Connecting the Windy City

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With a touch of a button on this very day 99 years ago, a little girl, the daughter of sculptor Lorado Taft, started water flowing from shell to shell in The Fountain of the Great Lakes, a sculpture that can be seen today in front of the west wall of the Ferguson Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lorado Taft was born in Elmwood, Illinois on April 20, 1860.   He received his degree from the University of Illinois in 1879, stayed for another year to earn his Master’s degree and then attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, the most prestigious school for design in the world, until 1883.

The sculptor opened his studio in Chicago in January of 1886 and began his career as an instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago that same year.  He went on to teach at both the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois.  He also worked as part of a team of sculptors assembling the vast collection of sculptural work at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

As Timothy Garvey wrote in his book Public Sculptor:  Lorado Taft and the Beautification of Chicago, “To a public knowing and therefore appreciating only portraits and soldier statues, he resolved to bring a new sensitivity to ideal sculpture; to a city and region convinced that art of high quality was necessarily produced elsewhere, he determined to prove the ability of local talent.” [Garvey. Public Sculptor:  Lorado Taft and the Beautification of Chicago. University of Illinois Press, 1988.]

He spent his life trying to achieve that grand vision.  At the age of 76, Lorado Taft died at his home at 6016 North Ingleside, just off the Midway Plaisance, on October 30, 1936.    

The Fountain of the Great Lakes had its birth in a casual conversation between two Chicago giants as Lorado Taft and Daniel Burnham rode to their homes in Evanston on a commuter train shortly after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

In his book on Lorado Taft, Garvey wrote, “Taft recalled, Burnham originally poses his advice as a gentle scolding.  Claiming sculptors often overlooked wonderful subjects at their own doorsteps, the architect cited the example of the lake beside them as a rich American theme a sculptor might do well to consider.”

Working on other commissions and teaching almost continuously, Lorado Taft was unable to produce a model for the lake fountain until 1906 when a full-scale version was provided for public display.  The date of 1906 is a significant one, too, because it came just a year after Benjamin Franklin Ferguson left one million dollars in trust to the Art Institute of Chicago which was to be used “entirely and exclusively . . . under the direction of the Board of Trustees in the erection and maintenance of enduring statuary and monuments, in the whole or in the part of stone, granite, or bronze, in the parks, along the boulevards or in other public places within the city of Chicago, Illinois, commemorating worthy men or women of America or important events in American history.” 

  

Benjamin Ferguson was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania in 1839 and was among that generation of adventurers who came to Chicago just prior to the fire in 1871 and made their fortune.  Ferguson worked exclusively in lumber and made a fortune doing so . . . enough so that after traveling in Europe where he was impressed with the public sculpture, he vowed to bring to Chicago that same sensitivity to public art.

Some 20 sculptures in Chicago have been funded by the Ferguson fund. They include such works as the sculptures on the south pylons (Defense and Regeneration) of the DuSable Bridge carrying Michigan Avenue across the Chicago River, Ivan Mestrovic's Bowman and Spearman, just east of Michigan Avenue on Congress, and Henry Moore's Nuclear Energy at the University of Chicago. 

In the Fountain of the Great Lakes Lorado Taft fashioned a series of female figures, executed in bronze, symbolizing the general flow of the great lakes system with Lake Superior at the top which, along with Lake Michigan, empties into a shell-like container held by Lake Huron.  The stream continues onto Lake Erie, which passes the stream onto Lake Ontario.

In his remarks at the formal opening of the fountain 99 years ago, the sculptor paid particular attention to the maiden representing Lake Ontario, observing that as the waters of the Great Lakes “escape from her basin and hasten into the unknown, she reaches wistfully after them as though questioning whether she has been neglectful of her charge.” [Dedication of the Ferguson Fountain of the Great Lakes]

Writing just days later the scholar, critic, and patron of the arts, Harriet Monroe, observed, “[Lorado Taft] has made a truly sculptural work, which takes with a certain authority one of the proudest sites ever granted to a sculptor, adorning the fine south façade of the institute, and dominating the open space of the park.  And he has expressed with force and beauty and a fine plan of enthusiasm his magnificent subject.  The ultimate rank of his monument among the world’s treasures only the verdict of time can decide.”   

When water first began to flow from lake to lake back on September 9, 1913,  the statue faced south and sat on the south side of the original Art Institute building, finished 20 years before.  After standing for nearly 50 years in that location the sculptural work was moved so that it now faces west from its position in front of the 1962 Morton Wing of the Art Institute.

The move was not without controversy.  The Chicago Heritage Committee objected to the Art Institute “pushing our statues around.”   The committee, which came into being in 1957 in the fight to save Robie House on the city’s south side, was made up of Chicagoans from all walks of life, including Alderman Leon Despres of the Fifth Ward.

The committee held that the Ferguson fund, which according to the original will of the generous lumber man was to be used for “erection and maintenance of statuary and monuments” had been twisted over the years to suit the needs of the Art Institute.  For one thing the 1959 Ferguson Wing of the museum on its north side used $1,600,000 from the fund to construct the $2,300,000 addition.

The head of the group, a teacher at Crane Junior College, Thomas Stauffer, said, “The legend on the back of the Fountain of the Great Lakes statue, beneath the bust of Ferguson says his ‘fund must be used for erecting and maintaining enduring statuary and monuments’—not for playing shuffleboard with them.”

Interestingly enough, the placement of the statue in its new location in 1963 has the piece so close to the west wall of the Morton Wing that no one can even see the back of the thing, a nice, practical way of solving the problem that Mr. Stauffer pointed out.

The great sculpture sits in a lovely urban garden completed between 1962 and 1967, the result of a collaboration between two great designers, architect Harry Weese and landscape architect Dan Kiley.  On the west side of the space honey locusts and ground cover provide a transitional entrance to this escape from the city.

The central plaza is recessed 18 inches and holds a rectangular pool leading one's eyes to the great fountain to the east.  On either side of the pool cockspur hawthorn trees provide a canopy over the entire plaza. 

On a sunny, summer’s day, with the water of Lorado Taft’s fountain splashing in the background, I don’t think there is a better place in the city to read a book and eat a take-away lunch.

A year after the Great Chicago Fire destroyed 17,500 buildings and left 90,000 Chicagoans without a roof over their heads, the city had committed itself to building a second city, one greater in every way than the one they had lost a year before.  The Sherman House was finished that year, the Palmer House was begun, and Michigan Avenue was once again lined with modest structures.  Manufacturing concerns in the burnt district were erecting new plants by the scores. 

Chicago had begun its amazing trajectory, from ashes to the fastest growing city in the history of mankind.  Think about this . . . a local census in 1872 pegged the city’s population at 367,396.  By 1880 it had passed the half-million mark; by 1890 there were close to three times as many people living in the city as there had been less than two decades earlier.    

It was in that year of 1872 that William James Chalmers, just 20-years-old, went to work with his pop at the small Chicago firm of Fraser & Chalmers. The young man's father, Thomas, was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1816 and at the age of 27 headed to Glasgow with his wife, Jeanette, where the couple picked up a steamer for a 56-day voyage to New Orleans.  By 1844 they had found their way to Chicago, a hamlet with 4,000 citizens.

Thomas Chalmers found work with P. W. Gates in a foundry at the foot of Randolph Street, working for a dollar a day in a concern that manufactured plows, wagons and machinery for flour mills. 

Well-played, Thomas . . . a clear case of being in the right place at the right time.  It wasn’t long before Gates got the contract to forge the ironwork for the locks on the Illinois & Michigan Canal, which was finished in 1848.  It was also the Gates firm that built the first steam-operated sawmill in the country at a time when Chicago was the leading producer of milled lumber in the country.  

By the time of the Chicago fire, the gentleman from Dundee was a partner in the huge Eagle Works Manufacturing Company, where his son came to work with him.  This company did not survive the fire, but the elder Chalmers organized the Fraser & Chalmers firm in short order.

Starting with 50 employees, the company had within a few years added more than a thousand more workers, ultimately becoming the largest manufacturer of mining machinery in the world.  By 1891 the company actually did become an international firm when it built a manufacturing plant in Erith, England.  At the same time the firm was expanding across the seas, it was spending $1,000,000 on a brand new 550,800 square foot works covering a dozen acres between Twelfth Street and Rockwell just a few blocks east of Douglas Park.

About the same time William James Chalmers, old man Chalmers’s son, a man not yet 40-years-old who had been born in Chicago and educated in its public schools, became president of the company. 

Nine years later Fraser & Chalmers merged with three other manufacturers of heavy engines, mining and other machinery to form the Allis-Chalmers Company, capitalized at 25 million dollars of preferred and 25 million dollars of common stock.  Cornelius Vanderbilt sat on the board of the new company along with the man whose father had begun his work in the United States at a forge not far from the Chicago River.

Before he moved north of the river to the tonier section of the city by Lincoln Park, William Chalmers lived in a house on Ashland Avenue across the street from the home Carter H. Harrison.  His father, Thomas, lived in a house just down the street.  Fritz Foltz and Samuel Atwater Treat designed Williams Chalmers' home at 315 Ashland Avenue.

Mr. Foltz was born in 1843 in Darmstadt, Germany and educated at the Polytechnic School in that city, finishing his training at the Royal Academy in Munich.  He began the practice of architecture at Frankfort-on-the-Main.  By 1868 he was in Chicago, where he joined Samuel Atwater Treat in a partnership that lasted until 1898.  Mr. Treat was born in Hew Haven, Connecticut on December 29, 1839 and began his architectural career at the age of 17.  

The two partners designed high-end homes for some of the most noted personages in Chicago, including the Martin A. Ryerson mansion on Drexel Boulevard and the Charles B. Farwell residence at 120 East Pearson.

It is interesting to note how much the Chalmers manse on Ashland Avenue has changed since it was constructed in 1885.  I’m not sure that it has been changed for the better.  Especially notable is the original porch that extended north from the rounded tower.  Ditching the porch probably allowed for more window space and a greater amount of light inside the home, but it seems to have diminished the elegance of the original design. 

The building is now divided into rental apartments.