematurely crumbling edifice was demolished in 1908, after less than a quarter-century's service.    It's restrained replacement by Holabird and Roche, while woefully deficient in graft and corruption, proved far more durable.  It still stands - handsomely - today.

So Goddard's sculptural fragment, looking now a bit worn, dazed and disoriented, has already spent over three times as long looking down at Indian Boundary's lawn then it ever did in its intended deployment at its high perch,  gazing impassively at the teeming parade of human comedy passing below through the portal of that proud, forgotten building.  Ozymandias, anyone?

SEAOI Awards presentations, Bachrach's Garden, Wolner's Henry Cobb, Gene Summers memorial - May begins!

It's the first of the month - time for me to start working on the May 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

We've got quite a bit for this week so far.  Among the highlights: Today, Tuesday, May 1, the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois is holding Final Presentations for its 2012 Excellence in Structural Engineering Awards at Pazzo's.  On Wednesday the 2nd, Julia Bachrach talks about the new edition of her book, The City in a Garden: A History of Chicago's Parks, at CAF lunchtime, while later in the day at AIA/Chicago, Andrew Sedgewick of Arup London discusses Current Trends in Museum Design. 

Thursday, the 3rd, John Quail discusses the Chicago River for Friends of Downtown lunchtime at the Cultural Center, while over at Charley-Persky House, Ted Wolner talks for SAH about his great book, Henry Cobb's Chicago.  At IIT,  Friday, the 4th is the Annual Student Work Exhibition, while on Saturday, there's a memorial celebrating "the life and legacy of architect, design, sculptor, painter, education and entrepreneur Gene Summers."

We still have a ways to go, but you can check out the two dozen great items already on the May 2012 Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.  100% proof-reading free!

Dead Lumber Magnate restores Bourgeois Hands for Jane Addams Memorial

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In 1996, for a new park just west of Navy Pier and north of the Ohio Street Beach dedicated to the legendary Jane Addams, the great sculptor Louise Bourgeois created a memorial, Helping Hands, comprised of six rough-hewn granite stones topped by carved marble hands . . .

Bourgeois's leap of faith was not rewarded.  According to Chicago Park District historian Julia Bachrach, Bourgeois's sculpture "did not fare well in that location. It was exposed to the intense winds of Lake Michigan. It was in a heavily used area. It was in a low setting with poor sight lines. It not only deteriorated, but the art work was also the victim of severe vandalism." As reported by The Reader's Martha Bayne and Jeff Huebner, the sculpture was attacked at least twice - with the fingers on one of the hands chopped off as if they belonged to someone who had failed to pay back a juice loan.  The Art Institute, which bankrolled the sculpture, and the Park District, which placed it, threw in the towel and removed the piece to a Park District warehouse.

"Fortunately," continued Bachrach at rededication of the artwork this past Saturday, "this sculpture was the gift of the Ferguson fund of the Art Institute. As Chicagoans we are so lucky that lumber merchant Benjamin Franklin Ferguson decided to establish a $1 million endowment for the installation and perpetual care of public art in our city more than a century ago." Ferguson's largess, valued in the tens of millions in today's dollars, funded 20 individual works, from Lorado Taft's Fountain of Time, to the Henry Hering monumental reliefs on the Michigan Avenue bridge, Henry Moore's Nuclear Energy at the U of C, and Isamu Noguchi fountain along Columbus Drive, which has fallen into a state of neglect where even its owner, the Art Institute, appears to have forgotten it's there.  (You can find photographs and full descriptions of all the Ferguson Fund commissions on Jyoti Srivastava excellent Public Art in Chicago website, here.)

"In 2006," says Bachrach," the Ferguson fund covered the cost of moving the artwork, sending the damaged pieces back to Louise Bourgeois so that they could be recreated by the artist, who was then in her 90's. The other pieces went into storage. For several years, "the project was tied up in good old political bureaucracy"

Bachrach credits Park District President Bryan Traubert for suggesting, "why don't we find an alternative location with Chicago parks so that we can return the artwork to its rightful place in the public sphere?" "The timing was excellent, " remarked Bachrach, "because the City of Chicago had recently transferred ownership of the Chicago Women's Park and Gardens to the Park District. Mimi McKay is the landscape architect who originally designed Chicago Women's Park for the city and she very graciously helped us identify the location for the installation and advised us on some of the landscape issues." 

So the sculpture is back, relocated to just the north of the Clarke House Museum, at 1827 South Indiana, fronting on the Prairie Avenue historic district.  Chicago's oldest house, it's celebrating its 175th anniversary this week with an all-day symposium this Wednesday, September 28th, and a Family Day, Saturday October 1st offering free mini-tours, folk music, period fashion and other events.  (More information here.).

Naomi Beckwith, Julia Bachrach

Saturday's event also offered remarks from Glessner House's William Tyre, 2nd ward alderman Robert Fioretti, and Museum of Contemporary Art curator Naomi Beckwith, who compared Bourgeois's more human take on surrealism than that of the flamboyant Salvador Dali.  "She didn't choose," said Beckwith, "to make a monument that was a large scale sculpture. It wasn't a sort of a real figuration of Jane Addams, a picture of her, as you would normally see. But it was about these hands that Jane so beautifully spoke about, as a symbol.  And all these hands as you can see are reaching out and touching, and they're so delicate, and so warm, and so for Bourgeois this idea of surrealism was about the inner life of what you could love and what you feel inside."

As someone whose early childhood was marked by nightmares of disembodied hands emerging from the baseboard to grab and hold me, I'm probably not the best person to critique Bourgeois's sculpture.  Far more interesting to hear from Jane Addams . . .

. . . whose person and spirit were ably recreated on Saturday by artist and activist Jan Lisa Huttner, portraying Addams, and reading an excerpt from her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House, in which she recalled a visit to a London slum where she witnessed the desperately hungry poor thrust out their hands to grab their winnings in a regular Sunday auction of rotting fruit and vegetables.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery and with which he is constantly groping forward.

I have never since been able to see a number of hands help upward, even when they are moving rhythmical in a calisthenic exercise, or when they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them in eager response to a teacher's query, without a certain revival of this memory, a clutching at the heart reminiscent of the despair and resentment which seized me then.

If you want to see more, here's an execrably shot video of excerpts from Saturday's ceremonies, complete with  vertigo-inducing camera movement and thumbs and fingers over the lens.  It might be better if you just listen. (I really have to take the time to teach myself how to shoot extended videos on my Canon T2i.)  Suitably, for a monument whose history and substance carries ambiguities between hope and despair, the day oscillated between a persistent drear drizzle and short bursts of blue sky and  bright sunlight.

Who's buried in John Logan's Monument? Superb new website catalogues Chicago Parks' Fountains, Monuments and Sculptures

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OK, let's get past the bad stuff first. The web design sucks. In fact, there really isn't any web design, just a library of dead-end pdf's. No hyperlinks, no works by artist, name or subject, no sorting chronological or geographic. And if you don't know which park the work you want to learn about is in, be prepared to start clicking through a list of 67 until you find the right one.

All that said, the new Chicago Park District Guide to Fountains, Monuments and Sculptures, now on-line after several years of research and work under the direction of Park District historian Julia Bachrach, is an amazing new resource. There's a PDF for each work - as I surfed through them all, Safari actually gave up, saying I had exceeded the maximum amount of open windows. The works and their histories are described in an informed, fact-packed text, and illustrated with both contemporary photographs by Park District photographers, and historical shots from the holdings of the Chicago History Museum.

To get back to our initial question, there's actually no one buried in the Augustus Saint-Gaudens/Alexander Phimister Proctor John Alexander Logan Monument east of Michigan Avenue at 9th street, although originally the rising hill beneath the sculpture was intended to be the final resting place for Logan and his wife. I never knew it was designed to be a tomb. Did you?

I've also always wondered where those big carved stones scattered on the site of the late, decrepit 12th street Metra Station were from. Now I know they're from Bradford L Gilbert's 1893 Central Station, with its great arched-ceiling waiting room and tall tower that personified the might of the Illinois Central, until the decline of rail travel led to its demolition in the 1970's.

And did you know that the Columbus Statue in Arrigo Park at Loomis and Polk is actually the sculpture Moses Ezekiel created for above the entrance of W.W. Boyington's 1893 Columbus Memorial Building, which soared 240 feet into the air at the corner of State and Washington where Old Navy's stubby store now stands. Did you know the forty-foot-high columns at the Cancer Survivor's Garden came from Henry Ives Cobb's domed 1905 Federal Courthouse on Dearborn, replaced by Mies van Der Rohe's Post Office and Kluczynski Building?

Or that the Tribune's Robert McCormick's $600 contribution in 1906 paid for half the cost of the Washington Square fountain that now bears his name, part of a series of improvements designed by Jens Jensen?  Or that in addition to our Standing Lincoln and Seated Lincoln sculptures, there was once also a Leaning Lincoln statue in Kennedy Park,  until the Women's Christian Temperance Union forced its removal?

Delving into the Chicago Park District Guide to Fountains, Monuments and Sculptures is like opening a bag of potato chips - you have one, then another, then another . . .  but it's a lot more nourishing. This is an absolutely superb compendium of images and information about Chicago's rich storehouse of public art, a seminal resource for historians, and an addictively entertaining read for the rest of us. Check it out here.

Jens Jensen vs Michael van Valkenburgh: Park Designer Deathmatch! September 29th.

On one level, it's not really a fair fight, since Jens Jensen, though he lived to 91, has actually been been dead since 1951, but Jensen's legacy and idea's remain very much alive, so why not put them up against those of one of the today's most prominent park designers?

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This Thursday, September 23rd,  there will be a 7:00 p.m. screening of a new documentary, Jens Jensen: Harmonious World, at the Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 North Central Park.

Jensen was actually born September 13th in dat ole Dybbøl, Denmark, coming to the United States in 1884, but at 6:00 p.m., on Wednesday, September 29th, there'll be a 150th birthday blowout at the Jensen-designed Humboldt Park Boathouse, 1359 N. Sacramento.  Park District Historian Julia S. Bachrach will lecture on Humboldt Park: Jens Jensen's Living Laboratory, and BauerLatoza prinicipal and Commission on Chicago Landmarks member Edward Torrez will talk on The Boathouse Then and Now, and his firm's Driehaus-award-winning 2002 restoration.

Meanwhile, across town the same evening, also at 6:00 p.m., Michael Van Valkenburgh, who has been chosen to design the renovation of North Grant Park, will kick off the IIT College of Architecture's fall lecture series by discussing Recent Parks and Projects in the Public Realm.

It would have been great to hear these two men square off against each other - where's Dr. Brown's DeLorean when you need it?  - but unless you're able to teleport yourself, you're going to have to chose just one.  Both events are free and open to the public

And a reminder that this Saturday, September 25th is  Preservation Chicago's fall benefit at the spectacularly restored Sears Power House, now Charles H. Shaw Technology Center, including a silent auction for such goodies as 5 days/4 nights at a luxury Californian Tower Home, Power House Photos by Darris Lee Harris, Laura Lombardi Jewelry, and an original negative of a Richard Nickel photo of ornament from Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott building.

These events are among two dozen still to come in the last nine days of this month.  Check out all the details in the September Calendar of Chicago architectural events.