Pullman Ruins

What creates a ruin? The elements over time, neglect, war, accidents, extreme weather, assorted acts of God. In the case of the industrial structures at Pullman State Historic District, arson. After the structure was severely damaged in 1998, the Chicago Tribune reported that “the police determined the fire to be arson and arrested a 45-year-old man on Wednesday,” the article noted. “Sgt. Maurice Sullivan, a detective with the police bomb and arson unit, said that the man confessed to setting the blaze at the direction of voices he heard in his head.”

Much reconstruction of the Administration Building and Central Clock Tower has been done since then.

Inside, though, it’s still mostly raw space. These things take time.

The nearby industrial buildings aren’t in such good shape, inside or out, though they’ve probably been stabilized.

Even though I believe the buildings ought to be restored, there’s still something satisfying about wandering around ruins. Especially when large pieces of iron equipment are nearby.

What is it? What was it used for? Someone could probably tell me. Why did it end up in exactly that place and position? Who were the workmen who moved it to where it is, and did they intend to abandon it, or just put it somewhere temporarily – but never got back to it? Maybe no one knows these things any more. Or maybe I’m misinterpreting the object. Could be it was removed from the wrecked building after the fire, and will return after its restoration.

Someday, parts of the Pullman district, including the industrial sites, might be part of a National Historical Park, along the lines of the one in Lowell, Mass. The National Park Service recently reported that it thought Pullman had the right stuff to be such a park, and Congress and other interested parties have to figure out how to pay for it. Considering Congress’ recently difficulties with even basic governance, it might be a while before that happens.

Sounds like a good idea to me. A petition to grant park status to Pullman was at the Visitors Center when we picked up our House Tour tickets, and I signed it.

The Greenstone Church

The Greenstone United Methodist Church is at the corner of 112th St. and St. Lawrence Ave. and it’s green.

Yuriko suggested it was covered with moss, but closer inspection reveals that much of the rock itself is green. Apparently it’s made of serpentine quarried in Pennsylvania. I wasn’t familiar with serpentine, so I looked into it. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica says that it’s “a mineral which, in a massive and impure form, occurs on a large scale as a rock, and being commonly of variegated colour, is often cut and polished, like marble, for use as a decorative stone… Although popularly called a ‘marble,’ serpentine is essentially different from any kind of limestone, in that it is a magnesium silicate, associated however, with more or less ferrous silicate.”

Why aren’t more things built of it? Could be the expense. But it does make for a sturdy structure. Greenstone has been standing since 1882, designed by Solon Beman, who did all of Pullman. He did a number of other things – including a large number of Christian Science churches, interestingly enough – but he’s best known for Pullman.

Back in the days of Mr. Pullman, the structure was built as a Unitarian Church “for all to unite in a union body and get a broad-minded evangelical clergyman,” according to the Pullman Foundation. That dog didn’t hunt, with each denomination going its own way in rented space elsewhere. It also didn’t help that rent was high at Greenstone. In 1907, a decade after Pullman and his company ceased to own the property, Methodists acquired it.

The inside is modestly adorned, with its original cherry wood pews. I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear the organ.

Again from the Pullman Foundation: “The organ was built in 1882 by the distinguished firm of Steere and Turner as their Opus #170. It is one of the few manual tracker organs remaining in the United States… The organ contains 1,260 pipes ranging in size from the large front pipes to others the size of a pencil. It consists of two manuals for the hands, one for the feet, twenty-one stops and twenty-three ranks of pipes, three couplers and a twenty-seven note-pedal board.”

I don’t know a lot about organs, but that sounds fancy. The foundation further says that “its tracker action means that the valves are mechanically linked to the keys and are directly activated by the organist’s hands and feet. Most organs have an electrical system which eliminates this direct link between the keys and pipes. Today’s organists find playing this organ a physically demanding but emotionally satisfying act.” No organ for old men, you could say.

Pullman Interiors

All together we visited seven residences on the Historic Pullman House Tour, none of them usually open to the public because people live in them. But on this particular weekend the owners agreed to show them off. I don’t think I’d ever been on a house walk of this kind before, probably because of a vague association with a House Beautiful sensibility. De gustibus non est disputandum, but it isn’t an impulse I share. I’m more House Cluttered.

Pullman’s historic character pulled me in, and come to think of it a house walk can be a good way to go into places and see things. I might have to look into other walks: House Interesting or Odd, if not Beautiful.

Usually it took a few minutes to get into each house, with small groups entering as others left. None of the Pullman houses are that large, and they’re easy to fill up. The event wasn’t teeming with people, but well attended, including a couple of busloads of seniors. In fact, I’d guess that the average age of the attendees was a bit older than me.

Sometimes the rooms and halls were so crowded, it felt like being at a party – except no one knew anyone else, or planned to stick around to gab. The homeowner was usually in one of the rooms, with volunteers in other rooms to explain the original layout of the place, answer questions, and (probably) keep an eye on small possessions.

As far as I could tell, none of the houses still feature their original layouts, but some were closer than others. You’d hardly except a 21st-century family to live in space designed for, say, a half-dozen unmarried skilled workers of the late 19th century. A couple of the homeowners, especially the fellow who owns 533 E. 112th St., whose block is also known as Arcade Row, did an elaborate, painstaking restoration job inspired by design of the late 19th century – wall colors, fixtures, furnishings. He also had art and artifacts either from the period, or reminiscent of it, including items from the mostly lost mansions on Prairie Ave. (George Pullman had his mansion there), and others depicting the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

Arcade Row is close to the former site of the Pullman Arcade Building, a missing part of Pullman. It would be quite a thing to have around: “Pullman Arcade Building contained a 500-seat theatre, a post office, library, the Pullman Trust and Savings Bank, the town management offices as well as office and storefront spaces that were rented to private businesses,” notes the Historic Pullman Foundation. “Modeled after the enclosed arcades of Europe, the Arcade Building was a forerunner of the modern shopping mall we know today. The building was unfortunately demolished in 1927, as the nearby shopping areas gained greater popularity and the building became no longer financially viable.”

Jazz Age retail killed the Arcade, not rampant out-with-the-old of the ’50s and ’60s. Ah, well.

All of homeowners had put a lot of effort into their properties, but mostly their interiors were distinctly modern, some more aesthetic than others. One owner’s hobby was stained glass, and he put a lot of nice work into his house. Other owners invested a lot of time in their small back yards, raising flowers and koi and installing sculptures and sundials and fountains. Another owner was fond of art exhibit posters. I looked at one in particular for a few moments  – The Age of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, which was at the Art Institute in the summer of ’87 – before I thought, “Hey, I went to that one.”

Yet another owner had a large collection of model fantasy figures – you know, heroes, dragons, orcs, and so on, a few inches high, quite detailed, and each with a home in a display case. And, he told me, places to set them up that were put away for the house tour. I told him my cousin has an impressive collection of military model figures, and he allowed that fantasy/military is probably the main division among figure-oriented hobbyists.

Each home has two or three floors, all of them with narrow staircases. After climbing stairs in seven houses, we were fairly tired but also thirsty and in need of lunch. So we repaired to the Cal-Harbor Restaurant, a diner-like place without a lot of decoration; it was good to take a rest from sensory overload. Or at least to shift away from visual stimulation to the satisfaction of good omelettes and – something you don’t always find in Chicago diners – good grits.

Cal-Harbor is on 115th, which is a mid-sized east-west street. Visible from its window is a facility across the street that includes a vast plain of black asphalt and a brutal concrete building, all surrounded by a chain-link fence. I don’t know what it is. I guess it has some economic utility. But it’s butt ugly. The Pullman neighborhood could have been that.

The Historic Pullman House Tour

On Saturday, Yuriko and I went to Pullman to participate in the 40th annual Historic Pullman House Tour. For a fairly modest fee, you can walk around the Pullman neighborhood and go into seven privately owned houses, one church, one community center, and the visitor center – which would be accessible anyway and isn’t historic, though it’s a good little museum about Pullman.

You can also take a look at the outside of the Hotel Florence, which has been closed and under renovation for years, and wander around the Pullman factory ruins, which were ruined less by the neglect over the decades than a fire set by a lunatic in 1998. We did all those things over the course of the afternoon, and also squeezed in lunch at the diner-like Cal-Harbor restaurant at the edge of the district.

In the early 1880s, industrialist George Pullman established a company town just to the south of Chicago to build his famed railroad cars. The place has a long and storied history, easy to find described elsewhere. Enough to say that the legacy neighborhood, now in the city and way down on the South Side, features about 900 row houses either two or three stories high, made of brick with limestone foundations, with a lot of late Victorian detail. It is, I’ve read, one of the largest collections of 19th-century residences in Chicago.

The entire neighborhood was nearly Eisenhowered around 1960 to make way for an industrial park. The neighborhood successfully fought its destruction and it lives on, though parts are still dilapidated. Pullman clearly includes some enthusiastic residents.

You might call that a Pullman car.

The Rookery

Also during my most recent visit downtown, I swung by the Rookery. Because it had been a long time since I’ve been in the Rookery. The last time might have been the Halloween parties that the concierge service down the hall at the Civic Opera building used to have, when I had an office at the Civic Opera building. The early ’00s, that is.

As always, the Rookery is cool on the outside.

And stunning on the inside.

As you can see, I wasn’t the only person paying photographic attention to the Burnham & Root creation, with its Frank Lloyd Wright filling.

Electric Jellyfish

Not long ago I visited the J.W. Marriott hotel at 151 W. Adams. It hasn’t had that flag very long — only about three years — and the building itself is the former Continental & Commercial National Bank, designed by no other than Daniel Burnham in 1914. I read that to turn the structure into a 610-room hotel — an upmarket one, since J.W. Marriott is described as the “black label” of Marriotts — and restore the ornate lobby, the hotelier spent $396 milllion.

I didn’t have a lot of time in the lobby, but ornate is a good adjective for it. Mostly I was in one of the larger meeting rooms, which was more interesting than most hotel meeting rooms.

There must be a reason, maybe in the original design of the property, that the ceiling sports arched beams, but I’m not in a position to say why.

Nice lights, too. A bloom of electric jellyfish

Protest at Adams & Clark

Back again on September 3 or so. Hard to believe the summer’s dwindling down, but at least it’s still as warm and dry as a real summer.

I was downtown late yesterday morning, and spotted a protest at the northeast corner of Adams and Clark. I heard it first, and then went closer to take a look. People filled the sidewalk in front of the building at that corner, and with them were a speaker on a small platform, some cameramen, and a few bored-looking cops, watching.

At first I thought it might be fast-food workers out on strike, but no. That was scheduled for today, and besides, no fast food is available at that corner. Instead, the building is home to the Chicago Board of Education, and it wasn’t long before I figured out that the protestors were being vocal about the recent closings of a large number of public schools in the city.

The speaker, despite his microphone, was a little hard to hear. Across the street, a fellow let us know his displeasure with Mayor Emanuel.

I haven’t followed the mayor’s time in office closely enough to form much of an opinion, but I know the protestor is hardly alone.

The Fern Room

Another picture of the Garfield Park Conservatory: The Fern Room.

According to a sign at the entrance, the room was Jen Jensen’s “imaginative tribute to prehistoric Illinois. So natural looking was the result that when the Conservatory first opened, visitors thought it has been erected over an existing lagoon… Many of the plants in this room date to the time of the dinosaurs. They have changed little from their ancestors over the last 200 million years. Our plants, of course, are not that old. The oldest are about 300 years of age.”

At the entrance to the Fern Room, another Chicago talent of yore left his mark: sculptor Lorado Taft. Seen a few of his things before.

He called this piece “Idyl,” and it dates from 1913.

This one is “Pastoral,” of the same vintage.

The (Glass) House That Jens Jensen Built

“In 1905, Chicago’s West Park Commission’s general superintendent and chief landscape architect, Jens Jensen, demolished the three smaller greenhouses in Humboldt, Douglas and Garfield Parks to create what was intended as ‘the largest publicly owned conservatory under one roof in the world’ in Garfield Park,” according to the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance. “Many of the original plantings came from the three smaller West Side conservatories.

“Constructed between 1906 and 1907, the Garfield Park Conservatory was designed by Jensen in collaboration with Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden and Martin and the New York engineering firm of Hitchings and Co. It represents a unique collaboration of architects, engineers, landscape architects, sculptors and artisans. Jensen conceived the Conservatory as a series of naturalistic landscapes under glass, a revolutionary idea at the time.”

It’s a fine place to stroll, even if you don’t spent a lot of time absorbing botanical facts. Plenty of leafy vistas.

Jens Jenson ought to be better remembered, and not just for the conservatory. The Jens Jenson Legacy Project tells us that he “created Columbus Park on the western edge of Chicago, and extensively redesigned three other large west-side parks (Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas) as well as 15 small ones. He designed parks in smaller cities – among them Racine and Madison, Wisconsin; Dubuque, Iowa; and Springfield, Illinois. He landscaped dozens of estates belonging to wealthy Midwesterners along the North Shore (Rosenwalds, Florsheims, Ryersons, Beckers) and elsewhere (Henry and Edsel Ford).

“Jensen organized and inspired the early conservation movements that led to the creation of the Cook County Forest Preserve District, the Illinois state park system, the Indiana Dunes State Park and National Lakeshore.”

The Garfield Park Conservatory

Last week I was visited the Garfield Park Conservatory on the West Side of Chicago, one of the great conservatories (just ask anyone). Been some years since I’ve been there, but I remember taking younger versions of Lilly and Ann at least once, and pointing out the cocoa trees. “See? That’s the plant chocolate comes from.”

The cocoa trees are still there, of course. So are the banana trees.

Plus a welter of plants I’ve never heard of. Or forgotten. No matter how many conservatories or gardens I visit – and I try to take in a few every year – I always run across something new.  I don’t have it in me to be a botanist, just someone who says, wow, that’s interesting.

Take a look at the Hanging Lobster Claw, Heloconia rostrata cultivar, Heliconiaceae, native to South America (someone added the little glass eyeballs on the top petal). It’s like something Dale Chihuly might hang at the conservatory. He had a show at the Garfield Park Conservatory a few years ago for which he did hang his glass art in the conservatory, but I missed it.

Or the Shrimp Plant, Pachystachys lutae, Acanthaceae, which grows in Peru.

I liked this plant, but it also shows that my note-taking isn’t always very thorough.