Connecting the Windy City

The design was part of an ambitious plan to create a drive along the north bank of the river, joining the north end of Wabash Avenue at Wacker Drive with the south end of Cass Street on the opposite side of the river.  The plan was to construct a viaduct that would span the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad tracks and Kinzie Street on the north side of the bridge and a ramp that would descend from the bridge over the viaduct to grade level at Illinois Street.

Businessmen on Cass Street on the north side of the new bridge were elated at the prospect of the increased business that the new bridge would bring.  They proposed widening Cass Street, named after Brigadier Lewis Cass, United States Secretary of State under President James Buchanan, by at least eight feet and changing its name to North Wabash Avenue.

On June 30 of 1930 four huge trunnion girders, each weighing 80 tons, arrived at the construction site by barge.  Fabricated in Gary, Indiana, they had been taken to south Chicago on flat cars where derricks hoisted them onto barges for the trip to Wabash Avenue and the river, where the substructure of the bridge had been completed.

Two months later the last piece of steel for the south span of the bridge was put into place, marking the completion of the steel work for the entire bridge.  On December 20 the bridge was formally opened.  After a parade south on LaSalle Street from Lincoln Park to Wacker Drive and then east to the new bridge, Mayor Thompson cut the ribbon to open the bridge at an “occasion for political speeches to the scores of city hall pay rollers who had ridden in the parade,” according to The Chicago Tribune.

Not all of the “pay rollers” were happy.  The Commissioner of Public Works, Richard W. Wolfe, was under investigation by an aldermanic committee over irregularities in the letting of contracts for the north side viaduct and approach to the new bridge.  Apparently Wolfe oversaw a process in which the contract for the north side infrastructure did not go to the low bidder.  The Ketler-Elliottt Company, which had been contracted for the project, charged the city $10 a cubic foot for caisson excavation below a depth of 75 feet while the low bidder, the E. J. Albrecht Company, offered a price of $2.

Still, it was a big boost for the city, relieving traffic on busy Clark Street and helping to take up some slack while the old State Street bridge just to the east was being replaced.  And on June 15, 1931 the American Institute of Steel Construction selected the new bridge as the most beautiful span costing more than $1,000,000 in the United States and Canada.  City Bridge Engineer Thomas G. Pihfeldt drew the plans for the new bridge, which was fabricated by the American Bridge Company.  

On December 23 of 1985 the Chicago City Council renamed the Wabash Avenue bridge, and it is today the Irv Kupcinet Bridge.  “Kup” for nearly 50 years wrote a column for the Chicago Sun Times, also serving as host for a weekly television show fromn 1959 to 1986, also helping Jack Brickhouse call Chicago Bears games from 1953 to 1976 (“dat’s right, Jack”).

The south span of the Kupcinet Bridge (American Historic Buildings Survey)

Wabash Street, itself, reflects the changing nature of Chicago, perhaps more than any of the major downtown streets.  Its origins lie in an old Indian trail that began at the southwest corner of the reservation near present day State and Madison Streets and followed the present line of Wabash Street to Roosevelt Road, where it moved eastward to Vincennes on the Wabash River.

In the early years the only structure on the path was a barn that served Fort Dearborn just to the north.  It wasn’t until 1841 that St. Mary’s Catholic Church was built at Madison and Wabash, the first building of permanence on the street.  Things picked up during the 1840’s with various merchants putting up shops on the street.  In fact, it was in John V. Farwell’s store between Lake and Randolph on Wabash that Levi Leiter and Marshall Field first worked as clerks.

Just before the fire of 1871 nearly a dozen churches stood on Wabash between Van Buren and Washington, including the South Presbyterian Church, established by Cyrus McCormick in 1856, Kehilath Anshe Maariv, the oldest synagogue in the west, and the Second Presbyterian, which The Tribune called “the most magnificent church edifice in the west.”  [Chicago Tribune, December 15, 1929]

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.