Charles H. Wacker Houses

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Charles H. Wacker Houses (1873/1884 remodel) /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The name Wacker is very familiar to most Chicagoans, and tourists often chuckle when they hear the word before realizing that there is no “h” between the w and a. But much of Chicago wouldn’t look the way it does today without the resolve of Charles H. Wacker’s implementation of the Burnham & Bennett Plan of 1909.

  [Charles H. Wacker Houses, 1836 & 1838 Lincoln Park West, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Although Charles became famous as a result of his 17 year tenure as the first head of the Chicago Plan Commission, and therefore having the double-decked street named after him, he became wealthy running his father’s brewery operation. And it was papa Frederick Wacker who built the house that only child and son Charles, would grow up in and eventually own.  

 [Charles H. Wacker Houses, Old Town Triangle National Historic District, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Frederick got into the Chicago brewery business in the 1850s, but he was plagued by ill health and frequently left the city on extensive European rest cures. In 1873 after the Chicago Fire, Wacker built a house in the northern section of the burn district, but left in 1876 when he took his wife and son on an extended three year trip to Europe. Since he was not a healthy man, rest cures on the Continent were not uncommon in those days for the people who could afford them. Charles was only 20 years old when the journey began in his father’s homeland of Germany, with a long stays in Switzerland, Vienna and Paris. By the time the family came back to their Lincoln Park home in 1879, Frederick was on the mend and Charles was off to a career as a grain merchant with a Chicago trading company.
Frederick died in 1884 and Charles took over the brewery business. He remodeled the house on what was then North Park Avenue as well as the small cottage that originally stood behind the main house but had been moved from the rear of the lot and into the property’s side yard. He took-up residency in the big house with his wife and children and his mother-in-law moved into the cottage next door. As the neighborhood changed and original owners moved on, both homes were sold. In 1950 Otto Forkert bought Charles’ ornately carved and decorated Italianate dwelling and spent nearly 20 years preserving what was left of the original. In 1964 he purchased the house next door and once again the entire property was under the same ownership. Forkert eventually sold the big house, and in 2008 Amy Forkert sold the former mother-in-law cottage.

Arcaded Away

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Auditorium Building (1890) Adler & Sullivan, architects /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Although heralded today as one of architecture’s great masterpieces, the Auditorium Building barely survived the 20th century. The project never met the financial windfall its investors had hoped for, and by the 1930s the association that had constructed the largest privately constructed building in the nation at the time, filed for bankruptcy. But even after surviving one demolition threat after another, the building underwent an alteration that significantly altered its original design when an “arcade” was cut-through the southern bay of the ground floor in 1952.

  [Auditorium Building, 430 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The pedestrian arcade was carved out of the building because of a street widening plan first  proposed by the city in 1941. Congress Street ran along the south side of the massive granite structure which had grown from its original 38-foot-width to an expanded 62-feet. By the time the city jumped on to the federal government’s super-highway building program in the early 50s, the highway connecting artery ran right along the edge of the building’s southern facade. This meant that there was no longer a pedestrian sidewalk between the building and the street so the city created an open pedestrian arcade that cut through the first floor, and paid the building’s new owner Roosevelt College $500,000 for the right-of-way, which helped the school offset the cost of their recent purchase of the property.

  [Auditorium Building, National Historic Landmark, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

While the building was saved, the Auditorium lost one its more famous interior spaces which ran 65 feet along Congress Street. The long, narrow Oak Bar & Room, packed to the rafters with Louis Sullivan’s exuberant foliage in wood and plaster was removed for the sidewalk overhaul and was hauled away along with a portion of the Auditorium Theatre’s ticket lobby. You can see the line of the theater’s old, cast iron entry canopy in the rust stains and mortar-plugged holes that still remain imbedded in the grey, granite stone blocks.

Supreme Reprieve

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Auditorium Building (1890) Adler & Sullivan, architects /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

It stands proudly as one of brightest stars in Chicago’s architectural firmament. For scholars and laymen alike, the Auditorium Building represents the team of Adler & Sullivan at their best and is heralded as a masterpiece.

  [Auditorium Building, 430 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Chicago had never seen anything like it. But by the time the 350-room hotel and commercial office building with one of the most beautifully decorated and detailed auditoriums ever constructed was finished in 1890, the multi-million dollar investment was already on its way to becoming an anachronism. Unfortunately the massive structure was never the financial success its shareholders had dreamed it would be, and from almost the day of its dedication, the hotel portion of the ground breaking multi-purpose building was already considered obsolete. For one thing, it didn’t include private baths which would soon become all the rage in an upscale hostelry, and because of the amount of space eaten-up by the theater, there weren’t enough hotel rooms to help pay the mortgage and there weren’t enough offices to help float the note.

  [Auditorium Building, National Historic Landmark, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

As early as 1910 the Chicago Auditorium Association, the consortium that owned the structure, began exploring the idea of demolishing the theater to make room for more hotel rooms, and even turned to Louis Sullivan for ideas. A concept arose in the late 1920s which called for the demolition of the entire building and replacing it with a new modern high-rise. But the Association didn’t own the land on which their building sat, and with a lease that ran until 2085, (yes you read that correctly – 2085) the trusts and hereditary estates that owned the land had the right to say no to the demo. Inevitably law suits were a-flying and the case ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1931 the Court ruled in favor of the property owners, and the building got its first reprieve. The Association went bankrupt, the property owners took possession and came up with their own plan to demolish the structure. But when they found out that the building would cost more to demolish than the land it was sitting on was worth, Sullivan’s design got another reprieve.

  [Auditorium Building – Roosevelt University, National Register of Historic Places, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The Auditorium Building and its acoustically perfect theater finally closed its doors for good in 1941. Ironically not because of sad state of things but because of a loss of power – not political – but heat and electrical. In 1893 the Association had built another hotel across the street designed by architect Clinton J. Warren called the Annex, and in 1898 a state-of-the art power plant was constructed at the southern end of the Annex building which provided power to the Auditorium via a tunnel under Congress Street. By 1941 the folks who owned the Annex were not owned by the Auditorium group and they cut-off the power supply because of long overdue bills. With no heat and electricity, Adler & Sullivan’s long-neglected architectural wonder had no choice but to close-up shop. In 1942 the City of Chicago took over and turned a portion of the hotel into a temporary housing and service center for the military, and the theater was converted into a bowling alley for the servicemen. When the war ended it looked like things were really over for the Auditorium, but a very active and dedicated group of citizens worked hard at trying to preserve the theater, and therefore the building. In 1947, the new, one-year-old Roosevelt College bought the structure along with the remaining leaseholds, and for the first time in its history the building its property owner were one and the same.

La Salle Street Church

 by: chicago designslinger

 [LaSalle Street Church (1882) Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The LaSalle Street church building has survived the widening of the street in the 1930s, which obliterated the front facades of most of its neighbors, the changes of the ethnic and racial make-up of the neighborhood, and several different congregations who have used the facility as a house of worship.   

 [LaSalle Street Church, 1136 N. La Salle Street /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

It all begins in the early 1880s when the Scandinavian immigrant community built Trinity English Lutheran Church on LaSalle Avenue. They moved from their previous home at Dearborn and Erie Streets into a neighborhood of German and Irish immigrants who didn’t participate in Sunday services at Trinity since the Irish were Catholic and the German Lutherans attended their own churches. As those ethnic groups began to assimilate and prosper and started an exodus out toward neighborhoods farther away, they were followed by other nationality groups and people of other races.

 [LaSalle Street Church, Trinity English Lutheran Church /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger] 

The building became Christ Church of the Deliverance and soon thereafter was called the Elm-LaSalle Bible Church. The formidable Moody Bible Institute campus was located further south on LaSalle Street and the church building was located north of the old Trinity parish church. Moody took over the facility and ministered to the recent wave of Italian immigrants who had moved into the area. In 1942 one of the biggest changes the neighborhood would undergo through in its long history was brought about by the construction of the massive, new government housing development being built nearby which bore the name of Francis Xavier Cabrini an Italian immigrant herself, and the first American citizen ever proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church.
By the 1960s Elm-Street Bible Church was located in a community undergoing dramatic racial changes. Cabrini-Green’s population had changed from a housing project primarily made up of low-income whites to even lower-income blacks, and LaSalle Street became a dividing line between the poor minority community and the upper-income white community to the east in Chicago’s Gold Coast. There was a struggle within the conservative church hierarchy between those wanting to reach out to the minority group and those opposed. In the early 70s Moody turned over the reigns of operation and the building itself, to a new pastor and the remnants of the majority white congregation. The outreach didn’t work too well at first since the African American community distrusted the intent of the newly named LaSalle Street Church whose membership by now had dropped to 125 people. I was in high school at the time and our choir director was the music director of the church and we participated in the musical portion of Sunday services now and again. Soon after taking over the reins the new pastor, Rev. William Leslie, formed a consortium of neighboring churches to create the Chicago-Orleans Housing Corporation in an effort to build a large residential development a block west of the church for moderate to low-income families as a bridge between Cabrini and LaSalle’s neighbors to the east. It took a while, but in 1977 Atrium Village opened its doors and still provides housing today while Cabrini-Green has been almost completely demolished and has nearly disappeared.
The 128-year-old church building has survived, and provides a home to a progressive congregation ministering to the local community despite the ravages of time, weather,street expansion and political upheaval.

Sexton School

 by: chicago designslinger

[James A. Sexton Public School (1882) Chicago, IL. /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

In 1882, the Chicago Board of Education needed a high school on the north side of the city to accommodate the city’s expanding student population, and this was the result. One of Chicago’s first high schools, this beautiful Victorian Italianate structure is also one of the oldest public schools still standing in the city, and the first in a line of remarkable school buildings constructed by the Board over the next 40 years.   

 [Sexton Grammar School, 160 W. Wendell Street, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Originally known as the North Division High School, the name was changed in the late 1890s to the James A. Sexton High School. Sexton was born in Chicago in 1844 and enlisted in the Union Army at the beginning of the Civil War when he was just 17 years old. He was a Colonel by 21 and was almost always addressed as Colonel Sexton rather than Mister, until the day he died. After the war ended Col. Sexton eventually made his way back to Chicago where he opened a stove manufacturing business which made him a man of means and politically well connected. He was appointed Postmaster of Chicago by U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, and served for 5 years. Continuing his association with all things military, he became Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. The GAR was the largest veterans organization in the U.S. at the time, made up of men who had served in the Union Army during the War Between the States. The Colonel happened to be in Washington D.C. when he died in 1899, and his body was brought back to his La Salle Street home, located around the corner from the school.

 [Ruben Salazar Bilingual Center /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

By 1900 Chicago had annexed itself into a much larger city and in the process acquiredseveral large high schools while its grammar school aged population was exploding. So the Board of Education spent $15,000 for upgrades on Sexton High and it became a grammar school. Unfortunately in the winter of 1901 the building was closed by the principal when the school ran out of coal to fire the boiler which provided heat for the classrooms. The local coal yard owners were owed money by the Board and they weren’t willing to deliver their heat source until the past due bills were paid. The issues of school funding, or lack thereof, seems to have been a problem even back then!

 Ninety-two year later, the building was renamed the Ruben Salazar Bilingual Grammar School and Center. Salazar had been created in the early 70s to help children whose primary language was not English and the Center moved into this building in 1993. Salazar was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and was hit by a police gas cannister and killed in 1970 during a National Chicano Moratorium March protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The organization was formed and named in his memory.

 It’s pretty remarkable that a 128-year-old school building has survived the ravagesof time, the wear and tear of thousands of children, and can still look so good. The sturcture was rehabilitated in the late 1990s, and it’s a testament to the commitment of the Board of Education that the rehab was done with a sensitivity to the historic nature of the building. One of the best examples is in the windows. Instead of bricking in the openings and putting in smaller standard issue replacements which had been done in other older schools in years past, the new windows were built to modern specs within the old framework. Col. Sexton would have no problem recognizing the place.