Marquette Building

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Marquette Building (1895) Holabird & Roche, architects (2008) renovation & restoration, Holabird & Root, architects /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Peter and Shepherd Brooks were two brothers from Boston who had made a fortune in shipping by the late 1870s and were looking for places to invest their money. They found an opportunity in Chicago real estate. The city was growing by leaps and bounds in the years following the 1871 fire, and the Brooks’ believed that the city would one day be the largest in the nation. They assembled a team of agents, builders and architects who would go on to construct some of Chicago’s most famous buildings, including Holabird & Roche’s Marquette.

  [Marquette Building, 140 S. Dearborn Street, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

The Marquette was not the first project Brooks and company had put together, but William Holabird and Martin Roche were relatively new team players. The brothers and their Chicago agent Owen Aldis, had been using the powerhouse architectural firm of Burnham & Root, but had switched to H&R, including asking the team in 1892 to design an addition to Brooks-Burnham-&-Root’s 1891 Monadnock Building. Apparently pleased with their new design team, Aldis asked them move to join the real estate team on their next project, the Marquette.

  [Marquette Building, National Historic Landmark, Chicago /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

At the time, the architects, like many of their Chicago-based peers, were experimenting with new building technologies and design innovations which transformed the city and the world of architecture. One of the firm’s first experiments, the Tacoma completed in 1889, helped to propel architecture into the 20th century. In the Marquette, they moved farther into the future by supporting the entire building with a steel frame covered in a minimum of fire-proof required masonry, hinting at the framework beneath and allowing for wide open spans of glass, which became one of the benchmarks of modern construction and design. It also provided the architects with a system of construction that kept the office flush with commissions for the next decade-and-a- half. Utilizing the 3 basic components of the classical column’s base, shaft and capital, and applying that concept to the building  facade, the Marquette sits on a base articulated by a heavy, guilloche-patterned terra-cotta, with a wide expanse of a uniform repetition of window openings, topped off by a heavy, column-capitalizing cornice. The Marquette won accolades of praise and was heralded as a landmark by journals and newspapers of the time, and became one of the buildings that defined what later critics and architects came to call, the Chicago School.

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.

 

Thalia Hall

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Thalia Hall (1892) Faber & Pagels, architects /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Thalia is the Greek muse of comedy and poetry, and as such her name has been inscribed above the door of many a theater. Her first appearance in Chicago wasn’t on this building, but it is her last, and she has stood proudly on the corner of 18th Street and Allport in the city’s Pilsen neighborhood since 1892.

  [Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Pilsen came together as a community in the 1870s immediately following the big fire of 1871. The first settlers were immigrants from Bohemia, today’s Czech Republic, and the area came to be called Pilsen after Boehmia’s second largest city, Plzen. The story goes that Faber & Pagels designed the theater building, which also contained apartments and retail space on the ground floor, after an old opera house in Prague. But it could have also been inspired by Adler & Sullivan’s 1888 Auditorium Building, a multi-use theater project (although on a much grander scale) but with heavy rusticated stone work, large arched openings and carved limestone decoration. Faber & Pagels also did a group of single family homes in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood around the same time that used similar rusticated stonework as a design feature. The hall itself was home to Bohemian actor Fran Tisek Ludvik’s theater company for 15 years and provided the ideal gathering space for community events including the Jednota Ceskych Dam, a women’s organization who in 1895 listened to Hull House’s Jane Addams(ova) [ova added paternity to her name] give a talk about child reform.

  [Thalia Hall, City of Chicago Landmark /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

After the Second World War, and the G.I. bill providing easy access to mortgages in outlying suburbs, Pilsen’s ethnic make-up began to change. The original Bohemians, who were later joined by Poles, all began to depart for the greener lawns of suburbia and Pilsen became home to a large Mexican-American community, many of whom were displaced by the destruction of their neighborhood to make way for the University of Illinois’ Chicago Campus. Pilsen became a gateway for Mexican immigration into the Midwest region, and eventually grew to include citizens from other Central American countries. Today the area is undergoing another change as more and more  young, and often non-Hispanic residents move into the area, which has caused tensions with the existing community fearing a Gringo-gentrification invasion. But the current owner of Thalia Hall is looking to cater to the desires of this next generation of newcomers, converting many of the small, original apartments into larger loft-style units and opening an upscale Italian eatery in the ground floor space. As for the old theater, it has been vacant for decades but plans are in the works for refurbishing the currently crumbling hall.

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.