You win some and then...

The day after the optimistic news of Target's plans to set up shop in the old Carson, Pirie, Scott store on State Street, came the terrible news of the bookstore chain Borders going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The headline of the Tribune article about Borders said the chain would close half of its Chicago area stores. Checking the list of closures however, it appears they plan to close 100 percent of the stores that my family and I frequent on a regular basis. As I mentioned in my previous post about Carson's, I spent a lot of my life wandering around department stores but never spent much money in them. Bookstores are another story. I've spent countless hours browsing, and seldom have I left a bookshop without money changing hands.

The Borders store where my family and I have spent the most time is about ten minutes from home, in downtown Evanston. It has been a fixture of our lives for as long as our children have. We have many happy memories of that store. Countless children's books that mark the passing of time in Theo and Rose's young lives were purchased there, not to mention the books and magazines that illustrate my wife's and my passions over the last ten years. Saddest of all will be the loss for the people who work there, for the most part folks who care deeply about their work, and passed along their love of books to their customers. I wish them all the best in their future endeavors.

That store was the main draw for us to the town of Evanston, but not the only one. Evanston has a vibrant downtown and we consider ourselves fortunate to live so close. Besides, there is a Barnes and Noble about a block away so our lives in that respect will probably not change much as a result of the store's closing.

The same can't be said about the Borders store on Lincoln Avenue near Devon. More happy memories there as well as we found ourselves spending a lot of time in that shop if we happened to be coming up Lincoln or from points west of our home. There is no other reason for us to visit the otherwise uninspired Lincoln Village shopping center, so that chapter of our life is closed.

A little farther afield, there was the Northbrook store that we'd sometimes drop into if we were in the vicinity. I bought my copy of "The Sibley Guide to Birds" in that shop.

Once in a while on the way home from work, I'd stop in the Borders in the old Goldblatt's building in Uptown. That closing is perhaps the saddest of all to me as its presence signaled one spark of life in a shopping district of faded glory.

Then there are the two Borders closing on the south side of Chicago, the store in Hyde Park, a neighborhood that does not have a scarcity of book shops, and the store in Beverly, a neighborhood that does.

There are those who feel little sympathy for stores owned by a corporation they feel has engaged in predatory tactics. As mentioned above, Borders set up shop in Evanston very close to an existing Barnes and Noble, a comparable store. In the neighborhood of Lakeview on the north side, not only did they open up across the street from another B & N, but also down the block from an older, local independent chain store, Barbara's Bookstore. Barbara's could not compete with the two mega stores and closed that shop as they did also in Oak Park after Borders opened up in the old Marshall Field Building on Lake Street, one block from another long, established Barbara's.

That Oak Park Borders will remain open for now, but the Lakeview store is a goner.

The bookseller that is most associated with Chicago was Kroch's and Brentano's. At one time they dominated the scene, having stores in all the major shopping centers in the area and at least three in the Loop alone. Their closing in 1995 left an enormous void, leaving the Loop for a time with no quality booksellers. Borders opened up their State Street store about five years later to fill the void. Barnes and Noble followed suit shortly thereafter in the South Loop. The State Street store will be the one remaining Borders in Chicago proper.

Unlike their retail counterparts in other areas, the big chain booksellers didn't offer discounted merchandise in a no frills atmosphere. If anything, they went in the other direction, creating customer friendly environments that invited visitors to stick around and browse to their heart's content. Service was also a priority. The vast resources of a Borders or a Barnes and Noble insured that you could almost always get what you wanted, if they didn't have it on the shelves, they could get it for you asap. I dare say that some of these stores even surpassed the independents in many respects. There were a few big, discount book chains that resembled Walmarts more than traditional bookstores, but they didn't survive for long.

Still it is appealing to root for the Davids against the Goliaths. Independent booksellers have been going out of business at an alarming rate over the past thirty years. But the same can be said for independent retail merchants of all varieties. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the fact that for years, children, in this country anyway, have been encouraged to study hard, go to college and go for the golden ring, usually meaning getting into a profession. Few kids today I imagine dream of opening up or running a retail store when they grow up. The work is simply too hard, not glamorous enough, fraught with too much risk, for too little in return. The people who do open stores usually have passions for what they are selling, which is probably why today you'll find more independent booksellers than say, butcher shops or dry goods stores.*

The biggest culprit in Book Wars and the decline of the traditional bookstore of course is the computer. If they do it right, buyers can purchase books on-line for a fraction of what they pay at a brick and mortar store. To add insult to injury, some people use the generous comfort of the traditional bookstore to select what they want then go home and order the book from Amazon. I must admit to having done this myself a couple of times. Speaking of Amazon, they've also brought us the e-book which is wreaking havoc with the publishing industry and promises to do a lot more wreaking in the future. There is speculation that part of Borders' problems is that they did not address the e-book phenomenon as Barnes and Noble has.

So is the bankruptcy of Borders the death knell of the brick and mortar bookstore? Quite honestly I don't think so. I think back to the days when movie theaters urged their customers to "fight pay TV." They understood way back in the 60s that the day was coming when people would be able to access movies from the privacy of their own homes. Once that happened they figured, no one would go out to the movies. Of course that day did come and movie theaters closed at an appalling rate all over the country. But they didn't all close. People still feel the need to get out of the house and commune with other people. The collective experience of seeing a movie in public is a much different experience than watching a movie at home.

Shopping in public is a similar experience. For me as I suspect for countless others, there is no shopping experience that matches the joy of spending time in a bookstore. The presence of a bookshop is a sign that all's not lost in a neighborhood. As books are an essential part of my life, every bookshop that closes represents a little death for me. I know I'm not alone in this sentiment. The fact that Borders is not going away completely is cause for guarded optimism.

I wish them well along with their competitors, independent and otherwise.

Visiting Frank

One of the great joys of parenthood is following your children's passions and doing your best to encourage them. Architecture has been a keen interest of mine for many years, but I can't take credit for my son's latest passion, Frank Lloyd Wright. That came as a result of a field trip to the FLW Home and Studio in Oak Park at the end of last school year.

Since then he, his little sister and I have made a couple of pilgrimages to Oak Park which has the the world's greatest concentration of the architect's work, and also to the neighborhood of Hyde Park to see one of his most famous and beautiful homes, Robie House.

In that vein, our family decided to devote much of our summer vacation to Frank Lloyd Wright by visiting as many of his works as we could in his home state of Wisconsin.

Any FLW tour of Wisconsin has to revolve around a visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Spring Green. It was there, on property owned by his family, that the architect built his home, Taliesin, and his school of architecture, also referred to by that name, which continues on to this day.

In nearby Mount Horeb, my wife found a home designed by one of Wright's Taliesin apprentices, the guesthouse of which is available for lodging. Her touch of brilliance insured that we would not only visit Wright, but also have the first hand experience of living Wright.

This Prairie Style home was built in 1953 for the renowned chiropractor Dr. Clarance Gonstead. Its architect, Herb Fritz Jr. as both student and disciple of Wright, designed the house in what Wright described as "organic architecture," that is to say, built in harmony with nature. This house, like so many of its Prairie Style brethren, does not stand out from its surroundings, but rather blends in, its horizontal motifs echoing the contours of the flat prairie landscape.

Typical to the style is the fireplace which is the centerpiece of the home. As you can see from the picture, this is true even in the guesthouse of the Gaustead home. The hearth, the most important part of the home is where, according to Wright, the family should congregate. It is placed not along an outside wall where it would block the view to the outside, but rather in the center of the room. This is significant because there is a strong connection between the interior and exterior of the house. Wright and his followers took great pains to make this point clear in their treatment of the windows where exterior walls typically extend without a break into the interior. The intended effect is that there is not a clear distinction between inside and outside.

To visit the buildings of the Foundation at Taliesin you need to take a tour from a Foundation member. As we had young children along, the only tour available to us included only the school, not the house.

The house was the center of the most salacious and tragic episode in the architect's life. You can read about it here. Suffice it to say, this is no doubt the reason why children are not invited as discussion of the tragedy that took place inside the house in 1914 is inevitable.

The school, pictured here, evolved from a design which was originally built as the Hillside Home School, commissioned by Wright's aunts as a school for children. Both the house and the school continuously changed over the decades as Wright used them as laboratories where he would work out design concepts before committing them to actual commissions. As the school was intended to be a work in progress, little attempt was made to make the building permanent. Consequently the Foundation has its hands full preserving the building.

The drafting room is the most amazing space in the school. It has a large open space with natural light pouring in from the windows which provide a beautiful view out to the grounds of Taliesin. The students work under spectacular trusswork beams, their now anachronistic drafting tables serving as bases for their CAD enabled computers. T-squares and triangles, other ancient tools of the trade adorn the room, no doubt more as decoration for the benefit of the visitors than for the students who probably wouldn't know what to do with them.

Another great space is the theater where students as part of their curriculum are expected to put on performances. As is typical for Wright, this is an unconventional space with two tiers of seats meeting each other at an oblique angle. A beautiful pieced felt curtain, its design abstractly depicting Taliesin and its environs, was given to Wright by his students. Our guide pointed out that upon receiving the gift, Wright immediately found fault with it, insisting that the region depicting the sky was too prominent. His students dutifully dyed the fabric with coffee, thereby toning it down a few shades.

The deference to FLW given by the Foundation guides borders on the obsequious. My wife and I have taken this tour before as well as the tour of the school's winter home in Scottsdale, Arizona, and noticed that Wright has developed what could be described as a cult following. He is reverentially referred to as "Mr. Wright" and seldom is heard a discouraging word about him. This time however our guide let slip a few good ones, dealing mostly with the architect's gargantuan ego. "Mr. Wright..." our guide pointed out, "not only claimed to be the greatest architect who ever lived, but also the greatest architect who will ever live." She went on; "I guess we'll have to come back in 500 years to see if that's true."

One thing is certain, considerable work will have to go into them if any Frank Lloyd Wright building will be around in 500 years. It is said that FLW didn't believe that his buildings needed to survive him. The cost of maintenance alone on one of his homes is staggering. He was an innovative and radical architect who was not afraid to take chances, employing building materials and techniques that were often impractical and unwise.

Despite his countless clients, the person Wright seemed the most driven to please was himself. Anyone who stands taller then Wright's 5'6" stature, certainly understands this as it is not uncommon for ceiling clearances to be well under six feet. Here is a deliciously iconoclastic post about the architect from the 2 Blowhards blog.

Later in our trip we visited Wingspread just north of Racine. Built in 1938, the magnificent home of H.F. Johnson, president and C.E.O. of the Johnson Wax Company, was Wright's last home to be built in the Prairie Style. Outspread wings (giving the house its name), radiate from the central core of the home which consists of the family room, centered of course by an enormous fireplace. In fact there are no fewer than nine fireplaces in the home.

The room is lit from daylight filtering from hundreds of window panes in the ceiling. The centerpiece of the tour of Wingspread is a video featuring Sam Johnson, the son of H.F., who moved into the place during his early teens. Sam recounted a particularly amusing story of a dinner party in the house with several prominent guests. The sound of thunder began to rumble in the distance, and father and son Johnson looked at each other with trepidation as their worst fears were about to come true. The roof leaked, badly. As rain drops dripped on the elder Johnson's bald head, he told the maid to bring over the phone. In front of his guests he picked up the receiver and demanded the operator connect him with Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright in Scotsdale Arizona. Much to the amazement of the guests, Wright picked up the phone at the other end. Johnson in a stern voice said, "Frank, you've built me a beautiful home, my family and I are in love with it, but the roof leaks. I am at this very moment sitting at dinner with the governor, and several prominent members of our community, and rain is pouring in above my head." At this point there was dead silence in the room as every word of the response could be heard by all. Without missing a beat, Frank Lloyd Wright told Mr. Johnson: "Well why then don't you move your chair?"

Sam Johnson also recounted a story about a visit by Wright to Wingspread. This was after H.F's second wife, the one for whom he built the house, died suddenly. His third wife understandably was never in love with Wingspread. When she moved in she brought her furniture with her. Wright woke up early in the morning on the second day of his visit. He proceeded to move all of Mrs. Johnson's furniture out and brought up the original furniture he designed from the cellar. When Mrs. Johnson awoke, she was astonished to find FLW sitting in her re-furnished living room. Wright said to her: "now isn't this better?" Mrs. Johnson in no uncertain terms told Frank Lloyd Wright to leave her home immediately.

He never returned.

It was H.F. Johnson who commissioned Wright to build his company's famous headquarters in South Racine. Again, unconventional is the rule. Wright designed the administrative building to be another great open space with a roof comprised of glass (currently being replaced by acrylic) tubes, which bathe the working space with diffused natural light. The roof is held up by the building's most distinctive feature, its lily pad inspired columns. As photography was not allowed inside the building, here is a link to a photograph of the interior. You can see from the photograph that the Wright designed furnishings still are in use. The open workspace was a break with the traditional office design of the time and is a testament not only to Wright's design skills, but also to the innovative thinking of H.F. Johnson whose company continues to this day to set standards for corporate ethics and civic responsibility.

Unfortunately, another innovative design as well as the most prominent building on the Johnson Company campus, the Research Tower is no longer in use as its provision of only one stair well is no longer up to building code.

Wright was the paradigm of the idiosyncratic, difficult, creative spirit. He led his life as he alone saw fit, which resulted in scandal, forcing his departure from Oak Park. Oak Park has long since forgiven, they've in fact made a cottage industry out of him. But in his home state with the exception of the Wright sites, there seems to be little love lost for its native son. Indifference was mixed with tales of Wright's egotism and his misplaced sense of entitlement all during our vacation. Part of the trip included an unscheduled stop in Milwaukee to see one of the Wright homes featured in my son's book on Wright. Since we hadn't planned visiting the city, we didn't look up the address of that particular house. No problem we thought, we'd just head to our favorite bookstore and find a book on Milwaukee architecture. If that failed surely someone at the store would know where it was. Unfortunately we failed on both counts, no book, and most surprisingly to me, no knowledge of the house.

Undaunted we headed to the nearest branch of the Milwaukee Public Library where we found a very helpful librarian who was impressed with and eager to participate in our nine year old's quest. She found out all she could for us about Wright in Milwaukee. Not only did she locate the house we were looking for, but also a block consisting of Wright's American System Built Homes on the city's south side, as well as the flying saucer inspired Greek Orthodox Church in the suburbs that was to be the architect's last design. She even added a story of her own about a long deceased aunt from Spring Green who, like many of her neighbors, did not approve of Wright's penchant for being above the trivialities of everyday life such as paying his bills.

Our intended destination, the 1916 Frederick C. Bogk House turned out to be only a few blocks away. It was designed during the same period that FLW worked on the Imperial Hotel in Japan. In contrast to his Prairie Style homes, this one has an imposing presence on the street and, as its owner describes in this interesting article, is strongly influenced by Japanese and even Mayan design, a marked departure at the time for the architect.


The south side homes are closer to the Prairie Style Wright with their exaggerated, cantilevered eaves and strong geometric lines. These were built as affordable middle class homes, an early incarnation of his much later "Usonian" designs. As the self-appointed architect for the ages, Wright clearly had his sights on bigger and better things to do than simply build homes for the wealthy. He wanted his influence to spread across all society and was convinced, like so many architects of the 20th Century, that he had a better idea of how people should live. Unlike the Swiss architect Le Corbusier whose famous plans for the city of the future would have had people stacked on top of one in other in cities that would be made up of clusters of glorified housing projects, Wright's idea for the ideal city gave each family an acre of land to tend as they saw fit, as long as they did it Wright's way of course. In FLW's "Broadacre City" there would be no political administration. It would be (not surprisingly) the architects who planned and organized the way people lived. Wright saw the automobile as the great democratizing force and even looked forward to the day when private planes and helicopters would be as prevalent as cars.

As much as Le Corbusier's vision lives on in the long discounted notion of high density public housing, Wright's vision will forever be tied to suburban sprawl, another idea whose time has come and gone, or at the very least, has been discredited.

Today we are left with as this picture depicts, the irony of perhaps the quintessential expression of suburban life, aluminum siding, cladding a house by the greatest proponent of suburban life, Frank Lloyd Wright. It's kind of fun to think that this sublime indignity may have been in some way the third Mrs. Johnson's final revenge on the Master.

All that said, there is much to admire about Frank Lloyd Wright's work. He was a radical thinker, thoroughly original, an innovator whose ideas, far fetched as many of them were, prompted to us to re-think the way we live and how we relate to the world around us. Most important he crated a body of work that is unique and stunningly beautiful.

I think it is no accident that there is something immediately appealing to children about Wright's work. Sam Johnson lovingly described in the Wingspread video the joys of growing up in a house with a crow's nest from which he could command divisions of armies of friends attacking each other from the grounds of the estate divided by the wings of his fabulous house.

My son was completely swept away by the whimsical design of the children's room in the Home and Studio. He, as I was some forty years earlier, was struck by the design of a house, the likes of which neither of us had ever seen before. Clearly, someone was responsible for creating this wonderful space and, eureka, the idea of the architect suddenly became apparent. It is not surprising that when most Americans hear the word architect, the name they are most likely to conjure up is Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright was by all accounts a fantastic teacher who had a great fondness of children, if not particularly, adults. Blue Balliett in her novel The Wright Three, about the fictional near demise of Robie House (which takes on its creator's cantankerous personality), suggests that Wright was perhaps atoning for the sins of abandoning his six children in Oak Park.

In any case, my son is completely enthralled by the architect and his work, and through this interest has developed a new found appreciation of architecture. One can certainly do worse than teach a nine year old boy that there are worthwhile things in life besides baseball and football.

And for that, all I have to say is, thank you Mr. Wright.

Going home

When I was nine years old, my family moved to Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Often I thought of how my life would had been different had we moved to the much different suburb of Lincolnwood which was my mother's first choice, or if we had remained in the city.

Fifth grade is a tough time for a kid to move and change schools. I ended up in a school where I was an outsider in a class made up of kids who for the most part had known each other since kindergarten. Looking back after forty some years, I can honestly say that was one of the most difficult years of my life. Eventually I gravitated toward people who were outsiders like me. One of them, another transplanted Chicagoan, continues to this day be my best friend. My wife experienced being an outsider too as her family moved around quite a bit during her childhood. I've always been attracted to the eccentric, rooted for the underdog, and prided myself on my contrarian ways. It's only dawned on me recently how all this may be related to my first experiences in Oak Park.

The year we moved to Oak Park, 1968, was a watershed time for Chicago. The riots on the West Side after the assassination of Martin Luther King set in motion an exodus of white families from that part of the city. Oak Park is on the western border of Chicago and it was the natural destination for many of those families. The pattern of white flight from the city meant that the racial composition of the West Side shifted entirely from all white to all black in a very short time. Oak Park was smack dab in the midst of this transition and village officials and concerned citizens set upon a radical program of institutionally bringing integration into the suburb. The idea was to gradually bring blacks and whites together to stem the tidal wave of racial tension that devastated much of the city.

Oak Park in 1968 was a much different place than it is today. Back then the village was lily white and staunchly conservative. We were the only Democrats on the block. Having grown up in the city, used to kids of different ethnicities and races, I was shocked when I came to Oak Park to hear the n-word used repeatedly. The parents of those kids who spewed racial epithets naturally were appalled by Oak Park's integration policies and ran as fast as their little legs could carry them. Which turned out to be a good thing as it weeded out exactly the people who would have been at the forefront of the "let's get the hell out of town before the ni--ers come" movement. Those that remained, and there were a good many, realized that Oak Park was a wonderful place to live and raise a family. It had the best of both worlds, good schools, beautiful homes, parks, and a plethora of amenities and services, yet it was still very close to the city and all that it had to offer.

It remains that way to this day. The political climate of Oak Park today is an about-face from the way it was when we moved there. It is one of the most staunchly progressive communities around, fiercely liberal, racially and ethnically diverse. The village is also a nuclear free zone although I'm not quite sure exactly what that means. I've often joked that if a member of the "Axis of Evil" decided to nuke Oak Park, they'd have to answer to the formidable Oak Park Village Board.

When we moved to Oak Park I pined for the old neighborhood. I missed the wonderful Sunday afternoons in Humboldt Park with my dad. I missed our apartment building named the Luella, where I had the run of the place because my grandmother was the manager. I missed Logan Square where the end of the line of the elevated (now the Blue Line) was smack dab on top of the building that housed the aptly named Terminal Restaurant. I even missed our old church, St. Sylvester's. Every chance I got I asked to be taken back to the old hood and when I was old enough, went there on my own as often as I could. When I left home I moved to Logan Square where I remained for many years.

But Oak Park was the place where I spent my formative years. It was there I learned some of the most of the valuable lessons of my life. It's where I first became interested in art, architecture and photography. It's where I first fell in love, had my first kiss, and my first marriage. And it's where I developed some of my deepest and most lasting friendships.

Given all that, surprisingly after I left Oak Park all those years ago, (my parents left shortly after me), I have visited it only sparingly. Perhaps the memories of the normal trials and tribulations of my adolescence and of my difficult first year there override my nostalgia for the place.

This past week I brought my children to Oak Park as my son has developed an interest in Frank Lloyd Wright. I took them to Fair Oaks Avenue which has a good number of Wright works including the Fricke House which is as radical a departure from the neighboring houses as humanly possible. On that street is another significant house by the architect E.E. Roberts, which was the home of a boyhood friend of mine, another eccentric, with whom I have unfortunately lost contact. I spent many hours in that grand house only slightly aware of its architectural significance. We didn't make it to another Roberts house, the ancestral home of yet another dear old friend, the godfather of my daughter, whose one son is my godson and whose youngest is a friend of my boy. We strolled along Forest Avenue where the heavy hitters of Wright's work reside including his first truly Prairie Style work the Thomas House, the over the top Nathan Moore House, the sublime Heurtley House, and Wright's Home and Studio.

The funny thing about Wright and Oak Park's other favorite son, Ernest Hemmingway is that both had swift departures from the place. Hemmingway famously called Oak Park the place of "big lawns and small minds." He left after high school and never looked back. Wright's ignominious departure took place when he left his family after he fell in love and ultimately married the wife of a client whose house we also visited on our little trip.

But all's forgiven these days.

The highlight of our trip for me anyway, was showing the kids the house where I grew up. It's not at all a significant house by any means, not even all that attractive. But it was home, the place I lived longer than any other place in my life. While I've driven by it numerous times in the 25 years I since have been gone, this was the first time I passed by on foot. Apart from the deck that was built to replace the decrepit back porch where we spent so many warm summer evenings, not much has changed in the house's appearance.

What was stunning was the work done in the back yard, not by the owners, but by nature. I think the reason my parents fell in love with the house was the yard. When we moved in, we had two enormous elm tress that my father and I used for soccer goal posts. We also had a gnarly old cherry tree whose trunk came out of the ground at a 45 degree angle, making it the perfect climbing tree, and a magnificent spruce in our front yard that towered over the house.

The first to go was the cherry. The year after it gave us a magnificent spring show of flower blossoms, then a bountiful harvest of the most delicious cherries I have ever eaten, it gave up the ghost. Our biggest fears came true the following year when Dutch Elm disease took our two beautiful elms within a year of each other. To add insult to injury, the spruce tree suddenly died for no apparent reason shortly thereafter. Our yard which had once been a haven of shade during the brutally hot summers, suddenly became a windswept open field.

Yet the lack of shade made it possible to plant a garden. We had rose bushes, peonies, day lillies and planted several varieties of annual plants. We also had a modest vegetable garden. In the midst of the garden I dug up a volunteer maple that was maybe about a foot tall and replanted it in the lawn, a little bit away from the former site of the elm. Also in the garden which formed the strip of dirt in front of the fence that separated our yard from our neighbors', was another volunteer, a small elm which I decided to leave alone.

I mention these volunteer trees because today they are two great trees. The elm I'd say is about thirty feet tall with a girth about two thirds that of the elms we lost. The fence is gone, most likely in order to accommodate the tree. The maple is only a little smaller than the elm, it's a tree that has been taken care of and appears to be a cherished part of the property, as our trees had been decades earlier.

It reminded me that while I've taken a lot of Oak Park with me, both willingly and not, I've also left a little bit behind. After all the years I spent there and amazingly the even more years I've been gone, I never appreciated the place as much as I did the other day.