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| The Allerton Hotel, 701 N. Michigan Avenue (JWB, 2008) |
Stroll up Michigan
Avenue one day when the sun is out and ask yourself a simple question: Of all the buildings on the Magnificent
Mile, which one seems least likely to be a “Chicago” building. Which building seems to be the offering
of an out-of-town intruder who plunked it down in the midst of the grand
boulevard that winds its way from the river to Oak Street?
You might first
guess the 1970 John Hancock building, the X-braced black steel-and-glass giant
that sits opposite the Fourth Presbyterian Church, proclaiming that God really
is in the details.
But, of course, you
immediately think of Willis Tower in the West Loop, 330 North Wabash on the
river and the Federal Center between Jackson and Adams, and you know that Big
John holds its own with any of those great Mid-Century Modern Chicago towers.
There’s really only
one possibility left, right? Up
and down a street on which virtually every building takes its cue from the
yellowing Joliet limestone of the Chicago Water Tower and is clad in stone, the
Allerton Hotel is the only structure on the Magnificent Mile that is clad in
brick as it rises to its 25-story height.
Then . . . tack on the “Tip Top Tap” sign hanging way up there, just
above that tip top balcony, and you’ve got something that you don’t see much of
around Chicago.
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| The Tip-Top-Tap is gone but the sign still remains as part of this Chicago landmark (JWB, 2011) |
And that’s as it
should be; the firm that designed the Allerton was the New York outfit
of Murgatroyd and Ogden. This was the first hotel outside of New York City for the Allerton Company;
it was to be part of a series of “club hotels,” built to provide accommodations
along with privileges such as lounges, reading rooms, dining rooms, a
gymnasium, and a squash court.
It’s easy to look
at the Allerton today as being out of place, but when it was finished in 1922,
there was only one other high-rise hotel on the street—The Drake, finished in
1920, on Lake Shore East at the end of Michigan Avenue. Both the Allerton and The Drake had three-story limestone bases that
filled their sites. At the time
they would have simply been two competing hotels in very different styles for very different clienteles.
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| The three-story base clearly shows the northern Italian medieval style that was chosen for the building (JWB, 2008) |
Architect Arthur
Loomis Harmon, the designer of the original Allerton hotels in the shopping
districts of New York City, used the Medieval architecture of Northern Italy as
his model. In the early 1920’s the
Allerton Company replaced Harmon with Murgatroyd and Ogden. Architect and engineer Everett
Murgatroyd remained faithful to Harmon’s original style.
Weekly rates ranged
from ten to twenty dollars when the building opened in 1924, and the hotel
became popular with young men and women just out of college. Eventually 102 colleges and
universities and 21 fraternities and sororities made the Allerton a residential
headquarters with ten floors for men and seven for women with another four
given over to married couples.
Planned as a
20-story hotel, the Allerton was built to 25 stories which contained 1010 rooms. The three-story limestone base was set
aside for shops; Brooks Brothers and Nine West currently occupy the retail space. The shaft of the building is H-shaped,
designed to increase window area, an important consideration in the days before
air conditioning. At floor 20 the
corner wings become eight-sided, forming imposing towers.
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| More Italian influence (JWB, 2011) |
John W. Stamper
said of the building’s design, “The building’s three-story base has an arcade
motif consisting of broad pilasters and lancet arches with window motifs and
corbelled sills and arches. At the
main entrance, which as with the Drake Hotel faces south rather than onto
Michigan Avenue, the arcade motif is open to form a grand loggia. The buildings’ upper-wall surfaces,
clad in red brick, are articulated by pilasters and further punctuated by a
pattern of projecting headers giving the building a rustic quality. Other features of the Northern Italian
style are seen in corbeled cornices, striping, and, at the top, overhanging
balconies supported by arched brackets.” [Stamper, John W. Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue:
Planning and Development 1900-1930. University of Chicago Press: 1991. P. 128]
And there’s the rub
. . . the style, although certainly reflective of the Allerton Company’s brand
at the time, worked in the beginning on a building halfway between the
classically designed towers at the Michigan Avenue bridge and the streamlined
art deco surfaces of The Drake. But now The Allerton stands apart from the sleek
facades of the art deco, mid-century modern, and post-modern buildings that
line the great boulevard.
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| The brickwork, which causes the Allerton to apart, on Michigan Avenue is quite exceptional (JWB, 2008) |
I, for one, love
the difference.
Take any great
hotel in the city, and you can find stories of exhilaration and woe reflective
of the thousands and thousands of human beings who come to stay. The Allerton has had its share.
One of the most
thrilling stories occurred on June 19, 1936 when firefighters rolled up to the
hotel as smoke rolled out of its 19th floor windows. Beneath one of the windows, crouching
on a ledge was 18-year-old Madeline Britain of Salem, Illinois.
When the
firefighters reached the 19th floor, they found it filled with
smoke. The door to the girl’s room
was locked, so Lieutenant Thomas Burns ordered the men of Engine Company 98 to
use their axes to break down the door.
The girl had locked the door, opened the window in her room and climbed
out onto the ledge.
And she wouldn’t
leave it.
Burns tried to get
Ms. Britain to give him her hand, but she was too panicked to respond. “Get me a bath towel,” Burns
ordered. With the towel in hand,
Burns leaned out of the window, looped the towel under the girl’s and “yanked
her to her feet.” She was quickly
lifted into the room.
The fire, it turns
out, began in the hotel’s incinerator and was quickly extinguished.
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