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| The home of RIchard Teller Crane, Jr. at the corner of North Avenue and Lake Shore Drive (Ryerson & Burnham Archives) |
On this date in
1955 another of the great mansions that lined Lake Shore Drive north of Oak
Street was consigned to the wrecking ball as a contract was signed to level the
former home of Richard Teller Crane, Jr. at the corner of North Avenue and
Lake Shore Drive. The 45-room house with
eight bathrooms had stood on the corner since 1910 when it was completed for an
estimated half-million dollars. Charles Summer Frost, the same architect who gave Chicago the original buildings at Navy Pier, designed the mansion. Plans
were to convert the vacant lot ion which the house stood into a surface parking lot.
Mr. Crane was the
son of Richard Teller Crane, a nephew of the great Chicago lumber man, Martin
Ryerson. Crane, who had gone to work at
the age of nine after the death of his father, came to Chicago in 1855 from New
York. He was shocked at what he saw,
writing in his autobiography that the city “was literally alive with rats” and
its unpaved streets “a sea of mud.” [www.craneco.com]
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| Richard T. Crane and family, son Cornelius, daughter and wife, Florence and Florence |
On the Fourth of
July of 1855 the young Crane opened up the R. T. Crane Brass and Bell Foundry,
14 feet by 24 feet, at the corner of Canal and Fulton Streets. One thing led to
another and by 1865 the company had moved into its third location, a huge plant
at 10 North Jefferson Street, the first cast iron foundry west of
Pittsburgh. The firm fabricated just
about everything, from cast iron moldings to steam engines to elevators.
After the old man’s
death there was some discussion between R. T. Crane, Jr. and his older brother,
Charles, over the terms of their father’s will.
Their lawyers advised both men to submit a closed bid naming a price for
buying the other out of the family business.
Richard submitted the higher bid and Charles agreed. World War I brought a huge increase in
business to the company, and it continued to expand.
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| The Drawing Room (Ryerson & Burnham Architve) |
In 1921 with the
purchase of the Trenton Potteries Company, the firm launched a line of business
for which it is probably most remembered today. A line of plumbing fixtures had been sold
since 1894, but after the war ended Crane began an advertising campaign, exceeding a
million dollars a year, one of the first full-color series of advertisements in
magazines, to create demand for a new luxury bathroom. The campaign worked. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo,
the brand new Drake Hotel, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the 1928
remodeling of Wrigley Field all used the Crane line of plumbing fixtures.
And hundreds of thousand of people changed their idea in the space of a decade of what a bathroom should be.
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| The Crane Parlor (Ryerson & Burnham Arhive) |
Success continued
after the death of Richard Teller Crane, Jr. in 1931. Much of the Chicago operation was gone by the
early 1970’s and the plumbing division was sold to American Standard Brands in
1990. A thorough and engaging look at the history of the company can be found here.
The man who lived
in the mansion at the corner of North Avenue and Lake Shore Drive was a
complicated man, full of contradictions as most human beings are. As early as 1917 he created a life insurance
plan for his workers and provided medical care for them and their
families. In the years between 1914 and
1922 he gave every employee a bonus of between five and ten percent of their
annual salary, distributing $11,511,000 to the employees during that time. He sponsored scholarships for high school
students and encouraged other Chicago industrialists to do the same.
Yet, he had
opinions that often found disfavor. One
example was the hot water he found himself in over comments he made in 1909
about public universities and the University of Illinois specifically.
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| Front Hallway (Ryerson & Burnham Archive) |
“I have given a
great deal of thought and study to the subject of higher education, and have
conducted several systematic investigations with regard to this and many other
institutions engaged in advanced lines of education," he wrote to the president of the U. of I. In fact, as far as I know, I am the only one
who ever has taken up this subject in a businesslike way, and the conclusion I
have reached is that practically every one of these institutions is a fraud and
an imposition on the public.” [Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1909]
The industrialist
didn’t stop there but continued, “Instead of appropriating funds for such
institutions it would be a good deal better for the state to put a torch to
them and burn them down, to go out of the ‘higher education’ business, and
permit the boys to go back to their homes and assist in supporting their
families, instead of causing them heavy expense.”
In January of 1955
the 45-room mansion on Lake Shore Drive would cause no more heavy expense. The Speedway Wrecking Company made sure of
that.
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1 comment:
Photograph shown of house not Crane Jr. but Crane Sr. at 2541 S. Michigan Avenue.
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