Little Orange Dots

I've written before of the plans to build the Barack Obama Presidential Library in Chicago. The project no doubt will be a tremendous boon to the city and to the community in which it resides. I'm happy the Obamas and the powers that be settled on the South Side of Chicago, because frankly, that's where the attraction belongs. I call it an attraction rather than a library because all of its holdings will be digitized, no papers will be stored on site. Perhaps Presidential Digital Repository would be a more appropriate term.

However as I've stated before, I'm less than enthused about the city's and the Obamas' cavalier attitude about building the proposed attraction on existing park land. It's clear where the former president's sympathies lie. Talking about the proposed Presidential Library/Digital Repository at the unveiling of the design, Obama said this:

It's not just a building. It's not just a park. Hopefully it's a hub where all of us can see a brighter future for the South Side,

Obviously to Barack Obama, to all the people working on the project, and to a great many Chicagoans, the benefits of having such an institution in the city, especially in a neighborhood that has seen better days, outweigh the loss of several acres of parkland. After all, it's just a park right?

Frankly I find this attitude, while understandable, grossly shortsighted. Our public parks are a public trust, they are meant for the use of the public, and should not be surrendered to private interests, even worthwhile ones. Unfortunately the city does this all the time when they rent out park space for commercial events such as the massive Lollapalooza Music Festival which will be taking place in Grant Park next weekend. This means that unless you're willing to drop hundreds of dollars on a ticket to the event, that enormous, important downtown public park will be off limits not only next weekend, but now for the setup, and for whatever amount of time it takes to clean up the mess.

What's more, many of our parks, including Jackson Park which is where the Obama Library will be built, are significant architectural landmarks designed by some of the greatest landscape architects this country had to offer. They are an important connection to our history as well as works of art in their own right, Compromising them is no different than significantly altering or tearing down our most beloved architectural landmarks. Sadly, we do that all the time.

Obviously this is a losing battle, and Chicago has taken the easy way out. This city has no intention of giving up millions of dollars of much needed revenue just so you and I can spend a summer afternoon strolling through Grant, or any other park that has some kind of paid festival going on, any more than it's going to give up the chance to be the home of the Obama Library. Still reeling from the potential lawsuit preventing the George Lucas Museum from being built on the lakefront, causing the Lucas family to give up their plans to build here, Mayor Rahm Emanuel doubled down on his efforts to not let that happen with the presidential library. Even the park's most visible advocacy group, the Friends of the Parks, has remained uncharacteristically silent on this one.

Two potential park sites were on the docket during the preliminary competition to bring the Obama Library to Chicago. The first runner up was on the western edge of Washington Park. I wrote about that site here two years ago. The site that was selected is on the western edge of Jackson Park, from 63rd up to 60th streets. One could consider Jackson and Washington to be one continuous park connected by the Midway Plaisance which surrounds 59th and 60th Streets in Hyde Park. The entire collection of parks and green space was the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux who are perhaps best known as the architects of Central and Prospect Parks in New York City. While altered substantially, both parks have retained much of the spirit of those two remarkable architects. Perhaps the greatest alteration occurred at the Jackson Park library site, where football and baseball fields used by Hyde Park High School were added decades after the park was built. Those facilities will need to be moved for the sake of the library somewhere, most likely elsewhere in Jackson Park.

What remains then of the site you may ask, once the ballfields are removed? Hundreds of trees, many of them mature maples, London planetrees, cottonwoods, lindens, honey locusts and many other varieties including red and white oaks which judging by their girth, were most likely around at the time of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Surrounding the ballfields, gentle berms create a varied topography breaking up the tedium of Chicago's flat landscape.

When my daughter and I visited the site the other day, orange spots were painted on the trunks of every single tree on the site, save for the immature trees planted on the parkways, indicating they were all slated for removal:

White oak (center) that was probably around at the time of the Worlds Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Trees of different varieties framing Hyde Park High School

London planetree with orange dot at its base, marking its doom, along with the rest of the trees pictured on this post.

Here is a link to Blair Kamin's Chicago Tribune article on the unveiling of the design of the presidential library, the work of New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, that would occupy the Jackson Park site. From the rendering you can see that the parkways are untouched, but everything else, including the gentle berms and the century plus old trees are to be leveled.

As they say, you have to break an egg to make an omelette. I get it, you can't save everything, especially in a city that intends to grow and prosper. But this design appears to me that, just like the football field that was plopped down in the middle of the park, it was rendered without any consideration to the surroundings in which it is to be built. Jackson Park is a very special place and each segment of it was carefully designed to lead into the next. The Obama Library design as it exists on paper, could be plopped down into any part of the city. Its rigid, formal plan contrasts drastically with the free-form English garden style plan of Jackson Park.

To my eyes it would appear from visiting the site, that the design of the library could and should be altered to fit into the landscape, and in the process, save at least some of the century old trees. I'm not entirely against removing trees, even ones that have been around for over 100 years, for an important project, but you have to have an awfully good reason to do it. That would be the very least they could do.

But I wouldn't count on it.

A Walk in the Park

The brouhaha surrounding the Lucas Museum makes it easy to forget that the mission of the so-called "elitist" organization, Friends of the Parks, doesn't end at the lakefront. Rather, Friends of the Parks advocates a commitment to and the preservation of the parks and open spaces throughout the entire Chicago area.

The industrial ruins and decaying residential neighborhoods of the west side are the last place you might expect to find the crown jewel of Chicago's storied park system. But there it sits at the intersection of Central Park Boulevard and Lake Street, Garfield Park and its magnificent Conservatory.

Before the Great Fire of 1871, architect and engineer Willam Le Baron Jenney was hired by the commission who oversaw the parks on Chicago's west side to lay out plans for three major landscape parks and the boulevards to connect them. Jenny is most famous for having designed the first multi-story commercial building whose interior metal skeleton would support the outside wall, or in pure Chicago parlance, the world's first skyscraper. Fourteen years before the Home Insurance Building opened, the parks Jenny laid out would become Humboldt Park on the north. Douglas Park on the south, and appropriately enough, Central Park in between. Central Park would get a new name in 1881 after the assassination of the 20th president of the United States, James Garfield.

A tiny bit of the landscape of the Garfield Park community peaking though
the lush plants of the tropical house of the Conservatory.

One might consider Humboldt, Garfield and Douglas Parks and their connecting boulevards to constitute one greater park, much as you would the south side Jackson and Washington Parks and Midway Plaisance, the wide swath of park and boulevard that connects the two. The idea of a Chicago boulevard system creating a ring of parks that would connect the city and the lakefront goes all the way back to the 1840s and was the brainchild of one John S. Wright, an early real estate speculator and developer. Alas politics and the economy got in the way as they usually do, and no action was taken until the idea was picked up upon by the Chicago Times newspaper who in 1866 published a plan of a park system "one quarter mile wide and fourteen miles long" that would encircle the existing city starting at the northernmost part of the Chicago lake shore and ending at the southernmost.

The three west side parks of Jenny's would be among the first sections of the boulevard system to be realized. Unlike today's emphasis on recreation, the west side parks were designed with the typically mid-nineteenth century principle that parks were intended first and foremost to be a relief from the city, in the words of Lewis Mumford, they provided "refuge against the soiled and bedraggled works of man's creation."

Jenny's west side parks did just that. Curving carraige paths and walkways contrasted sharply with Chicago's practical but relentless street grid. Berms and strategically planed flora would wall off the everyday functions of the city from the parks' interiors. Quite the contrast from the typical architecture found in the city, the parks were filled with fanciful, ornate buildings that served as bandstands, conservatories, observation towers and field houses. The limited area set aside for the west side parks inspired Jenny and his associates to import species of plants from all over the world to make up for less than promising land features. Most of all, Jenny's liberal use of water, especially in Humboldt and Douglas Parks resulted in over fifty percent of their respective areas comprised of lagoons and small rivers.

Some of Jenny's plans were realized but yet again, fate, the economy, and a trait at which Chicago particularly excels, political corruption, all got in the way. It would take a scrupulous laborer from Denmark who had a particular talent in horticulture to see the project through to its completion. Along the way, Jens Jensen would become one of the most influential landscape philosophers and architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It's well known that Jensen began his career in Chicago as a laborer in Humboldt Park then quickly made his way up the ladder to become park supervisor. Just as quickly, he lost that job because he wouldn't play along with the "Chicago way." Soon bygones became bygones and Jensen found himself as the director of the West Parks as well as their chief architect. Jensen, who came to love the prairie landscape of his adopted home, the American Midwest, was a strict advocate of using only native species in his plantings. Unlike his predecessors and many of his peers, Jensen did not believe you could improve upon nature.

"A great Midwestern haystack" The southern facade of the Garfield Park Conservatory

Slowly but surely, Jensen transformed the Humboldt, Garfield, Douglas trifecta into a glorious reflection and tribute to the landscape in which we inhabit. Gone were many of the trappings of Victoriana including the exotic buildings and more exotic flora, replaced by Prairie Style buildings and plantings. Jensen was not only a great landscape architect but he knew his way around a building as well. He designed the current Garfield Park Conservatory along the same principles of adherence to regional influence as his philosophy of planting. In an interesting contrast to the Lincoln Park Conservatory which looks like it could have been plucked straight out of nineteenth century London, Jensen's building, according to Julia Bachrach, author of The City in a Garden: A Photographic History of Chicago's Parks, is designed "to emulate the simple form of a great Midwestern haystack."

Throughout his career, Jensen had an on again off again relationship with Chicago and the West Park Commission. (The Chicago Park District which consolidated the many different park commissions in the city was not organized until 1934.) During one of those off again times, the baroque style  "Gold Dome Building" was built in 1928 to be the headquarters of the West Park Commission. After the establishment of the CPD, it would become the park's field house. Surely Jensen hated it, despite the fact that it and its eponymous dome are enduring symbols of the Garfield Park neighborhood that has to put it mildly, had its ups and downs over the years.

The Conservatory too has had its ups and downs, but in the last dozen years or so, much effort has been put into its restoration and today, despite being slightly off the beaten path, is one of the premier cultural institutions of this city.

Certainly in my lifetime and perhaps since it was built in 1908, the conservatory and its environs have never looked better. Most recently, several acres of land directly to the west of the conservatory were turned into The City Garden. 

Bridge spanning the vast lily pond of The City Garden.

As the newest public garden in Chicago, The City Garden, much like the great Palmisano Park on the site of a former limestone quarry in Bridgeport, embraces the industrial landscape surrounding it rather than walling it out. Built upon land that once was the site of tennis courts and a wading pool, The City Garden, according to the Garfield Park Conservatory website,

takes urban greening as its guiding principle, and it gives expression to that principle at multiple levels, from its structure to its materials and plantings. It also provides an important link in an ever-growing lacework of boulevards, gardens, and open spaces scattered beyond its borders.

City Garden in front of reminders of the west side of Chicago's industrial past

It is a little disconcerting to hear the rumbling of the L as you stroll through the multiple "garden communities" of The City Garden, including a grove of hawthorn trees supposedly planted by none other than Jens Jensen. But as Elwood Blues told his brother Jake when he spent the night at his place whose open window was about ten feet from the extremely busy Loop elevated structure, "you get used to it."

Although not as well known nor understood as Chicago's commercial and residential architectural history, Chicago has a distinguished history of landscape architecture. The legacy of Jenny, Jensen, Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, Alfred Caldwell and others, is one we can be proud of, one worth caring for. The City Garden, the Conservatory, Garfield Park and its sister parks Humboldt and Douglas, remain treasures to behold, no small effort, thanks in part to the tireless efforts of groups like Friends of the Parks.

Thanks folks for a job well done.

The magnificent South Side

Martin Ryerson Home on Drexel Boulevard, Kenwood

Outside of the Loop, Chicago for its size and diversity is somewhat predictable. When you think about this city, a few architectural paradigms come to mind, its neighborhoods are filled with designs that were replicated by the tens of thousands. Essentially a handful of architectural styles give Chicago its distinctive look from one corner to the other. A person could be dropped at random from the air into pretty much any neighborhood and know he's in Chicago just by the types of buildings all around him.

There's the typical Chicago two or three flat.  Occasionally they are doubled up, two of them placed side by side separated by a common hallway. Built out of brick or stone, these apartment buildings with their shotgun plans, are the backbone of residential Chicago. Their post-WWII counterparts adorn the neighborhoods on the city's extremities. On a larger scale we have the multi unit apartment building, many of whom have a central courtyard, built by the thousands during the first part of the twentieth century. As for single family dwellings, the quintessential gable roofed, frame sided Chicago cottage was built to provide an affordable home for middle and working class Chicagoans in the nineteenth century. That design was replaced in the next century by the one story brick bungalow as the preeminent style of basic home design. So common are they that the term "bungalow belt" is synonymous with middle class Chicago. Houses for the more affluent may have been slightly more varied, but still followed established archetypes, Italianate, Queen Anne and Romanesque inspired styles in the nineteenth century and derivatives of the Prairie Style in the twentieth were the most common. The variety of styles in commercial buildings in most of Chicago, is also fairly limited.

I have a recurring dream where I discover a neighborhood in Chicago that I've never seen before, in fact never even knew existed. The undefined neighborhood is remarkably similar from dream to dream; it's a big commercial district of faded glory. In that sense it's not entirely different from so many of Chicago's mini downtowns that have all fallen upon hard times, Uptown, on the North Side, Garfield Park on the West Side, or Roseland on the South Side to name a few. Yet my dream city doesn't look like Chicago at all, the buildings don't resemble typical Chicago buildings, they're much grander in scale, and all the storefronts are occupied. Despite having seen better days, there is frenetic activity on the streets both day and night and yes, all the neon signs still work.

Granted I haven't visited every inch of the real Chicago, but I know it pretty well. So when I wake up and slowly come to terms that I've just returned from a city that exists only in my imagination, I'm a little disappointed.

Yet as well as I know Chicago, there are still undiscovered treasures, places that don't exactly fit the mold. Encountering them is like a dream come true to me. This happened the other day as I was driving home from a photographic shoot on the South Side. I chose a meandering route that took me through  some of the residential neighborhoods of Kenwood, Oakland, and Douglas. Generally speaking, I know these neighborhoods well, but as I discovered, not nearly well enough.

Former home of Gustavus Swift

All three communities were at one time suburbs of Chicago, and their architecture reflects that fact. The community of Kenwood, just north of Hyde Park, features some of the grandest homes in the city, in the 19th Century it was refered to in some circles as the "Lake Forest of the South Side." A century ago its residents included the likes of meatpacker Gutavus Swift and Sears chairman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. The homes of the two giants of industry and commerce sit catty corner from one another at 49th and Ellis. Swift's back door neighbor was lumber magnate Martin Ryerson. More recently Kenwood has been the home of Muhammad Ali, Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, former U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi, and the Obama Family.

Among the architectural highlights of South Kenwood are two adjacent homes by a young Frank Lloyd Wright, "bootleg" homes that he designed under the radar, while he was still under the employ of Adler and Sullivan.

Early FLW; George W. Blossom House, left, and  Warren McArthur House

Blossom House coach house and garage

The style of the two houses built in the same year, 1892, as you can see could not be more different. The homes show the young architect cutting his teeth by experimenting with traditional styles and forms, the restrained, elegant Palladian of the Blossom House, contrasts sharply with the rustic barn-like Gambrel roof of the McArthur House. It's almost as if the audacious Wright purposely created them to be stylistically divergent just to show off his versatility. Go around to the back of the Blossom House and you'll see a much more familiar Wright building, a full-fledged Prairie Style design, the coach house/garage which was built 15 years later in 1907 when Wright was at the height of his powers, the same time as the construction of Robie House, about a mile away.

In 1889, Hyde Park Township, which included Kenwood and Oakland to the north, became absorbed into the City of Chicago. The World's Columbian Exposition was held in 1893. With that great world's fair came the construction of the Elevated which connected the area to the Loop, and with that came a boom in population and new construction.

Along with Gutavus Swift, many others associated with the Union Stock Yards lived in Kenwood and its adjacent communities. In fact, much of the prosperity of the area was a direct result of the meat packing industry. As the yards grew, so did their effect on the community. Any Chicagoan old enough to remember the Stock Yards can testify to the foul smell that was a permanent feature of its environs. Given the tendency for a prevailing  wind blowing from the west, Kenwood only a few miles east, was more often than not, directly down wind from the yards. Eventually the "smell of money" became less alluring and with it, the attractiveness of the neighborhoods. While the area of the great Kenwood mansions between 51st and 47th Streets has remained fairly stable, the neighborhoods to the north have been in a constant state of change essentially for the past 120 years.

Many of Kenwood's north/south streets dead end at 47th Street which is the dividing line between North and South Kenwood. Comparing that border to the Berlin Wall may be a bit of a reach but the difference between Kenwood north and south of 47th Street is dramatic. At that point, the grand mansions give way to duplexes and row houses as you can see from the photograph below.  

As I mentioned, most of the area has been in flux for quite a while, but no period of change was more dramatic than the decade after World War II. Refugees from the war moved in to North Kenwood by the score. Single family homes were sub-divided into apartments. During the fifties, the neighborhood's population shifted again, from 85 percent white to 85 percent black. With the help of the notorious Chicago practice of red-lining, funds for the rehabilitation of property in the area dried up and many of the buildings fell into disrepair and were destroyed. Lake Park Avenue was one of the most exclusive streets in the neighborhood. Louis Sullivan built his home (long gone) on that street, yet today you have to use your imagination, using the small handful of extant buildings to imagine what the street looked like. Large public housing projects (also now gone), virtually identical to those of the notorious Robert Taylor Homes replaced the elegant town houses. The same fate did not befall Berkeley Street one block to the west which boasts an amazing collection of mid to late nineteenth century duplexes, row houses and single family homes.

According to the AIA Guide to Chicago, the "fashionableness" of Kenwood and Oakland went into decline as they became absorbed into the City of Chicago in 1889. These days you wouldn't guess that the block of Berkeley between 44th and 45th Streets, developed in the 1890s with its splendid multicolored stone facades, was an indication of the downturn of the neighborhood. But at the time, the locals considered it to be an affront to the community. Responding to the influx of people into the neighborhood, the developer of the block sought and gained the right to widen the alley between Lake Park and Ellis, thereby creating the street that would bear his name. If you're at all familiar with dramas set around the turn of the last century such as Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, or the current BBC television series Downton Abbey, you can understand the resistance to such change. According to Glen Holt and Dominick Pacyga in their book: Chicago: A Historical Guide to the Neighborhoods: the Loop and the South Side, this is how a long time Kenwood resident, sounding like the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey, described the street:

...row on row of queer little houses with the windows cut into corners of the house and weird looking facades in the front. He (Berkeley) knew only one plan for a house, and they were all turned out of the same mold like a pan of biscuits; one could find dozens of houses that he built scatered throughout the community.

With the exception of a vacant lot here and there, reminding one of missing teeth, the block is in very good condition, especially given the economic troubles of the community. By today's standards it's a little difficult to understand what all the fuss was about. Putting oneself in the position of a Kenwoodite of the 1890s on the other hand, this block was the bellwether of the drastic changes to come, the  shift from the tranquility of massive houses and expansive yards of suburbia, to the density of the city. To what our eyes appears to be an example of elegant city living, 100 years ago was practically an example of urban blight. Our old time Kenwood observer was right, stone fronted row houses and duplexes much like these were and continue to be a familiar sight all over this part of town.

A couple of blocks to the north in the neighborhood of Oakland, there is a development of homes designed by Cicero Hine in the 1880s, known as the Berkeley Cottages. Twenty six of these cottages remain on Berkeley and Lake Park Avenue. Hine's cottages built in an eccentric, Queen Anne style, are unlike anything else found in this city, with the exception of a couple of other of Hine's developments in Chicago that no longer exist. Our unfortunate plane jumper might have a rough time identifying his whereabouts if he were to land on this lovely block.

Farther north is the community of Douglas, named after Stephen A. Douglas, the Illinois senator who unsuccessfully opposed Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. Douglas was also a land speculator who bought up 70 acres of lakefront property, subdivided it and created among other things, two neighborhoods that surrounded parks. One of those neighborhoods still exists, the elegant "gated" community of Groveland Park, the entrance to which is pictured on the left. 

Douglas's impressive tomb is a fixture of the South Side lakefront at 35th Street on the site of his home. His larger than life bronze likeness stands atop a ninety-six foot column. The monument rivals the final resting place of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. Across 35th Street from the tomb stands a bona fide relic of the Civil War, the Soldier's Home, now the Cardinal Meyer (pastoral care) Center. It was designed by one of this city's most prominent early architects, W.W. Boyington of Water Tower fame. Nearby was the site of the notorious Camp Douglas which served in part as a prison for Confederate soldiers during the War. Up to 23 percent of its prisoners died while in captivity at the camp.

Douglas, Oakland and Kenwood, all comprise parts of the neighborhood known as Bronzeville, the heart and soul of African American Chicago. The great migration of blacks to Chicago began around the time of the First World War. For many reasons including the virulent racism of the inhabitants of this city, African American people were forced to settle in the already transitioning neighborhoods of the South Side. In its heyday in the 1940s, Bronzeville was a city within a city, rivaled only by Harlem as the great center of black culture in America. Times and transition have taken their toll in much of the area, the once magnificent turn of the 20th Century housing stock as been depleted and some areas appear as devastated as portions of a bombed out city. Yet there is a great deal of life and revitalization going on, entire neighborhoods are springing up in areas where there once was little or no hope.

The following pictures document part of the death and rebirth of parts of what is in my opinion one of the most fascinating parts of Chicago:

Ignored and neglected for decades, the South Side communities of Douglas, Oakland and North Kenwood are coming back. The era of building dumping grounds for the poor in the form of massive housing projects has passed, and mixed income housing is popping up all over the city. I believe this is a good thing. Developers are starting to notice the handful of older buildings and as you can see above, they are taking cues from the past. 

The fact is these neighborhoods are some of most significant in the city in terms of their architecture and history. They contain some of the finest residenses in Chicago, connected by streets, parks and boulevards designed by the estimable team of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Not to mention that these communities are conveniently located and readily accessible to public transportation, it seems a no-brainer that the near South Side will one day return to its former glory.

Now my dream is to be around to see it happen.