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| John Root's 1887 home for Lot P. Smith at 32 E. Bellevue (JWB, 2011) |
I got this place on
Bellevue in my head, and I have been trying for the past three days to make my
peace with it. The story of the
men and women who brought it to life are as important to me as the architecture
is, and I have been trying to figure out who this Lot P. Smith was.
I didn’t get very
far. The United States census of
1880 shows that he was born in Illinois in 1846, and that at the time was
living in Harvard. His profession
was listed as a “purchasing agent for railroad construction.”
Well, he must have
done pretty darned well working on the railroad because by 1890 he had been
voting in Chicago for seven years and had contracted with Burnham and Root to
build a home right down next to the lake on Bellevue, the address listed as 27
Bellevue Place. Chicago changed
its numbering system in the first decade of the last century, so the address is
now 32 East Bellevue Place.
And it is
magnificent – John Wellborn Root at the height of his powers . . . probably
designed somewhere between the Rookery and the Monadnock.
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| The plasticity of sandstone in the hands of a genius . . . note the pattern of circle (which is repeated in the dormer) (JWB, 2011 |
I struck out on old
Lot Smith. At the time Chicago had
a host of publications profiling the personalities that brought the city to
greatness. Smith isn’t mentioned in
any of them.
BUT . . . I hit an
unexpected turn and ended up with something that I never would have predicted
when I began the process. That’s
the fun of digging into the past.
It seems that
Sidney Root, John’s father and a resident of Georgia, undertook a series of
foreign travels when the Civil War began, seeking to convince foreign
governments of the justness of the Confederate cause. In 1864 John sailed to England with his father on a blockade
runner and ended up at a school in Claremont, just outside of Liverpool. Young John stayed there for three
years, and he actually passed the exams that admitted him to Oxford. But in 1867 he returned home to attend
New York University.
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| Note decorative treatment of dormer at 32 East Bellevue and top of Oriel Chambers in Liverpool (Oriel Chambers photo from www.e-architect.co.uk) |
So . . . it does
not seem far-fetched to speculate that a teen-aged John Root, who already had a predisposition
toward art and music, saw and never forgot the brand new Oriel Chambers in
Liverpool, which architect Peter Ellis designed and which is, at five stories,
the first metal-framed building with a glass curtain wall in the world.
If you look closely
at the way Ellis finished off his structure, one that was so widely ridiculed
that he designed only one more building in Liverpool, and then look at Root’s
work at 32 East Bellevue Place, especially at what the AIA Guide to Chicago calls the “decorative detail in the unusual
dormer,” you see how much of an impression Ellis’s building left.
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| Dormer detail at Lot P. Smith House (JWB, 2011) |
Nearly a
quarter-century after first glimpsing the Oriel Chambers building, Root was
still drawing upon it for inspiration.
Finished in 1887, Lot P. Smith’s home is one of the few Root-designed
residential buildings we have left and was probably one of the last of his
career. He would die of pneumonia
on January 15 of 1891, just 42-years-old.
On that cold night
in January Nellie Mitchell, Root’s aunt, broke the news of the young
architect’s death to his partner, Daniel Burnham, who had been staying at
Root’s Astor Street home most of the week. “His snatches of soliloquy through that night of despair,
before he emerged to new dreams, took the form of wrath,” Mitchell reported,
“and he shook his fist and cursed the murderous fates as he paced back and
forth between intervals of comfortless sleep on the living room couch.”
Burnham moaned, “I
have worked. I have schemed and dreamed to make us the greatest architects in
the world. I have made him see it
and kept him at it – and now he dies – Damn! Damn! Damn!” [Hines, Thomas S.
Burnham of Chicago. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974]
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| JWB, 2011 |
Who knows, given
another 20 years of productive work, what glories John Wellborn Root would have
built upon his already impressive achievements? Burnham, when he shook his fist at the heavens, must have
felt as much the heavy tragedy of all those works that never would take form as
much as he felt the loss of his friend and genius-partner.
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1 comment:
I have old photos of Bellevue Place. Interested? WChatfield1@gmail.com
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