State of the State

STATE OF THE STATE

Chicago protects its architectural
heritage better than five years ago

by Lee Bey

Chicago is a living textbook of architecture, and they don't tear many important pages out of it anymore. The city hasn't allowed a significant Louis Sullivan building to be demolished in nearly 30 years. And Frank Lloyd Wright's remaining Chicago homes — even an existent West Side factory building — seem safe from the wrecker's ball.

Thirty years ago, the city stood by while important buildings fell in the name of progress. But it's a different story today. Buoyed by Mayor Richard M. Daley, an avowed architecture and design fanatic, preservation is one of the hottest topics — and movements — in town.

Daley has taken an active hand in at least half a dozen recent preservation issues. He publicly displayed anger in 1996 when the Chicago City Day School allegedly took advantage of a bureaucratic snafu to demolish a historic North Side coach house.

But the city may not be able to stick its chest out too far. While it smartly unleashes tax incentives so that old Michigan Avenue office buildings can be restored and reused, scores of nicely detailed post-Chicago Fire buildings are demolished.

Things are better than they used to be. But is that really saying much?

Though a better protector of its architectural heritage over the past five years, Chicago may not be able to stick out its chest too far when it comes to preservation. While it smartly unleashes tax incentives so that old Michigan Avenue office buildings can be restored and reused, it will stand idly by — as it is doing now — as scores of nicely detailed and beautifully scaled post-Chicago Fire-era buildings near the Gold Coast are demolished for dull, skyscraping condominiums.

Old habits die hard.

City government and developers — particularly in the current economic boom — still foster the exasperating habit of building anew with one hand while destroying Chicago's heritage with the other. Yes, the Sullivans and Wrights are safe, but the fate of secondary buildings that as an ensemble speak to Chicago's architectural history is needlessly uncertain.

"The people who should really be outraged are the ordinary Chicagoans, the people who live in it, shop in it, work in it," Lost Chicago author David Garrard Lowe told the Chicago Sun-Times in October. "These are the people who are losing their history."

Lowe's remarks may come off like an overstatement, but they are true. A decade of lackluster preservation on North Michigan Avenue had created a thoroughfare that is disconnected from its origins as a swank, but very Chicago, strip of boutiques and shops behind 1920s buildings. Such chain retailers as Banana Republic, Crate & Barrel — and soon, a Gap flagship — have introduced a graceless kind of retail chain architecture, seemingly created with styling so vague as to it in anywhere.

Michigan Avenue is alive and functioning. But its look is increasingly homogenous and corporate-approved. Is it Chicago or Houston? It is obvious the city must grant landmark status to North Michigan Avenue. The move would preserve the streetwall from further insult and keep what made Michigan Avenue so special.

And protecting unique, special places is one of the most important aspects of preservation. The year's biggest preservation battles occurred in the western shadow of McCormick Place. The Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the agency that operates the convention center and Navy Pier, moved to demolish its own headquarters, a landmark-quality, century-old office building designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw, architect of the Goodman Theatre and suburban Lake Forest's Market Square. The nonprofit Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois and the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to block demolition. The fight resulted in a compromise to save the building's facade and incorporate it into a new parking facility being built on the site.

At least the building's face was saved, preserving its Georgian-meets-Arts & Crafts entrance of brick

6 December 2000 Illinois Issues www.uis.edu/~ilissues

Columns, arches and limestone medallions. But, given the building is footsteps away from a convention center — and that it got a $2.4 million rehab less than a decade ago —there is some sentiment that the whole building should have been adapted and reused. Might the old Platt have found new life as a boutique hotel? Or a meeting space? The answer has been lost in the rubble.

The political will for more aggressive architectural preservation does exist in Chicago, if only sporadically. When the Chicago City Day School demolished the coach house, the controversy led to the discovery that 29 important buildings recommended for landmark status were never approved due to foot-dragging in the City Council. In an impressive flexing of political muscle, Daley cracked down on aldermen and won landmark status for the marooned buildings in a single year. Then he pushed for a rewrite of the landmarks ordinance, forcing the City Council to act within a year on proposed landmark buildings.

It will take a courageous political stand to make sure more of the city's buildings are preserved. And such a stance would not occur in a vacuum. In such suburbs as Hinsdale and Glencoe, residents and landmarks committees are attempting to stop "teardowns" — preservationists' parlance for the demolition of older suburban homes to build larger ones. Old suburban "main streets" in such towns as Forest Park and St. Charles are being restored to provide alternatives to space-gobbling suburban commercial sprawl.

"People are thinking about preservation," says David Blanchette, spokesman for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. "All of the preservation battles, both successes and failures, have raised consciousness in terms of preserving our resources."

The city's landmarks division, with its small staff, seeks status for about a dozen buildings and districts a year. The Daley Administration must move to significantly increase the agency's staff and funding so its workload can increase.

One prime example of that is in the Pullman community on the Far South Side of Chicago. Architectural preservation went through a trial by fire there two years ago this month when Anthony Buzinskas, a 45-year-old man from the suburb of Burbank, walked into a vacant factory and set afire several trash piles.

Buzinskas did not torch just any vacant industrial building that December 1998. He nearly brought to ruin one of the country's most historic structures: The landmark former Pullman Palace Car factory and administration building. The old brick building was once the centerpiece of Pullman town, the famed model industrial city built and ruled in the 1880s by railroad car manufacturer George Mortimer Pullman.

Sections of the old factory collapsed in a 2,000-degree inferno. It took 150 firefighters to put out the blaze. Neighborhood residents, many of whom fought for decades for the building's preservation, wept as it burned. The state bought the factory in 1990 under an ambitious plan to restore the building and turn it into a railroad museum. But the effort — one of the last acts of Gov. James R. Thompson's administration — languished during Gov. Jim Edgar's eight-year tenure. The project barely got enough money for the most rudimentary stabilization. And the historic site was unguarded and open from 1991 until after the fire.

Governmental bungling, indifference and delays had again imperiled a historic Chicago building. But instead of a demolition team, construction workers have spent more than a year at the site. Much of the exterior shell of the fallen building has been shored up and rebuilt. Meanwhile, Gov. George Ryan and Mayor Richard M. Daley formed a task force to examine new uses for the site. Last summer, the task force recommended turning the structure into a museum featuring Pullman railcars, craft demonstrations and historical re-enactments. The recommendations, which include a pitch to begin raising the $100 million needed for the project, now sit before Ryan and Daley.

Things happened because elected officials were willing to expend the political capital to shake things up. It's a wonder — and it's a shame — it's not done more often.

It would be easy to dismiss preservation as symbolic building-hugging were it not for the benefits reaped when an old building is saved. The Frank Lloyd Wright homes on two blocks of Forest Avenue in Oak Park provide a fine illustration of this, and of the virtues of historic preservation. The progression of seven restored Wright Prairie School homes mingles with equally impressive Victorian architecture. The Wright houses, along with the architect's Unity Temple, give Oak Park its identity. And the town goes through the trouble to stand up for the buildings and the surrounding old non-Wright homes, the presence of which allow Wright's architecture to be seen in the context of the architecture of its day. Landmarks are serious business in Oak Park.

And in Chicago as well, only they should be more so. The city's landmarks division, with its small staff, seeks status for about a dozen buildings and districts a year. The Daley Administration must move to significantly increase the agency's staff and funding so its workload can increase.

It's a lot of trouble, for sure. But it's well worth it. Chicago can then untangle itself from this maddening paradox in which its preservation efforts are at once tantalizingly close to being a national model, yet so maddeningly far from where they need to be.

Lee Bey is the architecture critic/or the Chicago Sun-Times. His most recent piece for Illinois Issues, "Nowhere is it written," appeared last April.