Photographs of the Month

Every year, like clockwork, the first thing my old man God rest his soul, would say on the morning of June 21st was: "The days will be getting shorter." Summer had just begun and he was already proclaiming its doom. To balance that out, he would proclaim the days about to get longer every December 21st, but that cheerful thought could only last for so long as he would every year proclaim another Christmas being over by the time the last gift was opened on Christmas Eve.

Anyway, June is now coming to an end and indeed the days are getting shorter, Baseball, which I thought would be winding down with the end of my boy's high school season, has revived and he's now playing on no less than three different teams.  My daughter is happily enrolled in two summer camps and for my wife and me, summer as usual, is unlike most normal people, our busy season. In other words, no rest for the weary.

And here we are, one half year since I began the tradition of posting some of my favorite photographs of the month. Here goes:

June began sadly with the death of an old friend after a three year battle with cancer. After his funeral service, an even older friend, who introduced the two of us us took me behind the chapel at Graceland Cemetery to show me the stone marking the final resting place of the man who brought the famous German school of design, the Bauhaus, to Chicago. That school would become the Institute of Design where the three of us studied and worked.

June 4, Graceland Cemetery

Back to the land of the living, the following day at a game featuring my son's house league baseball team, I captured the fleeting moment that was famously described in the intro of a sports program from long ago as "the thrill of victory." If you're old like me and can remember what followed that line in the intro, I've got that covered too, see below. In case you're wondering, my son is not visible in the photograph.

June 5, Gompers Park

A case of life imitating art, the ornament of Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott Building is mimicked by the shadows of the honey locust trees that line State Street.

June 10, State Street

After passing this enigmatic sign for a good long time, I took its picture then looked up John Galt. In case like me you didn't know who he is, I encourage you to do the same.

June 12, North Pulaski Road

Coming up in the fall at the National Building Museum in Washington DC, there will be a retrospective of the work of the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. For that exhibition, I was asked to document his Museum Campus, the green space that connects the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium. I'm not a stranger to that architect's work as I photographed his FDR Monument in DC a few years ago. You can see those pictures (along with others) here. The following three pictures were made for the Halprin exhibition.

June 15, Museum Campus

June 15, Museum Campus

The photograph below features the great equestrian statue of Tadeusz Kościuszko that once stood in Humboldt Park and was an important part of my childhood. It was removed in the eighties after years of neglect and moved to the peninsula that contains the Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium, along with the statue of influential Czech man of letters, Karel Havlicek. In front of the planetarium is a more recent statue of Nicolas Copernicus. This trio of tributes to pan-Slavic heroes was the inspiration for the renaming of the roadway that traverses the peninsula to Solidarity Drive. You can see a photograph of the Kościuszko monument in its original site on this post.

June 15, Underpass beneath Solidarity Drive

Here is yet another example of life imitating art in the Loop.

June 20, Monroe Street

8:23PM, sunset on the day of the summer solstice. As my father would say, now the days are getting shorter. Indeed they are.

 June 20, Skokie, Illinois

Visitors to my city on the front steps of my place of business.

June 21, Art Institute of Chicago

Light in the Loop on the longest day of the year.

June 21, State Street

The following two photographs are experiments with the panorama function of my iPhone, shot not as intended, with moving subjects,

June 23, Michigan Avenue

June 24, CTA Red Line near Fullerton

And finally as promised, "the agony of defeat", a post game - post mortem of a high school baseball game as presented to the losers of said game. Better luck next time fellas.

June 29, Lane Tech High School

Well you know as they say, in baseball as in life, somebody's gotta win and somebody's gotta lose. Let's hope we're all winners this summer. Happy July.

Richard Nickel: Dangerous Years

My friend Rich Cahan has done it again.  Along with Michael Williams he just compiled and published the third of (what his wife hopes to be) a trilogy on the life and work of the Chicago photographer Richard Nickel. Cahan's first Nickel book, They All Fall Down: Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America's Architecture, was a straight ahead biography which depicted his subject as a driven young man whose life's work began as a grad school project documenting the work of the architect Louis Sullivan. The project which Nickel made his own, to record and save everything he could of the architect's disappearing work, turned into an all consuming passion that ultimately cost him his life. In I972 Richard Nickel was crushed underneath the rubble of Sullivan's Stock Exchange Building while attempting to salvage artifacts of the building as it was being demolished.

The second book was called Richard Nickel's Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City, a book that allowed Nickel's camera speak for him. Beyond proof sheets, Nickel didn't make many publication or exhibition prints of his own work, so the lion's share of images in this exquisitely printed book had not been seen outside of a small circle. The book, not limited to the work of Louis Sullivan, or architecture for that matter, could be considered the definitive work on Richard Nickel the photographer, as it is to the best of my knowledge the most comprehensive collection of his photographic work to be found.

Richard Nickel was the Charles Marville of Chicago. Marville if you recall was the photographer who was commissioned to document the city of Paris as it existed before and during its mid-nineteenth century destruction and re-construction under the hand of Baron Haussmann in the reign of Napoleon III . Here is a link to a site describing a major exhibition of Marville's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York.

Unlike Marville, Nickel's work documenting the destruction of his city was for the most part, self-commissioned. Richard Nickel's Chicago shows us the ways and means of a soon to be post-industrial city, rooftops with their smokestacks and water tanks, steel rails reflecting the sun, automobiles in motion, and the incessant building up and tearing down of a restless city.

Early on, Nickel photographed people. Many of his early pictures show the influence of his school, the Institute of Design, especially the work of Harry Callahan with whom Nickel studied. The very first picture in the book proper in the chapter titled, The Passing Scene, is a provocative image of a woman standing alone in front of the Tunnel of Love at Riverview amusement park. Her expression suggests concern or maybe disappointment. Perhaps she is waiting for a lover who has stood her up, or one that never existed at all. One can't help but think of this image as a metaphor for Richard Nickel and his first love, the City of Chicago. a love that was unrequited.

As Callahan taught Nickel how to construct a photograph, it would be his other major influence at the ID, Aaron Siskind, who would teach him how to tell a story. Siskind initiated the Sullivan project and the two worked closely on the project during Nickel's remaining time at the Institute and beyond.

Eventually Nickel became a one man band with the Sullivan project which remained incomplete at the time of his death. Were it not for the steadfast work of Nickel's close friend and accomplice in salvaging Sullivan's work, architect John Vinci, Nickel's project would have died along with him in the rubble of the Stock Exchange Building. Forty years after Nickel's death, Vinci managed to complete Nickel's project with the publication of the massive tome The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan.

Cajan's third Nickel book, Richard Nickel: Dangerous Years, What He Saw and What He Wrote, puts the photographer/preservationist's life, work and times into context. This time along with Nickel's photographs, his words speak for him. Nickel was a compulsive letter writer who kept carbon copies of all the letters he sent out as well as copies of letters he never sent. The current book reproduces in full color, selections of Nickel's letters to friends, collaborators, newspaper columnists, architects, landmarks commissioners, Mayor Richard J. Daley, the residents of buildings about to be demolished, and the owners of those buildings whose help he enlisted in gaining access before and during demolition, even though he openly opposed their intentions to destroy them. The book also reproduces Nickel's personal notes, sketches and detailed itineraries for photographic road trips in minute by minute detail.

Two of Nickel's struggles to save Chicago Landmarks are covered in great detail in the book, the Garrick Theater and the Stock Exchange Building, two of Louis Sullivan's greatest works.

Another great loss, and perhaps a bigger personal blow to Nickel was the demolition of Holibard and Roche's Republic Building on State at Adams. A self-portrait of Nickel on the roof of the Republic graces the cover of They All Fall Down. The new book includes two Nickel photographs of the Republic that I've never seen. The first is a stunning cityscape from about 30 stories up looking southeast. The stepped pyramid atop the Metropolitan Tower with its famous beehive beacon, dominates the picture. Grant Park and Lake Michigan can seen in the background. Virtually every building in the photograph still exists, save for the Republic Building, smack dab in the middle of the frame. The Republic stands out from its neighbors with its classic Chicago School facade, gleaming, (despite its grimy surface), in the hazy late afternoon light.

The other photograph, taken from the NW corner of State and Adams, shows the building toward the end of its demolition, with only the first two floors remaining. (the caption mistakenly identifies the picture taken at the start of the construction of the building that would replace it). Signs on the scaffolding proudly announce the coming of the new building, the Home Federal Savings Savings and Loan Building. Even the architects of the new building, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, shamelessly display their stylized logo, despite the fact that part of the ornament of the doomed building was still visible through the scaffolding. Talk about a lack of respect! In the photograph, passersby go about their business, causing me to wonder what must have been going through their minds as one of the best buildings to have ever graced this city turns to dust before their eyes, about to be replaced by a second rate building, despite the first class pedigree of its designers. My guess is that most of them, as was the popular opinion of the day, thought that new necessarily meant better.

Richard Nickel begged to differ. In one letter reprinted in Cahan's book addressed to a Chicago Daily News reporter he wrote:

I had a good look recently at that Home Federal S&L building which replaced the Republic several years ago. That looms in my mind now as one of the great tragedies... or rather as one of the most willful unnecessary destructive acts to Chicago School heritage. I'll  never forgive Hartmann (Bill Hartmann, then senior partner of Skidmore Owings and Merrill) and SOM for that. The Republic was a work of art, and the new building is nothing... maybe some tinsel!

Nickel wrote a much more scathing letter to the editor of a publication called The American City, responding to an article they wrote in praise of the Garrick Parking Garage which replaced the Garrick Theater, The article pointed out the design of an ornamental panel which consisted of 233 slabs of concrete that were cast from a molding of a detail from the Sullivan building, plus one of the original details, all stuck together. in a large mass. Nickel scoffed at the caption of a photograph of the garage that said: "Chicago's new Civic Center Parking Garage represents a growing awareness of Chicago's architectural heritage." In response Nickel wrote:

...what about the lines, "the building pays graceful tribute to the memory of "Louis Sullivan"? They wreck one of his masterpieces, and you conclude it is a tribute. How? Why? Would  you say that if someone wrecked St. Peter's Cathedral [sic] in Rome and erected a garage on the site,  using some statues and whatever, that that was a tribute to St. Peter???

Whoever wrote that article is soft in the head...

Nickel was one of the leading advocates for saving the Garrick Theater. It turns out that he was successful in convincing none other than Mayor Richard J. Daley that the building was worth saving. The city of Chicago filed an injunction in an attempt to halt the demolition of the Sullivan building, but were over-ruled by the courts.

Daley was not so moved to save the old Stock Exchange Building. In a letter to CBS News, praising their coverage of the fate of the building, Nickel wrote:

it doesn't surprise me at all that hizzoner Daley is the dumbhead who lacked the imagination to save this unquestionable work of art. ... 

The question now is, well, it obviously isn't even a question... why do we have a landmark commission (headed at the time by the aforementioned William Hartmann), which gets $100,000 a year (?) funding, and is getting nothing done, is working at odds with the City Council and the blankety-blank mayor?

Nickel goes on in the letter to lambaste the cultural elite of Chicago who turned a blind eye to the fate of the city's architecture, by failing to show up for demonstrations to save the building:

Where was the cultural leadership of Chicago?? The architects, the curators, the professors and historians, etc. So perhaps it boils down to our getting what we deserve... 

Cahan follows that letter with another, a bitter attack of the city fathers, perhaps written under the influence, a double scotch to be exact, to William Hartmann himself. What does the letter say? Well you'll just have to buy the book to find out.

What follows these two letters are a series of heartbreaking photographs of the construction of the scaffolding around the Old Stock Exchange Building, symbolizing the demise of both the building and the photographer. This time, passersby stop and look in dismay at the sight of impending doom for a marvelous building.

The book is a fascinating look into the psyche of Richard Nickel, into what drove him, and the conflicts he faced as the life's work of the artist he chose to devote a good portion of his life to, was crumbling all around him.

It's easy to imagine Nickel as a bitter, tragic figure, pursuing a quixotic mission, doomed to failure, much the way Cahan portrays him in his biography. But the correspondence in this book show another side to the man: funny, engaging, awkward and perhaps like any good artist, just a bit off.

One letter (presumably never sent), which Nickel put huge crosses through, is a comical, rambling, stream of consciousness rant to a potential collaborator, referencing everything from sailing, to the author's car troubles, to his frustration about the apparent sexual advances from a male art historian. As if it were necessary to point out which side of the fence he was on, Nickel writes: "I often do a lot of things I don't want to do just to accommodate people and then I get impossible and bitchy. And art history is so full of old ladies...and whilst I'm not married, that doesn't mean I like to travel with men, or associate with men much at all." then at the bottom of the typed page he writes out by hand: "I'm beginning to appreciate women more and more! Backlash?" There he closes the letter with "Regards, Dick", but he wasn't finished. On the flip side of the page he typed another half page explaining the tone of the letter by saying he was sitting listening to (the composer) Janacek while downing some Johnny Walker Black, a "real luxury." Once again he closes the letter, this time with "Drunken Dick."

Nickel did have one release valve and that was a sailboat which he kept moored in Burnham Harbor. He delighted in inviting friends to sail with him. One post card printed in the book was an invitation written to the daughter of the ID professor and photographer, Arthur Siegel. "Oh I love to have pretty girls aboard the boat..." he writes, "wear your bikini (or whatever the girls are not wearing nowadays)." At a recent lecture at the Art Institute promoting his book, Cahan flashed on the screen that postcard, not commenting on its content, when who should turn up but the recipient of that letter, Julie Siegel. Being perhaps the one person in the room who actually knew Nickel, she tried to assure the audience that while tragedy befell Richard Nickel, he was quite a lovely, engaging character, not at all the sullen, miserable wretch as he is often portrayed.

Having written three books on Richard Nickel, Richard Cahan must now be considered the world authority on the subject. His quest to document the man rates up there in tenacity with Nickel's pursuit of Louis Sullivan. Cahan said at his talk at the Art Institute that when you think about it, Richard Nickel was a failure in everything he did. He lived much of his life with his parents in Park Ridge, Illinois. He wasn't successful in preserving any of the Sullivan buildings he worked diligently to save. He never came close to finishing the Sullivan project. And he never finished the house he bought for himself in Bucktown.

This time I beg to differ. Cahan is certainly right in asserting that Nickel left this world with an unfinished legacy. But his work to save the most important Sullivan buildings did make a difference. The group that Nickel led, protesting the raising of the Garrick Theater in the early sixties was a ragtag bunch that managed to get the mayor's attention and his tacit support. By the time the Stock Exchange Building was about to turn to dust, there was a more significant presence of protesters opposed to the demolition. The ultimate loss of the building and the tragic death of Nickel inside it, galvanized the preservation movement in Chicago. It would be premature to say battle lost but war won, as the struggle to save Chicago's architectural heritage continues. Yet I'm convinced that Nickel both in life and in death was and is the driving force of the preservation movement in this town and for that we have much to be thankful, as well for the efforts of Messers Vinci and Cahan who have worked so diligently to care for and preserve the legacy and the work of Richard Nickel.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you.

St. Louis

We've been spending our late summer vacations in Wisconsin for so long it surprised me when the three other members of my family decided they wanted to go someplace else this year. The choice of destination surprised me too, St. Louis. I must admit having been a little disappointed as I was looking forward to getting out of this city for some well deserved R&R, perhaps look at some birds and maybe even some stars. Mostly I thought the change of scenery would do me good. Going to another big city I thought would just not fit the bill.

Ten years ago, when there were only two other members of my family, we drove down to the Mound City for a little three day vacation with our then four year old son who was just about to enter school for the first time. Flash forward ten years and the boy is about to enter high school. I suppose there was symmetry in going back, which we did last week.

Being creatures of habit, we set out to do many of the same things we did on our first trip. Top on our list was the zoo. The St. Louis Zoo's reputation as being one of the best around is well deserved. While my eight year old daughter doesn't exactly share her brother's early passion for animals, (he has since lost that passion in a big way), she loves them enough that we spent a solid six hours there, closing the place down. Another highlight from our previous trip was a visit to the fabulous City Museum, but more on that later.

One thing we did differently this time thanks to the ingenuity of my wife, was stay in a condominium rather than a hotel, living more like locals than tourists. The neighborhood we resided in for three days was Shaw, a sleepy residential community in the vicinity of St. Louis University, and the beautiful Missouri Botanic Garden. The neighborhood was named after the Garden's founder, Henry Shaw who made his fortune as a merchant in the quickly growing river city in the early 19th century.

The neighborhood of Shaw, or "Historic Shaw" as the tourist web sites prefer to call it, sits adjacent to The Hill, or "Dago Hill" as the neighborhood was called in less politically correct days, due to its predominantly Italian population. On our visit ten years ago, we stopped at a place that doubled as a restaurant and bocce court. It's still there but on this visit, it was filled with a younger, hipper crowd as opposed to the locals we experienced ten years before. It could have been that we visited on a Friday night this time rather than mid-week or it could be that many of the folks there during our last visit have passed on. It's been ten years, things change after all,

One of the landmarks of The Hill is Elizabeth Street, one block of which has been dubbed "Hall of Fame Place" in honor of two ball players who grew up directly across the street from each other. Not only did both become major leaguers, but both were catchers. That led Joe Garagiola to quip that not only was he not the best catcher in the majors, he was not even the best catcher on his own block. His neighbor, life long friend, and fellow major league catcher was a guy by the name of Yogi Berra.

The home town Cardinals passed on Berra in favor Garagiola, which probably was the worst mistake made in that town since they passed on building the first bridge across the Mississippi River in the mid 1800s. That bridge was built a couple hundred miles upstream in Rock Island, Illinois, and the first intercontinental trains that crossed it ended up in Chicago, making that city the rail hub of the United States, rather than St. Louis.

But don't say we didn't give anything back. At the end of the nineteenth century, Chicago reversed the flow of its river, sending its waters, along with the sewage they carried in the direction of you guessed it, St. Louis. This is truly the stuff of which great rivalries are made. That rivalry today is expressed mostly through the two cities' National League baseball teams, the Cubs and the Cardinals.

The good folks in St. Louis take their baseball very seriously. Why not, their Cardinals are second in the major leagues only to the New York Yankees in the number of pennants and World Series Championships won. As for the Cubs well...

The scorecard I bought at the Cardinals/Giants game my son and I attended, included an example score sheet which featured star players from Cardinal history which sent shivers up my spine. The position players consisted of Lou Brock, Rogers Hornsby, Stan Musial, Johnny Mize, Enos Slaughter, Ken Boyer, Ted Simmons, and Ozzie Smith, with Yadier Molina (whom we saw hit his 100th career home run) as a pinch hitter. With Bob Gibson as their starting pitcher, I'm guessing they saw no need for a reliever.

The ballpark in which we saw that game, which the Cardinals not surprisingly won, was under construction ten years ago. At that time, the home of the Cardinals was Busch Stadium II, one of the first multi-purpose stadiums built for baseball and football. That building was designed in Modern style, with niches carved out of the top of the stadium that reflected the iconic Gateway Arch a couple blocks away. The older stadium still looked new while the new stadium and its retro style design made it appear that it was the building about to disappear. I never was inside Busch Stadium II, but through photographs of it and my preferences of how a ballpark should function, I would say that Busch III is a vast improvement.

As you can see, Busch III provides a spectacular view of the Downtown St. Louis skyline including the Arch and the 1864 Old Courthouse Building, its dome seen in the center of the photograph. Unfortunately beside those two structures, the rest of the skyline is rather ho-hum in my opinion. Like many cities in this country, St. Louis in the sixties, and seventies was obsessed with the idea of "urban renewal", destroying thousands of high quality buildings in order to make way for massive public works projects, including Busch Stadium II, miles upon miles of freeways, and many of the buildings you see in this photograph, (The land for the Arch and its environs was cleared much earlier, back in the 1930s.) Consequently, St. Louis is now stuck with hundreds of second rate buildings from an era not known as a high point in architectural history.

The mother of all urban renewal projects:
90 plus acres of the heart of historic St. Louis cleared in the 1930s
 to make way for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial
 which would not be realized for another 30 years.
The Old Cathedral can be seen in the center of the cleared area.

That's not to say that St. Louis no longer has any great buildings left. Downtown St. Louis boasts one of Louis Sullivan's best skyscrapers, the Wainright Building, as well as many other fine commercial buildings of that era. The city did not have to import all its architects, Theodore Link was perhaps the preeminent St. Louis architect of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His Romanesque Revival Union Station, which opened in 1892, is without question the greatest 19th Century train station built in this country, Passenger train service has unfortunately been relegated to platforms outside Union Station, but the building has been lovingly preserved and is now a hotel, the main waiting room now serves as the lobby of the hotel and in my opinion is one of the most beautiful public spaces I've ever experienced. Slightly less successful, but a happy compromise just the same, is the conversion of the station's massive train shed into a shopping mall.

St. Louis boasts not one but two Roman Catholic cathedrals. The old one, rechristened the Basilica of St. Louis, King of France, dates back to 1770, shortly after the establishment of the settlement  St. Louis. The current Greek Revival building was completed in 1834. It stands near the river, in the shadow of the Arch, an anomaly as it was the only building left standing during the construction of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, the site of the Arch. In 1914, the austere Old Cathedral was supplanted by the highly ornate and eclectic Byzantine/Romanesque Revival Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis on the city's west side.  That building is known primarily for its remarkable mosaic ornament which covers virtually every inch of the interior of the cathedral. Sadly due to time constraints, we were unable to visit either building on this trip.

They did finally build a bridge that spanned the Mississippi and what a bridge it is. The Eads Bridge was a tremendous engineering and aesthetic success when it opened in 1874. It was the steamboat companies that lobbied against the construction of bridges across the great river as ostensibly they posed a threat to successful navigation of the river. In reality they were the last link to allowing railroads to become the primary means of transportation in the United States. The St. Louis steamboat lobby was particularly strong and despite the handwriting of the steamboat's demise being on the wall, the captains of that industry stipulated that the bridge's clearances be unrealistically high. The bridge's designers lead by James B. Eads for whom the bridge was named, called their bluff and responded with what would be the largest arch bridge to date. The great bridge was so distinctive that it served as the de facto symbol of its city until the mid sixties when another engineering marvel took its place.

That of course would be the Gateway Arch. Its deceptive simplicity is a sight to behold as the experience of the structure changes when seen from different viewpoints and at different times of the day, What the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, Big Ben is to London, Eero Saarinen's Arch is to St. Louis, the defining symbol of the city. As such it defies criticism.

The same cannot be said about the Arch's immediate environs which as you can see, are cut off from the rest of the city by a highway and its flanking streets, limiting access and discouraging potential visitors with limited time, us included, from strolling around the Arch and the banks of the river.

These concerns are currently being addressed by a major re-design of the Jefferson Memorial which if all goes as planned, will extend across the river into Illinois. Here is a web site from the architects who came up with the winning bid, describing their work.

I could go on and on about St. Louis but it's late and I need to go to bed; besides our four day, three night vacation simply doesn't warrant it.

My immediate plan is to definitely not wait another ten years to visit the great city on banks of the Mississippi.

Chicago, 1928

Courtesy of a fellow subscriber to a Facebook group devoted to "Forgotten Chicago", the fascinating book, Chicago in 7 Days was just brought to my attention. The book, published in 1928, was written by John Drury, a poet, writer, and later a radio host, much of whose work was based upon the Chicago scene. In the twenties and thirties he had an article in the old Chicago Daily News specializing in restaurant reviews, which becomes readily apparent when you read this little book. He was not related to the famous local TV news anchor of the same name.

Chicago in 7 Days is written as an account of a day by day tour given to a Miss Anne Morley, a self described "wide eyed visiting yokel from the Corn Belt." (We later learn that she hailed from Springfield). Day after day, the author takes Miss Morley on an exhaustive bus, streetcar, and elevated tour of the city, from the top to the very bottom. Miss Morley is shown neighborhoods where many life-long residents today wouldn't dare venture.

For example, stopping at an establishment for something to eat in the vicinity of Sacramento Avenue and Madison Street in East Garfield Park, Mr. Drury writes the following:

Because of its good food and pleasant appointments"  I explained to Miss Morley, "this place is popular with the beau monde of the far west side.

Today this area would be off limits to all but the hardiest urban pioneers and adventurers. The "beau monde" of the west or any other side for that matter, haven't been found in that part of town for years. In truth, many of the places our tour guide takes his intrepid guest would have been far off the beaten path for the average 1928 visitor as well. Hardly a stone is left unturned in their exploration of the city.

The ground rules are expressed at the outset: "We won't visit the stockyards." To our 21st Century ears, that might sound like an ironic remark, as if a gentleman would ever think of showing a young lady the brutal, mechanized killing industry that put our city on the map. On the contrary, Miss Morley is a bit put off that Chicago's number one tourist attraction at the time, might not be on her tour guide's agenda. The author puts her mind to rest, she would indeed get to visit the stockyards including its most gruesome features, but not before she saw the "fruits of our famous pioneer industries", that is to say the architecture, public works projects, and great cultural institutions that were all made possible by those industries.

There is an unabashed pride and optimism in Mr. Drury's words about this city. One can easily see the Chicago swagger and braggadoccio that is so off--putting to critics such as Rachel Shteir whose lambasting of Chicago in the guise of a book review was published in the New York Times earlier this year. That's not to say this little guidebook is a mouthpiece for the Chamber of Commerce. Far from it, Drury doesn't pull any punches, he takes Miss Morley through some of the most unflattering parts of the city, places with colorful names like Floptown, Bum Park, the Slave Market, and a place he calls simply, the "Underworld District". They visit the Western Undertaking Company which is:

particularly interesting because practically all persons who meet a sudden death in the north end of the Loop are brought here-that is, until such a time as the relatives of the deceased are located of notified by the police.

The couple visit the "Noose" Coffee Shop across from the Criminal Courts building and County Jail where the proprietor, Joe Stein:

provides meals gratis to condemned prisoners on the eve of their hanging.

Drury takes the lovely lady to Little Sicily on the near northwest side where:

at Milton and Oak Streets, we stood at Chicago's notorious "Death Corner"... where Sicilians are mysteriously shot to death every two or three weeks. And a shrug of the Sicilian shoulder is as far as the police ever get in their investigations.

And to the famous neighborhood on the south side, just west of the stockyards where in Drury's words:

in recent years, Back O' the Yards has been the scene of many gang murders and shootings, arising from the territorial disputes in distribution of illicit beer and alcohol.

In 1928 of course, the country was still under the grips of that noble experiment, Prohibition. Substitute the word "drugs" for "beer and alcohol", and he could have written those words today.

Despite the desperate conditions, Drury takes pains to point out that things were much worse in the past, that great strides were continuously being made to rectify the evils of poverty and its effcts. While walking through Floptown past the:

gnarled old men with yellow teeth, shabby young men with dirty wrinkled clothes, middle-aged men with doughy complexions, laborers, Mexicans, lumber- jacks, and drunks, 

he shows Miss Morley, Hobo College, an institution :

founded and conducted by Dr. Ben Reitman... for the betterment of the down-and-outer.

And they visited Chicago's legendary institution devoted to helping the needy of this city, the Hull House. Founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr as a settlement house and a place for social reform, the Hull House provided housing, educational opportunities and cultural activities for tens of thousands of individuals, mostly newly arrived immigrants on Chicago's west side. Unfortunately Miss Addams, who was still very much alive at the time of the writing, was not available  for a visit.

Of course not all of the seven day journey through Chicago ivolved visiting as Miss Morley called it: "how the other half lives." Starting from her base camp at the late, great downtown hotel the Sherman House, our travelers' urban excursions typically began mid-morning, and didn't end much before midnight. The first day is a whirlwind overview of the city, north, south, and west. Even the much overlooked east side is explored as the two find their all the way down to the residential neighborhood still known as "The Bush", adjacent to the now defunct United States Steel South Works plant.

Day two was devoted to Michigan Avenue (mostly south of the river), and the lakefront. It's interesting to note the contemporary sensibilities about architecture and other matters of the day. Drury singles out two specific buildings on that day's tour as "two of the world's greatest structures." His choice might come as a surprise given the number of notable Chicago buildings that were built before 1928. The first stop on the Michigan Avenue tour, number one on Mr. Drury's list of great buildings of the world, is Tribune Tower. The tower, the work of the New York architects Raymond Hood, and John Mead Howells, was selected the winner of a 1922 contest sponsored by the newspaper to build "the most beautiful office building in the world." The stiff competition included submissions from all over the world; many of them were, as was the winning entry, designed in the popular at the time, neo-Gothic style.  Drury spends several pages on the building, waxing poetically about its magnificence: the breathtaking design that makes the building appear to be reaching toward the sky yet remaining firmly planted on the ground, its cathedral-like entrance, the masterful stonework, the unforgetable view of the Chicago skyline between its flying buttresses thirty stories above the ground, and yes, he even goes on and on about the building's occupant, richly deserving in his opinion, of its self-proclaimed title: "World's Greatest Newspaper."

Surprisingly, for all the words Drury devotes to the Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, directly across the street, is mentioned only in passing.

The "second burst of glory" in John Drury's collection of great buildings of the world found in Chicago, conveniently comes at the end of this particular tour sitting as it does at the other end of Michigan Avenue. My guess is that unlike Tribune Tower, this one would not rank highly on most lists of Chicago best buildings today. It's the Stevens Hotel, today known as the Hilton Chicago but best known to most long time Chicagoans as the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Its ornate Beaux Arts style,  Louis XV appointments, and especially its enormity overwhelms the visitor. These days, those of us who care about such things, marvel over the originality of the great architects of Chicago, John Root and Louis Sullivan for example. Back in the twenties, those architects' work already three decades old, was seen as "old fashioned." It was the architecture that looked back to the past for its inspiration, that was the current vogue. Another building that Mr. Drury lavishes praise upon, is the Classical Revival Elks Memorial at Lakeview and Diversey, a building well off the radar of most contemporary Chicago Architecture buffs.

Interestingly, under the heading of Architecture, the book's index lists, Classical, Colonial, Moorish, Reproduction of Parisian churches, Romanesque and Renaissance. However, the couple does explore a number of buildings that do not fit into any of those categories. These styles are described by the author as "modernistic" or "futuristic." Inside the long lost Union Station concourse, Miss Morley makes the observation:

I would say it looks unfinished...

Drury continues:

What aroused this thought in her was the appearance of square pillars of exposed fabricated steel, forming criss-crosses along the walls and lofty ceiling. "This exposed steel work," I asserted, "is an original innovation in terminal design. In fact, many of the more advanced modernistic artists claim that this is the first appearance of a typical American architecture. Because of its simplicity and directness, these artists believe that such an interior fulfills the purpose of art. They hold that art, particularly in the field of architecture, should reflect the present and not the past."

OK so Mr. Drury may have gotten his timeline a little mixed up; the appearance of a "simple", direct" and "typical" American architecture did not begin with Chicago's Union Station, not by a long shot.

Here's another passage from the couple's tour of the South Side:

Our walk then led north on Woodlawn Avenue to 58th Street.  

"What an odd-looking house," sang out Miss Morley, indicating a long, low, rambling house on the northeast corner.

"That," I replied, "is known as 'The Houseboat House because of its similarity to a boat, and is one of the show- places of the south side. It is easy to see that it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the foremost of American architects of to-day.

In case you haven't guessed it already, the house he's referring to is Robie House, one of FLW's most iconic designs. While Drury's writing on the subject may not shed much light on architectural history from a scholarly point of view, he does give us great insight into the way the average person looks at buildings, back then and today.

Miss Morley and her guide do eventually make it down to the stockyards where the visitor is at the same time repulsed and exhilarated by the goings on. "Gracious..." she says:

...the experience has a weird thrill with so much killing going on. I shall never forget it in all my life.

No sooner than the thought of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle came into my head, Miss Morley brought up the muckracking novel. Always quick with the reply, her tour guide said:

"Yes," I said. "That novel caused as much of a stir when it appeared years ago as Uncle Tom's Cabin did earlier. Its expose of conditions in 'Packingtown' did much to bring about improvements in the meat-packing industry in Chicago. The deplorable conditions pictured in the novel are of course a thing of the past.

Of course.

In many parts of the book, Drury brings up Chicago's literary scene, even taking his guest to some of the hangouts of the famous writers of the time. He drops names of the likes of Theodore Dreisser, Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and others. Unfortunately, our wanderers never seem to meet up with any of these literary giants. No one would ever confuse this book with the works of the great writers whose paths crossed at some point with this town. What Drury's book lacks compared to the works of his literary idols is a critical edge and a sense of irony. Superlatives abound in desribing the assets of this city, and its problems are reported as matter-of-fact, they're little more serious than smashed bugs on a windshield. Drury even finds something positive written from perhaps the greatest cynic of all, H.L. Mencken, who wrote this on Chicago's literary scene:

In Chicago there is the mysterious something that makes for individuality, personality, charm; in Chicago a spirit broods upon the face of the waters. Find a writer who is indubitably an American in every pulse- beat, an American who has something new and pecul- iarly American to say and who says it in an unmistak- ably American way, and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with the gargantuan abattoir by Lake Michigan— that he was bred there, or got his start there, or passed through there in the days when he was young and tender.

No, you will not find within its pages of this book, an insightful critique of this town. That's part of its charm. It would be almost inconceivable to find such a book, even a visitor's guide, written in our own cynical age.

If you were to break open a compenprary guidebook to Chicago, you will notice the book more than likely covers only a sliver of a section of the entire city. The large swaths of "unworthy" areas are deemed so because authors and editors consider them to be short on interest and/or high in danger. Not so with Chicago in 7 Days. The greatest joy for me in reading this book was Drury's portrayal of a city of tremendous life and potential. He and his guest embark on a magnificent seven day journey exploring practically every nook and cranny of Chicago, discovering treasures in even the most banal of places. Those banal places are are woven in seamlessly with the landmarks, the places considered "worthy" of note as tourist destinations go. That in a nutshell, is the essence of what the eperience of any real city is all about.

Unfortunately, tourists in our day it would seem, are not by and large interested in exploring real cities.

Again that term, "Disneyfication" rears its ugly head. Chicago's North Michigan Avenue is a good example. In the book, Drury writes about the neighborhood then known as "Towertown", after the Water Tower. In the twenties, this was the heart of Chicago's "Bohemia" as Drury called it, referring not to ethnicity but its lifestyle. The neighborhood once abounded with cafes, nightclubs, bookshops, and art galleries, much like New York's Greenwich Village and San Franciso's North Beach back in their heydays. As its counterparts in other cities, there was a certain edge to Towertown, which only added to its appeal:

Anne saw a long, low, dimly lit room filled with swaying couples - long-haired men and short-haired women. A jazz orchestra in one corner at least provided time for the dancers. On the walls of the room my companion noted weird futuristic and impressionistic drawings and cartoons, as well as newspaper clippings and art pictures.

"This," I said, "is Bohemia in all its glory !"

This milieu would over the years combine with upscale shops making for an interesting mix. Towertown as it was, became history in the late sixties and early seventies as major projects like the John Hancock Building and Water Tower Place anchored a wave of commercial development that continues to this day. North Michigan Avenue now is Chicago's major shopping street and any trace of its "bohemian" past is long gone. As a result, the neighborhood is both perfectly safe, and perfectly bland. It's also highly successful, economically at least. It may have gained the world at the cost of losing its soul.

Chicago of the Twenties was anything but Disneyfied; it was real to the core. Its lifeblood as John Drury pointed out, was found in its steel mills, factories and stockyards. In them, and in all their "fruits", progress and the hope for a better future seemed to writers like John Drury to be boundless. Today that industrial lifeblood is all but gone, but the great institutions that were made possible because of the industries still hang on. That is testimony perhaps, to the greatest quality of this city, its willingness to re-invent itself. Chicago has been doing just that since its inception. Simply put, no city can re-invent itself without people believing in it.

The term "world class city" had not yet been coined in 1928 but I have no doubt it would have been used unsparingly in Drury's text if it had. Perhaps taking their cue from Chicago in 7 Days, more recent unabashedly overbearing accounts of Chicago testify to the fact that there are people who still believe in this city. Whatever your opinion of the grandiose rhetoric, I'd be inclined to put this city's future in their hands, rather than in the hands of the apologists and cynics who can come up with nothing better than: "well at least we're better off than Detroit."

It's a charming book, a fun read, and a fascinating insight into the spirit of a city in the midst of one of its golden ages.

If you have any interest in Chicago, its past, and how that past relates to the current city, Chicago in 7 Days is a must read. Pick up a copy if you can find one. Short of that, you can find a PDF version here.

Pilgrim Baptist Church

One afternoon in early 2006, I was driving toward the Loop on South Lake Shore Drive when I saw a huge plume of smoke a few blocks in from the lake. Out of curiosity I turned on the radio to get some information and my heart sank when the headline said a historic church on the South Side was in flames. Immediately I assumed it was the Mount Olivet Baptist Church, a historic African American church on 31st and King Drive. When they reported the story in detail, my heart sank even further when I learned that the church on fire was actually the Pilgrim Baptist Church at 33rd and Indiana, the glorious Adler and Suillivan synagogue building that was converted into a Baptist church in 1921.

Not only was the building architecturally important, but in 1932 the Pilgrim Baptist Church choir was founded by the man who would become known as the father of Gospel Music, Thomas A. Dorsey. It was here that Gospel legends Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland and others cut their teeth and naturally the church became hallowed ground in Gospel circles.

One cruel irony is that the fire was ignited by workers repairing the roof during a restoration project. The fire consumed everything except for the exterior limestone walls. Immediately there were plans afoot to reconstruct the church. Then governor Rod Blagojevich pledged millions in state funds to help the cause, until someone pointed out to him that the Constitution prevented him from doing that.

The congregation of Pilgrim Baptist is small and cannot afford on its own to re-build its landmark church. But it looks like it will rise again, at the very least approaching the way it looked back in the 1930s during its heyday, with the help of many sources including possibly, you.

Go to this site to read about the restoration plans and find out how you can help rebuild a landmark.

Ready or not...

...here it comes. At long last the much rumored Target at Carson's is starting to make its presence felt in the landmark Louis Sullivan building on State Street.

Let's all hold our breath.

The new face of State Street

In lavishing praise upon the big box chain Target for their plan to open a store in Louis Sullivan's masterpiece, the former Carson Pirie Scott Building on State Street, Mayor Daley in his typical "there you have it" fashion said this:

"State Street's not just State Street,....It's Michigan Avenue, it's Wabash, it's Dearborn, it's Wacker, it's Clark, it's Roosevelt Road. It's all of it. It's not -- it has to be more than just one street, and that's what it is. I mean, everything's connected."

Now I'm not entirely sure exactly what he was getting at, but one point I'm able to gather is that he feels State Street is no longer the State Street it once was.

The Huffington Post in their story about the new Target posted an on-line poll asking their readers the following:

How do you feel about Target moving in?

Great! More convenience, low prices, what could be wrong?

Terrible. Another giant corporation draining the character from our city.

I didn't vote because I could have easily chosen both options.

Those of us long time Chicagoans still think of State Street as special, the heart and center of our city, the street of (among other things) grand department stores, perhaps the greatest concentration of them anywhere in the world. We once proudly boasted that the intersection of State and Madison Streets, the location of the Carson's Building, was the busiest intersection in the world. Back in the day, State Street was definitely NOT Roosevelt Road, Wacker Drive, Michigan Avenue, or any other street in Chicago or anywhere else. State Street was State Street, period.

As for the building, it was the pinnacle of the career of Louis Sullivan. It was also The Master's swan song as never again would he see a commission as grand as this. Two magnificent curtain walls flanking a beautiful rounded bay and a highly ornate but not over the top arcade express all that Sullivan and the Chicago School of Architecture stood for. It is arguably the greatest building in Chicago.

Target on the other hand, is the epitome of automobile culture, of one stop, no frills, in and especially out convenience shopping. It symbolizes the suburban shopping strip, the vast wasteland located in Anywhere, USA. And it symbolizes a culture that cares only about corporate image and the bottom line, little if any at all for local history or culture.

I should know. Hardly a week goes by when I am not to be found at the local Target. As for the experience of shopping there, well I'll just say I simply cannot afford to pay for a pleasant shopping experience, so I shop at Target. In other words, I'm just as much to blame for this sad state of affairs as anybody else.

We have to face the fact that the State Street of our childhood is gone and is not coming back because the era of the department store is also history. Like me, most people love to wander around them and reminisce about the great department stores, but they prefer to spend their hard earned cash in the places where it goes the farthest. Volume is the name of the game and the big boxers have turned low overhead, sophisticated distribution models, and marketing into an art form. No company without their vast resources can possibly compete with them.

Which is precisely why I'll be buying my milk, toothpaste and paper towels at the new Target on State Street when it opens sometime next year. It will be convenient for me as it is smack dab between work and the train. I won't have to drive to the one in our neighborhood so often.

The building, now officially called the Sullivan Building, has undergone a massive restoration which began in 2006, ironically the same year that Carson's (as it is known in Chicago) announced it was leaving. Most noticeable is the reconstruction of the original cornice, the collumnade and the facade of the top floor. Save for one temporarily boarded up window, never in my life, and probably not since it was built at the turn of the last century, has the building looked so good. It has also been empty for the past five years. As we saw in the case of Block 37 a couple of blocks away, the city believes that something, anything in fact is better than vacant space in the heart of the Loop. Having spent some time in the new behemoth development (I can't bring myself to call it a building) that occupies the entire Block 37, I would have to say, well, maybe something could be said for nothing.

That's not to say I think that the Sullivan Building should remain vacant, not in the least. I think that if designed properly, the new store that the company in a departure from their traditional business model is billing as an "urban Target", will be a welcome addition to the Loop. These days after all, the Loop is a heavily residential neighborhood. I've often asked myself: "where do all those people shop?"

That said, while it will serve those of us who are already there, it's hard to imagine that a Target store would be a big draw to bring people into the Loop. Ideally I think it would have been better to have something a little more special, a destination, say like what Marshall Field's used to be. On the other hand it could have been much worse, it could have been a Walmart.

My biggest fear like everyone's, is that in their zeal for corporate identity, the Target folks will destroy the character of the building. Goodness knows the company has splattered their unavoidable logo everywhere possible, as Edward Lifson pointed out a few years ago on his blog. One only needs to look two blocks to the north to see what happened to the aforementioned late, great Marshall Field's store. While the company that bought it (ironically from the Target company), had the sense to leave the Field nameplates in front of the building, they have done everything possible in the name of corporate identity to destroy the character of the old Chicago institution by removing practically every vestige of the Field's legacy.

Now it's true that as a department store, Carson's was no Field's, neither as a store nor as an icon. Frankly I don't know many people who even miss it. It's also true that Sullivan designed the building to be a retail store, not an art museum, a school or anything else. It is entirely appropriate that it should continue to function as such. But the building is special and I would urge the brass at Target and their designers to downplay their "image" as much as possible, and let the design of the great building take center stage. They now have in their possession of one of our city's crown jewels, let's hope they don't mess it up.

Perspective

To put Richard Nickel's work into deeper perspective, according to Richard Cahan's biography of the photographer, between the years 1950 and 1972, roughly the span of his career, 39 buildings of Louis Sullivan, one third of the Master's major works, were destroyed. Nickel photographed as well as salvaged artifacts from practically all of them.

The two greatest losses of these were the Stock Exchange Building at 30 North La Salle Street, (where Nickel lost his life), and the Schiller (later the Garrick) Building at 64 West Randolph Street. The Old Stock Exchange was replaced by a thoroughly undistinguished skyscraper while the Garrick Theater was replaced by a parking lot. Ironically, that parking lot was subsequently leveled to make way for the Goodman Theater complex which leads to the lament, if only...

Many more important Chicago buildings were lost during that particularly dark period of the city's architectural history. The Republic and Cable Buildings by Holabird & Roche, the Pullman Building and Grand Central Station by Solon S. Beman, the concourse of Union Station by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White and the lovely Edison Building by Purcell, Frick and Elmslie were all replaced by vastly inferior buildings, if anything at all.

In his eulogy for Richard Nickel, his longtime friend and mentor, the photographer Frederick Sommer wrote:

When the single masterpiece is struck down, the act is attributed to the madman, but when the coherence of an entire society is vandalized, the destruction is viewed with proud arrogance as evidence of progress.

1810 W. Cortland

So here it stands today, the center of a landmarks controversy of sorts, the former home of the photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel. I decided to make the pilgrimage after I picked up my wife from work about a mile away. Last week I wrote a post about an article in "Time Out Chicago" which balked at the idea that the building was worthy of landmark status.

I've been thinking a lot about Nickel lately as we've recently installed an exhibition at the Art Institute of his photographs along with those Aaron Siskind and John Szarkowski, all dealing with the architecture of Louis Sullivan.

Of the three photographers it was Nickel who devoted his life to the single minded pursuit of documenting Sullivan buildings as they disappeared at a horrifying rate during his twenty plus year career. In 1972 while he was in the process of recovering fragments from the Old Stock Exchange Building during its demolition, he was killed as the building collapsed around him.

His life is chronicled in Richard Cahan's excellent book; "They All Fall Down; Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America's Architecture".

According to Cahan, Nickel was a difficult, irascible perfectionist. His character on the one hand enabled him to set his focus narrowly on the subject of Sullivan, but his perfectionism prevented him from following through on his most ambitious project, a book that was to be a compendium of the complete work of the Master. The book was begun while Nickel was under the tutelage of Siskind at the Institute of Design in 1953, and remained unfinished at the time of his death.

His character also resulted in a tumultuous life, never financially secure, couldn't hold down a job or a relationship, he was constantly reckless and depressed. Nickel's depression no doubt was exacerbated by the fact that the subject of his work was literally turned to dust before his eyes. This is the stuff of the quintessential artist melodrama and it would have made for a good movie. An alternate title for Cahan's book could have been: "The Agony and the Agony."

That said, Nickel's work was sublime. In his endless passion for the work of Sullivan, he developed such a comprehensive understanding of the Master, it was almost as if the two had become one. Nickel documented Sullivan's works not only with a camera, he also drew up scrupulously detailed plans of doomed buildings and removed whatever he could of Sullivan's magnificent ornament. The fruits of his work are virtually all that remains today of the bulk of Louis Sullivan's work.

Nickel was more of an advocate for Sullivan's buildings than Sullivan himself.

Here is a quote from Sullivan's "Kindergarten Chats" that Rich Cahan reproduced in his biography of Nickel:

And decay proceeds as inevitably as growth, function is declined, structures, disintegrate, differentiation is blurred, the fabric dissolves, life disappears, time engulfed. The eternal life falls.

Out of oblivion into oblivion, so go the drama of creative things.

Those exact words were read as testimony in favor of destroying the Stock Exchange Building in a 1970 hearing before the Landmarks Commission.

Nickel bought the Cortland St. building that housed a bakery, remembered fondly by long time residents of the neighborhood as the "Punchki Bakery", in its storefront in 1969 for $7,500 after an exhaustive search. The building is in Bucktown, only a few miles from Nickel's childhood home in Logan Square. Moving into the midst of an old Polish neighborhood, catty-cornered from the magnificent Polish Cathedral style St. Mary of the Angels Church, Nickel was returning to his own heritage and he called the house his "Polish Palazzo."

It is an attractive Italianate Style building, built the same year as the Auditorium Building. It's a vernacular building that proudly announces its place in the world with its original name, Grims Building, prominently spelled out in abbreviated form on the frieze. Nickel loved the little touches of detail which grace the storefront.

Nickel spent an enormous amount of time reconfiguring the house to suit his needs. He and his friend and some-time collaborator, the architect John Vinci, drew up plans and executed the rear wall of the building to replace the bakery section of the building. Again, Nickel's perfectionism got in the way, he never completely moved into it, living for the most part with his parents in suburban Park Ridge. His work on the building also remained unfinished at the time of his death.

For many years the building served as the studio for the portrait photographer Mark Houser.

In 2009 when the owner of the adjacent property to the east purchased the property, Preservation Chicago, a citizen's advocacy group, included the building on its list of the seven most endangered buildings in Chicago. The owner then made a deal with the Chicago Landmarks Commission agreeing not to challenge landmarks status for the facade in exchange for a construction permit to alter the rest of the building.

The house has been gutted down to the beams and joists, the back wall that Nickel and Vinci built is gone, and as you can see from this snapshot taken from the alley, even the honey locust tree that Nickel planted in the backyard has disappeared. All that's left of the structure are the outside walls and the facade.

This begs the valid question, is this house worthy of landmark status as virtually nothing is left of Nickel's work?

There are seven requirements for landmark status in Chicago, and at least two of need to apply in order for a building to become a landmark. The seven are listed in this post on Lynn Becker's blog.

Preservation Chicago claims that three necessary criteria for landmark status apply to the Nickel house, although they don't say which three in their web site.

Here are three requirements that I believe the house fulfills:

1) Identification with a significant person: Richard Nickel's life and work was devoted to the preservation and documentation of the work of not only Sullivan, but to the rest of the significant architects of Chicago. He created a body of work that not only showed the city as it once was, but created a unique and cohesive vision. Nickel is in his own right, one of our city's most significant artists.

2) Critical part of the city's heritage: Nickel's life and death brought public attention to the importance of this city's architectural heritage. While he in no way constituted the entire preservation movement, he became the public face of it. In addition, without Nickel's steadfast devotion to the documentation of the work of Sullivan and others, much of the heritage of the Chicago School of Architecture would be lost forever.

I would say that last sentence speaks for itself. But to convince those who see architecture only as a disposable commodity, let us consider the unquestionable fact that Chicago's architectural legacy brings business to this city. Look at every tourist brochure, every ad, every enticement to come here, and you will see, hear or read some reference to the city's great architecture. People come to Chicago from all over the world to see the work of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. At best this is practical thinking, at worst cynical, but it is a fact worth noting that our great buildings are our golden goose that we would be terribly foolish to squander. And Richard Nickel is at least partly responsible for that phenomenon.

Every city worth its salt takes pains to address its history. One can't walk a few dozen steps through London, Paris or Berlin without stumbling upon some reminder of what happened on a particular site decades or even centuries ago. In our own country, New York City has landmarks ordinances that put ours to shame.

3) The home in question is a terrific example of late 19th Century storefront architecture, a style that is typically not protected and is disappearing throughout the city. This would probably fall under the Unique visual feature category. In a neighborhood that has seen a great deal of development over the years with a mish-mash of styles being employed, the house I believe is worth saving for this reason alone. Contrary to opinions expressed by the author of the "Time Out Chicago" piece, the building is not "drab" at all, as are many of its neighbors. Even in a state of reconstruction, with its orange face brick and the splendid detail work on the cornice and around the windows, the house is a gem.

I think that were he alive today Richard Nickel, would find delicious irony in the fact that people were willing to fight tooth and nail over his modest little home, when in his day he witnessed the destruction of some of the greatest buildings ever built.

As for singling out only the facade for landmark status, I would say that it makes sense in this case. Richard Nickel significantly altered the building when he converted it from a bakery to exclusively a residence. The facade remains the only historically significant part of the building. True it would have been nice to leave the building preserved as Nickel left it, but one can only assume that subsequent owners changed it as well in the last 38 years. Short of the city buying the property and converting the house into a Richard Nickel museum, a highly unlikely scenario indeed, I think it's a good thing that the current owner and the Landmarks Commission worked out an arrangement that benefitted all parties. It was a compromise to be sure but given the fact that this building was admittedly not a slam dunk candidate for landmark status, I think everyone came out ahead in the end.

The preservation of our history doesn't impede progress in the least. In front of the Landmarks Commission, testifying against the demolition of the Stock Exchange Building, preservation activist Thomas Stauffer said:

Progress does not consist of starting over at every sunrise. Progress consists of the accumulation of achievements.

That, in a nutshell is what great cities are all about.

Two points of view

Yesterday I stumbled upon two iconoclastic articles about Chicago architecture, both a little surprising and refreshing in their candor. The tone of each piece is crystal clear from the first sentence.

The first began like this:

"Much modern architecture has grown tiresome to me."

Wow. Chicago architecture boosters love to boast about this city being the birthplace of modern architecture. One hundred fifty years of innovation and struggle only to be summed up in those seven words.

And this is how the second article began:

"No doubt Louis Sullivan made a beautiful building or two in his lifetime."

Ouch. My contrarian personality has to admire the chutzpah of a Chicago writer lavishing such faint praise on Louis Sullivan. It would be like an Italian writing: "Verdi no doubt wrote a few catchy tunes."

The first piece was by Roger Ebert. I've always marveled at Ebert's keen sense of observation and this piece is no exception. He makes the point that to him one of the failures of Modern architecture is that it doesn't speak to history and to the time it was made. More than fifty years after Mies' first Chicago buildings were built, they continue to seem new to him, in Ebert's words, "they seem helplessly captive to the present."

This obviously is not a problem for Madeline Nusser, a staff writer for Time Out Chicago. Her article titled "Sullivan Sullied" asks the question: "is our obsession with the past ruining Chicago's cityscape?"

Obviously neither of these opinions will be heard on any Chicago Architecture Foundation tour.

Nusser's piece was written in response to the two major Louis Sullivan exhibitions in town, "Louis Sullivan's Idea" at the Cultural Center and "Looking after Louis Sullivan" at the Art Institute. She feels that after "the city celebrated Sullivan’s 150th birthday in 2006 with a deluge of activities," all this attention to the architect amounts to hagiography, the "sanctification of his work."

It is certainly true that Sullivan is revered in Chicago more now than ever, more even than during the zenith of his career. Nusser is probably correct in her assertion that the adulation may be a bit overblown. After all, Sullivan's influence on subsequent generations of architects was limited to say the least. She also correctly points out that in Sullivan's own words, he didn't cringe at the idea of his own buildings being destroyed. "Only the idea was the important thing" she quotes him as saying.

Roger Ebert also sites Sullivan's words in his piece and speculates what the architect might have thought of the work of Mies and his followers. He says: "Although Mies is believed by many to have followed in the direction indicated by Sullivan, I doubt Sullivan would have been pleased by many of his buildings."

This may or may not be true but what is certainly without a doubt is the fact that Sullivan reserved the bulk of his wrath for his contemporary Daniel Burnham, whose work and influence Ebert lavishly praises. After the death of his estimable partner John Root, Burnham and his firm in its various incarnations, became the chief exponents neo-Classisism, all that Sullivan stood against.

That said, Sullivan's legacy, like that of any other artist, should be his work, not what he said about it. While Sullivan was eminently quotable, he wasn't a great writer. He was a blow hard. His writing is filled with an unquestioning belief in his own correctness. Often times he is simply unreadable, he painted himself into such a tight corner that he could not find a way out. This uncompromising attitude is what ultimately destroyed his career and led to years of relative obscurity following his death.

It is the profound experience of the eloquence of Louis Sullivan's architecture, the buildings themselves, what little is left of them, and the photographs that document his work by John Szarkowski and Richard Nickel to name only two, that should speak for him. The buildings he made reached for the sky but remained bound to the earth with his glorious attention to detail in the form of ornament.

Of course his use of ornament is quite the matter of personal taste. "Their modern uselessness" is how Nusser describes Sullivan's elevator grilles from the Stock Exchange Building, as seen in Szarkowski's wonderful photograph at the Art Institute. Clearly she has been sucked into Modernist ideology ironically inspired but ultimately misunderstood by Sullivan's own "form follows function" dictum.

Ebert on the other hand provocatively follows no particular ideology, he just knows what he likes.

Like him, my heart soars whenever I cross Edward Bennett's Michigan Avenue Bridge walking north toward the magnificent ensemble of buildings surrounding it, specifically the Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building. These two buildings may not be at the top of the list of Chicago's greatest buildings as compiled by most ideologically driven architecture critics. Sullivan had he lived to see them to completion would have despised them. Yet they are crowd pleasers along with the bridge, itself a result of the Burnham Plan. Crossing that bridge day or night is an unmistakably unique Chicago experience, one of the truly great urban experiences of the world.

Yet unlike Mr. Ebert, I am also moved to this day by particular works of Modern architecture. Their bold lines clearly expressing two materials, steel and glass, surfaces that reflect sunlight creating beautiful plays of light and shadow, gravity defying structures that appear weightless, are also thrilling to me, dare I say even beautiful. The problem as I see it lies not with Mies and his contemporaries, but with their followers who slavishly held to the dictum "less is more" (which Mies himself never did) to the point of stripping all life out of their buildings. As one of the commentators to Ebert's online article aptly remarked, "less isn't more, it's simply less."

Unfortunately Nusser doesn't make a good case for her assertion that we are bound to the past at the expense of the city. Chicago's cityscape today is a splendid amalgam of architectural styles ranging from those of the 1860s to yesterday. Preservation of historical buildings in fact has always been a struggle, it has been stymied by developers and politicians for well over a century, and continues to be to this day.

She does however tip her hand to reveal a specific ax to grind. It turns out that a couple of her friends tried to build themselves a Modern style home in a neighborhood filled with "Victorian" structures. The residents of the community objected to the proposal and it died. But this isolated case in no way represents the majority of residential neighborhoods throughout the city who for the most part have even fewer landmarks restrictions than commercial districts. Evidence of this can be found here from Robert Powers' wonderfully peripatetic blog, A Chicago Sojourn.

The most appalling part of Nusser's piece is her mindless quibble with Preservation Chicago's placement of Richard Nickel's house on Cortland Avenue on its list of the seven most endangered buildings in Chicago.

For starters, Preservation Chicago is a citizen's advocacy group, not to be confused with the Chicago Landmarks Commission, and is not tied to city government in any way. It has no power other than suggestion. In an era when all but a handful of Chicago's most significant buildings are threatened, Preservation Chicago serves an important purpose in bringing the city's history to the public's attention.

Then this remark: "You might be asking Richard who?", as Nusser snickers at the suggestion that the house of the man whose personal struggle to bring justice to our architectural legacy which ultimately led to his tragic death, is worthy of preservation.

"Actually, Nickel was neither architect nor artisan." she adds. "He was a photography student turned preservationist." The omissions from this statement are cruel and stupid. Richard Nickel was an artist of the highest caliber. He and his work may not have the same cache as artists in Nusser's own limited sphere of knowledge, but are important just the same. As I wrote in this space a few weeks ago, were it not for Richard Nickel, (and may I add, his collaborators, namely John Vinci and Tim Samuelson), and for a handful of other people who were voices crying out in the desert in the days when nobody else cared, Chicago might have completely lost all traces to its past, and today might be just another big American city, undistinguishable from Houston or Denver.

These past two weeks I brought my son to art camp at the School of the Art Institute. He has just developed an interest in architecture and every day we would take a different route to point out some of my favorite buildings. And every day we would pass the entrance of Sullivan's Old Stock Exchange Building which was saved from destruction during the building's demolition through the efforts of Messrs Nickel, Vinci and Samuelson. It now stands isolated, completely out of context in the midst of Renzo Pianomania. Instead of being the backdrop for yellow cabs and fedora wearing gents smoking cigars, it now serves as the backdrop for a garden of native flowers, with Millennium Park visible through the arch.

Although its power is diminished in its new setting, it is still a grand monument, and a great reminder that the work of preservation of our city's treasures is an important, never ending task that we must pass on to our children.

Chicago is indeed a very special place.