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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Preservation Scorecard: Wreckers 2, Violinists 0

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.

So it goes.

New Geographies 5, Shirley King for CAF, new items for logjam week on the April Calendar!

Yep, still adding items to the April Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

This Thursday, April 18th, the publication of New Geographies 5 - The Mediterranean: Worlds, Cities, Regions and Architectures will be marked with a panel discussion at the Graham with editor Antonio Petrov, architect Clare Lyster, Sean Keller of IIT, Hashim Sarkis of Harvard and Stephen J. Ramos of the U of GA.

It's one of those logjam evenings that will also include 99% Invisible's Roman Mars at Unity Temple, Erin Feher on The Architectural Rise of San Francisco at the Driehaus, and Paul Stoller of Atelier Ten at AIA/Chicago.

We've also learned that this Friday's Chicago Architecture Foundation Gala, Architecture is Art, at the Radisson Blue at Aqua, will feature, in addition to dinner, dancing and an auction, a performance from Shirley King, who will perform with the Blue Road Band.  About the same time, Preservation Chicago will be hosting it's own Spring fundraiser at the Union League with live music, an auction, and a presentation by Lost Chicago author David Lowe.

As if that's not enough, there's also the final days of the American Planning Association's 2013 National Planning Conference, an AIA/Chicago panel on the Chicago Infrastructure Trust, Michael Webb of Cooper Union at UIC, the principals of Project Projects at the Art Institute, UrbanWorks' Patricia Natke talking about Pilsen at CAF lunchtime on Wednesday.  

Hashim Sarkis returns for a lecture, The World According to Architecture at Wishnick Hall, IIT , a Landmarks Illinois presentation on the restoration of Hairpin Lofts at the Chicago Cultural Center and a DePaul University Real Estate Center symposium on Chicago's New Eastside.

Next Saturday the 20th sees a symposium at Evanston's Block Museum, The Modern Capital: City, Utopica, or Spectacle?, on the occasion of the opening of its new exhibition, Drawing the Future: Chicago Architecture on the International Stage, 1900-1925.

And believe it or not, that's not all, not by a long shot.  Check out all the great items and get the who/what/where's on the April Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Handsome Allstate, Looking for Good Hands

click images for larger view

What started as a simple post on the former Allstate building on Chicago's west side has turned into a full-up consideration of one of the most compelling architectural cities in the city.  This is the first of two parts . . . 

It's a place where you can read in architecture the entire arc of the 20th century, the former Sears Roebuck complex on Chicago's West side.  It's the story of how an architectural juggernaut arose out the kind of ruthless innovation that builds cities, of its rise to dominance, decline, and fall, and of the unsteady phoenix that now struggles, outcome still uncertain, to rise out of abandoned district time had passed by.

photograph: Preservation Chicago

Perhaps the best place start is today, at the 1949 Allstate Headquaters Building.  Located just south of the Eisenhower at 3245 West Arthington, it was the last major structure to be constructed at the complex, and nows stands empty and decaying.  A few weeks ago, Preservation Chicago named it one of its 2013 Chicago Seven list of ‘most endangered buildings’. 

Everyone remembers that the Prudential Building was first  skyscraper erected in Chicago after the Great Depression.  That was in 1955, but the first multi-story building constructed in Chicago after the beginning of World War II was actually the ten-story Allstate headquarters, completed in 1949 to a design by the firm of Carr and Wright.

Never heard of it?  Don't be surprised.   Out of sight, out of mind, in a Sears complex that grew out of the residential North Lawndale neighborhood.  It's not a trophy building like the Prudential, or Inland Steel, which followed downtown in 1956, but even in its current, derelict state, it's a beauty.  Not steel and glass, but concrete and two-tones of brick, mediating modernism with the classically-styled original buildings constructed at the Sears complex nearly half a century before.

The brick and heavy rectangular massing gives the Allstate a real bulk, while the continuous strips of metal-framed double-hung windows impart a counterpoint of lightness, the brick banding floating above bands of windows that wrap around and dematerialize the corners, holding the entire design in a kind of visual tension that's very powerful.

According to Preservation Chicago, the building has been vacant for years.  It's a good thing it's no longer controlled by Allstate, spun off by Sears as a separate company in 1995, because it would probably already be nothing more than a vacant lot.  In  2012, Allstate announced plans to demolish a half-million square foot building on its South Barrington campus.  The year before, it demolished a 430,000 square foot building in Prospect Heights. Back on Arthington, a 2005 plan to convert the building into 238 condominiums went nowhere.

photograph:  Preservation Chicago

Recently, Crain's Chicago Business reported that the Chicago Public Schools was looking to sell off their current headquarters, the 1907 D.H. Burnham and Company Edison Building, across from Mies' Federal Center.  The Allstate, close to downtown and both the Blue and Pink lines and multiple bus routes, would be a great solution, with Rahm dipping into his infrastructure trust for the rehab.

The Allstate headquarters was the last major building constructed at the Sears complex, a city within a city that helped build the City of the Century, and define the American Century.  Looking at today's Sears - both complex and company - it's hard to imagine that in its time, it was both Amazon and Wal-mart, and as dominant as either.   The true origins of Amazon are not Jeff Bezos, but Julius Rosenwald.  Everything Amazon has done, Sears did a century before, with far less sophisticated technology, with an interface, not of a website, but of catalogues.   

more tomorrow . . .

Will 130 years of history and faith be destroyed? Friends of Historic St. James rally to forestall wrecking ball.

click images for larger view (recommended)

 This Sunday, March 17th, at 10:45 a.m., Friends of Historic St. James will be holding a vigil to support saving this historic Chicago church.  2942 S. Wabash.

On Tuesday, Preservation Chicago released the 2013 edition of its annual list of the Chicago 7 Most Threatened Buildings. As always, it's an interesting mix of the well known - the Lathrop Homes and Century and Consumers Buildings - and neighborhood finds: the Harry Weese bank in clearing, Hotel Guyon, the former Meyers Drug Store in Lake View and the 1949 Allstate Headquarters Building in Lawndale.  We'll probably be writing more about these soon.

But perhaps the most endangered structure on the list is the majestic 1880's St. James Church, at 2942 South Wabash.   If the Chicago Archdiocese's proceeds with its published plans, demolition will begin this coming Monday.  The majestic organ will be dismantled, the church bells stripped and salvaged.  Within two months, nothing will remain of the historic structure but rubble and memories.

The relationship between the Archdiocese and architecture has been profoundly schizoid.  Time and again, often led by immigrant parishioners,  it has willed into being incredibly beautiful church buildings that are moving symbols of timeless devotion.  Let a neighborhood change, or membership dwindle, however, and the Archdiocese loses all faith in a better future.  Troubled churches are sacrificed to a real estate operation so ruthless it makes Sam Zell look like a gross sentimentalist by comparison.  Tear it down.  Sell it off.  Demolition is the perfect political tool.  It ends the argument with a finality that precludes any future appeal.

photograph: David Schalliol

Not all unneeded churches merit saving, no matter how old.  St. James does.  The congregation dates back all the way to 1855, and construction on the "new" church back to 1875, just four years after the Great Fire.  The parish was unusually prosperous, to the point where it was debt-free by 1895. The Gothic Revival church designed by Patrick C. Keely, the architect of Holy Name Cathedral, includes  a 200-foot tall bell tower that provides a visual and aural anchor for the surrounding community, even as IIT to the south attempts to cut it off with chain link fencing.  The church originally also had Tiffany windows, destroyed in a 1972 fire.  Although services have not been held in the building for over two years, the now white-painted interior, as seen here in the photos by David Schalliol, still exudes a serene dignity.  The Archdiocese claims to have been spent $1 million on studies proving that  the building is not worth saving, and have worked to speed the process along by letting it deteriorate unabated. 

photograph:  David Schalliol

In a last-ditch effort to save the church from destruction, a group of parishioners has formed Friends of Historic St. James Church, with both a website and a Facebook page.  The group disputes the estimate of $12 million to rehabilitate the church that has come from the Archdiocese, which plans to replace it with a new building on a site a block east on Michigan Avenue, at a cost that has varied in different media reports from $4 up to $7 million.

Photograph: David Schalliol (detail)

In point of comparison, the Archdiocese was reported by the Chicago Tribune to have gone $6 million into hock to repair structural problems with the roof of Holy Name Cathedral. Work also included repairing damage from a fire that took place during the project, whose $8 million in costs was covered by insurance.  Fading gold leaf was replaced with “a fresh 23-caret coat.”

Old St. Patrick's

Time and again, the Archdiocese has had to be dragged kicking and screaming by its own parishioners to take actions that have ultimately proven to be in the church's own best long-term interests.  An under-utilized church today often can see its fortunes completely reversed in just a couple decades.   As recently as 1983, Old St. Pat's was down to four registered members.  Today, it's a thriving center of a rapidly redeveloping West Loop.  In act of astounding myopia, the Archdiocese in 1987 announced its intention to destroy the 1857 Holy Family Church on West Roosevelt.  Fortunately, a popular outcry persuaded them otherwise, and, today, the church unites the strip malls and condo towers of the New West Side with Chicago's long spiritual history.  Last December Holy Family received relics that are said to be fragments from Jesus's manger.

Holy Family, Roosevelt Road

God is eternal; man, mortal.  If you want to be cynical, you could well remark how the the lavish beauty of the great churches is, at least partially, as much a self-tribute to those who built them as they are a devotion to God.  Still, as all our lives are transitory, it it these buildings and these spaces that provide a spiritual continuity down through generations.  In the civic realm, they are the glue that binds communities together, the physical presence that gives each neighborhood its distinctive character. 

The area in which St. James finds itself is poised for a resurgence.  Recently, Greg Hinz Crain's Chicago Business reported on The hottest urban center in the U.S. - Chicago's mega-Loop, the vital, economically resurgent district that's expanding beyond the old downtown to take in adjacent, often previously distressed neighborhoods.  St. James is within the next potential wave.  What a civic impoverishment it will be if that next cycle of expansion finds only a vacant lot where a 130-year-old  historical landmark stood until only recently - a loss for future gentrifiers to be sure, but even more importantly for long-standing current residents and parishioners, robbed of their heritage.

Photograph: David Schalliol

 By the Archdiocese's own numbers, the choice at St. James is between spending $4 to $7 million for a new church, or spending $5 million more to save a historic building that's been a beacon of spirituality across 15 decades representing over two-thirds of Chicago history.  The spiritual damage inflicted by destroying this singular building far eclipses any short-term savings, and it cannot be undone.

This Sunday, March 17th, Friends of Historic St. James will be holding a vigil to support saving their historic church.  2942 S. Wabash, 10:45 a.m.

Just Added: Tenorio's I Speak of The City; plus Pecha Kucha, Grete Marks, Keck and Keck and Chicago Seven Bingo - still more for March!

We're still adding items to the March Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Specifically, Thursday the 7th at UIC's Great Cities Institute, teacher and author Mauricio Tenorio's I Speak of the City will provide a “multidisciplinary tour of Mexico City [focusing] on the period 1880to 1940, the decisive decades that shaped the city into what it is today.

It's one of over a dozen great events this week, including, but not limited to, Pecha Kucha Chicago Volume #25 tonight, March 5th, at Martyr's, Joan Gand talking about Keck and Keck tomorrow the 6th, lunchtime at CAF,  and in the evening a series of panel discussions Urban Documentaries and Social Change at MCA.

Thursday the 7th, Mel Buchanan lectures on Grete Marks: When Modernism was Degenerate, at the Second Presbyterian Church, and Preservation Chicago offers up its Chicago Seven Bingo fundraiser at Lottie's Pub.

Check out the 40+ great items still to come on the March Calendar of Chicago Architecture Events.