UIUC Walkabout, January ’17

Posted on January 17, 2017 by admin

The first time I took a walk through the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, when visiting with Lilly not quite a year ago, we didn’t have much of a plan. On Sunday, I took another walk around UIUC, studying a campus map beforehand. Not exactly a plan, but at least informed guesswork about an interesting route.

I parked on 6th St. next to the College of Business and near a side street named after sculptor Lorado Taft, a distinguished early alumnus, and headed out from there on foot. I saw more evidence of Taft’s connection to the university elsewhere, though not the well-known “Alma Mater” sculpture (this time).

Nearby was the Architecture Building. Four panels are embedded in the walls of the building, on conspicuous display. Here’s one, featuring Michele Sanmicheli.

“The Architecture building, also known as Architecture and Kindred Subjects, was designed in the Georgian Revival style by Charles A. Platt in 1926-1927,” writes Muriel Scheinman in Explore C-U. “Platt, who also designed ten other buildings on campus including the University Library, David Kinley Hall, and Mumford Hall, embedded four panels with medallion portraits of famous architects on the Architecture building. Michelangelo Buonarroti and Michele San Michele are displayed on the west gates, and Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones are on the east gates. Frank G. Menconi, an architectural sculptor based in New York, designed the panels.”

Back to Lorado Taft. One of his monumental works is the Fountain of Time in Chicago. He had planned a similarly monumental work nearby called the Fountain of Creation, but the project was never realized.

He did complete four figures intended for the Fountain of Creation, however, and now they stand in front of the UIUC main library and behind the Foellinger Auditorium. I wandered by and saw them all. Here’s one of two near the library’s entrance, “A Daughter of Pyrrah.”
“Pyrrha” is how it’s spelled in my go-to reference on the subject, Gods and Mortals in Classical Mythology: A Dictionary (Michael Grant and John Hazel, 1979) and other places. She was part of the husband-and-wife team who survived a worldwide flood and then helped re-create mankind by tossing rocks over their shoulders, which then became people.

Pyrrha had natural-born daughters as well as rock-created ones. It isn’t clear which one Taft was thinking of, at least from reading the plaque.

Here’s the other.
Whatever else, they seem to be in some kind of distress. A collegiate title might be, “I’m not ready for my exam!” A more topical title could be, “The inauguration’s coming soon!”

Not far away, behind the Foellinger Auditorium, are two sons of Duecalion, whom Taft called “Eucalion.” He was the husband in the flood myth.
If anything, the sons look even more distressed than the daughters.

“After a weekend bender” might be a good title for that one.

“Around 1917, [Taft] proposed to the city a pair of huge fountains, one at each end of a strip of public park known as the Midway Plaisance on the Chicago’s South Side,” explains Chicago Outdoor Sculptures. “On the western edge, the Fountain of Time and at the eastern edge would stand the Fountain of Creation. Although the Fountain of Time was completed, The Fountain of Creation was never completed… Taft planned 38 monumental figures and figure groups for the Fountain of Creation. But only four were carved in stone.”

Nearby is the UIUC Observatory. It wasn’t open for inspection, but I liked the outside.

“The University of Illinois Observatory was constructed in 1896,” the university says. “…Though none of the astronomical instruments are being used for professional research today, the observatory still contains a 12” Brashear refractor. The observatory played a key role in the development of astronomy, as it was home to a key innovation in the area of astronomical photometry. The facility has been directed by such noted scientists as Joel Stebbins and Robert H. Baker.”

Looping back, I took in the view from the steps of the Foellinger Auditorium, which is nice even in winter. It encompasses the Illini Union. You wouldn’t know it to look at the building, but part of the financing for its construction came from the WPA.
There’s a bowling alley in there somewhere, among other things. I’ll have to take a closer look inside sometime. Likewise with the Foellinger Auditorium, which was closed on Sunday afternoon.

Paris 1994

Posted on November 13, 2016 by admin

November was a good time to be in Paris. So were the 1990s, as far as I could tell, though people sometimes pine for the Jazz Age or La Belle Époque in curious cases of nostalgia for times they never experienced. I take an interest in the history of places that I go, but I’m more interested in seeing them as they are now.

Which, after some time (say, 22 years), becomes places as they were then. Here I am on the Champs-Élysées.

I spent a few minutes with Google Maps trying to figure out exactly where I was, without conclusion. But I think Yuriko took the picture with her back to the Arc de Triomphe.

Here she is in front the Louvre Pyramid, which was fairly new at the time.

Even though it was November, the museum was ridiculously crowded. I’d hate to experience it in July.

Eastern State Penitentiary

Posted on November 1, 2016 by admin

What to do after you’ve visited a major cemetery in Philadelphia? Visit a former prison, now a museum. You could, anyway, since they aren’t that far apart, though not comfortable walking distance.

Specifically, you find yourself outside the massive walls of Eastern State Penitentiary, built in the late 1820s as one of the first modern prisons in the United States, and the first of its kind. In its early days, the prison enforced solitary confinement all the time for all the prisoners.
The museum’s web site tells the tale of its development very well: “In 1787, a group of well-known and powerful Philadelphians convened in the home of Benjamin Franklin. The members of The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons expressed growing concern with the conditions in American and European prisons… It took the Society more than thirty years to convince the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to build the kind of prison it suggested: a revolutionary new building on farmland outside Philadelphia.

“Eastern State Penitentiary broke sharply with the prisons of its day, abandoning corporal punishment and ill treatment. This massive new structure, opened in 1829, became one of the most expensive American buildings of its day and soon the most famous prison in the world. The Penitentiary would not simply punish, but move the criminal toward spiritual reflection and change. The method was a Quaker-inspired system of isolation from other prisoners, with labor…. proponents of the system believed strongly that the criminals, exposed, in silence, to thoughts of their behavior and the ugliness of their crimes, would become genuinely penitent. Thus the new word, penitentiary.”

Eventually — though it took a long time to abandon the system, as usual with institutional change — the practice of all solitary was abandoned when it became clear that solitary confinement all the time drove a lot of prisoners nuts. Guess that counts as an example of good intentions paving the road to Hell.

Eastern State’s massive walls form a square, the idea of which was to look as scary as possible from the outside, to deter criminal urges among those still outside (I doubt that that worked, either). Inside, the British-born architect John Haviland’s design included “seven cellblocks [that] radiate from a central surveillance rotunda,” explains the museum web site.

In our time, a number of the cellblocks have been partly restored to an earlier look.
Not quite the original look, since at first the hallways’ only connection to the cells were through slots through which food was passed. “Haviland’s ambitious mechanical innovations placed each prisoner had his or her own private cell, centrally heated, with running water, a flush toilet, and a skylight. Adjacent to the cell was a private outdoor exercise yard contained by a ten-foot wall,” the prison says.

That wall had the only door, which of course was locked all the time. “In the vaulted, skylit cell, the prisoner had only the light from heaven, the word of God (the Bible) and honest work (shoemaking, weaving, and the like) to lead to penitence,” continues the web site. “In striking contrast to the Gothic exterior, Haviland used the grand architectural vocabulary of churches on the interior. He employed 30-foot, barrel vaulted hallways, tall arched windows, and skylights throughout. He wrote of the Penitentiary as a forced monastery, a machine for reform. ”

Later, Eastern State became more of a standard 20th-century prison, closer to the New York system, rather than the Pennsylvania system pioneered at Eastern State, finally closing in 1970. Hallway doors were added.

New cellblocks were also added, including a few two-story ones.

Some cells are open. Many of the cells are unrestored, containing debris of various kinds.

A few are more-or-less restored. The urge to take selfies doesn’t seem to go away just because the setting is a prison ruin.

Note that the fellow in the picture is wearing earphones. Part of the price of admission — not an extra — was the loan of an mp3 player and some earphones. Wearing them, you went to various stations and listened to narration about the prison by actor Steve Buscemi. He had a good voice for the text, which was well-written and informative. Adding an extra layer of interest: some of the segments also included interviews (perhaps done some years ago) of both inmates and guards at the prison in the 20th century.

The museum featured a number of other restorations, such as a barber shop, the exercise yard, hospital, and (surprisingly) a synagogue. The museum couldn’t resist re-creating Al Capone’s cell, and I couldn’t resist taking a picture of it.
There are about a dozen artists’ installations in the museum, most of which occupy single cells in various parts of the prison. I found this one, “Other Absences,” the most compelling.
Artist Cindy Stockton Moore’s web site says she created “fifty portraits of murder victims. The paintings, created with loose ink washes on translucent mylar, depict men, women and children whose deaths were attributed to those incarcerated at Eastern State Penitentiary.” That’s good. The prisoners shouldn’t get all of the attention.

The Bridgeview Bank, Uptown

Posted on October 20, 2016 by admin

Back posting around October 30, when I might have seen another thing or two to write about, with any luck.

One more destination on this year’s Open House Chicago: the Bridgeview Bank Building in Uptown Chicago, originally known as Sheridan Trust & Savings and then the Uptown National Bank. It’s one of the taller buildings in the neighborhood. You enter the building on Broadway, into a small foyer. From there, a grand staircase leads to the second floor, which is mostly occupied by a resplendent former bank lobby.

The building, and the lobby, is a Marshall & Fox design from 1924, and it’s ornate. And solid.

It occurred to me as I wandered around the marble and brass and ironwork of this sturdy structure that the FDIC probably helped kill off this kind of bank design. Before accounts were insured, a bank needed to look solid. The more solid, the better — at least as far as reassuring your customers was concerned. But if customers can’t lose their deposits, that consideration takes a back seat.

Just speculation. It’s also likely that the generation of bankers who came of age during the Depression (e.g., Milton Drysdale) considered such ornamentation frivolous spending. I should also note that the splendor of Sheridan Trust & Savings’ lobby didn’t save the bank during the Depression.

Never mind, Marshall & Fox did a stunning bank lobby. Here’s a closer look at the ceiling.

The tables where customers used to get ready for the tellers still sport some striking lamps. I want a couple of these at the colorless suburban banks I visit.
There are bank offices ringing the lobby, but otherwise the space isn’t used any more, certainly not for retail banking. Too bad; it should be used for something.

Down on the lower level is a vault — the very picture of a bank vault from another time.
It isn’t used for anything any more, either. I doubt that the bank would consider it, but maybe a hipster restaurant can go upstairs, along with a hipster bar in the vault.

Four Houses of Worship

Posted on October 19, 2016 by admin

A number of churches — and other houses of worship — were part of Open House Chicago. That’s one of the attractions of the event, as far as I’m concerned.

In Evanston, we visited First Presbyterian. It’s not just a church. It’s a Daniel Burnham church.

The church’s web site says, “In July 1876 a new church building was dedicated after the original church burned down. However, this church only stood for 18 years. In February 1894, the second church burned to the ground [and maybe sank into the swamp]. The congregation met in a former roller rink while our current building was being constructed, at a cost of $80,000. Daniel H. Burnham, the famed architect who was the inspiration for Chicago’s lakefront, designed the new church.

“The church is constructed of Lemont limestone, with an interior finish of red oak and Georgian pine. The sanctuary is ninety by seventy-five feet, and with the balcony, seats eleven hundred persons.” A lovely sanctuary it is.
With a lot of stained glass. This wall includes the Old Testament collection.

In the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago is the Buddhist Temple of Chicago. I’m pretty sure we visited there ca. 1997 during a Japanese cultural festival (I remember the taiko drummers especially). Seems that there’s an new building on the site now, or newer anyway, built 10 years ago. The religious organization goes back much further, to when Japanese and Japanese-Americans forced off the West Coast resettled in Chicago.

A fine altar.And a nice collection of wood panels. This one illustrates Gautama under the Bodhi Tree.

In the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, on the same street and the same block — Lunt Ave., near Ridge — are St. Jerome, a Catholic church, and the local HQ of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON Chicago).

Here’s St. Jerome, a century old this year, with its Italian Renaissance exterior. The architect was one Charles H. Prinderville.

Inside, an ornate Baroque sanctuary. At some point, the building was lengthened, becoming one of the longer church buildings I’ve seen lately.

Practically across the street, the devotees of Krishna do what they do. Until 1980, the structure was a Masonic temple. Now inside you can see depictions of Sri Kishora, or the youthful Krishna, and Sri Kishori, or the youthful Radharani.

Then there’s this fellow.

That’s an awfully lifelike statue of Abhay Charanaravinda Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896-1977), whom you might call a Vaishnavite Hindu missionary to the West. He seems to have done well with that.

I can’t resist one more thing: cutting and pasting his name here in Sanskrit (according to Wiki, anyway), just because I can: अभय चरणारविन्द भक्तिवेदान्त स्वामी प्रभुपाद

The Frances Willard House Museum & The Levere Memorial Temple

Posted on October 18, 2016 by admin

Here’s something I learned last Saturday while making the rounds at Open House Chicago. Learned it in fact at the first place we visited. Namely, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union is still in existence.

If you’d asked me beforehand, I would have put the WCTU in the same class as the GAR or Godey’s Lady’s Book or Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound or other things without much purchase beyond the early 20th century. Not only is the WCTU still around, the organization’s HQ is in Evanston, and it owns the Frances Willard House Museum, which is a few blocks south of the Northwestern campus.

Frances Willard was one of the founders of the WCTU. As the organization’s web site says, “Willard recognized, developed, and implemented the use of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union as a political organizing force. Under her leadership, the Union increasingly saw its role as an organization advocating for broad social as well as political change.”

That is, she wasn’t the one who took a hatchet to saloons, but I’m sure she smashed them in other ways. She had a handsome home in Evanston, built in 1865 and made a museum only two years after Willard’s death in 1898. Clearly, the other members of the WCTU held her in high regard. Some artifacts are in place, such as this typewriter.

I like to think Frances Willard banged out some anti-demon rum polemics on it, but I’m not sure it looks old enough to be a late 19th-century machine. Maybe WCTU writers used it later to assure everyone that Prohibition was going swimmingly.

According to the volunteer on hand at the house, the place wasn’t open very much until recently, when it was cleaned and refurbished. Now the museum seems to be actively trying to attract visitors, which must have been the reason it was part of Open House Chicago. All the years I’ve visited Evanston I’d never seen or heard of it. Now I have.

At the other end of the alcohol appreciation spectrum is the national headquarters of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, which is closer to Northwestern — across the street, in fact. It too was part of Open House Chicago.

A lot has been written about the SAEs lately, such at Inside Higher Ed, which noted that “there’s nothing quaint about the nicknames SAE has these days — on many campuses people say the initials stand for ‘Sexual Assault Expected’ or ‘Same Assholes Everywhere.’ ” (Then again, if you hold the entire frat responsible for the actions of a few, aren’t you badmouthing the United States of America?)

Whatever else you can say about the SAEs, they’ve got a swell national headquarters building, including a library, museum of frat artifacts, meeting and office space, and elegant chapel, which is called the Levere Memorial Temple. It was designed by Arthur Howell Knox in 1930.

Open House Chicago says of the structure: “This understated Gothic-Revival building sits across from Northwestern’s gate. It was the vision of Billy Levere, a Temperance preacher with a key role in the history of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity… [temperance again? Maybe there’s a ritual toast to Levere at SAE keggers.]

“It was the first national headquarters building of any fraternity (a use it still serves today). It was also a memorial for the fallen of World War I. A local architect and fraternity member designed the building, including its colorful chapel with a large but uncharacteristic collection of Tiffany windows that narrate the history of America and Sigma Alpha Epsilon.”

The fact that it’s called a “temple” led to some discussion with Yuriko about whether the structure was actually some kind of church — it certainly looks like one, complete with pews, stained glass, religious art, and an altar. No, I offered that whatever the SAEs call it, it’s a chapel. No one meets there regularly for services, after all, and I doubt that it’s been consecrated.

I was interested to see that the stained glass windows on one side started by honoring the soldiers of World War I, but didn’t stop there. In fact, there was a window for Persian Gulf War soldiers.
And Vietnam.
And Korea and WWII, going all the way back to WWI. Behind the altar is stained glass with a Union soldier on the left, a Confederate soldier on the right, and Jesus in between, with Pax Vobiscum on the banner below.

One more thing: hanging on the landing between the first and second floors is a painting of President McKinley.

He’s the only U.S. chief executive that the fraternity counts as a member, having joined at Mount Union College during his short time there.

Open House Chicago 2016

Posted on October 16, 2016 by admin

Turns out there are two kinds of building-visiting events in the world, Open House and Doors Open, and a good many cities in a lot of countries participate in one or the other. (Shucks, missed Milwaukee’s — next year, maybe). As far as I can tell, the idea is exactly the same in both cases: one weekend out of the year, various buildings are open — maybe a little more open than they’d usually be — and you can wander in and look around. A really good idea, if you asked me.

I was out of town last year, but participated in Open House Chicago in 2013. Yuriko and I went in ’14, and again this year, on Saturday. This time our focus was Evanston and some sites on the North Side of Chicago. All are parts of metro Chicago that we know well, but no matter how well you know a place, there’s always more to it. First we drove to Evanston, and then on foot and by El train, we managed to visit more than a dozen places new to us.

Including, in Evanston: the Francis Willard House Museum, Sigma Alpha Epsilon National Headquarters (Levere Memorial Temple), Northwestern University’s Charles Deering Library and its Dearborn Observatory, Stone Terrace (an elegant B&B near Lake Michigan), the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston, and the Lake Street Church of Evanston.

In the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, we had lunch at a good Vietnamese restaurant — there are many around Broadway and Argyle — and then went to the Bridgeview Bank Building, the Buddhist Temple of Chicago, the ICA GreenRise and the Preston Bradley Center (the Peoples Church).

In the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, just as our energy flagged, we managed to make it to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness building and then, practically across the street, St. Jerome’s, a Catholic church just about to start one of its Saturday masses, in Spanish.

With Evanston as target for the morning, we naturally spent a while walking around the still-leafy campus of Northwestern. The university, we saw, was quick to honor faculty member and recent Nobel laureate, Sir Fraser Stoddart.

Among other things, Sir Fraser is known for his work on mechanically interlocked molecular architectures. How it’s possible to understand such things, besides what they are in the first place, is a source of puzzled wonderment to me. But I’m glad there are people who do understand such things.

Sir Fraser’s banner was on Sheridan Road, near the southern edge of the school. From there we went further north, into the heart of the campus, where we chanced on Sir Fraser’s parking space.

This amused me for no good reason. Maybe it’s because Sir Fraser drives a Camry too (and does have a license plate, which I’ve blocked). His looks in better shape than mine.

The B. Harley Bradley House

Posted on October 4, 2016 by admin

I wondered recently, when did I first hear about the small Illinois city — or maybe the large Illinois town — of Kankakee? (Pop. 27,000 or so.) Not a very urgent question, since there’s usually no reason to remember when you first heard of most places — and no way you can remember. With a few exceptions in my case, such as Stevens Point, Wis., which I never heard of till Mu Alpha Theta held its national meeting there in 1978, which I attended.

Even so, I’ll bet I heard of Kankakee because it was in the lyrics of “The City of New Orleans” in the early ’70s, so artfully written by Steve Goodman, so memorably sung by Arlo Guthrie. “Kankakee” makes a clever rhyme with “odyssey.”

All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
And rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passing trains that have no names
And freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobile.

A lot of people could probably say that’s where they heard about Kankakee. Even some Germans. Years ago, my friend Rich played a German-language version of the song for me. Apparently it too was popular. In our time, those lyrics are easy to look up.

Auf seiner Odyssee nach Süden passiert der Zug Kankakee,
rollt an Häusern, Farmen und Feldern vorbei,
passiert andere namenlosen Züge,
Abstellplätze voller alter farbiger Männer
und verrostete Autofriedhöfe.

More recently, the Bradley House in Kankakee came to our attention. In full, the B. Harley Bradley House, vintage 1900.
It doesn’t take too much looking to see that Frank Lloyd Wright did the house. One of the first ones — the docent claimed the first one, others claim differently — done in his distinctive Prairie School. I can’t comment authoritatively which was first, and I don’t really care, but even so the house was interesting enough for a day trip.
The house, and the one next to it — the Warren Hickox House (behind it in the pic above), another Wright design that’s still a private residence — are in the the western edge of the town’s Riverview Historic District. The neighborhood features large old houses in various states of repair, but no others like these two.

The Bradley House is also close to the Kankakee River.
During the tour, I asked the docent whether flooding had ever been an issue — as it has with the Farnsworth House — but apparently the Kankakee isn’t as testy as the Fox River, at least at that place.

The house has had a long string of owners over the last century-plus. Within living memory, for instance, it was a well-known local restaurant, The Yesteryear. For a considerable time in the early to mid-20th century, a wealthy man named Joseph H. Dodson owned the place. He was a bird lover and used the house’s stable, which is now the gift shop, as a bird house factory. It seems that Dodson bird houses were quite an item at one time.

Then there’s the sad story of Stephen B. Small. Another wealthy Kankakee resident, he acquired the property in the mid-80s and set about to restore it. That came to a halt in 1987 when he was kidnapped and buried in a box whose air tube wasn’t large enough to supply him enough air, and so he died (both kidnappers are still in the jug).

More recently, through various twists and turns, the house came to be owned by a nonprofit that’s aiming to pay down its mortgage. Our little part in that was paying for the tour, along with buying a postcard an a refrigerator magnet.

I did not, however, want to pay $5 to take interior pictures, which wouldn’t have turned out all that well anyway. The interior restoration, completed only in 2010, restored the place to its 1901 appearance. A nice bit of work: long halls, spacious rooms (except for the servants’ quarters), wooden floors, art glass in the windows, and the kind of alcoves and recesses and the like you associate with Wright, though few low ceilings. Guess this was before, as The Genius, he could insist on ceilings fit only for short people.

Kankakee Walkabout

Posted on October 3, 2016 by admin

For no charge, the Kankakee County Convention & Visitors Bureau will send you a 24-page booklet (six forms of four pages each) called “Historic Churches of the Kankakee Area Self-Guided Walking and Driving Tour.” It’s a high-quality, full-color bit of work, with some text, a few maps and a lot of interior and exterior pictures of Kankakee-area churches, such as Asbury United Methodist, Wildwood Church of the Nazarene, First Presbyterian, St. Paul’s Episcopal, and others.

There’s also a few interesting historical tidbits about some of the buildings. This is my favorite, about St. Paul’s: “Divine intervention spared the stained glass windows during two great hail storms in 1932 and 1982.”

The churches weren’t the only reason we went to Kankakee on Saturday, braving intermittent rain, but as long as we were going to be in the area, I wanted a look. Ideally, a look inside a few of the churches, including divinely protected stained glass, but I suspected that would be impossible. We went to four of them, all in walking distance of the Kankakee County Courthouse, and none were open.

I understand the reasons. Things would go missing if they didn’t lock up most of the time. Still, it was irritating. We did get a look at the outsides, some of which are impressive enough, such as Ashbury United Methodist, which dates from 1868.

I liked the bell tower of First Presbyterian, vintage 1855. According to the booklet, its 2000-lb. bell is rung by hand on Sundays.
Churches weren’t the only buildings of note. This is the Kankakee County Courthouse, standing on this site since 1912.
The architect who designed it, Zachary Taylor Davis, ought to be better known in Chicago, considering that he also did the original Comiskey Park (gone) and the still-beloved and still-standing Wrigley Field. It should also be remembered that lunch-counter baron Charlie Weeghman commissioned that ball park for his team, the Chicago Whales of the Federal League.

The courthouse statute, dated 1887. As you’d expect, “In memory of the soldiers of Kankakee County who fought for the Union.”
Kankakee County Courthouse statue 2016 One more Kankakee County structure, just south of the courthouse: the brutalist county “detention center.”
The jail, that is. Detention is what you get in school. Otherwise it’s just official euphemism.

The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago

Posted on September 20, 2016 by admin

Saturday was the annual Churches by Bus tour organized by the Chicago Architectural Foundation, which we were on last year and the year before. Not this year. We’ve been to two of the five churches listed on the tour. The tour isn’t precisely cheap, so I wanted a little more novelty. Four out of five, maybe.

So we planned to look at four churches around Michigan Ave. while in the neighborhood. Nothing new — almost nothing new — but no charge either. As it turned out, only two of the four were open, and a third had a service in progress; not the time to wander around looking at it. The open one that wasn’t busy was Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago on Michigan Ave., a fine Gothic structure in the heart of the shopping district.

Nice courtyard to the south of the main building, too.

When the church was finished in 1914, however, that part of Michigan Ave., still called Pine St., was no great shakes. Cheap land, in other words. All of the action on Michigan Ave. was still south of the Chicago River. That changed with the completion of the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the river in 1920, and Fourth Pres has watched temples of mammon grow up around it since then.

A fine interior. Been inside a number of times over the years. The ceiling’s a little dark, but lights up there would be expensive not only in electricity usage, but maintenance, I figure.

Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), an architect who did a lot of ecclesiastical work, designed the church. He’s also known for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.

Adjacent to the church is a much newer structure, the Gratz Center, which was completed only in 2013 to house a preschool program, the Buchanan Chapel, a new dining room and kitchen, offices, and rooms. We took a look at the second-story Buchanan Chapel, which is mostly spare, but well lit with natural light, and with a labyrinth on its floor. The chapel’s architect was Brian Vitale, in Gensler’s Chicago office.

Up in the corner of the chapel hangs “Quaternion,” a 2014 piece by Alyson Shotz, a Brooklyn artist.

Interesting. Often, that’s all I ask from bits of the world.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: architecture