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| This is what two million bucks got you back in 1882 (Ryerson-Burnham Archives) |
In
the year I was born, 1950, one of the great mansions ever to be built in
Chicago was razed. It was just about
this time of year in 1950 that the wreckers came to level the home of Potter
Palmer to make way for a huge apartment project.
What
an amazing place this must have been when it rose in 1882. When the year began, Jesse James was still
creating mayhem. It wasn’t until
September of that year that Thomas Edison opened the first electric power station in the
country, lighting up one square mile of lower Manhattan. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born that
year. As was Igor Stravinsky and Edward
Hopper. Édouard Manet completed one of
my favorite painting in the world, A Bar at the Folies-Bergéfre.
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| The three-story main hall (Ryerson-Burnham Archives) |
Bertha
and Potter Palmer budgeted $90,000 for the project when it began. It took three years to complete the mansion
and another two years to finish the interior.
By the time the family moved in the place had consumed $2,000,000.
That
would be just over $45,000,000 in 2015 bucks.
The
home had a great pedigree, its designers were Henry Ives Cobb and Charles
Summer Frost. Cobb designed, among other
things, the Chicago Athletic Club Association building and the Newberry
Library. Frost designed the original
buildings at Navy Pier and the La Salle street railroad station. Joseph Lyman Silsbee was responsible for
designing the interior of the home. When
you stroll through the Lincoln Park Conservatory, you’re walking through another of Silsbee's buildings.
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| The first floor gallery with about 75 gazillion dollars worth of French Impressionism on the walls (Ryerson-Burnham Archives) |
The
Palmer home on Lake Shore Drive had the first elevator in a private house in Chicago. Entry was through a three-story octagonal
hall, off of which was a drawing room, a dining room and a music room. The most spectacular rooms on the first floor
were the drawing room “with cupids on the ceiling, mosaic walls and floors, into
which golden tesserae were set in intricate patters, and the enormous gallery-ballroom
on whose walls, covered with rose red velvet, hung many of the great paintings which now comprise the Potter Palmer collection at the Art Institute of
Chicago.” [Chicago Tribune, February 10,
1950]
No
one had lived in the immense home since 1933, except for the night of December
28, 1935 when a ball was held for the debut of Potter Palmer, Jr.’s daughter,
Pauline. Her grandfather had died in 1902 leaving Bertha $8,000,000, which she parlayed into $15,000,000 by the
time she died in 1918. At
that point Potter Palmer, Jr. took up residence until 1930 when he sold the place to
Vincent Bendix, creator of gearing that made the first electric starter in an automobile possible.
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| The second floor landing. One could make quite the sweeping entrance to a party from this thing, right? (Ryerson-Burnham Archives) |
Good
timing, Junior. The bottom fell out of
the real estate market, as we all know, and in 1933 the mansion was back in the
Palmer family again even though no one lived there. From July of 1942
to March of 1943, according to The Tribune, the “vast echoing shell sheltered the surgical dressings
center of the Red Cross.” In the first
week of February of 1950 Chicagoans were allowed to wander through “the empty
house, a ghost of an era past almost forgotten.”
And that was the end.
By
March, 1950 the house at which kings, queens, and potentates had been
entertained and which had hosted three presidents of the United States, was
just another piece of ground overlooking Lake Michigan. Today 1350 and 1360 North Lake Shore Drive
occupy the site, two buildings designed in the earliest stages of the career of
the firm of Loebl, Schlossman, and Bennett.
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| The dining room (Ryerson-Burnham Archives) |
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6 comments:
Loved seeing photos and reading this post!
Thanks for sharing this! I love the old mansions and homes. It's such a shame this one was destroyed for something so bland to be put in its place.
Love seeing the pictures. Thank you!
It sure was a good one. It is amazing to see how the power brokers lived back in the day, right? Wouldn't it have been cool to have been a Chicagoan back on those two days when they were allowed into the house to check it out?
Thanks Mr. Jim. You've nailed it again.
I am constantly amazed and even shocked how we humans prioritize our arts. If a tiny fleck of paint falls off a Monet painting the world rallies to raise a million dollars to restore the thing. Here is a piece of architecture that displays many more crafts and much more skill that an Impressionistic painting and we allow it and thousands more to crumble or be violently razed to the ground.
Architecture is the Mother of all Arts since a painting without it frames looks barren, a sculpture with out its base looks deserted, etc., etc., etc. I know this will never change but I lament the ART that has been destroyed in only the name of progress.
This was a architectural Wonder. We will never see the beauty of thus magnitude again. It is a same that this lovely display,lost to us forever could not have been saved. I have always been interested in the creativity and inguinatity that went into the design of these buildings. I realize that we must make way for progress but not at the cost of destroying a of a kind art. For this grand mansion represented a piece of art the same as a Rembrandt or Picasso.
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