Ernest Hemmingway came from Oak Park; he wrote about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.
I’m wondering about the running of the lions in Chicago….
Here, we have the Lion of the Art Institute of Chicago, guarding the main entrance on Michigan Avenue, Facing Adams Street…
And here, we have a lion crafted by Albert Speh named “David”, guarding the front door of a bungalow house in Oak Park…
As follow up to a previous post about William Street in River Forest, the street with an entire block of houses that might – or might not – be designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the three Flori Blondeel Houses in Oak Park look very Frank Lloyd Wright – especially in the way they relate to each other – but aren’t. They were designed by another architect who worked under FLW for a time in the Oak Park studio, John van Bergen.
Van Bergen was a prolific designer of prairie school houses, in neighbourhoods all across Chicagoland, including Oak Park.
The Blondeel houses are all virtually the same, the middle house being built without the same front “sunroom” of the other two, to give an overall spatial focus.
As witness to how easy it is to still generate prairie school massing and detailing, that same middle house recently sprouted a large addition in back – difficult to photograph from the street, but sporting many of the same stucco and wood trim details found in the original house. One fault that only a purist would find with the new addition is that it is much larger than any small prairie school house, and takes up much more of the lot. This house also has a well detailed coach-house in back (again, remember my previous posts about coach houses), though the double garage door and wooden fence are dead giveaways as to its real age.
My favourite prairie school coach house? It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Emma Martin, adjacent to the Peter Fricke House facing Iowa Street in Oak Park. Emma Martin acquired the main house – also designed by FLW – and proceeded to commission FLW to design several additions, including the garage and coach house, and a pavilion. The garage and coach house is visually connected to the main house by a garden wall, the coach house comfortably resting atop to complete the visual composition.
I always muse that the Fricke / Martin house – at least according to signs posted throughout Oak Park – sits atop the “Great Continental Divide” – on the middle of the prairie! It looks nothing like the Kicking Horse Pass (Canadian Rockies) or the Rogers Pass (Selkirk Range) that I can recall.
During a recent Scottish Motor Club event, a visitor asked the question “what cars are there are still British made and British owned?”
We rattled off all sorts of British companies and marques with disappoint results. MG isn’t. Jaguar and Rover are both owned by the Indian company, TATA. For the moment, Vauxhall is owned by General Motors, but part of the German company Opel, which is being courted by both Canadian and Russian concerns. MINI is part of BMW. Aston Martin is Ford, but like Vauxhall, that will probably change. It was all quite confusing, but made for a good conversation.
The only two British made automobiles by British owned companies we could muster are both fairly exotic.
Lotus – a company with race car heritage producing small, lightweight, fiberglass body speedsters with powerful engines that send one making an impression on their seatbacks whenever the accelerator is depressed, and;
Bristol – a company that produced legendary fighter planes during the Second World War that retooled to produce motorcars that are luxurious, powerful and thrilling, all at once.
The Lotus marque – though produced in limited numbers – is sold through a worldwide dealer network, while the Bristol is sold directly by the manufacturer, their only “showroom” of sorts is a storefront in London. There is far more demand for Bristol cars than are cars manufactured; test drives are out of the question.
While some like to think that history has uncovered everything that it will, some still keep finding secrets to be told.
The houses of the 700 block of William Street in River Forest seem different from their large, revivalist neighbours. The two dozen or so small, simple houses are… Prairie School. But “Frankly” Prairie?
It’s a mystery. Many neighbours are claiming that their houses are long lost designs of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The houses were built just prior to 1910. It was a ‘colourful’ time in FLW’s personal life and career; some major commissions were going through his Oak Park studio. Purportedly, he was spending time away; he spent time at the Banff Springs Hotel prior to his commission for the Banff Pavilion in association with Francis C. Sullivan. Something doesn’t seem to suggest that he would want to do two dozen simple houses – anonymously – when others were beating down the door for his services.
Apparently, the FLW Foundation Archives carry no record of these houses.
The FLW Studio spawned many students – virtually every architect, designer and craftsman in Oak Park at the time claimed to have worked for him. William Drummond, Dwight Perkins and Walter Burley Griffin are well known architects who come to mind who worked under FLW in the Oak Park studio; EE Roberts and John Van Bergen may not be as well known architects, but were every bit as talented.
My thought – they were done by students of Frank Lloyd Wright. The “Prairie School” – a phrase later coined by University of Toronto historian H. Allen Brooks – by 1910 had become excessively formal and rigid and, well…anticipatable. It’s the bane of any contemporary Oak Park architect trying to do any sort of work in this town. It’s so easy to recreate. Since the River Forest houses are smaller, it may be an indication of a high style finding its way into more and more popular markets.
So there ya go.
Years ago, the Chicago-born rock group “Chicago” had a sit single “Saturday, in the Park”. It described what was seemingly an idyllic weekend day in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. These kinds of days happen all the time in Chicago, witness this last weekend.
Friends from Toronto called the night before. They had just flown in and hoped to meet up. Their plan was to take a leisurely morning stroll around Graceland Cemetery, completely unknowing about the Chicago Cubs baseball game next door at Wrigley Field, or even the Air and Water Show. I warned them, and they though that this was unusual. We agreed to touch base later in the day.
The Illinois Saint Andrew Society had their wrap up meeting of the Highland Games Committee, over breakfast. From my vantage point as Chairman of the British Car Show, we talked a lot about the weather, the flooded fields, and the success of the show despite nature’s wrath.
The Province of Nova Scotia invited me to attend their private reception at Irish Fest in Milwaukee. The Nova Scotians are awfully nice folks, even for a prairie kid like me. Though I really like Nova Scotia, I must admit that I’ve never been there. My parents were great fans of the CBC television show, “Don Messer’s Jubilee”, broadcast from Halifax, perhaps that counts. I hope that they’ll invite me back for their reception at Celtic Fest in Chicago.
More than a million people descended on the lakefront for the Air & Water Show. I kept thinking back to our visitors from Toronto, who were taking the same el line that those million people would be taking to the show, as well as all the crowds partaking the Cubs game; again, on the same el line. Game Day at Wrigley is kind of like a giant street party. Apparently, there’s a baseball game that happens during the party, the throngs are simply out having a good time.
Heard back from my visitors, they chose to spend the afternoon inside conditioned air at the Art Institute of Chicago. Good choice. They acknowledged my advice about the crowds at Wrigley.
It was one of the few dry days we’ve had in a while, and despite everything going on during a typical weekend (wasn’t it Lollapalooza last weekend?) the mundane things never let up. Yard work and my tomato plants were finally showing signs of ripening.
We managed to meet up at the Burnham Pavilions at Millennium Park. Last time I was there was at the dedication reception, coincidentally held during the nasty storm that reeked havoc on the Highland Games. Although the pavilion designed by UN Studio of the Netherlands was complete, the Zaha Hadid pavilion was not. It was now, and the time to see these pavilions are at night.
Reynar Banham once described a concept of “the architecture of energy” – not counting every last watt or joule of energy and finding ways to conserve, but rather defining architecture by energy. The Burnham Pavilions at night – even the rest of Millennium Park – are great examples. The Bean was shining profusely in the dull light. Both Burnham Pavilions were kaleidoscopic in nature. The Crown Fountain was alive with shadows of children playfully running through the water on a hot, muggy night.
I’m still taken by the UN Studio’s Burnham Pavilion. Despite being designed in Europe, it’s a very prairie display of the earth and the sky, and the city that grew in between.
I used to fly out of Gallatin Field in Belgrade, Montana quite a bit as a student. During my terms of office with the American Institute of Architecture Students, Gallatin Field became a regular point of departure / point of entry for trips to the east coast and other points. My alma mater, Montana State University, is located in Bozeman, Montana, and Bozeman is located at the very end of a broad but contained plain, the Gallatin Valley. The Bridger Range is at Bozeman’s doorsteps, so the only location flat enough, and with enough flat land on either side to support aircraft approaches is a town several miles away – Belgrade.
Belgrade’s a small town, out of a Hollywood western movie. The Malibu Supper Club used to be there before they had a fire and it burned down. It had a wooden grain elevator that was a seed cleaning plant and a water tower. They had a ‘walk up’ style mexican restaurant that served food on plastic plates.
Gallatin Field was a small airport with tremendous airline connections, the only airport at the time in the Northwest Orient Airlines route system that didn’t have a control tower. One year, the MSU “Fighting Bobcats” football team made it to a national championship of some sort. The Bobcat Booster Association chartered a DC-10 to fly out of Gallatin Field: waiting until the wind was blowing in the right direction, it barely made it over the mountains. The terminal building at Gallatin was a comfortable place; it even had a wood burning fireplace. Peter Fonda – a local – used to have a morning routine of breakfast at the airport cafeteria where other locals would fly in to partake of the runway view over coffee and huevos rancheros with the Bridger Mountains in back. One night, a group of us came across Mr. Fonda in the airport lounge – the cocktail waitress told us that she was ecstatic having just served Jeff Bridges, and complimented this fellow (actually Peter Fonda) on his movies. Perhaps Gallatin Field was the perfect hangout for a Hollywood star wanting to remain anonymous, or at least mistaken for Jeff Bridges.
Then Hollywood moved to Bozeman, more so after the filming of “The River Runs Through It” by Robert Redford. Glenn Close’s sister bought the Leaf and Bean Coffee Shop on Main Street in Bozeman; they used to sell a Celestial Seasonings tea blend called “Evening in Missoula” that I never drank. Apparently, the airport terminal was expanded to have a third gate, I haven’t heard if the fireplace, or the cafeteria, or the lounge still exist; it finally has a control tower, however.
This morning’s edition of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle featured a slideshow presentation of Air Force One – on the tarmac at Gallatin Field! The television networks were abuzz with a Town Hall meeting held inside a hanger – a hanger probably meant for Piper Cubs, maybe the occasional Lear Jet, but not Air Force One.
It seemed like the end of the age of innocence. After this event, it’s quite doubtful that Peter Fonda – or anyone else from Hollywood living near the Gallatin Valley in Montana – could ever frequent the airport ever again and be mistaken for Jeff Bridges.
The current economic doldrums have brought out all sorts of vacant storefronts – not just a tell tale of the economy, but a fascinating take on urban anthropology.
At first glance, they would indicate that the economy is down, that the activity that previously existed at that location fell victim to a recession. Any retail leasing agent would be quick to point out that marginal locations die first, and that the economy is really in bad shape if the vacant storefronts syndrome were to hit the more sought after locations and properties.
At a deeper investigation, one may wonder if the types of commercial activity that went on in any given vacant storefront is sustainable economically, and if things picked up, would this type of activity resurface?
The concept of selling goods changes presentation and architectural trappings often. In North America, we’ve seen a progression of:
Open Air Markets
General Stores
Specialty Stores
Department Stores
Stores arranged along a main street, accessible on foot
Stores arranged along commercial highway strips, accessible by car
Open-air shopping plazas, approached by car, then accessed on foot
Mall-ified pedestrian street, which closed a street to all but pedestrian traffic, to recreate the open-air shopping plaza concept in an urban setting
Climate controlled, enclosed shopping mall in a suburban setting, with anchor tenants (usually department stores), approached by car but accessed on foot, where every day is always a pleasant 72° Fahrenheit (20° Celsius) regardless if it’s winter or summer
The climate controlled enclosed shopping mall even saw an urban version, closing off streets and creating“superblocks” with inward focuses. While the classic examples may be Eaton Center in Toronto, the Galleria in Philadelphia or even the ZCMI Center in Salt Lake City; a more iconic version may be Rochester’s Midtown Plaza. Opened in 1963, it virtually recreated a controlled suburban environment in an urban setting, complete with a promotional “courtyard” featuring the “Clock of the Nations” that commemorated one of twelve different countries every hour and an elevated “kiddie monorail” made by the Louden Machinery Company of Fairfield, Iowa – also found in department stores like Kresge in Newark, NJ, Sears on State Street in Chicago and the Meier and Frank Department Store in Portland, Oregon. (Let’s save the kiddie monorails for another entry, I do write about transportation devices from time to time)
And I’m not even touching on further developments like festival markets (Faneuil Hall in Boston, the Inner Harbor in Baltimore), power centers (name your suburb) and big box retailers (even real cities are clamouring to get big box retailers).
Who knows what the next step will be. Web based e-commerce seems to be picking up, but my guess is that retail – as in going out and shopping – is too much of a social event to be relegated to a computer screen.
The bigger question is something like, who knows what will happen to all this vacant space, and what sort of impact will this redevelopment have on the visual image of our cities…
Yesterday, I attended the US / Canada “Pay the Freight” Rail Infrastructure luncheon presentation, presented jointly by the Metropolitan Planning Council, the Consulate General of Canada and the Union League Club of Chicago, where the luncheon was held.
The Union League is a tremendous venue for events like this – centrally located, spacious facilities and displaying the largest privately held art collection in the country. Not to mention that its present clubhouse, opened in 1926, was the product of Chicago’s most prolific Canadian architect, William Bryce Mundie. Mundie – born, schooled and articled in Hamilton, Ontario – was the successor to the “Father of the Skyscraper”, William LeBaron Jenney in his practice. Mundie was also a well known member of the Union League; a bit confusing, since the Union League is a patriotic American organization tracing its roots back to the Union vs. Confederacy. To this day, one needs to be American to join. My account of how Mundie trained a young architect coming through the Jenney and Mundie office by the name of John Atchison, and how Atchison ended up in Winnipeg as the only local architect with the wherewithal to do “skyscraper” buildings during its pre First World War building boom caught the interest of the Assistant Deputy Minister of Transport Canada.
While transportation and rail networks in North America have traditionally been oriented east to west, economic realities see more north to south linkages and railway networks are being reoriented to reflect this reality.
The accounts of Canada’s Pacific, Central and Atlantic Gateways – all of which involve Chicago – are all very industrious. I mentioned to a consular friend about my family’s Canadian Pacific Railway background, the response being that at one time, some 40% of Canadians worked for a railway. That much of Canada’s economy depended on transportation. The gateway projects reflect this importance.
A further presentation compared the amount of the US Gross Domestic Product spent on transportation now, and in 1979. That amount has been cut in half over this period of time; directly attributable to more and more products being shipped by railroads rather than by trucks. If just 10% of what currently is shipped by trucks were to be put on a train, the amount of greenhouse gas and energy reductions achieved would be quite astounding. This reduced amounts of required transportation costs reflected by railway efficiencies become free to be channeled elsewhere in the economy.
Not a bad deal…
Otherwise, the luncheon was a great occasion to catch up on old acquaintances and create new ones.
In stripping wallpaper off of the walls in the study, what did we find but this inscription written on the plaster:
“March 16, 1937 16% above zero”
1937 is when Albert Speh Jr. graduated by Fenwick High School. March 16 would be the day before St. Patrick’s Day – a very big deal in Chicago, no matter what one’s parentage is. But 16% above zero? – I’ve no idea.
At the gym today, the only parking spot available for my 1977 Mini Clubman Estate was next to a 1970 Buick LeSabre four door Sport Sedan. I was dwarfed! Still there as I was leaving, I couldn’t even see around it when pulling out. My thought was “…gee, am I glad that this isn’t a Buick Electra, which was even bigger…”
Driving away on North Avenue, what happened to be a couple cars ahead in the next lane but a bright blue 1964 Buick Electra convertible. Absolutely enormous. But, no-one was turning heads to look at it – everyone was turning to look at my Mini !
The Electra finally turned off of North Avenue onto a side street. People still kept pulling up alongside my Mini, asking questions and ask questions like – is it legal to have the steering wheel on that side?…