19 S. Wabash/Jeweler’s Building

 by: chicago designslinger

 [19 S. Wabash/Jeweler’s Building (1882) Dankmar Adler & Co., Louis Sullivan, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

If a building is over 100 years old it’s not uncommon for it to have gone through some changes. Often those changes include a series of names, and the structure located at 19 S. Wabash is now often referred to by its address. On the other hand, the building is also commonly known by a former name, the Jeweler’s Building, having once housed jewelry wholesalers and workshops since it is located in the city’s jewelry district. The only problem is that there is another prominent piece of architecture that appeared on the Chicago skyline in the 1920s which uses the Jeweler’s Building moniker. Some call the Wabash Avenue address the Iwan Ries Building, its current owner and occupant for over 60 years. Whichever name you use, what makes the building truly unique is that not only was it designed by a young Louis Sullivan for his then boss Dankmar Adler and is an example of the type of work the pair were turning out in the early years of their partnership, but it is the oldest surviving Adler & Sullivan building still standing – anywhere.

  [19 S. Wabash/Jeweler’s Building, National Register of Historic Places, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designlinger]

If you’re at all familiar with the decorative laciness of Sullivan’s organic designs, you’d never guess that the facade of this building was typical of the architect’s work in the early 1880s. Built by Martin Ryerson as a speculative commercial structure, the building was leased to the S.A. Maxwell Company, a stationery, book and wallpaper retailer. The Maxwell retail store occupied the ground floor space and used the upper, open-loft floors for storage and office space. The interior plan was pretty straight forward, but the young architect designed a facade that stood out from its neighbors, a streetscape full of Italianate columns, capitals, arches with some quoining thrown in here and there.

  [19 S. Wabash/Jeweler’s Building, Jeweler’s Row Historic District, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Sullivan’s name was not on the door of the offices of Dankmar Adler & Co. when Ryerson came to call in 1881. The young architect was still a few years away from joining Adler as a full partner in their so-to-be legendary firm, but he was already making his mark on the Chicago landscape. Together, and alone, the pair built over 100 structures in the city of which, shamefully, only 21 remain. Thankfully the Levi family, 5th generation owners of Iwan Ries and the nation’s oldest family owned tobacconists, have done their best in preserving Sullivan’s facade. Although the ground floor has been substantially altered since its original appearance in 1882, the upper stories are the oldest preserved remains of Louis Sullivan’s career.

Building Exchange

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Chicago Stock Exchange Building (1893) Adler & Sullivan, architects (1976) restoration, John Vinci, architect /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

If you ever wander past the entrance to the new Modern Wing of the Art Institute and round the corner at the intersection of Monroe and Columbus streets, you’ll find a beautifully decorated arch sitting at the edge of a garden. It’s an amazing site, kind of unapproachable, a portal that goes nowhere, somehow out-of-place, and one of the most elaborate garden ornaments you’ll ever come across. Visitors always admire the craftsmanship, while many scratch their heads and ask, “what is it, why is it here?” Some of us know the answer but a lot of us don’t. The arch originally framed the entrance of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Building which was torn down in 1971, became another spark in an igniting preservation movement, and resulted in the death of one of the the city’s notable, building-saving activists.

  [Chicago Stock Exchange Building Trading Room, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

If you’re inside the Art Institute, you will find another piece of the old Exchange Building, the Trading Room itself. The large windows now look out into a corridor that connects the museum to the school, but it does offer a little bit of natural light into openings that originally looked out on to La Salle Street. The light was probably brighter in its original location, and the room would have been filled with men shouting out trades for wheat, corn and pork bellies. Today it sits mostly vacant with very few people occupying its exquisitely decorated space - except for those who know it’s there or who stumble upon it on their way to the museum’s cafeteria. The room is often filled with diners sitting down to catered meals or nibbling hors d’œuvres while sipping cocktails for special events, which is the former trading floor’s primary function these days.

  [Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room  /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

When the room was dismantled in 1971 it didn’t look like this. The Stock Exchange had moved out long before, and by the late 1940s the room had been reconfigured to fit the purposes of Bell Federal Savings. The ceiling was lowered and ornamentation was stripped away and painted over in an extensive “modernization.” It wasn’t the first “updating” that removed pieces of Sullivan’s ornamentation from the building, and wasn’t the last. By 1969 plans were in the works to just demolish the whole thing and construct a new, efficient high-rise building on the property. After the loss of Adler & Sullivan’s Schiller Building/Garrick Theater for a parking garage in 1961, the emerging preservationist movement kicked into high gear to try and stop the loss of another great architectural landmark. But official landmark designation efforts couldn’t overcome the interests of the property owners, so demolition began in the Fall of 1971. An agreement was reached to save pieces and sections of the old building and while photographer and activist Richard Nickel was documenting the building during demolition as well as rescuing fragments, he fell into a sub-basement in April 1972 and was killed. His friend, colleague, and fellow building-saver architect John Vinci, led the search for his friend’s body. Vinci also oversaw the complete restoration and reconstruction of the Trading Room inside the Art Institute which was revealed in 1976.

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.