2430 N. Lakeview, Chicago

 by: chicago designslinger

 [2430 N. Lakeview, Chicago (1927) Rebori, Wentworth, Dewey & McCormick, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Have you ever heard the expression, A rose is a rose is a rose ? They are the eight most famous and most quoted word group that author and art collector Gertrude Stein put together during her long, repetitive word, writing career. By 1934 Stein had achieved a certain amount of fame and notoriety when she and her partner Alice B. Toklas took their very first plane ride on a cross country journey from New York to Chicago to visit Toklas' good friend Bobsy Goodspeed. The couple were on a visit from their home in France touring the U.S. giving talks and lectures, and arrived at Goodspeed's swank Lincoln Park address for a prolonged stay while Stein worked in Chicago with composer Virgil Thompson on their production of Four Saints in Three Acts: An Opera to be Sung.

  [2430 N. Lakeview, Chicago, 2430 N. Lakeview Avenue, Chicago/Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Gertrude and Alice were wined, dined, and spent their nights sleeping in one of the   bedrooms in Elizabeth (Bobsy) Fuller Goodpseed's posh, top-floor duplex apartment at 2430 N. Lakeview Avenue that overlooked the park. Charles was a wealthy, Ohio industrialist which gave Bobsy the cash and cache to indulge in cultural philanthropy. She was the hostess with the mostess, fun-loving, witty, intelligent, and cultivated the culturally inspired. She took her interest in the arts seriously, serving as the president of the Arts Club of Chicago for several years. The Goodspeed's were one of the original shareholders and occupants of the high-rise, cooperative apartment building, built in 1927 on the site of the former Henry K. Chapin mansion. Chapin sold his property to a syndicate made up of wealthy city residents who were looking for luxury accommodations in a luxuriously designed building. As part of the deal, Chapin took over a single floor, while the rest of the building was cut in half and 16 duplexed, 17-roomed apartments were offered to the remaining owners.

  [2430 N. Lakeview, Chicago, Lake View, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Architect Andrew Rebori of Rebori, Wentworth, Dewey & McCormick, took one of the apartments for himself, and in keeping with the tastes of his rather conservative neighbors, designed an exterior with sedate, graceful, Georgian Revival detailing. The apartments themselves were finished-out per each owners requests, and the Goodpseed's chose architect David Adler, a practitioner of perfectly proportioned  classical architecture and exquisite sweeping staircases, to design their interior.
It wasn't many years after Gertrude and Alice went back to their home in France that Charles died suddenly while he and Elizabeth were spending the winter of 1947 in Arizona. The widowed Mrs. Goodspeed married widower and wealthy New York industrialist Gilbert Chapman in 1950 and left Chicago for New York City, where she died in 1980 at the ripe old age of 87.