Tour of Hyde Park Modernist Architecture Aug. 19

 

-posted by chicago pop

From Forgotten Chicago, a walking tour of Hyde Park's legacy of modernist architecture - everything from the Keck & Keck house on University to the I.M. Pei boxes and, uh, Regenstein Library. It all deserves our respect. Thanks to HPP reader I. for passing this along.

Go beyond the gargoyles: From Bertrand Goldberg to Edward Dart, Edward Durell Stone to Edward Larabee Barnes, and Helmut Jahn to Mies van der Rohe, the patrons and builders of Hyde Park have enthusiastically embraced (briefly, in some cases) everything from the International Style to New Formalism, Brutalism and the current preference for sustainable design.

There are few places in the United States with a more encyclopedic and concentrated overview of the last 75 years of modernist architecture than Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. From George Fred and William Keck’s minimal 1937 cooperative apartments (below left) to Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s towering new Logan Center for the Arts (below right, formally opening in October 2012), Hyde Park offers a comprehensive collection of 75 years of modernist masterpieces (and a few misfires). Additionally, Hyde Park offers a living example of the benefits and perils of large-scale land clearance and urban renewal. 

 

Join Forgotten Chicago as we explore Hyde Park for the first time with a walking tour on Sunday, August 19. Venturing far beyond the cliche (Collegiate Gothic and gargoyles), the beloved (a low-slung Prairie School house), and the familiar (a long-gone fair and tales of those swept up in its dark side), our exploration of Hyde Park will show an incredible array of lesser-known and often remarkable projects from the past nine decades. 

Details:

When? Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 12:50 PM. Rain or shine (severe weather will cancel tour).

Where? The tour will start in front of Powell’s Books at 1501 East 57th Street; Powell’s is a short block west of the Metra Electric District 57th Street station.

How Long? A little more than three hours and three miles of walking. The tour will conclude at 4:05 PM at the corner of 55th Street and Hyde Park Avenue, near the Metra 55th Street Station to allow participants to take the inbound 4:10 PM Metra train from Hyde Park, which arrives at Millennium Station at 4:26 PM. The 55 Garfield bus can also take those on the tour back to the Green and Red Lines.

HyPa's Official Launch

posted by Elizabeth Fama

The Hyde Park Alliance for Arts & Culture was officially launched this past Thursday (9/10/09) at the Hyde Park Art Center. The group calls itself "HyPa," which is...kind of not an acronym? (I think it's more like a rap album title, and they should have gone all out with the letter H on the end: "Hypah.") They've existed informally for about 10 years, but now they're an official 501c3, and rarin' to go.

The goal of the organization is awesome, even if the tagline contains about three too many business-speak words, and starts with a participle: "Leveraging collective resources to promote Hyde Park as a cultural destination."

It's a consortium of (so far) 30 arts and cultural organizations in the neighborhood -- from behemoths like the Museum of Science and Industry (possibly the single south-side tourist destination that north-siders can name off the top of their heads) to gems you haven't heard of yet, like the South Shore Opera Company.

Lunch and networking in the exhibit space of the Hyde Park Art Center.

The general idea is this: we already have a vibrant and attractive cultural destination in Hyde Park, we just have to get people to realize it and start coming here. The meeting itself was a living example of this phenomenon: it took months of cajoling for Irene Sherr to get the Chicago Cultural Network to consider having this -- one of their more than bimonthly meetings -- here, in the bright exhibit space of the Hyde Park Art Center. The young woman sitting next to me worked for the Austrian Consulate General downtown (she is planning an exhibition in conjunction with the Joseph Regenstein Library), and was wide-eyed about how simple it was to get here on the number 6 bus.

HyPa's first achievement is the Hyde Park Jazz Festival (in its 3rd year, Saturday, Sept. 26), which features world-class acts for free in 12 of Hyde Park's existing cultural venues. HyPa is also developing a "Passport to Jazz" program, which they envision as an annual pass to a variety of jazz events (financial support provided by Boeing).

Sheryl Papier, President of HyPa, and VP of Marketing for the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust, with Chuck Thurow, outgoing Executive Director of the Hyde Park Art Center.

After Sheryl Papier spoke, the rest of the meeting involved Stuart Flack showcasing the new web site for the Chicago Humanities Festival. The interesting Hyde-Park information I gleaned from his presentation is that the October 17 kickoff of the CH Festival is an all-day extravaganza in Hyde Park. (But maybe you all knew that already.)

Inside Drs Hospital: See What You're Preserving!

posted by chicago pop

Future Amputation Ballroom

Local preservationists must really like the façade of Doctors Hospital, because the interior sure isn't much. It's what you might expect it to look like, given the fact that it was a modern, functional hospital until 2000, when it was abandoned by the felons who ran the hospital and a Medicare scam there.

Not quite the Trading Room of Louis Sullivan's famed Chicago Stock Exchange, preserved today in the Art Institute. But pretty cool in an apocalyptic, white-collar crime sort of way.

From the looks of it, keeping the façade of this building would amount to a postmodern exercise in decorative make-believe: quaint exteriors with studied historical references, concealing the most unrelated of utilitarian interiors.

So what is there to preserve inside the building itself, you may ask? Look for yourself, and revel in the ambiance that wafts from these pictures...

Future Sigmoidoscopy Cafe

Wrong movie set -- get outta here! (*)

Future Bon Jovi Party Suite

Communicable Diseases Corridor-- Single and Double Rooms

Thanks once again to intrepid urban photographer, Charles Janda for the photos. After having led us through the ruins of St. Stephens, he has once more been our guide through the bowels of yet another decaying Hyde Park edifice. Thanks, Chuck. View the full set here and here.

* Planet of the Apes gag inspired by longtime HPP reader and scathing critic of all things NIMBY, famac.

Inside St. Stephens

posted by chicago pop

Back in November 2007, Peter Rossi posted an essay on the empty and deteriorating St. Stephen's Church at 57th and Blackstone.

In response, over the digital transom came an interesting link to a set of photos from someone, then unidentified, who had evidently been inside St. Stephens in November 2003 and had taken about a dozen pictures of it in all its magnificent decrepitude. I'm taking the liberty of posting a few of them here.



For those of you interested in the full set, follow this link, where you will see St. Stephens and much, much, more -- all presented to you courtesy of one Mr. Charles Janda, trained photographer specializing in decaying urban structures, and the challenges of photographing them. It's great, eerie stuff.

I thank Mr. Janda for passing his pics along, together with what I take to be implicit consent to their use on this blog. (Just let me know if you want them pulled).

I hope readers will appreciate these pics for their merit as photographs, but also for what they reveal about just how far gone this building is. Bear in mind these pictures were taken almost 5 years ago.



As Peter Rossi pointed out in a comment to his original post, the building is unheated and is masonry-clad, which is a bad combination in a cold-weather climate. Several broken windows continue to allow the elements full access to the interior.

Absent the sudden appearance of a lunatic philanthropist with a fetish for preserving knock-off greco-roman wedding cakes like this one, in a short time there won't be anything left to preserve here except some interesting graffiti up on the dome.

Word on 53rd: Put a Mid-Rise at McMobil

posted by chicago pop

In the aftermath of what, by all accounts, including my own, was a smashingly successful community meeting on the future of the 53rd Street TIF District, it seems like a good time to revisit our favorite little stretch of 53rd.

Side Face of a 6-Story Building Behind McMobil Lot
(5220 S. Kenwood)

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, it will come as no surprise to you what we think should happen at the McMobil site on 53rd and Kenwood. We want to see a mixed-use, mid-rise building put right there. Like the buildings of similar height just yards away. Not surprisingly, a group of folks want a building here which allows for more cars, fewer and therefore more expensive units, with none of these preferences based on substantiated arguments as to why a bigger building would be worse.

Mid-Rise, 8-Story Versailles a Block Away from McMobil Site
(5254 S. Dorchester)

In previous posts, we've gone over the reasons why we think a mixed-use mid-rise is a good idea, and in fact fits with the character of the neighborhood. The alpha and omega of this issue -- something which goes against the very core of the NIMBY soul -- is that Hyde Park needs more people. We've gone over the demographics here, and made it clear that the decline in neighborhood retail is linked to the decline in neighborhood population, and not just here but throughout the South Side.

We've also pointed out the research demonstrating that, as household density goes up, auto ownership goes down. That means fewer people actually chose to own cars. That's good for congestion. And the environment. And when retailers decide to locate nearby concentrations of shoppers, that means fewer trips by car are necessary. If NIMBYs don't want a building here, congestion is not going to be a convincing bogeyman.

Hyde Park is in fact full of such buildings, sprinkled liberally among low-rise structures. This is the case on 53rd as well, and a building here would in no way depart from the historic texture or precedent of the street or the neighborhood.

Here are a few examples of other mid-rise buildings amid low-rise housing. Does anyone have any complaints about these towers near the intersection of 56th and Kenwood? Can anyone argue that they contribute to congestion on 56th Street?

Residential Mid- and High-Rise Buildings at Intersection of 56th & Kenwood

After the 53rd Street community visioning meeting this past Saturday, I sense that people are starting to realize this, that the Old-Timer resistance to change may be ebbing. Hyde Park needs more people. It needs new people. And it needs new, modern housing to hold them in sufficient numbers to make streets busier and safer.

When you get a chance to build new housing on a major artery of the neighborhood, if you don't try to match what the neighborhood historically supported, you're perpetuating the suburbanization of the inner city that was the vision of Urban Renewal. It's something a lot of NIMBYs still cling to.

A lot of holes have been ripped into the neighborhood in the last 50 years, and the NIMBY crowd has grown accustomed to them. They like their vacant lots, dead space in public parks, empty streets with anemic urban densities, and marginal retail amenities. And they especially like their free street parking.

But none of those things are fundamentally good for the neighborhood. And there is as yet no good reason that has been offered as to why an 8-10 story building shouldn't go on this spot.

When we get a chance to fill one of those holes, and turn some of these things around, we should make the most of it, and in a big way.

Monster Rally To Save Doctors Hospital

Enormous Crowds Throng to the Defense of Historic Hospital

Chicago Police and Park District Security were overwhelmed by a recent rally in defense of the threatened Doctoral Hospital on Stony Island Avenue. Mounted police, half a dozen Segway Units, and aerial surveillance helicopters were all dispatched to maintain order as the crowds, which police estimated to peak at around 10 to 15,000 people, virtually shut down 57th Street and Stony Island.

Preservationists from around the nation continued to arrive by the busload throughout the morning, at one point roaring so loudly that the speakers -- all 23 Board members of the Hyde Park Antiquarian Society -- could not be heard above the tumult. As the crowd spilled over into nearby Jackson Park and the sun began to set, many protesters could be heard asking locals, "Does anyone know where we can find a good hotel?"

Doctor's Hospital and Urban Claustrophobia

It's been a while since we've read anything from Notable Local Guy, J-Spice, who has no official Cabinet position in the Establishment junta, but acts in a variety of capacities -- including, in this instance, adviser to the venerable Hyde Park Antiquarian Society.

At issue in the most recent letter from J-Spice to the Herald (September 7, 2007) is the burning question of how to respond to the University's plan to demolish the Doctor's Hospital and replace it with a high-rise Marriott hotel.

In the great tradition of Hyde Park activism -- or, considering the disintegrating revetments at the Point, perhaps the not-so-great tradition -- alternative plans for the Hospital site have been drawn up that purport both to accommodate the University's plans, and to re-use up to 80% of the original structure. This new-found spirit of compromise is certainly better than the pure obstructionism that has left the Point slowly washing into Lake Michigan, and so we say let's have a look.

We hope that the alternative plan, in addition to preserving the facade and layout, preserves the spirit of the place as well. Its unique ambiance should be adapted to the building's new functions as a hotel, perhaps anchored by an Amputation Lounge for the white tablecloth crowd; a Pathology Bistro for more of a quick fix; and, for Starwood Preferred guests, room selection from among the Polio, Smallpox, or Consumption Suites, with possible upgrades to penthouse lake views from the Blunt Head Trauma Deck.

Turning now to our leading theme, the classic Hyde Park phobia to which J-Spice gives such eloquent expression in this week's letter: "urban claustrophobia."

Establishment Individual Experiences
Urban Claustrophobia

What is urban claustrophobia? That penned-in feeling people get when they try to pretend that they are living in a bucolic, suburban parkland, when actually living near the heart of a metropolis of 8 million people. It's something the Marriott would cause, but the Doctor's Hospital doesn't.

In simple terms, it is a distaste for too many buildings, too many people, and too much congestion. Indeed, too much of anything. This urbano-phobic condition should not be surprising in a letter contributed on behalf of the Hyde Park Antiquarian Society which, being antiquarian, necessarily celebrates the semi-suburban heritage of Hyde Park.

The problem that can arise, however, is that celebrating the semi-suburban heritage of Hyde Park can lead one to try to preserve Hyde Park as a real suburb. As we have pointed out before, Hyde Park is not, and has not been a suburb for over a century. Preserving intrinsically suburban aspects of our neighborhood may actually do a disservice to the community, leading to pernicious effects when pursued in an area that has become fully integrated into a vast metropolitan region.

For J-Spice, the advantage of the existing Hospital building over its proposed replacement derives from the fact that its "set-back softens its impact on the street and ensures that any new, larger building added to the site would be even further west and away from the street, causing less urban claustrophobia and blocking fewer views."

*(The views in question are presumably those from the Vista Homes. We would prefer it if there was something blocking views of Vista Homes.)

The first question we would put to anyone suffering from "urban claustrophobia" is, quite simply, Why do you live in a city?

But more fundamentally, the preservationist drive in this case is tied to anachronistic design principles. Is there a need to "soften [the Marriott's] impact on the street"? Why? What does this mean concretely? How is this "impact" a problem, and according to whom? If a building built to the sidewalk generates claustrophobia in J-Spice or anyone else, that's rather unfortunate. But this particular hang-up requires therapy, or perhaps a stint in some sprawling suburb. It shouldn't determine how we site city buildings.

On the contrary, a building that comes directly to the public space of the sidewalk, and thereby encourages pedestrians to inhabit the space rather than merely travel through it or use it as a buffer, has multiple benefits to the sidewalk culture that is the most basic strand in the social fabric of cities. The most popular neighborhoods in Chicago have this quality, and newer projects are reverting to it. For Jane Jacobs, the sidewalk was the atomic unit of urban planning.

The stretch of Stony Island in question is barren and uninviting. There is very little pedestrian traffic. You want to get in a car and leave. The call for major buildings to be kept off or pushed away from the street is classic Urban Renewal, and like it demonstrates how this preservation effort is driven by fundamentally anti-urban sensibilities. It seeks to insulate, push back, cut off, turn in. Ultimately, this attitude represents a profound distrust of one's neighbors.

It may be possible to preserve and adapt an old building that only antiquarians could love. But let's not import bad suburban ideas into the city at the same time.

Harper Court Was, and Is, A Bad Idea

Harper Court is a failure. By the measures of its own founding mission to "further trade and economic development of the Hyde Park-Kenwood area," or to assist with the "continuation in the community of artisans, craftsmen ... of special cultural or community significance" it has failed from the very beginning. The artists and craftsmen it was intended for didn't move in. It is as much a product --in the very design and layout of the buildings -- of a 60s worldview as the Urban Renewal programs against which is was a response. Those who are attached to Harper Court are in love with its mission, and blind to the empirical fact that the site and the institution have not met their own goals nor met the pressing and changing needs of the community.

Harper Court has failed in its mission to "further trade and economic development." There are now more low-rent, vacant storefronts in Hyde Park than can be filled with tenants, while Hyde Parkers are still unable to shop for essentials in their own neighborhood. In light of the large sums of consumer dollars that are spent outside of the neighborhood, it is clear that Harper Court has not alleviated the drought of retail amenities that afflicts the neighborhood. Subsidizing small business does not economically benefit those who are burdened with frequent and costly voyages outside the neighborhood to procure quality food and clothing. In fact, it ignores this very real problem in the pursuit of an ideological chimera, and aggravates strucutral disadvantages that disproportionately affect the poor and minorities. The object of any redevelopment project or corporation should be to help draw money to our neighborhood, and above all to keep neighborhood money in the neighborhood. That is the best way to preserve the distinctiveness of Hyde Park and pursue social justice.

Harper Court was also intended as a refuge for artisans displaced from land clearance programs under Urban Renewal. Here its failure is even more apparent. Hyde Park currently has a thriving artistic culture, and it has nothing to do with Harper Court. Two self-governing artistic institutions have made Hyde Park their home, the Hyde Park Art Center and the Experimental Station. Evidently, for neither organization was the physical layout, location, or mission of Harper Court attractive. The failure of Harper Court in this respect is a symptom of its top-down, utopian-style approach to community planning. A philanthropist and some well-meaning activists thought they knew what artists and artisans wanted. They were wrong.

Beyond the empirical failures, the approach of Harper Court to commercial revitalization is backwards. Focusing on and subsidizing local businesses in fact guarantees that we have no businesses. The fixation on getting "local" businesses and keeping out "chains" is an aesthetic and ideologically-driven one that is uninformed as to the nature of entrepreneurialism and small-business dynamics. To get "local" businesses, you first of all need local entrepreneurs, and to judge by the number of empty storefronts, Hyde Parkers aren't jumping at the opportunity. Even if such entrepreneurs could be found, allowing their operations to be subsidized would not guarantee that the real -- as opposed to imaginary community in Hyde Park -- gets what it needs.

The preference for "local" businesses typically stands in opposition to a distaste for "chains." This stance quickly becomes problematic. The natural tendency of a good business is to grow. As soon as you have more than one branch, you are technically a chain. Several of Hyde Park's most well-known "local" businesses are now chains: the Medici, Toys Etc., the Seminary Co-Op, Powell's Books. Istria, if it ever manages to open its Cornell Avenue location, will then be a chain, and may expand into the rest of Chicago. Intelligentsia, the much-loved, Chicago-based purveyors of fine coffees, now has branches in the Loop and is opening in Los Angeles.

The fixation on subsidizing "local" business assumes that the best of everything can be found in one very small neighborhood, and that it is therefore justifiable to keep non-local things out. This gets the cause-and-effect of vibrant neighborhoods backwards. Local neighborhoods, the kinds that people love to live in and that others come to visit, don't emerge out of purely local conditions. They have strong economies that draw in outsiders, both to open businesses and to patronize them.

The most distinctive neighborhood shopping districts in Chicago have very few chains: Damen in Bucktown between North and Armitage; Armitage and Halsted in south Lincoln Park; and Central Street in Evanston. All of these shopping districts are full of local businesses. Hyde Park should be trying to replicate these areas, not tinkering with a flawed and obsolete redevelopment concept.

But Harper Court isn't only flawed in terms of its redevelopment track record. It is flawed in the very nature of its layout and buildings. Harper Court looks like a ski lodge in Aspen, not like a part of Hyde Park. More generally, Harper Court embodies the 60s era of urban design, when the whole trend of things was to close oneself off, to look within, to establish buffers between a given site and the "outside." This was the spirit that animated the design of Urban Renewal itself, a spirit that was shared by the design of Harper Court.

Harper Avenue was cut off, making the complex difficult to access, find, or even see. The very idea of a "court" was foreign to Chicago, based as it is on a grid of walkable pedestrian thoroughfares with storefronts coming to and meeting the lot lines. Everything about Harper Court is intended to isolate it -- never a good idea for business. It is of the same vintage as the State Street pedestrian mall, and about as effective. City leaders had the good sense to reopen State Street, and it has flourished. The whole trend of modern urban design is to connect places, not to cut them off.

Harper Avenue should be reopened. The buildings of Harper Court, which should have outraged preservationists when they were first built, did not and still don't fit with the period architecture that surrounds them. They should be torn down and replaced. This site is too small to house the large number of tenants for which it was intended. Modern retail demands larger spaces for fewer tenants. Whatever assets belong to the Foundation should be liquidated and transferred to a Hyde Park Trust for the Arts. These monies could then be used to fund juried, competitive, competitions in the arts, which would sponsor projects in the neighborhood and throughout the City. By being juried and competitive, but based in Hyde Park, it would bring the best of the City and the nation here, instead of making public art the object of public committees devoted to local clients.

We don't need more top-down economic and cultural central-planning posing as community control. Merchants and shoppers are part of the community too, and right now they are not sufficiently represented.

Development Beat

Stony Island Tower: Local Establishment types will probably have a tizzy once they get wind of this proposed tower for 64th and Stony Island:

Word-on-the-street has it that a few developers are assessing the viability of high-rise developments on the Lakefront from Bronzeville going south, a market that hasn't been active since before World War II. We're not holding our breath for this one, and recognize that most such deals fail to get farther than a nice computer rendering.

But the fact that such a project has even occurred to someone is a sign of changing times.


Vista Homes, or "The Brick Zebra": This property, of course, is not undergoing any renovation or addition. Seeing as how it is next-door to the proposed Marriott Hotel on the site of the current Doctor's Hospital, and also home to a good number of folks who have strenuously objected to the proposed hotel's utter aesthetic worthlessness, we thought it might be fun to see just how well Vista Homes holds up under aesthetic scrutiny. (Curiously enough, given the insistence of some that the area is not meant for a hotel, it is worth noting that Vista Homes was originally intended to be just that.) Let's look at the Vista Homes in profile:


Like a lot of residential towers built in the 20s and early 30s (Vista Homes was built in 1926), its developers obviously expected it to be sandwiched, Park Avenue style, by neighbors of equal height on both its south and north faces. Developers being a speculative lot and not always the best fortune tellers, this never happened. One result is that Vista Homes presents only one architecturally finished face to the world, that facing east over Jackson Park.

The remaining 3 faces of this building are unfinished and utilitarian, and indeed present the spectacle of something resembling a giant TIC-TAC-TOE board looming above the Midway, akin to the external appearance of the old CHA blocks at Cabrini Green. Several towers of the same vintage in Indian Village were left in a similar, though not quite so comprehensive, state of incompleteness.


How anyone who lives in or near THIS could complain about the proposed Marriott tower next door being architecturally déclasée is beyond me. S/he who lives in a building that looks 3/4 like a housing project should not throw stones at a moderately pleasant proposed commercial building that, at the very least, is finished on all four sides.

Of course, in keeping with the champagne-taste-and-beer-budget of local NIMBYs, neighbors at the 5th Ward community meeting on July 23, 2007 conceded that if the likes of Helmut Jahn, or Rafael Viñoly (of the GSB Building) were doing the proposed Hotel, then it might be OK. Otherwise, they would prefer not to have an off-the-shelf retro-modern building next to their quirky brick zebra. They are ENTITLED to world-class architecture in their back-yard, you see, even though they have had nothing to do with attracting the world-class architecture in the first place.

The Devil and Daniel Burnham

One of the reasons cited by the Hyde Park Antiquarian Society for preserving the unremarkable Doctor's Hospital is that it "addresses Jackson Park in exactly the way Daniel Burnham envisioned in his Plan of 1909." Now, Daniel Burnham was an important architect, but it's far from clear that he was a good city planner, and it's on the basis of the latter creds that we're being asked to value this building. The fabled and grandiose 1909 plan is breathtaking but utterly unrealistic, outdoing in its vision what the French Baron von Haussmann actually accomplished in the wake of his massive tear-down projects in the Paris of the 1860s, and rivaling some of the more outlandish schemes of later German modernists.

Which is all to say that, if you take one good look at the above illustration, you'll see that Burnham was crazy. His vision of Chicago as a beaux-arts European capital (Paris), as Northwestern University's urban historian Janet Abu-Lughod argues, was completely at odds with the attempts of Chicago's architectural luminaries, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, to find an architecture that was native to the American experience. The 1909 plans reflect the megalomania of one man, backed by the newfound riches of Chicago's industrial and commercial elite enamored with the cultural conventions of Old Europe.

It was also completely at odds with the economic reality of Chicago as one of the nation's top 3 industrial cities with an enormous and frequently striking proletariat, none of which figures in the pleasing aquatints of the 1909 Plan. Chances are that Louis Sullivan would not have thought much of the Euro-philic Georgian revival style of the Doctor's Hospital, to say nothing of the 1909 Plan, modeled as it was on the Neo-Classical, wedding-cake monstrosities of the 1893 World's Fair, which Sullivan is on record as loathing.

So when we are asked to appreciate the value of the Doctor's Hospital because it "addresses Jackson Park in exactly the way Daniel Burnham envisioned in his Plan of 1909", let's remember that this wouldn't have carried much weight with Louis Sullivan, and that there are good reasons why precious little of that Plan ever materialized -- because it had very little to do with the social or economic reality of Chicago as a meatpacking, steel-forging, Haymarket Rioting town resembling Paris only in the minds of a small elite.