First Immanuel Lutheran Church

Posted on September 21, 2014 by admin

On Saturday just after 10 a.m., Yuriko and I found ourselves at First Immanuel Lutheran Church, 1124 S. Ashland Ave. in Chicago. The predicted rain hadn’t happened yet, and the morning was warming up, unlike most of the fall-like days last week.

Note the top sliver of bus in front of the church. We’d come by bus, as participants in the Chicago Architecture Foundation Churches by Bus tour. Five busloads of people spent part of Saturday morning and afternoon, in an tour organized by the foundation, at five different churches on the West Side and in the Pilsen neighborhood. Each bus had a different route, so that only one at a time was at any given church. Our bus, #4, went to First Immanuel first. All of the churches were worth a look, and most had some extraordinary features.

These days First Immanuel is near the sprawling Illinois Medical District, anchored by enormous hospitals — Rush, UIC, Cook County Stroger, and Jesse Brown VA — and including a lot of other healthcare facilities. All that was in future when construction started on the church in 1888. The congregation dates back to 1854, as a daughter church of a Lutheran church in the city. The area was suburban in the 1850s, and a lot of Germans were settling there. An architect with a suitably German-sounding name of Frederick Ahlschlager did the Gothic Revival design.

In the church’s early days, it wasn’t far from West Side Park, where the pre-Wrigley Cubs played. The church’s web site asserts that parishioners were able to watch the Cubs from the tower on their way to winning the World Series in 1909, but maybe they simply got the date wrong, since the last time the Cubs won the championship was 1908. By the 1930s, the docent pointed out, the church was ahead of its time in making a conscious effort to include all races, and officially integrated in the 1950s. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the church.

The interior’s not overly ornate, but it’s decidedly churchly.

The church’s organist happened to be present, and he treated us with a few minutes’ playing. The organ is new, only installed a few years ago. It’s got 4,000 pipes and a powerful sound. We got a close look at it after the organist finished, which isn’t something you often get to do. Seemed like a forest of pipes in there.

House Walk Oddities

Posted on September 18, 2014 by admin

There’s a house facing Palmer Square in Chicago that sports a huge radar antenna next to its driveway.

The house was on the Logan Square House & Garden Walk. Everyone asked about the antenna. The docents asserted that it’s WWII vintage, and that the homeowner’s doing a bit of do-it-yourself SETI. Maybe that’s so, but I don’t think you need any reason to have something that much fun in your yard.

It also doubles as a home for plants.

This back yard was my favorite spot on the walk. Besides a piece of radar equipment that’s on the lookout for Vulcans or Vogons or whatnot, a there were a lot of tall trees – more than usual for a city yard — a picturesque trellis, and a charming little garden with built-in oddities in its stonework, such as this bench.

It took me a few moments to puzzle out what it says. Once you know it, though, you see it every time you look at it: TEMPUS FUGIT. A good thing to remember.

On the 3100 block of W. Lyndale Ave., a block north of Palmer Square, we happened across a fence made of old bicycle parts.

Maybe it’s an homage to the bicycle history of the area: Schwinn used to have a bicycle factory near Palmer Square, and in fact bicycle baron Ignaz Schwinn had his mansion at the corner of the square and Humboldt Blvd. (since torn down). Bicycle enthusiasts of the late 1800s and early 1900s held races around the square, too. And come to think of it, in our time, the Chicago Tour de Fat is held at Palmer Square.

Or maybe they just wanted to be creative with their fence. The bicycle-fence property wasn’t on the house walk, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t feature something I’d never seen before, or even conceived of. The kind of thing you’ll see if you’re paying attention.

The Houses Near Palmer Square

Posted on September 17, 2014 by admin

The point of a house walk is to go inside and look around while a docent tells you some interesting things about the things you see. They also sketch a short history of the property, and in the case of Chicago houses from the earliest years of the 20th century, the story tends to be: X house was built incorporating Y and Z influences. By the mid-century, later owners updated, modernized, painted over, or otherwise Eisenhowered the earlier charms of property, then the neighborhood went to hell and maybe so did the house. In the last 20 years or so, individuals have been spending a lot of time and money restoring – with some concessions to modernity – X house to close to its original design, because Y and Z influences are damn cool.

One particularly egregious example of Eisenhowering an interior on the Logan Square House & Garden Walk involved rooms trimmed with dark, beautiful woods installed by expert craftsmen in 1912 that have only recently seen the light of day again. Forty or so years after they were installed, they were painted white. All of them. Then re-coated a number of times afterward. Pictures on display showed just how lifeless that made the room.

The walk was well attended. Sometimes we had to wait outside a house while another group filed through.

Docents inside and out the houses pointed out various architectural details: Prairie School this and that, Victorian flourishes, Chicago-style windows, a couple of oculus ovule windows (oval eye, see above), an assortment of columns, a diversity of balustrades, cornices a-plenty, brick, limestone, beautiful woodwork, ornate electric lamps that used to be gas, wooden floors from species no longer harvested or at least tremendously expensive, walls restored or partly restored, and more.

And a surprising amount of stained glass in some of the houses, including the following remarkable example. Then again, Chicago used to be a mecca of stained glass manufacture.

Some of houses featured collections of stuff that were as interesting (to me) as the architectural details. One homeowner collected train paraphernalia, including a working early 20th-century fare box from a CTA car, plus neon sculpture, old radios, and more.

Another homeowner devoted the walls of a small room to his personal collection of presidential campaign buttons. Each candidate’s buttons were grouped together and under glass in one of those framings that’s a little deeper than a picture frame. All of the presidents since McKinley at least were represented, and so were a number of losing candidates (I saw Willkie, Goldwater, Humphrey and Dole), even a few that didn’t make it past the primaries, such as Nelson Rockefeller.

In another house, one wall sported a panoramic photograph of an enormous group of people in a park-like setting. From the looks of the fashions, about 100 years ago. The docent speculated that it was a company outing or picnic or the like in Humboldt Park, since it looks to be summer. But she said that no one was certain. Nothing was written on the print. I could have stared at the thing a good deal longer, taking in face after face – and there was quite a variety, young and old, male and female. Men in hats, women in long skirts. Who were they? What was important enough about the occasion to take a panoramic picture, but not important enough to record anything about it on the print?

In yet another house, the man who had owned the place from the 1930s to the 1980s had apparently walled up a number of things in the basement, including gold coins, gold certificates, postcards, and publicity shots of movie stars from (by the looks of them) the ’20s – no one I recognized, since fame is fleeting.

Maybe he thought G-men were going to come looking for his gold, though by the mid-1970s, gold ownership was lawful again. According to the docent, the current owners of the house sold the gold coins and the proceeds went to further the renovation. Some of the postcards and publicity images were on a table for us to look at, and the docent showed us a $10 gold certificate from the trove. It was a small note, clearly Series of 1928, making it one of the more common gold certificates. It was a fairly well circulated note, so not particularly valuable, though worth a good deal more than $10.

Old Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church

Posted on September 16, 2014 by admin

The Logan Square Preservation House & Garden Walk on Saturday didn’t start at a house or a garden, but at Old Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church on Palmer Square. I’d never been in a Serbian Orthodox church before. Russian, yes, Greek, certainly (in Chicago), even a Japanese Orthodox church, Nikolai-do in Tokyo.

Looking at the outside, it’s a little hard to discern anything Serbian, except for the flag, or even anything in a traditional Orthodox style.

It’s a handsome Gothic building with Arts and Crafts overtones, I’ve read, though my eye isn’t keen enough to pick out the overtones. Like much of the neighborhood, the property dates from the 1910s – 1910, in fact – and it was designed by Lowe and Bollenbacher, a firm active in Chicago and Bloomington, Ind., a century ago. Apparently they did a lot of work in both places.

It wasn’t built for a Serbian congregation, but an Anglican one. So it remained until a fire destroyed almost all of the interior in 1968. By then, the number of Episcopalians in Chicago was falling, but the number of Orthodox Serbs was on the rise, so the old congregation sold the ruin to the Serbs. They’ve been remodeling the interior in Orthodox style ever since, complete with an ornate iconostasis, bright frescoes on a still partly-white wall, a brilliant chandelier (not sure if it counts as a polyeleos), and a lot of standing room. This isn’t a particularly sharp image, but it gives some idea of the interior. One Filip Subotic did a lot of the frescoes.

I have no Serbian Cyrillic, and my understanding of saint symbolism isn’t all it could be, so I didn’t recognize a lot of the saints floating up on the white wall, in their blues and reds and gold-leaf nimbi. But I did know St. George. Who else is going to slay that dragon from atop his steed?

Palmer Square, Chicago

Posted on September 15, 2014 by admin

Saturday started cool, but evolved into a pleasant, almost warm day. A good day for walking around in a light jacket, which is what we did. We participated in the 31st Logan Square Preservation House & Garden Walk, during which seven houses, one church, and two gardens were open for inspection with the assistance (and under the watchful eyes) of volunteer docents.

Though named for Logan Square, the walk actually focused on structures in Palmer Square, which is a smaller neighborhood within the larger Logan Square neighborhood, and some blocks south of Logan Square itself – the place with the Illinois Centennial Memorial, described last week – and north of Humboldt Park, described in late August.

The focus of the Palmer Square neighborhood is Palmer Square, a rectangular park a few blocks long with a circular running track, a charming little playground with figures from The Velveteen Rabbit, and a lot of shade trees. The city, with money from the state, redeveloped the park in the mid-2000s, and I understand tree planting has been going on vigorously since well before that. A previous generation of sheltering elms had been lost to Dutch Elm Disease.

This is at the eastern edge of Palmer Square, looking west. On either side to the north and south are streets, and across those streets mostly are handsome residential structures that date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More about those later.

On Saturday, walkers, joggers, and a lot of dog walkers were using the park. A fair number of parents and children were enjoying the playground. Pretty much everything Saturday in the park should be.

Palmer Square and Logan Square (the urban feature, not the neighborhood), are both part of the Chicago Boulevard System, a series of boulevards that connect parks and encircle the central part of the city – a 28-mile chain of parks, or an emerald necklace, to be more fanciful. The system dates to the late 1800s, and as usual with such things, suffered from neglect during much of the 20th century.

I haven’t confirmed it with my own eyes, but I’ve read that the section in Logan Square (the neighborhood, not the urban feature) is the best preserved of the original lot. I know that no one I knew in Chicago in the 1980s ever mentioned the boulevards, so it’s likely that they were largely forgotten by that time. (Or maybe I didn’t hang out with the right people.) These days, there’s some awareness.

This is a view of Humboldt Blvd. from Armitage Ave., looking north, and a good number of blocks north of Humboldt Park, and a bit south of Palmer Square. To the left of the narrow parkland is the main street, and to the left of that is another strip of narrow parkland.

Flanking both strips of narrow parkland are small streets, where it seems mostly residents park their cars. It’s a lot better than many major Chicago streets, which may have six lanes, but two of those are parked up on either side.

The Illinois Centennial Monument

Posted on September 10, 2014 by admin

Rain in the morning, sun in the afternoon, drizzle in the evening. At least that’s variety. And it isn’t cold yet.

Henry Bacon’s well known for the Lincoln Memorial, as well he should be. He isn’t very known for the Illinois Centennial Memorial Column, a.k.a., the Illinois Centennial Monument, in Logan Square in Chicago, which is on the Northwest Side. I’d never taken a look at it up close until recently.

It’s a little forlorn. One of those monuments with passed by thousands daily, noticed by few if any, and marked with a little graffiti just to drive home the point. Then again, it’s been quite a while since the 100th anniversary of Illinois’ statehood, which was in 1918.

It’s a Doric column, and according to one source at least, made up of 13 solid marble segments based on the same proportions and scale as the columns of the Parthenon colonnade in Athens (or Nashville, come to think of it). The eagle on top, done by sculptor Evelyn Beatrice Longman, evokes the one on the Illinois state flag.

She did the reliefs along the base of the column as well, depicting Indians, explorers, farmers and laborers.

Plus a few figures from Antiquity. I’m pretty sure that’s Hermes holding a train and a steamship, maybe offering them to the laborer holding the hammer, and it looks like Ceres is to the workingman’s left. On Hermes’ right – is that Eratosthenes? He looks Greek enough, and he’s got a globe, fitting for the father of geography and the first person to more-or-less figure out the circumference of the Earth.

It’s too much to expect an Illinois Bicentennial Memorial in a few years, but may this one can be cleaned and restored for the occasion.

Ukrainian Village Exteriors

Posted on September 9, 2014 by admin

Cool in the evenings, warm during the day. Cicadas by day, crickets by night. We’re on the September slide. But the weather won’t be bad for two months or so, unless the Yellowstone Caldera blows or something like that.

As I mentioned yesterday, St. Stanislaus Kostka on West Side of Chicago is open all the time. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for a lot of other churches in the city. I understand the reason, of course: thieves and vandals and other miscreants. So sometimes all that’s visible to the casual visitor is an exterior, and that by itself can be a fine thing. Still, you want to go inside.

Earlier this summer we went to Ukrainian Village, a neighborhood in Chicago still populated by many Ukrainians, but arrived too late in the day to take a look inside St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. Now 100 years old, I’ve read that it was modeled after St. Sophia in Kiev, with magnificent icons, mosaics and stained glass windows inside.

It has 13 domes surmounted by crosses – one for Jesus, 12 more for the Apostles, most not visible at this angle. Only a short walk from St. Nicholas is SS Volodymyr & Olha Church, a Byzantine-looking sort of place, which only dates from the early 1970s, but which harkens back a good many centuries.

It too was closed that afternoon.

But the sun was shining bright on the mosaic above the entrance, which depicts the Christianization of Ukraine. I hope it was in the summertime when that happened.

St. Stanislaus Kostka

Posted on September 8, 2014 by admin

One reason I wanted to peek inside St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church not long ago when I was in Chicago – it’s not far east of Humboldt Park – was that I knew it would be open. I knew that it would be open because the iconic monstrance inside is the focus of 24-hour Eucharistic adoration. Here it is.

I found a press release, of all things, that describes the monstrance on the occasion of its unveiling in 2008: “The gilded receptacle has taken sculptor Stefan Niedorezo two years to carve from linden wood using Renaissance methods. The iconic monstrance is nine feet tall and weighs 700 pounds. Malgorzata Sawczuk applied the gilding and serves as project conservator.

“The monstrance depicts the Blessed Mother as the link between the old and new covenants. She stands over the Ark of the Covenant, a sacred container that held the stone tablets inscribed with the 10 Commandments. Mary is ‘clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars,’ as depicted in the Book of Revelation (Rev 11:19 and 12:1-2).”

St. Stanislaus Kostka is largely a Polish parish (masses in Polish, English and Spanish these days), and the 1870s structure is near the Kennedy Expressway. So near, in fact, that it was slated for demolition to build the highway back in the 1950s, when the Robert Moses school of road building was still in style (whatever’s in the way, knock it down). Ultimately the road was shifted to avoid the church, in a feature known as the Rostenkowski Curve, though apparently that politico (U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, who died a few years ago) wasn’t instrumental in saving the church. A lesser-known local politician, Bernard Prusinski, was.

Whoever kept it from being bulldozed, I’m glad. Your don’t have to be Polish or Catholic to appreciate such a handsome brick church, which I understand recalls major Polish churches of earlier centuries, though in fact designed by an Irish architect, Patrick Charles Keely. He also did Holy Name Cathedral on the near North Side, as well as a lot of other Catholic churches in a lot of places. The man was riding the wave of Catholic immigration to the U.S. in the latter decades of the 19th century, which spurred the demand for more churches.

Note that it only has one belfry. Lightning took another one down 50 or so years ago, but I like the asymmetry.

The church also has some superb glass in its ornate interior.

Humboldt Park Bronzes

Posted on September 4, 2014 by admin

As you’d expect, there’s a statue of Baron von Humboldt in Humboldt Park in Chicago, and it’s a good one, a ten-foot bronze by Felix Gorling. He’s standing next to a globe and an iguana. I like those details. But by the time I got there, my camera’s battery was exhausted – the modern equivalent of running out of film. Public Art in Chicago always features better pictures anyway, so here’s Humboldt.

The baron and I go back a ways. I did a report on him in the fifth or sixth grade. His science is impressive, but what I think really impressed me at the time, and still does, was how he successfully explored parts of South America without much in the way of modern equipment (though I guess what he had was state-of-the-art).

Also in Humboldt Park – another legacy statue of the long-gone German population in the area – is a bronze of Fritz Reuter by one Franz Engelsman. My knowledge of Fritz Reuter is meager, and at first I confused him with the fellow who started the news agency (Paul Reuter, as it happens).

The park district tells us that “Reuter is best known for Otto Kanellen, a volume of prose stories. But he is also remembered for writing against political oppression, a subject he understood first-hand. The Prussian government sentenced Reuter to death for high treason because he had participated in a student-run club promoting political activism. This was commuted to imprisonment, and despite poor health, Reuter continued to write throughout his years in prison. Reuter’s work included several comic novels that were popular with many of Chicago’s German immigrants.

“On May 14, 1893, more than 50,000 Chicagoans of German descent attended the dedication ceremonies. While Reuter is less well-known to the wider community than Goethe or Schiller—for whom monuments were also dedicated in Chicago parks—the impressive attendance at this dedication shows the great enthusiasm for Fritz Reuter within the city’s German community. Four bronze relief plaques of scenes from Reuter’s best known works originally ornamented the granite base of the monument; however, they were all stolen in the sometime in the 1930s and have never been recovered.”

Germans weren’t the only ones living near Humboldt Park more than 100 years ago. More from the park district: “On October 12, 1901, tens of thousands of flag-waving Scandinavian-Americans participated in events to celebrate the monument’s unveiling. Despite heavy rain that day, the festivities included a parade and a two-hour ceremony in Humboldt Park.”

The monument this time: a bronze of Leif Ericson on a granite bolder, the work of a Norwegian come to Chicago around the time of the world’s fair, Sigvald Asbjørnsen.

A determined “We’re off to Vinland, men!” look on his face? Maybe. Sure, among Europeans, he got to America first, not counting nameless Vikings who may or may not have been shipwrecked there. If I’m ever out that way, I’ll definitely take a look at L’Anse Aux Meadows. But it’s a historical curiosity more than anything else, and this kind of memorial speaks more of modern ethnic pride than anything else. Even if the Vikings had told anyone else, which they didn’t, what could have 11th-century Europe done with that information?

Humboldt Park

Posted on September 3, 2014 by admin

The day before we went to Millennium Park, which was full of people, I went by myself to Humboldt Park, which is also in Chicago, for about an hour’s walkabout. Few people were there, even though it was the Friday before a holiday weekend, but maybe the population picks up on Saturdays and Sundays. Even so, the place seemed underused, considering how gorgeous parts of it are. Especially along the banks of the “prairie river” that runs through part of it – a landscape element by Jens Jensen, whom I’ve run across before.

“In 1869, shortly after the creation of the West Park System, neighborhood residents requested that the northernmost park be named in honor of Baron Freidrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1759-1859), the famous German scientist and explorer,” the Chicago Park District says. “Two years later, completed plans for the entire ensemble of Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas parks and connecting boulevards were completed by William Le Baron Jenney, who is best known today as the father of the skyscraper. Having studied engineering in Paris during the construction of that city’s grand park and boulevard system in the 1850s, Jenney was influenced by French design.

“The construction of Humboldt Park was slow, however, and the original plan was followed only for the park’s northeastern section. Jens Jensen, a Danish immigrant who had begun as a laborer, worked his way up to Superintendent of Humboldt Park in the mid-1890s… [Eventually], deteriorating and unfinished areas of Humboldt Park allowed Jensen to experiment with his evolving Prairie style. For instance, Jensen extended the park’s existing lagoon into a long meandering ‘prairie river.’

“He commissioned Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden, and Martin to design an impressive boat house and refectory building which still stands at one end of the historic music court.”

The boat house is a fine structure.

The view of the lagoon from the boat house is nice as well.

A few people were fishing from the edge of the lagoon. I was looking at it. That was the entirety of the human presence there at that mid-afternoon moment. It was a little hard to believe that 9 million or so people live within 30 or 40 miles of this body of water except, of course, for the ambient traffic noise from nearby Humboldt Blvd. and Division St.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Chicago