A 1929 advertisement for the Congress Arcade. Credit Billiards Magazine

1920s Chicago was the unrivaled capital of early twentieth century bowling culture and was home to dozens of recreation centers, or “recs,” multi-story urban bowling and billiard halls that took indoor sports out of the saloon and installed them in settings more akin to movie palaces.  These early “palaces of pleasure” set the standard for recreation architecture across the country and were another few brilliant feathers in the cap of a city already known for its trailblazing architects and builders.  The Congress Arcade at 2047 N. Milwaukee Avenue, completed in 1925, is one of many great examples of Chicago’s recreation center building heritage that survive today.

The Congress Arcade (then-called Mill Bowl) c. 1975. Photo credit – Dr. Jake’s Bowling History Blog

With an eight-bay four-story steel frame housing nearly 50,000 square feet of sports and entertainment space, the Congress Arcade was one of Chicago’s largest 1920s recreation centers.  Located just northwest of the Western and Milwaukee station of the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railway Line’s Logan Square Branch (later the Chicago Transit Authority Blue Line), this large structure was among many new 1920s commercial developments facing the busy thoroughfare of Milwaukee Avenue. (The image of the Congress Arcade at right is from J.R. Schmidt’s fantastic bowling history blog, found at http://bowlinghistory.wordpress.com/ )

Chicago’s Congress Theater (1926). Photo by author

The Congress Arcade was the creation of proprietor Frank E. Spengler who in advertising for his new venture declared that “in all the world there is no recreational building like this.”  The Congress Arcade went up  nearly simultaneously with the Congress Theater (2135 N. Milwaukee Ave.), the Byzantine Revival style Fridstein & Co.-designed movie palace that opened in 1926 one block northwest along Milwaukee Avenue.  Though we don’t know the names of the architects who designed Congress Arcade, there is no doubt that they attempted to translate the scale and opulence of their movie palace neighbor, facing the Arcade with the same kind of ornate terra cotta skin.

An Adamesque window surround at Chicago’s Congress Arcade (1925). Photo by author

The terra cotta façade of the Congress Arcade was crafted to resemble ashlar masonry and nearly matched the cream-colored terra cotta of the nearby theater.  The Arcade’s second floor windows and the spandrel panels below them were decorated with terra cotta medallions, urns, and swag reminiscent of the work of eighteenth-century English brother designers Robert and James Adam.

The Congress Arcade originally displayed a large marquee sign that stretched the height of the three top floors over the Arcade’s main entrance.  Collecting under the metal canopy beneath the great marquee, visitors stepped inside the main lobby and checked their coats.  Further in they found a counter for soda and lunch, and a café for finer dining.  Upstairs there were women’s parlors and restrooms, and a ladies’ beauty shop.  There were also men’s dressing and locker rooms and a barber shop.

After enjoying a trim or a bite, visitors were summoned by a state-of-the-art public announcing system to a reserved alley or pool table upstairs.  In all, there were twenty-four bowling alleys and twenty-four billiard tables distributed on two upper floors.  Boxing matches were also common events at the Congress Arcade; though documentation is unclear, these large public events were probably held on the top floor where spectator galleries could more easily be accommodated.

Chicago’s Congress Arcade today. Photo by author

Taking out full-page advertisements in Bowlers Journal and Billiards Magazine, Congress Arcade proprietor Frank Spengler announced to sportsmen across the country that “there are many larger recreation establishments but none combine the beauty of design, harmony of color and modern detail of class found in this building.”   Rarely had words like “beauty” and “class,” and been used to describe a bowling or pool hall, but at the Congress Arcade, Spengler raised the stakes for recreation centers on the West Side and across Chicago.

Its original bowling and billiards halls may be gone along with its marquee and its ornate top story, but most evenings, night owls still come out in droves to the Congress’ resident clubs and restaurants.  After nearly ninety years, the Congress Arcade still draws in the crowds.

Sources:

Billiards Magazine

Chicago “L”.org (www.chicago-l.org)

Chicago Daily Tribune

The Chicago L (Greg Borzo, Arcadia Publishing, 2007)

Chicago Building Permit No.114075 (July 31, 1925)

Dr. Jake’s Bowling History Blog (bowlinghistory.wordpress.com)

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map

Lafayette Oil Center (A. Hays Town, 1952). Photo by author

Town’s work is unique not just because his career was so long (Town was active in South Louisiana for nearly eighty years before he died in 2005 at the age of 101).  Town’s renown also comes from the fact that he had two careers, the first as a prominent mid-century Modernist architect of prominent Gulf Coast commercial and institutional works, the second as the architect of residences that seemed to altogether reject Modernist principles and instead embraced the vernacular of South Louisiana.

Town’s career spanned almost the entirety of the twentieth century and his work reflected the century’s changing tastes in architecture. In the 1920s, Town was an architecture student at Tulane University in New Orleans just as the Modern movement was picking up across the Atlantic.  In his early architectural career, Town was a dedicated disciple of Modernism, becoming one of the American South’s most-respected practitioners of Modern design.

But in the 1960s, A. Hays Town appears to have switched course. Instead of holding firm to Modernist ideals, he began to look back at the traditional architecture of his home state for inspiration.  Town’s work took on a distinctly regionalist tone that focused on interpreting (and in some cases recreating) Louisiana’s architectural past.

I’ve taken a took a look at two buildings in Lafayette, Louisiana, by A. Hays Town which, though only three blocks and fifteen years apart, show the great breadth of Town’s career.

The first was the Lafayette Oil Center, begun in 1952 and designed as a low-rise office complex for Lafayette’s growing oil industry.

Lafayette Oil Center (A. Hays Town, 1952). Photo by author

Town worked on the Oil Center complex for decades over many phases of growth. But it is probably this first phase of the Oil Center, with its attempt at marrying the needs of the automobile with attractive human-scaled architecture, that best expresses Town’s mid-century modernist optimism.

The Oil Center was conceived as an expansive campus of single-story office bars built with warm-toned common brick. These office bars are accessed from covered galleries that circle wide paved auto courts.

Lafayette Oil Center (A. Hays Town, 1952). Photo by author

Town balanced the automobile-focused site planning with opportunities for natural landscaping.  Town adjusted his design in order to incorporate several existing live oak trees which today have become sculptural centerpieces of some of the Oil Center’s landscaped mid-block courtyards.

Lafayette Oil Center (A. Hays Town, 1952). The decorative column capitals and bases were added later. Photo by author

The sometimes uncontrollable infiltration of the wild landscape strikes a great balance with Town’s rigid and rational Modern office blocks.

Lafayette Oil Center (A. Hays Town, 1952). Photo by author

Three blocks away from the Oil Center is A. Hays Town’s University Art Museum built in 1967 for what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

University Art Museum (A. Hays Town, 1967). Photo by author

No Modernism here.  Town’s University Art Museum is a simple translation of the architectural type that Louisiana is most famous for: the Greek Revival style antebellum plantation house.  Though Southwest Louisiana rarely saw antebellum homes constructed on this scale — the plantation mansion type is more likely to be found in southeast Louisiana along the Mississippi River Road between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — Town’s art museum used a traditional architectural language that was more familiar (and more popular) than the Modernist style he espoused in his earlier career.

University Art Museum (A. Hays Town, 1967). Photo by author

For his plantation-style museum design, Town looked to the main house at Hermitage Plantation in Darrow, Louisiana, completed in 1814 and believed to be among Louisiana’s earliest examples of Greek Revival plantation architecture.  Town’s museum replicated several elements of Greek Revival plantation design including its 24 Doric columns, its hipped roof, and its traditional construction materials of wood timber, brick, and stucco.

University Art Museum (A. Hays Town, 1967) with new gallery building (Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, 2003) beyond. Photo by author

Town’s 1967 structure is today part of Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum and is flanked by a new gallery building designed by Eskew+Dumez+Ripple completed in 2003.  Though the two museum structures are generations apart in style, they are closer in age than first glance might suggest.

University Art Museum (Eskew+Dumez+Ripple, 2003). Photo by author

Prentice Hospital shortly after it was completed in 1975. Credit: Landmarks Illnois

This Thursday, November 1st, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks will meet to deliberate on the possible landmarking of Bertrand Goldberg’s 1975 Prentice Women’s Hospital.  The fight to protect Prentice has been led by the Save Prentice Coalition who has made an exceptional case for reusing the structure.  In the opposite corner is the property’s owner, Northwestern University, who is ready to demolish it, purportedly to build a new research facility on the site. The community’s alderman is unopposed to demolition and today we’ve learned our own mayor is willing to go along with Northwestern’s plans.

It’s hard to believe that a city famous for its world-class modern architecture would happily throw away one of its most significant buildings by one of its most celebrated architects. Then again, we have done it before.

William Le Barron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building. Credit: Wikipedia

In 1931, the Home Insurance Building, designed by William Le Barron Jenney and constructed in 1884 at the northwest corner of Adams and Clark Streets, was demolished without much opposition. In fact, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune  it came down with much excitement (see the 1931 article below), replaced with Graham, Anderson, Probst & White’s Field (now Bank of America) Building.

Jenney’s Home Insurance Building may not have been much to look at but underneath that stack of Classical colonnades was something very new for 1884: a skeleton of cast iron and steel. Instead of relying on thick exterior bearing walls to hold the building up (a method taken to the extreme in the bulging base of Chicago’s Monadnock Building), Jenney constructed a metal frame that supported the building almost exclusively from within, turning the building’s façade into a wrapping or “skin” that simply hung off the inner structure. This innovation was the absolute pinnacle of nineteenth-century building technology, an achievement that served as a jumping-off point for the modern skyscraper.

Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 22, 1931

The Home Insurance Building was believed to be so important that in 1931, the American Institute of Architects performed a novel kind of post-mortem on the old girl, poking around the Home Insurance Building’s innards as she came down. At the end of the delicate dissection these early architectural pathologists declared that Chicago had in fact just torn down the world’s first fireproof metal-framed skyscraper.

And now, guess what?  Chicago officials are giving their shortsighted support for the demolition of yet another irreplaceable piece of architectural history: Bertrand Goldberg’s 1975 Prentice Women’s Hospital.

Prentice Hospital’s curved concrete bays, achieved using an early version of computer-aided design. Credit: Docomomo

Like the Home Insurance Building, Prentice Hospital was another architectural first. In developing Prentice, Goldberg was among the earliest architects to use the cutting-edge technology of computer-aided design or “CAD” in the building design process.  Historian Susannah Ribstein writes in Docomomo’s online information fiche that the complicated digital finite element analysis software Goldberg’s office used to design the hospital’s cantilevering concrete bays “had probably never before been used on a structure as large or complex as Prentice.”  In using freshly-developed CAD software in his design for Prentice, Goldberg created a new paradigm for architects across the world. Whereas headache-inducing engineering challenges were once avoided, complexity could now be embraced and celebrated.

Prentice Hospital today. Credit: John Cramer

The benefits CAD afforded Bertrand Goldberg as he designed Prentice Hospital – a quicker design schedule, easier coordination of his architectural documents with engineering drawings, less calculation mistakes and, most important of all, the simplification of complicated building systems – are seen by today’s architects as indispensable tools for doing what they do. Without CAD, ambitious designs by the likes of Frank Gehry and Jeanne Gang would be nothing but impossible daydreams (it’s not surprising then that these and many more prominent architects have lent their voices to the effort to save this groundbreaking structure). Prentice Hospital helped show the world the infinite possibilities afforded by computer-aided design and in the process led to a complete transformation of the architecture and design industries which today rely almost exclusively on digital design means.

It’s hard today to overstate the revolutionary role that large computer-generated structures like Chicago’s Prentice Hospital played in the reinvention of  the fields of architecture, engineering, and design.  Prentice Hospital reminds us all of the extraordinary times in which we live and the incredible feats of  architecture and engineering early digital technology made possible.

Home Insurance Building (1884-1931), Prentice Hospital (1975-2012?)

William Le Barron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building and Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Hospital were both watershed moments in the history of building design and reinforced Chicago’s fabled pedigree of architects and architecture pushing the technological limits of their age. Let’s not make the same mistake we made demolishing the Home Insurance Building in 1931. Let’s keep a truly significant piece of architecture around for future generations to use, to study, and to enjoy.

Mercy Hospital’s west facade. Photo by author

It was a fiery stroke of bad luck, and on Friday the 13^th too, that really gave wings to the campaign to build a new Chicago Mercy Hospital.

New Mercy goes up, Old Mercy comes down – mid 1960s. Photo from Mercy Hospital

On Friday, September 13^th, 1963, a blaze broke out on the top floor of the east wing of Chicago’s old Mercy Hospital at 26^th and Prairie Avenue, about three miles south of the downtown Loop.  All patients and staff quickly evacuated and no one was hurt. Only days later the hospital was open again, albeit needing some serious cleaning and only offering limited services.  This time, though, there would be no renovation of the ninety-six year old hospital structure.  Fundraising efforts to rebuild the hospital were already underway and only two days after the east wing fire, hospital administrators announced in the Chicago Tribune their plans to demolish the old brick Mercy.

Old Mercy Hospital in 1910. Photo from Chicago Daily News Photos

Founded by Catholic Sisters of Mercy, this institution of healing received its charter from the State of Illinois in 1851 and the next year began administering medical care in a former boarding house in downtown Chicago.  In 1864, Mercy moved to a sprawling 20-acre site on Chicago’s South Side, remote enough a location to avoid the devastation wrought by the 1871 Chicago Fire.  From 1869 to 1917, Mercy expanded six times, growing to fill nearly an entire city block and becoming one of Chicago’s leading twentieth-century teaching hospitals and an important source of medical care to Chicago’s needy.

Plans to replace old Mercy with a new facility had already been in the works for a decade when fire broke out there in September 1963.  The hospital had earlier mulled over a move to the suburbs but resolved instead to remain and demolish its turn-of-the-century facility.  In old Mercy’s place, officials planned to construct a completely new facility, a modern medical center complex to be designed by the local firm of C.F. Murphy & Associates, well-known for their work at Chicago’s One Prudential Plaza (completed 1955) and for their long-anticipated Civic Center (now the Daley Center, completed 1965).

C.F. Murphy & Associates’ 1964 scale model of the new Mercy Hospital complex. Photo from the Chicago Daily Tribune

C.F. Murphy & Associates’ medical campus envisioned five low-rise structures – two identical six-story apartment buildings for nurses and interns, a five-story nursing home facility, and two four-story research facilities – all in the shadow of a concrete-frame twelve-story patient tower with enough room for 500 beds.  Finally released from the inefficient hodge-podge of Old Mercy’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings, the nurses and doctors of new Mercy would find a hospital designed with their needs in mind.  The new hospital would house a vertical conveyor system to aid in food, housekeeping, and medical supply distribution.  In the main medical building, outpatient care, operating suites, emergency rooms, and physical therapy spaces were kept on the main floor while patient rooms were lifted up into the tower, giving overnight patients peace and quiet, not to mention spectacular views of downtown to the north and Lake Michigan to the east.

A 1964 rendering of New Mercy Hospital. Photo from the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Staff and patients were not the only ones excited by the prospect of a new facility.  The new Mercy project, planned for the site of demolished neighborhood “blight,” was looked on favorably by city officials who saw not only a chance to improve local medical care but also the possibility to completely reinvent the physical and economic landscape of Chicago’s languishing Near South Side.  A new Mercy Hospital complex was intended to be only one of many neighborhood urban renewal projects and was hoped to become a focus of a reinvigorated inner city community.

Fundraising for C.F. Murphy’s new $24 million Mercy Hospital kicked off in earnest on November 9, 1963 at a glittering black-tie dinner held nearby at architect Alfred P. Shaw’s new McCormick Place Convention Center (completed in 1960, burned in 1967).  By 1965, enough money was raised to begin demolition of old Mercy and several surrounding neighborhood blocks and to begin the groundwork for the new complex.  In early 1968, after nearly three years of construction, patients were finally transferred from old Mercy into the new facility. Demolition of the old hospital was completed later that year.

Old Mercy (in the foreground), not long for this world, with its successor going up behind it. Photo from Chicago: City of Neighborhoods

Though new Mercy’s footprint has changed over its thirty-five year life, the centerpiece of the complex remains the twelve-story central patient treatment facility.

Mercy Hospital’s east facade. Photo by author

The tower’s two-story podium houses the hospital’s emergency services, accessed by a colonnaded entrance facing west, and the main visitor entrance pavilion facing east.  Perched above the visitor’s entrance on the second floor is the hospital’s original chapel (now closed for renovation), and cafeteria, its large windows looking east out onto an expansive parking lot, once the site of the Mercy’s Victorian era predecessor.

Mercy Hospital west emergency room entrance. Photo by author

In the tower above, Mercy’s patient bedrooms with their sweeping city views are set back within an exposed concrete frame. The colonnades of spindly white concrete columns hoist up the twelfth-floor penthouse which expands out beyond the footprint of the building like an abstracted and oversized classical cornice.

The underside of Mercy’s cantilevering twelfth floor. Photo by author

Inspiration for Mercy Hospital tower’s columns, modified groin/fan vaulting, and cantilevering twelfth-floor were most likely drawn from two notable American designs from the early 1960s:  architects Belt, Lemmon & Lo’s designs for the Hawaii State Capitol (designed in 1960 but not completed until 1969)…

Belt, Lemmon & Lo’s Hawaii State Capitol (completed 1969). Photo from Historic American Building Survey

… and Edward Durell Stone’s State Quad at SUNY Albany (1962).

Edward Durell Stone’s SUNY Albany campus (completed 1962). Photo from Wikipedia

Of Mercy’s planned outbuildings, only the 1964 intern resident apartment building survives.  This miniature-scale version of Mercy’s main tower gives us a glimpse at the scale of C.F. Murphy’s original complex design.

Mercy’s surviving intern residences (1964) just east of the main complex. Photo by author

Its twin to the north, an identical nurses’ apartment building, was slated to be built where the Stevenson Interstate-55 Expressway now runs just north of the complex (see the image of C.F. Murphy’s scale model above).  As the Stevenson was also in planning stages in the early 1960s, it is improbable that work on the nurses’ building ever broke ground.  The south intern apartment building, however, was completed as planned and sits intact on its original site just beyond the hospital’s east parking lot. This six-story structure, completed at the very beginning of construction on the rest of the complex, mimics its Mercy Hospital tower neighbor with its glass-enclosed flats suspended within a free-floating concrete exterior structure.

Expecting to build on the success of the nearby Michael Reese Hospital-Prairie Shores redevelopment district, the City of Chicago had ambitious plans for Mercy Hospital as a catalyst for rapid neighborhood growth.  The plans of civic planners did bear some fruit in the late 1960s.  Just south of Mercy, the South Commons redevelopment project, an ensemble of new high-rise and low-residential, education, and shopping facilities designed by Solomon-Cordwell and Gordon-Levin, was inaugurated shortly before the completion of the hospital complex.

A view of Mercy Hospital from the north with the South Commons development beyond. Photo by author

Despite its best intentions, the City of Chicago’s ambitious plan for Near South Side renewal came up short in returning the community to the level of vitality it hoped for.  Though Mercy was expected to spur a neighborhood building boom in the 1960s, the hospital’s twelve-story tower overlooks still-empty vacant lots cleared during Chicago’s urban renewal years.  Prairie Shores and South Commons remain attractive to residential buyers though the closure of Michael Reese Hospital in 2008 (and its subsequent 2010-2011 demolition) removed a major employer and life force from the neighborhood. With increasing focus on the return of South Loop as a vital commercial and residential neighborhood, it is yet to be seen how critical Mercy Hospital’s role will be in the Near South Side’s continuing revitalization.

Mercy Hospital’s east entrance pavilion. Photo by author

Set within the center of Douglas Park is the Prairie style-inspired Flower Hall, a reinforced concrete pavilion built around 1907.  The Flower Hall was designed in part by the influential Danish-American landscape architect Jens Jensen (1860-1951) as the focal point for his semi-formal garden that unfolds to the hall’s west.

Douglas Park’s Flower Hall today. Photo by author

Along with Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory, Douglas Park’s Flower Hall was one of only a few buildings Jensen had a hand in designing during his career and was his own thoughtful effort at fusing architecture and landscape into one unified composition.

Thanks to a restoration undertaken a decade ago, Douglas Park’s Flower Hall and its gardens still look as good as they did when Chicagoans got their first look at them 105 years ago.  Being there alone in the early morning (except for a few joggers), it’s still possible to imagine the park as it once was back in1907.

Jens Jensen’s Douglas Park Flower Hall in 1933. Image from the one and only Chuckman’s Chicago blog chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wordpress.com

America’s earliest skyscrapers in Chicago and New York were profitable for their builders but sometimes less than desirable spaces for those working in them.   Though the occupants of early skyscrapers marveled at how these buildings could rise to such  great heights, these same awe-struck workers grumbled through many a hot, stuffy day up in their offices in the sky.

Adler & Sullivan’s 1889 Auditorium Building in Chicago. The Auditorium Theatre was cooled with air fanned over ice. Photo credit Historic American Buildings Survey

Few early office buildings could claim to have integral mechanical ventilation systems because the technology simply did not yet exist to cool buildings on such a large scale.  Chicago’s 1889 Auditorium Building designed by Adler & Sullivan was one notable exception.  Though the office and hotel spaces remained unventilated, the great Auditorium Theatre at the west end of the building was cooled with air circulated over large blocks of ice.

Ice, however, was not the future.  To keep occupancies high and rents competitive, the thousands of warm-bodied office workers tall office buildings housed must somehow be cooled and ventilated in a consistent and efficient manner.  If the large office building was to be a success, a technology-driven way to maintain comfortable temperature and humidity levels indoors must be developed.  And quick, because if such an effective cooling system could be developed, the result would be no less momentous than the invention of the skyscraper’s own structural steel frame.

Willis Carrier in his later years, a proud papa with his first chiller design. Credit Treehugger (www.treehugger.com)

Enter Willis Carrier (1876-1950) from Buffalo, New York.  In 1902, twenty-six year old Carrier was an engineer for the Buffalo Forge Company, a casting operation that also developed heating coils and fans for industrial clients.  That year, the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing Company of Brooklyn, NY, asked the Buffalo Forge Company to solve a puzzling problem going on in their printing rooms:  the humidity of Brooklyn’s hot summers was causing their paper sizes to fluctuate from day to day and from print to print.  To maintain their printing quality (and to stay in business at all), Sackett-Wilhelms needed a way stabilize their paper sheet sizes by working around the temperature and weather conditions outside their printing rooms.  Young Willis Carrier was tapped by company brass to find a solution and the result was a 30-ton “air washer,”  an enormous mechanism that used fans to draw hot, humid air in, high-pressure cold water jets to cool and clean the air, and exit fans to push the fresh air out onto the printing room floor.

The Buffalo Forge Company, Buffalo, NY, in 1908, where Willis Carrier developed his first mechanical cooling system in 1902. Credit Buffalo Architecture and History (www.buffaloah.com)

Four years later on January 2, 1906, Carrier received the patent for his “Apparatus for Treating Air,” a more sophisticated incarnation of his air spraying system and a mechanism that eventually developed into the modern air conditioner.  Carrier’s initial “air washers” were crude, but his success as an air-washing expert would eventually drive him to leave Buffalo Forge in 1915 and start his own eponymous mechanical cooling operation.  Carrier’s later inventions elaborated on these earlier patents and won him the unofficial title of “father of modern air conditioning.”

Stuart Cramer (1868-1940), who popularized air conditioning in Southern U.S. cotton mills to keep cotton fibers cool and manageable in the spinning process. Credit Textile History (www.textilehistory.org)

Carrier may be known worldwide today, but it was actually textile mill engineer Stuart Cramer (1868-1940) who first coined the term “air-conditioning.”  The cotton mills Cramer developed at the turn-of-the-century in the Southern United States endured even more hellish conditions of heat and humidity. Cramer became an advocate for the mechanical cooling of these mills, though not in fact to make for a more pleasant work environment for those toiling inside of them.  Instead, Cramer was more concerned with the quality of raw cotton fibers which were much more easily spun into yarn when the air around them was kept cool.

Thanks to engineers and inventors like Willis Carrier, the technology now existed to artificially cool the enormous manufacturing halls pumping out American products and prosperity.  The early careers of Willis Carrier and Stuart Cramer showed more focus and more economic promise in the development of cooling mechanisms for America’s industrial spaces and less on keeping actual human workers comfortable.

Twelve year-old Selina Wall, a worker in the Brazos Valley Cotton Mill, West Texas, in 1913. Cotton mill workers like Selina benefited from Stuart Cramer’s efforts to keep cotton mills — and the cotton fibers processed within them — cool. Photo credit Library of Congress.

But what about the pencil-pushers supporting America’s growing corporate powers?  What about the executives and the assistants and the secretaries who greased the wheels of the nation’s commerce?  Sure, they weren’t the actual physical producers of the industrial products Americans were beginning to buy — they weren’t on the production floor dripping in sweat printing lithographs or spinning cotton yarn — but the roles of communication, accounting, and marketing they played were priceless when it came to getting goods to market and keeping American manufacturing afloat.

Couldn’t a value be put on the office worker’s need to keep cool and dry in hot weather?

Frank Lloyd Wright’s headquarters for the Larkin Company, Buffalo, NY c. 1906. Credit Buffalo Rising (archives.buffalorising.com)

Darwin Martin of the Larkin Company certainly thought so.  In 1906 with the help of his architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Martin would unveil his company’s new Buffalo, NY headquarters, a “Temple to Labor” designed to be as efficient in its use as an office building as in its mechanical air circulation and purification systems.  It was a structure not so very far from the Buffalo Forge Company where Willis Carrier was refining his own mechanical cooling inventions, and Martin would adopt many of his fellow Buffalonian’s ideas on how to keep indoor air clean and cool.   The Larkin Building would put Buffalo on the map with its innovative marriage of Wright’s design and Carrier-inspired environmental air quality system, and would inspire industrialists and architects all over the world to rethink how they should work how and build.

More to come.

Part 1 of this series on early air conditioning can be found here.

This Chicago cat’s had enough of the heat. Photo by John Cramer.

Though I’m a big fan of passive cooling, I know when I’ve been beat.  I have now utterly surrendered to the heat.  The Sun 1, John 0.  Even the air conditioner at work has conked out on us.  Though the office ceiling fans have been doing their best, the steady stream of frigid air coming out of the vents has been missed.

In offices like mine, like in a lot of contemporary work environments, the fluctuation of outside temperature and humidity makes for an inconsistent air quality.  Plus those electronics that keep businesses functional and connected — the computer, the printer, the server — tend to be happier in cool, low-humidity environments, just like the humans who use them.  From what I’ve seen over my working life, hot and humid office spaces can make for hot and bothered employees.

Oriel Chambers, Liverpool UK, designed by Peter Ellis and completed in 1864. Photo credit Courtauld Insitute of Art

Even as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, architects of the world’s first modern office buildings knew how important interior ventilation affected the work of the world’s first modern office workers.   There was, however, no way to effectively ventilate early offices other than to keep windows operable and pray for sustained cool, dry weather.  Liverpool’s Oriel Chambers (1864), one of the very earliest office buildings ever built, provided its resident barristers inside more than enough light through its innovative glass curtain wall; architect Peter Ellis knew better, however, than to seal the interiors off, and provided mini-casement windows at each of Oriel Chambers’ window bays to allow for at least some internal temperature and humidity modulation.

Chicago’s Marquette Building, designed by Holabird & Roche and completed in 1895. Note the office floors’ Chicago-style windows. Photo from the MacArthur Foundation

Across the pond, architects of America’s first skyscrapers in Chicago and New York anticipated the soaring steel towers we work in today with their early use of structural steel frames, innovative new elevators, and floor upon floor of large-paned transparent glass.  But late nineteenth-century office architects like William LeBaron Jenney, Daniel Burnham, Holabird & Roche, and Cass Gilbert still knew that to keep the workers inside their buildings from roasting within their offices’ glass skins, they had to make the skins of their buildings breathable.  The development of the “Chicago-style” window in the 1880s was one solution to this problem of ventilation, a compromise between aesthetics and functionality;  the Chicago window’s large center pane let in the most light while its adjoining double hung windows allowed occupants to moderate temperature and humidity of their workspaces within as much as possible.  Or it at least allowed them to try to moderate their office climate — on hot, humid days in the city, the soupy air outside inevitably made early office life unbearable.

Chicago-style windows at Chicago’s Marquette Building. Photo by author

The ideas of two unrelated businessmen from Buffalo, New York, changed all of this.  After the turn of the twentieth century, the visions of two men — Willis Carrier and Darwin Martin (with more than a little help from Frank Lloyd Wright) –  heralded the American office dweller’s escape from the flailing variations in his office air quality and pushed architects to rethink the office building’s relationship with the natural environment in which it was built.

Part 2 of this series can be found here.

North facade of Chicago’s Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church. Photo by author.

The terra cotta and windows of Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church on the city’s Near West Side looks like it’s in need of some serious attention.

South elevation of Chicago’s Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church. Photo by author.

This 1901 church, a designated Chicago Landmark originally designed by architect Hugh M. Garden (1873-1961) to house the congregation of Third Church of Christ, Scientist, is showing its 111 years with spalling white glazed brick along its south elevation.  More concerning is some of its damaged and missing pieces of exterior terra cotta work, particularly at its geometricized column capitals.   The column capitals at its main (north) portico have been wrapped in tarp for years now.  Is work to repair or restore these columns ever going to get underway?

Chicago’s Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church’s north portico with its perpetually wrapped columns. Photo by author.

Broken glass along the west elevation of Chicago’s Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church. Photo by author.

Probably the most frightening development is the destruction of what appears to be original art glass windows.  Shattered glass in the west facade’s uppermost windows have been filled in with plywood.

West facade of Chicago’s Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church. Photo by author.

Chicago’s West Side, so impacted by poverty and disinvestment and by the destruction wrought by mid-century urban renewal, has been expecting its own renaissance for the past decade.   Isn’t it important for us to see our historic resources like Metropolitan Missionary as assets in this neighborhood’s revitalization?  Is the City of Chicago going to let one of its own recognized architectural masterworks, and one of its few local landmarks on the city’s West Side, slip into dilapidation?

Architect John Eberson’s unbuilt Heraldic Theater (1926). Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1926.

I’ve had a copy of this September 19, 1926 Chicago Daily Tribune article (image above) taped to the wall over my writing desk, a little discovery I made while doing research on my historic preservation thesis project on Chicago’s forgotten recreation center buildings.  This “Fourteenth Century Castle Cinema” was designed by the great theater architect John Eberson (1875-1954) for a 22nd Street site in Cicero, Illinois, just west of Chicago.  The program for this enormous project included a 2,785 seat movie auditorium — Eberson called it the “Heraldic Theater” — and an adjacent 200-room hotel (remaining true to the medieval spirit of the project, Eberson called the hotel a 200-room tavern – that’s some big tavern).

Walter Conley’s rendering of Cicero’s unbuilt Heraldic Theater (1926). Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1926.

With a projected budget of $1.8 million, it’s not surprising the Heraldic remained just a pretty picture.  Lucky for us today, the Tribune published a rendering of the project drawn by Walter Conley, one of Eberson’s Chicago apprentices and later a successful local architect in his own right.   Conley’s drawing shows Eberson’s vision of a medieval French town straight out of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, complete with imposing castle towers and ramparts, a cathedral front with a great stained glass portal, and quaint half-timbered cottages.  At the Heraldic, Eberson’s picturesque French town has been transported to Cicero, Illinois, smashed and squeezed together into a single semi-coherent structure to fit onto a tight suburban structure.  If built, Eberson’s nine-story-plus Heraldic Theater complex would have towered over its one- and two-story Cicero neighbors.

The Palais des Papes in Avignon, France, home to Roman Catholic popes from 1309 to 1377 and inspiration for John Eberson’s unbuilt Heraldic Theater. Image from Wikipedia Commons.

In the Tribune piece, Eberson touts the inspiration of southern France’s former papal palaces.  “We are thinking,” Eberson told the paper, “of Avignon, the walled city of warring popes, a massive golden silhouette, punctured by parapets and turrets, spotted with bright arches, blocked windows, and sealed doorways.”  Eberson waxed poetic about this fortress in the midst of low-rise Cicero:  “the atmospheric expression of 14th century style of architecture, with ramparts, arched bridges, city walls, and house turrets, picture the rain washed remnants of an old castle church and tavern clustered in a medieval hamlet, which is the inspiration and thought behind our architectural treatment of the Heraldic theater and tavern building.”

Call the design of the Heraldic Theater  exaggerated if you like — it’s pretty over the top even for an entertainment center a important as Chicago.  The cache John Eberson’s name brought to the project made for some local admirers.  The Chicago Daily Tribune was a certainly a fan: the first line of its profile exclaims “Ah!  If Only This Were On Our Own Boul Mich!”  The Tribune even suggested topping the ramparts of “this great Gothic structure of impressive beauty and dignity” with machine guns, the perfect antidote to the organized crime that called Cicero home.

Chicago’s Paradise Theatre, designed by John Eberson and completed in 1928 (now demolished). Image from Chuckman’s Collection

Considering the fate of many of Chicago’s greatest entertainment structures like the Eberson-designed Paradise Theatre (built 1928, demolished late 1950s), the long gone Trianon Ballroom (built 1922, demolished 1967) or the Uptown Theatre (built 1925,  on life support but still standing) one wonders if such a building as this “Fourteenth Century Castle Cinema” had been built, would such a giant have even survived for us to see it today?

More to come.  Promise.

Chicago's Hotel Guyon, completed in 1928 and designed by architect Jens J. Jensen. Photo by author

One of Chicago’s architectural icons has received some much deserved (and very much needed) attention.   The Chicago-based preservation advocacy organization Landmarks Illinois has announced the Hotel Guyon at 4000 W. Washington as one of Illinois’ Ten Most Endangered Historic Places.

Landmarks Illinois has been keeping an eye on Illinois’ historic resources since 1971. The organization first cut its teeth fighting to save Louis Sullivan’s legendary Chicago Stock Exchange. The Stock Exchange came down but since then Landmarks Illinois has been one of the Midwest’s strongest voices for preservation. In fact, Landmarks Illinois is at the forefront of attempts to recognize the importance of our important architecture from the recent past; architect Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospitala (Chicago, completed 1975) joins the Hotel Guyon on this year’s Most Endangered list.

I’ve talked in past posts about the grandeur of the Hotel Guyon (completed 1928) and the great but all too unrecognized talent of its architect Jens J. Jensen (1891-1969). The Guyon’s neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side has seen its share of ups and downs – mostly down over the past few decades. A rehabilitation of the beautiful Hotel Guyon would be a great kickstart to the renewal of once economically vibrant West Garfield Park community. Leaving the hotel abandoned and window-less as it is today stands if anything as a roadblock to any meaningful rejuvenation of the neighborhood.  The City of Chicago should show its support for its ailing neighborhoods and for their historic resources and make a Guyon rehab deal sweeter for potential developers.

The Guyon and Prentice Women’s Hospital shares the spotlight on this year’s Landmarks Illinois Ten Most Endangered List with a group of equally worthy sites, among them five Illinois public schools that need creative new uses if they’re going to hang on and stay with us. It’s sad to see so many significant historic sites languishing the way they are – thanks to Landmarks Illinois for keeping an eye on them.