Humboldt Park Receptory & Stables

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Humboldt Park Receptory & Stables (1895) Frommann & Jebsen, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

When Frommann & Jebsen designed a stable and visitor center complex for Chicago’s Humboldt Park in 1895, people knew what a stable was, but visitor center was a head scratcher. So the building was called a receptory – as in reception or receiving space for guests – with an attached stable area for the guests horses and buggies. And in a gable-ending, cap-topping advertisement for the dedicated horse and buggy portion of the structure, the designers configured a wagon wheel and horse’s head to seal the deal. Apparently they didn’t see the need to do something similar to indicate that the building was also served as a rest station for bipedal mammals of the human variety.

  [Humboldt Park Receptory & Stables, 3015 W. Division Street, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The Humboldt Park neighborhood had originally been settled by Scandinavian immigrants who were followed by German-speaking migrants. At the time the city’s Park Board found picturesque designs charming and romantic so Frommann & Jebsen looked to the old country for a fanciful interpretation of recognizable architectural features from the homeland, which the Board labeled “German country house.” The sweeping roof lines, towers, gables and timbering provided just the kind of whimsical decoration the commissioners were looking for to enhance the appearance of a very utilitarian building providing horse stalls, canoe rentals and comfort station amenities for park patrons.

  [Humboldt Park Receptory & Stables, City of Chicago Landmark  /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

 The corner turret housed the office of park superintendent, Jens Jensen who went on to became Chicago’s premier landscape designer. Ironically, when Jensen became the head of the entire park system in 1905 he ordered the demolition of many of the park’s picturesque architectural structures in favor of a more organic and natural landscape. Perhaps he had nostalgic feelings for the old stables because under his tenure as general superintendent four Humboldt Park buildings built prior to the receptory were demolished. They were replaced with Prairie School era designs which were much more in keeping with Jensen’s redesign of the parks.
By the 1970s the building looked a little worse for wear with it’s aging asphalt shingled roof, falling down gutters and boarded up windows. The building hadn’t been used as a patron’s facility in decades and became a place to store machinery and supplies. After a devastating fire in 1992 which burned nearly 40% of the structure, the exterior underwent an extensive renovation in 1998, returning Frommann & Jebsen’s design back to its 1890s appearance. The receptory now welcomes visitors of the Institute of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture.

 

Interior Remains

 by: designslinger

 [Auditorium Annex (1893) Clinton J. Warren, architect /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

In a world that’s constantly changing, especially in the hospitality industry, its nice to find a remnant that brings us back to a time long gone. When the shareholders of the Auditorium Building got wind that a competitor was going to build a new hotel directly across Congress Street from their troubled investment, the group purchased the site and commenced construction of an Annex. One hundred and eighteen years later, the still operating hostelry contains hints of its once grand lobby.

  [Auditorium Annex – Congress Plaza Hotel, 520 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago  /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Although the smoked glass panels in the arches, the chandeliers, sconces, as well as the furniture are from a more recent era, there remain elements of the hotel’s glamorous, glory days. It is somewhat remarkable that after several changes in ownership and a series of names, The Congress, the Pick Congress, and today’s Congress Plaza Hotel, that anything of the old hotel survived a number of modernizations. At the beginning of the Second World War the military actually took over the building to provide temporary housing for soldiers. During their tenure they covered marble floors with linoleum for easier maintenance and turned the ballrooms into mess halls.

  [Congress Plaza Hotel, Historic Michigan Boulevard District, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

After the military left and after a few more upgrades and modernizations, some of the stunningly beautiful surfaces of tile, marble and bronze survived though other parts of the building weren’t so lucky. One of the most spectacular interior spaces – in a city of spectacular interior spaces – the hotel’s Pompeian Room is now preserved for posterity in photos and old postcards.

Hotel Annexed

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Auditorium Annex – Congress Hotel (1893) Clinton J.Warren, architect; (1902/1907)Holabird & Roche, architects /Image & Artwork:chicago designslinger]

When the owners of the recently opened Auditorium Hotel building learned that a long term lease had been secured for a chunk of property across the way for the construction of a new hotel, they lept into action. Although the Auditorium looked like one building from the outside, the 1889 Adler & Sullivan design was actually made-up of three components; a 4,300-seat auditorium, an office building, and a hotel, with the office rents and hotel rates meant to offset the cost of maintaining the expansive and expensive theater. So to help secure their multi-million dollar investment in the mammoth structure the partners bought-out the owner of the lease across the street and constructed the Auditorium Annex.  

 [Auditorium Annex – Congress Hotel, 520 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Designed by Clinton J. Warren, the exterior of the Annex paid homage to Adler & Sullivan’s design across the way. And although not an exact duplicate, Warren’s Michigan Avenue facing porch did mimic the Auditorium’s. An elaborate, large, arched door sat directly under the second story veranda which gave the building a beautiful distinctive entryway, lost in an updating modernization completed some 50 years ago.

  [Congress Hotel, Historic Michigan Boulevard District, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The hotel grew over the next 6 years, first with a small 4-story addition in 1898 that masked a large power plant constructed behind it. In 1902 architects Holabird & Roche were called upon to design a 4-bay, 13-story addition which grew by another 8-bays in 1907, completing the hotel we see today. But not quite as the owners had planned. As the building marched southward down Michigan Avenue, large single-family mansions built by wealthy Chicagoans as far back as the 1850s were demolished to make way for the hotel. But that didn’t happen with the very last parcel at the northwest corner of Michigan and Harrison Street.

  [Congress Plaza Hotel, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The aqua-paneled box at the southern edge of today’s Congress Plaza Hotel was once the site of the Jonathan Dunham mansion. When Dunham died in 1893 he left the house to his widow and children but stipulated in his will that the property could not be sold or leased until the death of his last surviving child. The Dunham’s youngest child Mary Virginia Dunham didn’t die until 1928 at age seventy-nine, after which the house was demolished and the property became a parking lot. In 1947 a 2-story building housing a restaurant was constructed on the site with a 99-year ground lease from the Dunham heirs. The Envoy Hotel was put-up on the small parcel in the late 1950s, and eventually the owners of the old Annex now the Pick-Congress Hotel, took possession of the corner lot.

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.

Judge Tree's Studios

 by: chicago designslinger

[Tree Studio Building & Annexes (1894) Parfitt Brothers, architects; (1912) Hill & Woltersdorf, architects, annex; (2002) Daniel P. Coffey & Associates, architects, restoration and rehabilitation /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

 Judge Lambert Tree was a member of an old Chicago family. And he built this building on the west lawn of the Tree homestead, which had been in his wife’s family – the Magie’s – since 1840.

 [Tree Studio Building, 601-23 N. State Street, 4-10 E. Ohio Street, 3-7 E. Ontario Street, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The Judge and Mrs. Tree were on their way to Egypt in 1894 with a stop-over in New York when they saw a building on Madison Avenue and 56th Street built to house artist’s studios. It made quite an impression on the couple. They were both big supporters of Chicago’s Art Institute and partons of the arts, so the Judge got in touch with the architectural firm Parfitt Brothers and told them to draw-up plans for a similar building that the Trees would construct back home.

 [Tree Studio Building & Annexes, National Register of Historic Places, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The Tree property filled one square city block and their large, sandstone mansion stood at the eastern edge. So the Judge divided the plot of land in half from north to south and at the western edge built the Studio Building. It would have two-story loft spaces on the second floor with large windows facing the street and skylights to capture the sun’s north light with retail establishments on the ground floor catering to the arts community. He also set-up a trust which would help defray the cost of the upkeep of the building in an attempt to keep rents low for his almost perpetually, financially struggling, artistic tenants. 

  [Tree Studio Building and Annexes, City of Chicago Landmark /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

After the Judge died in 1910 his house was demolished and the eastern portion of the plot was sold to the Shriners fraternal organization. They built Medinah Temple, a large meeting hall/auditorium right up to the north/south dividing line that divided the Tree property in two. The trustees of the Tree estate filled in the space behind the original Studio Building to the Temple’s back wall with an annex on Ohio Street in 1912 and Ontario Street in 1913. The annexes created a private courtyard which became a little green oasis in a neighborhood that was changing from a quiet residential neighborhood to a busy, noisy, congested commercial and retail district.
The Shriners took an option on the purchase of the Studio in 1920 but let it lapse. Then in 1956 the organization finally purchased the Studio and Annex Buildings in order to maintain control over the old Tree city block. By 1998 with membership falling, the Shriners put the block on the market and for a while it looked like the Studio Building would be demolished for a high-rise residential building replacement. The preservation community waged battle, and after the Mayor made it known that he wanted Medinah Temple spared, a deal was reached with developer Albert Friedman and the buildings were saved, rehabilitated, and painstakingly renovated under the supervision of Friedman and Coffey & Associates architects. The Tree subsidies ended decades ago, so although the studios are still available, the market rate rentals are beyond the means of many a struggling artist.

 

The Newman Triplets

by: chicago designslinger

[Gustav R. Newman Residence, 2430 N. Orchard Street, Chicago (1895) Chicago, John Van Osdel II, architect /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

When you look at these three houses sitting side-by-side on Orchard Street, there is something about them that looks very much the same yet different.

  [Charles Newman Residence, 2424 N. Orchard Street, Chicago (1895) Chicago, John Van Osdel II, architect /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

They were designed in 1895 by architect John Van Osdel II for the Newman brothers - Charles,   Gustav and John – proprietors of the Newman Brothers Piano Company, and built, all at the same time, on three adjoining lots. While Van Osdel matched the design of each exterior, he changed the kind of stone used to face each house front. Perhaps this was Van Osdel’s way to reflect the fact that while these three structures and their owners were related, the houses, like the brothers, had different personalities.

  [John Newman Residence, 2434 N. Orchard Street, Chicago (1895) Chicago, John Van Osdel II, architect /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

By 1910, Gustav and John were dead and Charles’s nephews, and his brother’s heirs, ousted him as president of the company. According to Mrs. Gustav, the nephews “feared that their uncle would close up the business and not do the right thing by the boys.” So although personal harmony between the houses of the Newman clan didn’t last that long, Van Osdel’s harmonious Chateauesque design have survived the test of time.