My lovely bride and
I have favorite restaurants all over Chicago, but a spot to which we are
particularly partial is Forno Diablo on Diversey, just west of Sheridan. It’s a mood-filled interior . . . you
walk through black velvet curtains to enter a place where I have never had a
bad meal. As you nurse a glass of
Malbec and wait for dinner, there are several flat screen televisions above the
bar that play old Charlie Chaplain movies.
The Brewster Apartments 2800 N. Pine Grove (JWB, 2011) |
And that’s
appropriate because just up the street is The Brewster Apartments, the former Lincoln Park
Palace, where Charlie Chaplain occupied the penthouse in 1915 and 1916 when he
was filming movies at the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company over on 1333-45
Argyle.
The Bewster
Apartments, now a condominium building, started its life as the Lincoln Park
Palace when it was finished in 1896.
It must have soared over this section of the city at the time;
few buildings on the north side would have rivaled its height.
The Palace stood
among the first generation of tall Chicago buildings – one year after the
Marquette Building on Dearborn and contemporaneous with the Fisher Building at
Dearborn and VanBuren. It was
steel-framed and filled with light, the result of a skylight or rotunda across
the roof of the building that streamed sunlight into the hollow core of the
structure, a core in which bridges of glass blocks led residents to their
apartments.
The Chicago
Tribune on January 22, 1893
announced that “E. Hill Turnock is preparing plans for the Lincoln Park Palace apartment
building for B. Edwards, proprietor of the American Contractor.
The article went on to disclose that the structure would be 100 feet
high, “ornamented with twelve larges bays.” Two entrances were planned, one on Diversey and “the ladies’
entrance,” facing Lake Michigan to the east on Park Street, what is now Pine
Grove. Each of the building’s nine
floors was planned for six apartments of six, seven or eight rooms.
The southeast oriel of pink Jasper granite (JWB, 2011) |
The optimism faded
quickly. On July 31, 1895 the
developer, Bjourne Edwards, died when he stepped on a piece of loose
scaffolding and fell from the roof of the partly finished structure. The next day The Trib reported, “The unfinished building rears
its somber, majestic proportions above its surroundings, to be completed by
some one else, but it is a monument to the struggles and trials and the pride
of the man who conceived its plans.”
Edwards was a
Norwegian immigrant who did manual labor until he had enough money to enter
school. He spent several years in
seminaries in Illinois and Iowa.
Then he became a book agent.
In 1886 he began The American Contractor.
Seven years later he was rich enough to build one of the great apartment
buildings on the north side of the city.
The neighbors in
the “fashionable residence district” had been against the building from the
beginning. They must have smugly
nodded when Edwards hit the pavement.
Trouble followed. The two
great entrances were spanned by arches composed of a single piece of polished
Jasper stone from Minnesota. But
as the building settled, the arches broke into pieces.
Despite what the
neighbors thought, the Lincoln Park Palace was luxurious, every inch of it
deserving the “Palace” that was a part of its name. The Chicago Tribune of 1896 raved about the “richness, beauty, and everlasting
qualities” of the rusticated pink Jasper granite from which it was built. Telephones connected each apartment
with the building’s office.
Electric and gas lights were used throughout the building.
Sullivan-esque tracery in the cornice with lion's heads just above that (JSB, 2011) |
And it was
successful. In October of 1897,
following its completion in 1896, the Palace, according to The Tirb had all but one or two of its 60 apartments
rented.
For whatever
reason, though, the Palace did not provide a fair return on the original
investment, and in November of 1900 a minor investor, General Henry Strong, the
President of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, was awarded the
building as the winner of a suit he had brought against the widow of poor old
Bjourne Edwards.
The structure was
estimated to have cost about a quarter of a million dollars to build. Strong nabbed it for about $146,000 in
the judicial sale. Mrs. Edwards “.
. . purchased the residence adjoining the Lincoln Park Palace on the west and
moved into it,” according to the November 25, 1900 Chicago Tribune article.
One of the great rusticated bays (JWB, 2011) |
The architect of
what is now The Brewster Apartments, Enoch Hill Turnock, was a fascinating guy
in his own right. Born in the
mid-1850’s in England, he moved to Elkhart, Indiana with his family in the
early 1870’s. Ten years later he
moved from Indiana to Chciago where he worked until 1890 in William LeBaron
Jenney’s office, the same office that started the careers of Louis Sullivan,
Daniel Burnham, William Holabird and Martin Roche.
Hill began his own
practice in 1890, so the Lincoln Park Palace must have been one of his first
commissions. In the index to the
database of Chicago building permits from 1898 to 1912, he is listed as the
sole architect of 37 buildings, dating from 1896 to 1907. [www.in.gov/history/ markers/497.htm]
Then in 1907 he left
the big city and returned to Elkhart, Indiana, where he continued to design
buildings in Elkhart, Goshen and Nappanee. In fact, five buildings that Hill designed in Elkhart and
Nappanee are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The architect died in 1926 and is
buried in the Lindenwood Cemetery in Fort Wayne.
The Ladies' Entrance on Pine Grove (JWB, 2011) |
His greatest
commission in Chicago still stands at the corner of Diversey and Pine
Grove. Affixed to the pink granite
in the southeast corner is the plaque that designates the Brewster Apartments
as a Chicago Landmark. It reads,
“The principles of skeleton-frame construction that made possible tall
commercial buildings were used her for an early highrise apartment building,
originally known as the Lincoln Park Palace. Behind its heavy masonry walls is an exceptionally
innovative interior, a light and airy construction of cast-iron stairs,
elevator cages, and bridges, paved with glass blocks, and topped by a
skylight.”
Turnock used the same design techniques that distinguished the first generation of great skyscrapers in the Loop on a building that took at least one life to build. It's worth a look, and while you're there stop in at Forno Diablo. You won't be sorry on either account.
1 comment:
Show some compassion in the story. Your imaginary response of the neighbors to Mr Edwards tragic death is callous and disturbing in an otherwise well written story.
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