John F. Tracy’s Plaque

Posted on October 8, 2015 by admin

I’ve seen some plaques in my time, such as ones commemorating the high-water mark of Hurricane Ike, a vintage Dairy Queen sign, the 25,000th 7-11 franchise, the site of Huey Long’s assassination, an outstanding civil engineering achievement of the 1980s, a Civil War veteran who died in 1947, Bill Murray’s footprint, even Addison Mizner’s pet spider monkeys. Guess I’m a sucker for words carved in metal trying to beat forgetfulness, though I think forgetfulness will eventually overcome such efforts.

Saw another plaque on Sunday, behind the Ridge Historical Society in the Beverly neighborhood of Chicago. A curious thing, this plaque, placed right next to the back entrance and mounted on a short block. Though made of metal, it was well worn by years of weather — close to a century, it seems.

There was no one was around to tell me about it, but my guess would be that it had been moved there from somewhere else nearby. It said (in all caps, actually, but I’m capitalizing the lines that are particularly large on the plaque):

1852 1922
ROCK ISLAND LINES
Seventieth Anniversary
October Tenth
The memorial tree planted nearby
is dedicated
by the Rock Island in affectionate memory
of
JOHN F. TRACY
Who by industry courage and loyalty
through every vicissitude signally
aided in the development of the
CHICAGO ROCK ISLAND & PACIFIC RAILWAY
into a great transportation system
DEVOTED TO THE PUBLIC SERVICE

The Rock Island is remembered in later decades thanks to Alan Lomax and Leadbelly and others, though that’s fading too, and it was an important railroad in its day (and a client of Lincoln’s in its earliest years). It was also a link in the Grand Excursion of 1854, which is known to us Millard Fillmore fans.

John Tracy’s not so well remembered. My guess would be that he lived somewhere in Beverly, and was long dead by 1922. A small amount of checking reveals he was an executive of the railroad, including its president from 1866 to ’77. A Gilded Age railroad tycoon! His story is probably in an out-of-print volume somewhere, maybe at the Ridge Historical Society. A book that’s no one’s read in years, and a story that probably doesn’t involve diamond-tipped walking sticks and lighting cigars with $100 banknotes, alas.

An American System-Built Home

Posted on October 7, 2015 by admin

There are only a handful of American System-Built Homes in existence, about 15 by one count, though others might be spending their days in anonymity. Because I’ve been slapdash in my approach to learning about Frank Lloyd Wright, it was a thing I’d never heard of until Sunday, on the architecture walking tour.

Tourdeforce360VR has this description: “Between 1915 and 1917, Wright designed a series of standardized ‘system-built’ homes, known today as the American System-Built Homes, an early example of prefabricated housing. The ‘system’ involved cutting the lumber and other materials in a mill or factory, and then brought to the site for assembly; thus saving material waste and a substantial fraction of the wages paid to skilled tradesmen.”

World War I interrupted production, and it never started again. Turns out there two in Chicago, and one of these is on S. Hoyne Ave., and known as the Guy C. Smith House.
The owners of the house, David and Debbie — or was it John and Jill or Mark and Margo? I forget, but the names began with the same letters — came out to tell us about the house.
Then we went inside. It was very nice of the owners to let us shuffle through their home. They’ve done right by Wright, too. This is the dinning room, for instance.
It’s a fine house, but I could never live in such a place and have it look like this. Soon, papers and books and other items would start to appear on the tables and other flat surfaces. Then they would take over, like kudzu.

A Few Beverly Houses

Posted on October 6, 2015 by admin

This was one of my favorites on the Beverly walking tour on the Southwest Side of Chicago, 10340 S. Longwood Dr., also known as the Hilland A. Parker House.
Note the enormous yard, sloping upward, which we were told continued quite a ways toward the back. The area was wide open when the house was built in 1894, so there was no reason to build on small lots. An architect named Harry Hale Waterman did the design. He did a fair number of houses in the neighborhood, but this one was for himself.

The AIA Guide to Chicago says: “Site and style combine here for high drama. The base of the huge rusticate brownstone blocks rises on the hill to form huge arches on the big semicircular porch. The tall roof, pierced with steeply pitched gabled dormers, exaggerates the height.”

Not far away is this charmer by Walter Burley Griffith, the Harry N. Tolles House, 10561 S. Longwood, which was built in 1911, with some later additions, such as the glass bricks.
Good old Walter Burley. I learned about him when I visited his signal creation, the city of Canberra, during the warm Christmas season in ’91.

Before the Australians tapped him to build their capital, he “designed more than 130 designs in his Chicago office for buildings, urban plans and landscapes, half of which were built in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin,” PBS says, in the years before WWI.

At 10616 S. Longwood: the house that’s now home to the Ridge Historical Society, dating from 1922 and designed by John Hetherington. Not this fellow, though.
The organization calls it the Driscoll House on a sign in the front; the Graver-Discoll on a plaque around back; AIA calls it the Herbert S. Graver House. Hope no one has come to fisticuffs over the nomenclature. Graver, it seems, commissioned it, while Driscoll was the last owner before the historical society. More about it here.

The oldest house on the tour was the Chambers House, 10330 S. Seeley, dating from 1874 and designed by that prolific architect of previous eras, Unknown (who also did the Irish castle mentioned yesterday).

AIA says: “The remarkably well-preserved house [indeed] is a classic suburban villa, complete with ‘French’ tower.” Maybe a French tower is a vantage from which to taunt passing Britons clapping coconut shells.

Beverly on a Sunday Afternoon

Posted on October 5, 2015 by admin

The leaves are turning. Here’s the scene at the 103rd St Metra Station, on the Southwest Side of Chicago, early Sunday afternoon, under a gray but not rainy sky.
We were at the station not because we rode the train that day — we drove, and parked nearby — but because Yuriko and I took a Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour of the Beverly neighborhood, which started at the station. Beverly is on the Southwest Side of the city, and distinctive for a number of reasons, but one that stood out while walking around is its hilly contour. A glacial ridge just west of S. Longwood Dr. is easily visible near the station, which is on 103rd just east of Longwood, among a knot of small retail shops, including a local bank that tells one and all:
“Known for its spacious homes, tree-lined streets, and racially integrated population, Beverly has retained its reputation as one of Chicago’s most stable middle-class residential districts,” notes the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Originally part of the village of Washington Heights (1874), the area was annexed to Chicago by 1890 but remained sparsely settled for decades.

“In 1886, real estate developer Robert Givins constructed a limestone castle at 103rd and Longwood Drive in the Tracy subdivision of Washington Heights, but the surrounding neighborhood did not achieve residential maturity for decades. The situation was the same north of 95th Street, where Civil War general Edward Young and W. M. R. French, the first director of the Art Institute, had built homes along Pleasant Avenue in the 1890s. Vast sections of Beverly, especially the area south of 99th Street and west of Western, remained prairie until the 1940s and 1950s.”

This is the Gilded Age “Irish castle” of Robert Givins, with its distinctive turret mostly obscured by leaves at the moment. These days, it’s a Unitarian church. Note the slope of the hill.
The tour involved walking south on South Longwood Dr., which follows the bottom of the slope, then up (west) on W. 105th Pl., then north on S. Seeley Ave. and S. Hoyne Ave. Along the way, we stopped and looked at houses, while the docent described them. We got to go inside only one property, the Guy C. Smith House on Hoyne. More about that later.

The last place we saw was at the corner of Seeley and 103rd.

Nice design, but the shoes got more attention. There was a sign in the yard saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOB! and another that said, 80 YEARS AND KICKING.

St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church

Posted on September 22, 2015 by admin

Go to 5000 N. Cumberland on the Northwest Side of Chicago, and then to the back of the building at that address, and you’ll be looking at this.

In full, the English name of this church is St. Joseph the Betrothed Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. The church is part of the the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Saint Nicholas of Chicago, a diocese of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. St. Nicholas Cathedral, which we visited last fall, is the mother church of this group. For simplicity, I’ll call this church St. Joseph’s, which is an Eastern church in full communion with Rome.

As a building, St. Joseph’s is an impressive use of glass, concrete and steel, completed in 1977, which such materials weren’t always so impressively used (and they still aren’t). The docent asserted that some people are reminded of rockets when they look at the church, but I think of those pneumatic tubes you use at drive-through banks. Still, they work somehow as building elements.

There are 13 domes, as often the case in Eastern churches, the center for Christ and 12 others for the Apostles (I assume that includes Matthias, who took Judas’ place). A Ukrainian-born Philadelphia architect named Zenon Mazurkevycz (Mazurkevich) designed the church. He seems best known for St. Joseph’s, though he’s obviously done other structures.

The inside is ornate and also light-filled, on account of the tall windows on all sides. I assume the scaffolding over the sanctuary are temporary.

Mazurkevycz is quoted, in this blog at least, as saying, “We are dealing with a very functional architecture today no matter what we do, but church architecture is aesthetically functional more than anything else… It probably is the last architecture, as our buildings become more regimented, in which you can be exuberant.”

Exuberant is a good word for this church, inside and out.

Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Cathedral

Posted on September 21, 2015 by admin

Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, at 5701 N. Redwood Dr. in Chicago and our tour’s second stop, isn’t far from O’Hare. Even if we hadn’t known that before visiting it, we would have found out standing outside the cathedral listening to the docent describe some of its features. Every few minutes, a plane would noisily fly by and she’d have to pause. In the background, Kennedy Expressway noise was also noticeable.

As we approached the building, I recognized the domes on top. They’re visible from the Kennedy. I’d seen them many times, but never knew they were part of this particular religious edifice. Pictures of the exterior and its domes are here, though more colorful than I saw.

This is the entrance, on the west side of the church, of course.

Radoslav Kovacevic designed the building, which was completed in 1973. According to his 2002 obit in the Tribune, the Belgrade-born Chicago architect “designed about two dozen houses of worship for Russian, Greek, Serbian, Protestant and Roman Catholic congregations,” as well as schools and commercial buildings. His funeral mass was held at Holy Resurrection.

Here’s the interior center dome and its Christ the Almighty and chandelier. Not sure if that counts as a horus, since it isn’t one of those circular jobs with depictions of the saints and apostles.

As you’d expect, the walls sported many murals, such as this one depicting the Raising of Lazarus. Note the fellow unwrapping Lazarus. He seems to be covering his nose. Lazarus had been dead a while, after all. I didn’t know until recently that Lazarus Saturday, the day before Palm Sunday, is celebrated in the Orthodox tradition.

The church sports plenty of excellent mosaics, too.

To the left (observer’s left, to the north) of the iconostasis is St. Sava.

That’s a detail from this mosaic, which is a reproduction of a painting called “Sava blessing Serb youth.”

The original painting dates from 1921, the creation of Serbian artist Uroš Predić. I’d never heard of the saint nor the artist before. Remarkable the things you can learn just looking around.

This, That and the Other Thursday

Posted on August 13, 2015 by admin

Here’s a sign you can see in my neighborhood.

Literally true, and it might mean a legal quagmire for the property owner, though I’m no expert on the matter.

Driving along today, I spotted the first bumper sticker of next year’s election. Next year being the operative term. Everything at this point is just talk, and citizens are entitled to pay it no mind. The sticker said: Bernie 2016.

Mostly blue, but the letters and numbers were white, with a thin red swoosh underlining the letters. Reminded me of the Obama O design; no accident, I’m sure.

I mentioned it to Ann, who is as nonpolitical as a 12-year-old should be, and she told me the only presidential candidates she’s heard of are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

On the Roosevelt Road bridge at the southern edge of downtown Chicago are some nifty bronzes. I only took a picture of one.

The sculptures are by Miklos P. Simon and include (among other things) likenesses of dolphins, dinosaurs and celestial navigation instruments, supposedly homages to the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum, and the Adler Planetarium, none of which are far away. More about the bridge is here.

The 300 S. Wacker Map

Posted on June 23, 2015 by admin

Last week in downtown Chicago, I also got a look at the 300 S. Wacker map, which was unveiled late last year and is easily visible from the west side of the Chicago River near Union Station. That’s because it’s a map as tall as a skyscraper, and who couldn’t like that?
A close up.
The giant map depicts the Chicago River and nearby streets, from Cermak to Chicago and LaSalle to Jefferson. The 300 S. Wacker building itself appears on the map as a three-dimensional red block.

Previously, 300 S. Wacker had little to distinguish it as a building, and little to catch the eye. Beacon Capital bought it last year and commissioned Elmhurst, Ill.-based South Water Signs to do the work. I’ve read that there are more art maps in the building’s lobby, backlit by LED lights; I’ll have to take a look sometime.

Two Chicago River Bridgehouses

Posted on June 22, 2015 by admin

More rain over the weekend and again today. Are we turning into Seattle? Except that Seattle really isn’t the rainiest place in the nation, according to various sources. It turns out most cities in the Southeast U.S. get more rain every year.

But who would understand you if you said, it sure has been rainy lately. Are we turning into Mobile? Information age, my foot. Even easily available data has a hard time killing received notions.

That reminds me of something else I encountered in the Pacific Northwest all those years ago: Slug Death. Or, to be more exactly, Corry’s Slug & Snail Death in the bright yellow box. (It seems to be Corry’s Slug & Snail Killer these days, as if that matters to dying gastropods.) I think we were visiting people on Bainbridge Is., and that’s what they had in their garden. I’d never heard of such a thing. It was one of those ordinary details of a new place that stick with you.

En route to Union Station to catch my train to the suburbs last week, I spent a few minutes looking at some of the bridgehouses on the South Branch of the Chicago River. There’s a museum in one of the bridgehouses of the Michigan Ave. bridge that opened only last month — the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum — but I didn’t have time for that.

Here’s the Monroe St. bridgehouse on the east side of the structure. The bridge dates from 1919 and was built by the Ketler Elliott Co., a name I’ve encountered before.
Looks like it’s been cleaned lately, maybe even since the bridge’s 2000s rehabilitation. The site HistoricBridges.org tells me that “the bridge’s operating and control panels inside the bridgetender buildings were reportedly the first in the United States to have completely enclosed circuitry so that no exposed copper connections were available for bridgetenders to mistakenly electrocute themselves on.”

This is the bridgehouse on the west side of the Adams St. bridge, which was built a little later, 1927, but still during a time when aesthetics was a consideration in a public building project (it might be again, but for quite a spell in the last century, the idea seems to have been on hold).
The bridge was rehabbed in the mid-1990s. The bridgehouse is dingy, so I guess that’s 20 years of urban air at work. More about the Adams St. bridge is here.

Pre-Victory Parade Chicago

Posted on June 17, 2015 by admin

Business took me downtown today. The Blackhawks victory parade is tomorrow, I hear, and I’m glad I’m going to miss that mess. Braving a crowd like that might be worth it to see the first astronauts to return from Mars, but other than that, no.

According to a parking lot sign on W. Madison St., today was very hot.

Or maybe that’s reporting a cold snap on Venus, as long as we’re talking about other planets.

No parade today, but Metra — the commuter rail I took into town — is getting ready.

A wise precaution, even if it’s going to be ignored by some riders. Or technically honored by riders who’re loaded when they get on board. I always disliked riding trains the night of a Cubs or Sox game; the later the train, the louder the drunks.

Also, just outside Union Station, I spied one of those post-championship souvenir vendors that pop up like toadstools after a rain. They were doing a brisk business in t-shirts, hats and maybe other gewgaws and gimcracks. It was too crowded to get a close look.

I didn’t see any Hawks banners hanging from lampposts — maybe I wasn’t looking on the right streets — but I did see other team totems. It seemed like more people than usual were wearing team shirts, for one thing, and then there was this:

The good tourist ship Lila plying the Chicago River, flying a Hawks flag.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Chicago