Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago Awaits Reconstruction

Last month while I was visiting Chicago I stopped by the Pilgrim Baptist Church at Indiana Avenue and 33rd Street in the Bronzeville neighborhood. Built in 1891 as the Kehilath Anshe Ma'ariv Synagogue, this Prairie School masterpiece was designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler. In January 2006, a devastating fire struck the building, leaving nothing intact save the limestone and brick walls. The photos below show steel bracing against the street-facing walls. The bracing was required by the Chicago city government to prevent collapse into the public right-of-way. Engineers have determined that collapse is unlikely since the walls remain sound.

Although the church has yet to be able to start reconstruction, they have made some progress with raising money and securing the structure. In 2006, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich pledged $1 million in state funds to the church school (since the state can't directly fund the church) to rebuild. Earlier this month, after his administration gave the money to the wrong school, the governor pledged an additional $1 million on top of the previous pledge. Last year, Pilgrim Baptist chose architects Johnson & Lee of Chicago and Quinn Evans of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to design the reconstruction of the ornate Sullivan building. How much of the intricate interior gets rebuilt is undetermined, but the exterior should be brought back fully to original appearance.

Elmslie and Sullivan Exhibit Opens With Talk by Tim Samuelson

Over 150 people attended the opening.
On Friday, January 25, the Architectural Museum at the City Museum opened its new exhibit Elmslie and Sullivan to a packed house. Architectural Museum founder Bruce Gerrie curated the exhibit. While featuring terra cotta ornament from the buildings of George Grant Elmslie, once Louis Sullivan's chief draftsman, as well as those of Sullivan himself, most of the exhibit incorporated ornament from the Morton and Thomas Alva Edison public schools designed by Elmslie that were built in Hammond, Indiana during the 1930s. The Hammond school district demolished these schools in 1991, but recovered much of the terra cotta. Some of the terra cotta ended up in use in new school buildings, but most has ended up in storage under the city's ownership. The last exhibition of the terra cotta in the region was in 1998 when University of Illinois professors Paul Kruty and Ronald Schmitt organized an exhibit at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The highlight of the evening may very well have been Tim Samuelson's rousing welcoming speech. Tim is the Cultural Historian for the City of Chicago and one of the leading scholars of Sullivan and the Prairie School. He also is a gifted orator with a compelling imagination. Tim Samuelson feels architecture, and he has that rare gift of being able to articulate that feeling. His talk began with a summary of the architectural theory of Louis Sullivan and led to a celebration of Elmslie, a quiet man who was the subject of somewhat disparaging remarks in Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography. Wright was Sullivan's chief draftsman before Elmslie, and the two shared an office for years. Seems that Wright didn't see much beneath Elmslie's cool exterior. Fortunately, Tim does and shared with the crowd his understanding of Elmslie's singular vision -- a vision powerfully manifest in the Hammond schools and one on par with Wright's.

Elmslie's unique terra cotta designs show a mind engaging both Sullivan's principles and the machine age architectural principles of the Art Deco style. And Elmslie's buildings reveal the conscious effort of one designer to reconcile organic lines with geometric mass. Some of Elmslie's work, like the Old Second National Bank (1924), almost heads off the rise of Art Deco by creating an American alternative firmly rooted in both the ideals of modernism and Midwestern regionalism.


Ever-animated Tim Samuelson speaks at the opening reception.
In all, the opening demonstrates the strong continued interest in the work of Elmslie and the Prairie School as well as the large audience for architectural programming in St. Louis. While the exhibit opening was supposed to last until 9:00 p.m., people were still viewing it and conversing with each other until well past 11:00 p.m.

The exhibit will be on display through December 2008 to anyone purchasing a City Museum admission ($12). More information here.

St. Nicholas Hotel Briefly Returns

Photo by Michael R. Allen.

In the past two weeks, construction of the Old Post Office Plaza downtown unearthed some fragments of a Louis Sullivan masterpiece lost twice, the St. Nicholas Hotel. The hotel stood at the northwest corner of Eighth and Locust streets downtown between its construction in 1893 and its demolition in 1974, surviving an unfortunate remodeling in 1903. Since 1974, its site has been paved and maintained as a parking lot. Salvagers picked the building of recognizable Sullivan ornament, but apparently other parts stayed on site.

When workers broke through the asphalt, they unearthed a mess of structural steel, brick and other parts of the old hotel. The city had an unusual and unanticipated archaeological site, offering potential clues on the elusive details of the St. Nicholas. Unfortunately, the potential opportunity came and went without any real investigation. Steel was loaded out to be scrapped, and more solid debris was either removed with other fill or left in the ground. The good news is that the excavation was fairly shallow, and surely more of the building survives beneath the plaza. Should the plaza ever be less than successful, and it future land use reconsidered, we may have another chance to mine the lot for traces of the prairie master's hotel.



Photo courtesy of Landmarks Association of St. Louis.

The eight-story St. Nicholas Hotel was defined by a dramatic side-gabled roof, large center arched entrance on Locust and projecting oriel bays on both street-facing elevations. Like the Wainwright and Union Trust buildings, the St. Nicholas featured a monochrome exterior palette accentuated by terra cotta featuring Sullivan’s imaginative geometric and organic motifs. The roof profile was somewhat unique among Sullivan’s designs. A supposed fire led to conversion of the building to office use in 1903, when the gabled roof and arched entrance were removed and four floors added according to plans by Eames & Young. Renamed the Victoria Building, the hotel survived in diminished form for another seventy years. (Read more about the St. Nicholas in Patty's Ramey's article Louis Sullivan and the St. Nicholas Hotel, St. Louis, MO.)

Sullivan-Designed Getty Tomb Destroyed by Fire

by Dan Kelly (Special to Ecology of Absence)

(Chicago) Early Monday morning, as firefighters played canasta nearby, the tomb of Carrie Eliza Getty burned to the ground in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery. Investigators are perplexed as to how the solid limestone and bronze-gated mausoleum caught fire, but chose not to pursue an inquiry, suggesting that, perhaps, the corpse of Ms. Getty was operating a blowtorch. The fire also defied the laws of physics by leaping into the night sky and descending upon and consuming the Sullivan-designed Ryerson tomb several hundred yards away. Traces of fire damage and spots of urine were likewise found covering Sullivan's tomb nearby.

"It's a shame, really. I guess. I mean, I don't especially care." said local developer Vic Sharkbastard as he and a surveying crew measured the 20 foot area formerly occupied by the Getty Tomb for a future, 500-unit condo. "But, hey, these things happen." Sharkbastard then cleaned the mud off his boots by scraping them against the gravestone of photographer Richard Nickel.

"Chicago has to go forward, it can't go backward," said Mayor Richard Daley. "If you're going backward, you're not going forward. People like the fires. They're pretty. It's nice to pack a lunch and watch the fire. It's a tragic loss of some of the city's history, but not really tragic, because, you know, you're going forward with the fire and the lunch and not backward." Mayor Daley then unwittingly on accident and without malice sat down on a dynamite plunger, the force of his ass starting a chain reaction of blasts, causing Carson Pirie Scott, the Auditorium, the Gage group, and the Krause Music Store facade to implode. "Oopsy. Heh heh heh," said Daley.

Fire Strikes Adler & Sullivan's Harvey House

Yet another Adler & Sullivan building burns in 2006, scarcely a week after the Wirt Dexter Building fire. This time it's the George Harvey House, built in 1888 and the last remaining frame structure designed with either Louis Sullivan or Dankmar Adler involved. The house is a total loss.

The owner of the home, Natalie Frank, had discussed demolition earlier this year, meeting with opposition from preservationists. She eventually announced plans to renovate the much-altered house using the full original blueprints Richard Nickel rescued from a previous owner.

The Chicago Sun-Times has the bad news here.

Lynn Becker has commentary here.

Demolition Started on Chicago's Wirt Dexter Building

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that emergency demolition of the Wirt Dexter Building began today. The building, designed by Adler & Sullivan and built in 1887, burned in a huge fire on Tuesday.

Try to stanch the pain of tragedy by reading Carl Sandburg's poem "Skyscraper." The poem invokes the golden age of American tall buildings, started by rapid architectural innovation in which the Wirt Dexter Building was an integral part. The roots of the American skyscraper pass back through what is now a blackened wreck and what will next week be nothing but rubble. Although the building is falling, it was one of many that -- through narrow piers, wide windows, pronounced height and embrace of the metal frame -- proclaimed to Chicago and the world that a new soaring architectural form was being born in America. That legacy remains vibrant, even as the Wirt Dexter building dies a senseless death.

Another Fire Hits a Sullivan Building

Tragedy strikes Chicago with yet another devastating fire at a building designed by Louis Sullivan. This time, the damaged building is the 1887 Wirt-Dexter Building on Wabash Avenue in the Loop, a formative work by Adler & Sullivan. The Wirt-Dexter Building possesses a lightness of form with vertical emphasis that Sullivan would develop further with the Wainwright Building in 1891. The building also has a unique exposed system of iron piers on its rear elevation, long before the expressed forms of Mies Van Der Rohe's buildings and almost a century ahead of the postmodern exposed structure fad.

There is no conclusive report on structural integrity after the fire. However, press quotes from Chicago Transit Authority head Frank Kruesi seem to indicate that the building, which abuts an El line, may be demolished soon.

Read more about the fire and the building in an incisive essay by Lynn Becker, Chicago's leading architectural critic.

The Wirt-Dexter Building has been vacant for nearly twenty years, and there was little political will to find a new use for it. There may be Louis Sullivan key chains at the Chicago ArchiCenter gift shop, but that is no guarantee of the safety of any work designed by his hand. In today's Chicago, time and time again we see that no pedigree guarantees protection of a historic building.

Louis Sullivan at 150

Louis Sullivan was born in Boston on September 3, 1856. Admirers have launched Louis Sullivan at 150, a series of tours, lectures and other events that celebrate the Sullivan sesquicentennial. The festivities happen in Chicago, although there is no stopping folks in cities with other Sullivan buildings of some importance of coordinating celebrations.

Part of the Sullivan at 150 program is a three-day symposium October 13-15; a tour of the interior of the Charnley-Persky House led by John Vinci, who oversaw the home's restoration; and, most impressive although mostly coincidental, the completion of the replication of the cornice on Sullivan's 1899 Schlesinger & Meyer Department Store Building (now the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building).

Chicago May Lose Another Adler & Sullivan Building

Just in case anyone thought that Chicago learned anything from the Chicago Stock Exchange debacle in 1972 (or the Pilgrim Baptist Church fire earlier this year), Lynn Becker brings us news of yet another threatened Adler & Sullivan building. In an article in the latest Reader (ah, if St. Louis could have a weekly so fine!), Becker writes that the owner of the George Harvey House -- probably the sole surving frame building by the firm -- wants to tear it down for a condominium building.

Anniversary of Richard Nickel's death passes again

Thirty-four years ago day, Chicago photographer, historian and salvager Richard Nickel was killed when several thousand pounds of the steel and concrete guts of the Chicago Stock Exchange Building fell on him. Nickel was inside of the building -- designed by Louis Sullivan -- on the first floor, having come to the building to rescue a stair stringer and a few other items after repeated warnings from wreckers to stay away. Nickel stepped forward a few years too far ahead of the preservation game to have had things easy. He saw destruction around him, especially of the works of the now-lauded Sullivan, and set out to at least document condemned buildings through photographs. Then he made the fatal discovery that he could recover parts of these buildings that would otherwise never be seen again. Motivated only by a love for preserving knowledge, and often privately very bitter, Nickel took over 11,000 photographs and saved countless pieces of architectural ornament, most of which now belongs to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Nickel rarely made a dime from his efforts, and never held a steady job except for the one that he assigned himself. He was somehat reclusive and shunned public attention, instead exerting influence through relationships with writers, architects and historians whom he thought were sympathetic to his lonely cause.

Nickel's work demonstrated that systematic efforts for photographic documentation and architectural ornament recovery were as important to architectural history as theory and research. While his amateur salvage efforts pale in comparison to those of St. Louis' own Larry Giles, at the time Nickel started saving parts of Sullivan buildings in the 1950s scholarly interest in architectural salvage was nonexistant. Nickel blazed his own path, and influenced architectural historians and preservationists that have come since his departure. Without Nickel, so much that I hold as certain may not even exist at all -- buildings and ideas both.

Remember the St. Nicholas?

I just found this article in the online version of the May-June 2005 issue of the newsletter of the Antique Doorknob Collectors of America:

Louis Sullivan and the St. Nicholas Hotel, St. Louis, MO by Patty Ramey

It's heavy on doorknob information, which is good because most people probably don't know much about Sullivan doorknobs.

The legacy of Richard Nickel

Today at the Chicago Cultural Center I attended a slide-show presentation of Richard Nickel's photographs of the buildings of Adler and Sullivan, given by Ward Miller of the Richard Nickel Committee. The slide-show included lesser-known color photographs of such notable buildings by the firm, including the Auditorium Building, the Ann Halstead Flats and the Jewelers Building. I was awed once again by the sensitivity to architectural detail that Nickel imparted in each of his images. He articulated buildings in another language than architecture, and thus made them greater than they were when he found them.

As a fitting summation of the day's introspection, I found this essay online tonight: Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground by Dan Kelly. Kelly traces minor buildings and fragments of Chicago buildings by Adler and Sullivan -- the ones Frank Lloyd Wright discouraged Nickel from including in his unpublished Complete Works of Adler and Sullivan -- and concludes:

"...the most minor buildings that construct the city's neighborhoods are always "missed" when they're gone, most often because no one bothered to notice them when they were still here. It follows that preservation isn't just about landmark status or collecting museum-quality ornamental scraps; it's about noticing what builds a neighborhood into a neighborhood. The city's blandest buildings can possess rich histories."

Indeed. This insight had to be what drove Nickel to keep working, and it's what drives this blog. Hopefully, we will help people avoid the "missing" of buildings and, with more effort, the losses themselves.