Time & Life

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Time & Life Building (1968) Harry Weese & Associates, architects /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Some of you may remember the amazing photography that arrived in the weekly edition of Life Magazine, many of you have probably never even heard of Life. Time Magazine on the other hand is still publishing a print weekly of world news and events, but for how much longer in our digital age is anyone’s guess. In 1968, when construction began on architect Harry Weese’s Time & Life Building, life and times were very different.

[Time & Life Building, 541 N. Fairbanks Court, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Chicago was the location of the magazines 2,500 employee subscription department and the company was running out of room at its Michigan Avenue headquarters. Weese provided the Time/Life corporation with a structure that was well suited to their specific needs with floor spaces free of interior columns and an innovative elevator system which delivered arriving and departing employees more efficiently. Both choices ate-up less square footage inside which made for a more attractive sales pitch to the outside tenants who would occupy the upper 12 floors of the 30-story structure. The trapezoid-shaped, structural columns ringed the outside of the building and shrunk to rectangles as they neared the top while the elevators were double stacked, meaning one cab sat on top of the other which reduced the number of elevator shafts required for the building.

  [Time & Life Building, Streeterville, Chicago  /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Weese also used a new product developed by the U.S. Steel called Cor-Ten. The product was meant to rust as it aged which made for an interesting looking exterior that would require little or no upkeep. It was quite controversial with the public, and still is. Some people like it, some hate it. And the U.S. Steel corporation no longer recommends using their product in architectural situations as siding or roofing. The steel has been found to not hold up as well as everyone thought it would in the snow, ice, and acid falling rain. Plus the rust stains everything that it sits on, so USS stopped pitching it as an architectural building material 20 years ago. Needless to say there are no more employees of Time & Life working here. Life as a print publication went out of business years ago, and Time’s subscriptions are probably handled in some overseas call center. So today Weese’s rusting trapezoid columns provide the expansive interior floor space to nearby Northwestern Hospital and the central offices of the Chicago Park District.

Prentice Women's Hospital

 by: chicago designslinger

 [Prentice Women’s Hospital  (1975) Bertrand Goldberg, architect /Image & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

It’s hard to imagine that the architect of these round lobes went to Germany in the early 1930s to study at the famed Bauhaus under the tutelage of Mies van der Rohe, known for an adherence to straight lines and 90 degree angles. What’s even more amazing is that when a young Bertrand Golberg left Germany in 1934, after the rise of the Nazis, he went to school at Chicago’s Armour Institute, soon to become the Illinois Institute of Technology where the Department of Architecture would become world renowned under the directorship of his former teacher, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. And he had such a rapport with his mentor that Goldberg would serve as Mies’ translator when the German-speaking architect met Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1930s. So how did this young man with a Miesian upbringing give birth to these round towers? In 1955 Goldberg said, he “received this terrible shock when I realized that Mies was not a man of his time.”

 [Prentice Women’s Hospital and Maternity Center Building, 333 E. Superior Street, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Bertrand Goldberg burst out of the Miesian mold with his cylindrical Marina City Towers in 1959 and never looked back. The cloverleaf of Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Prentice Women’s & Maternity Pavilion continued on the curvilinear-formed theme, which allowed for an interior floor plan that eliminated the long, traditional hospital corridor with the nurse’s station stuck at one end. The outer edges of this circular plan were lined with patient rooms clustered around a central core containing the nurse’s station, floor access, and support services, which made for a better patient, and care provider, interaction. When the Institute of Psychiatry took over a floor of the building, doctors found that the design played a large role in the positive treatment and therapy of their patient population.

  [Prentice Women’s Hospital Building – Institute of Psychiatry, Streeterville, Chicago /Images & Artwork: chicago designslinger]

Goldberg’s pavilions served their purpose well. The hospital was designed to handle 3,000 births per year and by the turn of the 21st century, Prentice was handling more than double that amount. With a need to expand, and to integrate advancing technologies, Northwestern Hospital left the Prentice pavilions and opened on a new, nearby maternity and psychiatric care facility in 2007. Goldberg’s groundbreaking, concrete cylinders now sit empty. The building, under the ownership of Northwestern University, will probably be torn down in the next few years to be replaced by a research facility. Preservationists are urging the university, and the community at large, to save and preserve this unique Chicago treasure. An update. After a vote by the city’s Landmark’s Commission to designate the building, the head of the Department of Housing and Economic Development which oversees the Commission’s staff, wrote an extensive report in support of demolition. Court battles ensued, and just a few days ago, on March 22, 2013 the city issued a demolition permit to Northwestern.

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.

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.