The Babuk Report

Category: History

Other Coach Houses in Oak Park

1965 Chrysler Crown Imperial Convertible, obviously different than my Mini

Once, in a fit to buy an inexpensive though highly presentable company car for my practice, I came across a restored 1965 Chrysler Crown Imperial convertible. Trouble is, we live on that side of Oak Park where garages are accessible off of alleys; our alley surveys at sixteen feet (about 5.2) metres across. I thought that I’d wedge the thing in between neighbour’s fences. Something like that once happened to me on a trip into a McDonald’s near the New Jersey Turnpike, though that is quite a different story than what I’m presenting here. However, remember my previous posts about our cities being designed around the size of our automobiles – good example.

An alley in Oak Park

Otherwise, Oak Park has some very well kept alleys that could make great “mews” style lanes.

My previous post about Laneway Houses in Vancouver prompted a brisk walk to look at other coach houses in Oak Park. As mentioned, current Village policy has it that accessory spaces connected to garages are acceptable, water service to that accessory building is not. Further, anyone living in a building accessory to the main building on a parcel of land constitutes a second family on that parcel, or a “multi family” situation. Some very large parcels of land that historically were built with coach houses fronting onto the street have seen that land parcel subdivided over the years, so that the original coach house is officially a separate house on its own.

A recent, local newspaper story spoke of the first garage built in Oak Park. Only Oak Park would recognize such a thing, but it was built to house a fellow’s Locomobile Steamer in 1898. This was a very nouveau idea for a new fangled invention; larger houses on larger land parcels here in “distant” suburbs were more likely to have horse stables with haylofts.

Formerly stables, now a garage

There are a couple examples in Oak Park of former horse stables, with what would have been hay-lofts above. There’s undoubtedly some sort of Village ordinance in these modern times prohibiting people keeping horses on their property, though one may have as many three dogs. Fancy dog houses aside, former horse stables have either been demolished or converted into garages for cars.

An elaborate coach house, now a single family residence

There are several examples of large houses with separate “motor garage” coach houses that have access from a street. Many of these land parcels have been subdivided, so that the former coach house is a residence unto its own.

There are new garages being built in with accessory space. One client approached me about building a large garage in his backyard, an upstairs space to accommodate his 10,000 volume library collection. While it didn’t require water service, putting that much weight above a long span structure doesn’t come inexpensively. The project never got off the ground.

August 31, 2009
Barn Doors, Department Stores, Kiddie Monorails and Urban Transit Systems

Louden Monorail, 10th Floor, Meier and Frank Department Store, Portland, Oregon

Some time ago, I was at a friend’s office and noticed a photograph on his desk. It almost seemed like something ‘photoshopped’ – it showed a bright, shiny metal tube with children, buzzing overtop the sales aisles of a department store. It was real – the photo was an image of the late 1940’s of the kiddie monorail installation at the Sears & Roebuck store located in the former Second Lieter Building at the corner of State and Congress in Chicago.

Second Lieter Building, Chicago. Jenney and Mundie, Architects

Sears moved out of this building years ago. Trying to keep a building this size full of the sorts of merchandise sold by Sears at that time was an awful lot of inventory. There’s only so many Craftsman Tool products one can sell – to a market that’s a bunch of office workers, no less. When I first landed in Chicago, there was an occasion when I was walking south from the Loop to retrieve my parked car when suddenly Congress closed up with security vehicles and there came the Clinton’s Presidential motorcade, Hillary Clinton on the side of the car facing the old Sears store which made me wonder how many times she – in her Chicago youth – passed that corner before, not realizing that she would ever pass by again waving to crowds as the First Lady. Moreover, the old Sears Store – the Second Lieter Building – was a watershed commission for the architectural firm of Jenney and Mundie. It was a mammoth skyscraper cage building capable of accommodating many different uses; it came with a beautiful pattern of window openings. Chicago is a city where, in the Loop, the ground floors of buildings always have corridors going in and out; the buildings are a permeable extension of the streets. The former Second Lieter Building – or former Sears Store – or whatever one called it was a handy short cut for me on days of inclement weather. I never imagined it to have something like this kiddie monorail suspended overhead.

Louden Monorail, Basement, Herpolsheimers Department Store, Grand Rapids, Michigan

The Louden Machinery Company of Fairfield, Iowa was a late 19th century leader in the invention and manufacture of farm equipment. A hay bale stacking machine was one of the company’s first patents; one can still find plan books that describe standard “Louden” barn configurations. One of their inventions was for a sliding barn door assembly. Looking at this particular invention in abstract terms: it allowed a heavy object to be suspended off of rollers that glided on a rail… use a bit of imagination, a couple machinery parts and something capable of accommodating people and voila! – one has a type of overhead monorail system that can convey passengers.

Louden Monorail, Kresge Department Store, Newark, New Jersey

After the Second World War, the Louden Company put all of these together and started manufacturing a child sized “kiddie monorail” that was snapped up by large, urban department stores to be a prominent feature in their toy department. Kind of like a toy train one could ride. Apparently, there were more than two dozen kiddie monorails installed. Asides from installation at Sears in Chicago, I know of others at the Kresge store in Newark, NJ; at Wanamakers in Philadelphia, PA; Herpolsheimers in Grand Rapids, Michigan; at the Midtown Plaza in Rochester, NY; and at the Meier and Frank Store in Portland, Oregon; this latter example being the last installation to operate. They must have been absolutely thrilling!

It reminds me of the Alweg Company building the Monorail for the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. Operated for a profit, sold at minimal cost to the City after the Fair, it presented a concept of moving people around at a minimal cost. Why can’t we do this nowadays?

August 28, 2009
… and even more “almost Frank” kind of houses

The Flori Blondeel Houses 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.

Recent Garage and Coach House for one of the Flori Blondeel Houses

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.

Emma Martin Coach House, by Frank Lloyd Wright

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.

FLW’s Coach House on the Continental Divide

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.

August 24, 2009
A curious street in River Forest

While some like to think that history has uncovered everything that it will, some still keep finding secrets to be told.

Are they, or aren’t they…?

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.

… only Frank Lloyd Wright knows for sure.

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.

First Congregational Church of Austin, William B. Drummond, Architect, 1908

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.

August 21, 2009
A River Runs Through It, and the Malibu Supper Club

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.

August 15, 2009
More Walls Talking – Vacant Storefronts

Vacant Storefront for Rent

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

Midtown Plaza, Rochester, NY

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…

August 13, 2009
If walls could talk…

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.

August 9, 2009
Roadside Oddities in Central Illinois

There is a certain stretch of Interstate 55 leading out of Chicago that is simply a nasty stretch of road, everyone drives like madmen. Before the television show made the term famous. And there’s lots of them. A peaceful way to avoid this is to take Old Route 66, this stretch being identified as Illinois Route 53.

Some years ago, I had the adventure of actually driving the entire length of Route 66, from Los Angeles to Chicago. My brain kept ringing the Nat King Cole tune “go through St. Louis, Joplin Missouri, and Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty…” .

Central Illinois has its share of oddities, though they are different than what I’ve encountered elsewhere.. Nothing like the “throw your trash into Orbit” roadside trash bins in Manitoba, with approaching signage timed to 100 km/h, or even the sign outside the CHAT Radio transmitter on the Trans Canada Highway in Medicine Hat that pronounced “10,000 persuasive watts” that had my mind in childhood fearful of these 10,000 critters roaming around, persuading people.

Giant Gemini – note the electrical wiring in back

“Giant Gemini” at the Launching Pad Restaurant in Wilmington, Illinois is a good example. Although there have never been any rockets (that I know of) launched from anyplace close to Wilmington, this concrete and sheet metal aberration – complete with its own electrical transformer so that the face inside the helmet can light up at night.

Signage as architecture – and vice versa

My favourite is the Java Stop coffee stand in Dwight, Illinois. A creative reuse of two metal freight containers, this is a visible piece of pop art visible for miles around. Too bad that it recently closed; I hope that it finds a new owner soon.

August 1, 2009
House of Terra Cotta

Our house is somewhat like a “Chicago Bungalow” format from the 1920’s, though there are various things about it that are unlike other Chicago Bungalows. For starts, it has one of three “boomtown fronts” found in Oak Park, which disguises a full second floor. It also has a preponderance of terra cotta briq-a-braq. We embarked on research.

We found the building permit for our house; it was advertised for issuance on September 5, 1922. Though it was built as a “show-home” for this then-new housing development, its first owner was Albert Speh, a sculptor for a terra cotta company in Chicago. Glazed terra cotta was a very popular cladding material at that time. Towards the end of his career, the famed architect Louis Sullivan, whom some argue to be the “Father of the Skyscraper” even had his desk at the American Terra Cotta Company in the Chicago area. Sullivan’s last major commission, the Krause Music Store on North Lincoln Avenue in Chicago has been noted as being a compendium of many different tile profiles he developed at the American Terra Cotta Company.

In any other town, our house and its pedigree would be big news. But this is Chicago. There’s hardly a street corner in this town where a major event in the history of modern, western civilization didn’t happen.

The local historical society took interest in our house when one of their members noticed our fireplace, and came across the Albert Speh connection. As a side note, it was found that Mr. Speh’s son, Albert Speh Jr., worked to create some sort of personal database system in joint venture with IBM in the late 1940’s. Albert Speh Jr.’s name is all over donor plaques at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, he was part of the Class of 1937. A quick web search revealed the Albert J. Speh, Jr. and Claire R. Speh Foundation; a charitable foundation that donated funds to support outreach programs for youth at organizations such as WTTW-TV and the Chicago Public School Board.

Last summer, an elderly couple appeared on our doorstep. The woman claimed that her father bought the house from the Speh family in the 1950’s. She brought her wedding pictures – with our fireplace as the backdrop – as proof. She spoke of Albert Speh Sr’s work as an architectural sculptor, confirming that the fireplace, and the lions and ram’s head urns gracing our front entrance as being his works; she also thought that he had done work for Frank Lloyd Wright.

We haven’t been able to locate any other of Albert Speh Sr’s work. Based on what we have at the house, it’s quite different stylistically from what appears on Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. It is known that FLW used another sculptor, Richard Bock, quite often. We haven’t been able to confirm or deny this claim. However, at a certain time period during the Frank Lloyd Wright Oak Park Studio, many Oak Parkers worked with FLW; this isn’t entirely unbelievable.

In many other towns, this would be front page news. But this isn’t just Chicago – this is Oak Park.

July 28, 2009
Cars with Lots of Real Estate

A friend wrote in reply of my 4 July 2009 post “Big People. Little Cars. Tiny Houses. The Scale of our Neighbourhoods”, which spoke of our neighbourhoods being sized around our mode of personal transportation which, in modern day North America, tends to be our cars. To quote Alex:

“There are a couple of arguments against the move to smaller-more-sustainable automobiles in particular. I’ll coin it “larger-and-more-survivable”.

Not that I have anything against the cute and vulnerable Cooper Mini nor it’s reincarnation, the 21^st Century BMW Mini, it’s just that with the striking deterioration of our public highways, a larger vehicle with adequate ground clearance is soon to become an advantage. By the way, it strikes me that the sudden downfall of public infrastructure is very much mirrored by the downfall of print media. I have a hard time seeing my younger nephews and nieces with their passels of kinder and requisite accoutrements actually fitting into the current generation of mini-vehicles. Indeed, with three or more small children in a vehicle, your old Mini Clubman just couldn’t hold the child seats, let alone the toys, diaper bags, etc that – at least – the younger generation of my family is saddled with. I don’t think that your Mini could even hold an SUV – Stroller Utility Vehicle!”

I’ve always maintained that we design our neighbourhoods around our cars. More succinctly, we design our neighbourhoods around the prevalent mode of personal transportation. We always have – for the longest of times, that mode was on foot – walking. Not until the Machine Age / Post Machine Age has transportation become so notable in our neighbourhoods, because the type of transportation we’ve invented is so different than what we as humans are capable of on our own.

The type of neighbourhood that I live in was built around people walking to a rapid transit or commuter train station, so the buildings and landscape look the way they do to reflect this. Since then and quite suddenly, we’ve built entire cities around the automobile – the prevalent method of personal transportation currently used in North America. Not only would it be difficult to “retrofit” an automobile neighbourhood to be function “walkably”, but trying to get around one of these automobile neighbourhoods by another method becomes challenging, if not dangerous. I know of someone who drives a perfectly restored 1969 Fiat 500 with a bumper sticker that reads “…my other car is a race car…”; he drives it on the expressways of Chicago fearlessly, leaving everyone breathless. The rest of us could never achieve this talent without intense professional training!

So becomes the quandary of dodging potholes and 18 wheelers at high speeds. Part of the format of automobile oriented development is to have an abundance of supply of transportation routes. Abundant infrastructure becomes very expensive to maintain properly.

Personal. mobile spaces within a larger, very public space, both quite flambouyant – "Superdawg", Chicago IL

Now, I do have this thing about the automobile and its allure. As architecture, automobiles are highly sculptural, display the personality and identity of their owners. Automobiles are not just personal spaces with their own environmental hierarchies and transitions, but they are personal space that moves, taking its occupants from place to place while experiencing the space within, and the spaces outside – in motion, in sequence no less. It’s a very contemporary, Machine Age experience – quite exhilarating, since it removes mankind from the need to have ties to the earth.

Although Frank Lloyd Wright was apparently an automobile enthusiast. Oddly, this notion of automobile as architecture goes against his philosophy of architecture being part of the earth. Two very exciting, diametrically opposed concepts.

July 27, 2009