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| William Holabird |
Happy
birthday to William Holabird, a giant in
Chicago architecture who would be 158-years-old today. He’s long gone, but many of the buildings
that he and his partner, Martin Roche, designed still live on.
Long, long
ago . . . back in a time when I never could have dreamed that I would be
leading tours in which I would rave about the genius of the architectural
partnership of William Holabird and Martin Roche, back in the days when Dion
was tearing open that shirt of his with Rosie on his chest, my father was
stationed at Fort Sheridan, 25 miles north of Chicago.
I wish I had
known then what I knew now.
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| The Water Tower at Fort Sheridan (JWB, 2011) |
As far as I can remember back in the
early 1960’s the military garrison, headquarters for the United States Fifth
Army, appeared almost the same as it did when
Holabird and Roche teamed up with Ossian Simonds to design it back at the close
of the nineteenth century. The one big
difference could be found in the south end of the fort where rows of stables
stood empty.
And, of
course, the Nike base 200 yards away from our quarters and the housing itself were fairly new.
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| The original pumping station for the base, now a special events facility (JWB, 2011) |
Today the
former army base is a lovely tree-lined community, a home to wealthy North
Shore folks who have been part of a project to redesign a historic landmark
with sensitivity and common sense. The
best of the old still remains, recreated to meet the needs of today’s
requirements. The old guard house and
stockade, for example, is now an arts center in which kids with violins and
cellos come, one after the other, for music lessons.
As an
11-year-old kid I rode my brand new J. C. Higgins bicycle all over that base,
and a decade later, while earning a graduate degree at DePaul, I delivered mail
there, walking through the slush on gray winter days on a route that took
forever because of the size of the place and the amount of mail that had to be
forwarded in a place where the turnover was so high.
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| Original officers' quarters on Logan Loop (Note the Richardsonian arch in the simple brick facade) (JWB, 2011) |
Except for
maybe the water tower and some of the great limestone officers’ quarters on the
bluff overlooking the lake, I never really gave the architecture in the place a
second thought.
Last year,
though, with Jill and our friends, Anita and Andy, I went back to Fort
Sheridan. It was like walking around a
museum with a collection of buildings that came from the drawing tables of two
great Chicago architects just a half-dozen years into their careers.
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| The Guard House and stockade on the west side of the fort |
Fort
Sheridan was built on land donated to the United States by members of the
Commercial Club of Chicago, a civic body scared spit-less by the labor unrest
that brought the constant threat of violence and confrontation to the rapidly
growing city in the late 1880’s.
As Robert
Bruegmann wrote in his definitive study of Holabird and Root, not a whole lot
is known about the process that allowed a relatively young architectural firm
to earn a commission for designing an army post on 600 acres of land
overlooking Lake Michigan between Lake Forest and Highland Park. The one thing we DO know is that young
William Holabird’s old man, Samuel Beckley Holabird, was the Quartermaster
General of the United States Army at the time.
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| Guard House detail--today a community arts center (JWB, 2011) |
The firm
probably received a pretty hefty dose of “do it this way” from the Army, and
there was little variety in the materials that were part of the design although
the materials were plentiful – a yellowish brick that was manufactured on the
property, limestone, and slate for the roofs.
Still, the
post was a far cry from the log and stick frame construction that was a part of
most frontier posts at the time. You
need only to look at the entrances to some of the officers’ quarters on Logan
Loop, let’s say, to see the influence of Henry Hobson Richardson and the
Romanesque design of the time.
Divided into
three sections – public (the 200-acre parade ground), residential (the barracks
for infantry and cavalry and the four “loops” for officers’ quarters, and
industrial (the stables, commissary, pumping station on the lake, and the
like), the whole design was dominated by
and centered around the 167-foot water tower that is just to the south of the
parade ground.
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| The water tower looking from the north across the parade ground (JWB, 2011) |
The tower is
still easily the most impressive part of the design. As Mr. Bruegmann wrote in Architects and the
City:
At close range the lower part of the
brick shaft with its bulbous projecting corners and slit windows, recalls a
medieval fortification more than a church tower. At the bottom the brick tower flares outward
to meet an impressive stone base dramatically opened by a great arch to provide
a carriageway. The enormous rusticated stones forming the wedge-shaped voussoirs of the arch reinforce the impression
of ponderous weight above the narrow opening and bring to mind a medieval sally
port. Creating such an opening in the
base of a massive tower was expensive and completely superfluous, of course,
since there was ample space for passages on ether side of the tower or through
the adjacent barracks buildings, but he architects and the army apparently felt
it necessary to create at least one impressive set piece that was unmistakably
martial perhaps to counteract the somewhat fanciful crowning element visible
from the surrounding suburbs.
Today the
Town of Fort Sheridan is a model for the painstaking restoration of its older
structures and the sensitive integration of new single-family and multi-family
units within the context of the green space that dominates the town.
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| The Lake County Forest Preserve District controls 250 acres of the old fort, and natural settings combined with easily navigable trails abound (JWB, 2011) |
The place
where my family lived on the north side of the base is long gone. It was a fairly awful place to live when we
were there, and I’m glad to see it gone.
But the rest of the base is much the same as I remember it, an imposing
testimony to the early work of two architects who would go on to change the
city of Chicago with their honestly-crafted, strikingly handsome, “Chicago-school”
designs.
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1 comment:
Loved that you finally did a blog on Ft. Sheridan! So interesting how this facilty came about and what it is used for today, It is an amazingly beautiful piece of property on the lakefront.
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