Hidden in Plain Sight: The Architecture of Chicago's Labor Movement

Chicago has always been known as a labor town, and for this Labor Day we'd thought we look at three Chicago structures whose role in the city's labor history is often overlooked.

click images for larger view

The Forum on 43rd Street, designed by architect Samuel A. Treat in 1897 was not only a ballroom and performance center, but also a regular home to political, civil rights, and union organizing events.  After nearly being demolished in 2011, Urban Juncture has began securing the structure and is working on a plan and building a coalition to bring it back to life.  And for the first time in recent memory, you'll be able to see it, as well - it's one of the sites for the Chicago Architecture Foundation's Open House Chicago in October.

Another key structure in Chicago's labor history is Pond and Pond's Chicago Commons building at Morgan and Grand, from 1901, which we hope to be writing about in far more detail soon.  The Chicago Commons Association was founded by Graham Taylor in 1894, patterned after Jane Adams' Hull House to serve the area's poor immigrant population. 

The Commons was home to pro-labor organizing activity, including a 1902 mass meeting to reduce retail worker's 14 hour days.  Although only 100 clerks showed up for the meeting, one speaker noted that the clerks had formed 13 unions and gained 2,000 members, and their efforts secured the reform that �nearly every store from Belmont to the Chicago River had been induced to close evenings.�

After the Chicago Commons merged, it moved its operation and sold off the building in 1947.  It's had an often-troubled past since then, but that may now finally changing with AJ LaTrace of Curbed Chicago reporting in July that the structure is to be restored as the centerpiece of a new campus for the Bennett Day School.

Finally, there's the building at Sheridan and Diversey that, since a late 1970's/early1980's renovation and expansion, has housed offices for medical professionals affiliated with St. Joseph Hospital. Originally, however, it was the proud, modernist headquarters for the Amalgamated Meat Cutters International, chartered by AFL in 1897 to consolidate seven Chicago unions.

A 1904 strike saw 18,000 meat cutters go out on strike for higher wages.  Although joined by most other major unions in the city, national leadership refused to support the strikers.  Employers turned to the city's large population of unemployed African American workers to serve as strikebreakers, which resulted in union members attacking the strikebreakers, police rallying to protect them,  4,000 union workers rioting, and the strike ending in total defeat.  Jane Adams interceding with stockyards magnates to procure a contract that would save face for union members, and keep the union, itself, from being destroyed.

image courtesy The Chuckman Collection

At it's peak, the union had over 200,000 members, but centralizing processing and work rule changes - remember when you couldn't buy meat after 6:00 p.m.? - decimated their ranks.

Today, the only surviving remnant of the original union presence is Egon Weiner's Brotherhood, an identical pair of sculptures positioned at either side of the entrance.  According to Jyoti Srivastava's essential Public Art in Chicago blog, each bronze grouping of Brotherhood depicts four �kneeling figures whose extended arms are interwined  [to] represent unity of people of Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. Each grouping bears a different set of inscriptions  . . .

. . . Brotherhood. Liberty. Tolerance. Equality. Peace and Unity. Justice.  Friendship. Knowledge.

Happy Labor Day

Also Read:

 Worker Spaces, In Fiction and Fact

The Architecture of Chicago's Unionville

Street Smarts: Chicago Street Art, at the Cultural Center only through Sunday - Plus our Photogallery on Art on the Street (and Viaduct)

Okay, so people liked our Monday story about the doomed Phillips House in Sheridan house a lot more than they liked Tuesday's post on pitching 150 North Riverside, so we're taking a break before part 2 to remind you of a great show at the Chicago Cultural Center's 4th floor exhibit hall, Paint Paste Sticker: Chicago Street Art. You have only through Sunday, January 12th to see it.  My apologies.

Painted, wheatpasted or stickered, made for a hard life on the streets or to enliven a domestic setting, the art flowing from the Chicago Street Art community is among the most intense and vibrant in the city today. The exhibit features work from over two dozen artists including Slang, Zore, Ish Muhammad, Hebru Brantley, Uneek, Statik, Brooks Golden, Chris Silva, You Are Beautiful, Oscar Arriola and an overview of projects by Chicago Urban Art Society & Pawn Works and Galerie F.

Jyoti Srivastava has a great post on the exhibition with photos of over a dozen works and curator Nathan Mason.   An article by the Reader's Deanna Isaac's profiles Statik, a/k/a, Rahmaan Barnes, who created his �remix� of Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, seen at the top of this post, entirely in spray paint.

Many of the artworks come from organized - and authorized - projects.   Others came from the more renegade forms of graffiti and tagging. I don't think I want to go back to days in 1980's when a deeply troubled New York City had its subway cars overrun with graffiti, nor am I comfortable with buildings and L stations being tagged by street gangs marking their territory, but you can't help to be impressed by the creativity street artists bring to some of the city's drab and unwelcoming infrastructure.  There's even a bus shelter, by Mario "Zore" Gonzalez. . .

. . . that would be a welcome relief from Bob Stern's joyless, thick-limbed constructions.

It's a great show, and this Saturday, January 11th, there's a closing weekend program, Chicago Street Art Stories:  1:00 p.m. in the Claudia Cassidy Theater on the Cultural Center's on the 2nd floor off the Cultural Center's north stairway. An open mic where you'll be able to hear many of Paint Paste Sticker's artists talk about their art and careers.  �The Exhibition catalog will be available and free for the taking.�

Here's our own gallery of some of Chicago's street art.  Some were temporary, others disappeared behind new buildings, many still endure for your enjoyment.

click images for larger view (recommended)

 

 

  

continue the survey, after the break

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1,600 Years of Sleeping with Strangers: The University Dormitory, from Ancient India to Future University of Chicago - Part One: Nalanda

rendering: Studio/Gang Architects - click images for larger view

 Last Tuesday, the University of Chicago unveiled its North Campus Residence Hall and Dining Commons.  The $148 million project, designed by architect Jeanne Gang of Studio/Gang and scheduled to completed in 2016, addresses the world just beyond the university's campus in a very different way.

We'll get to that design in the third and last part of this series.  To begin, however, we're going to take a look at India's Nalanda, often cited as the world's first university with dormitories.  Thanks go out to my good friend Jyoti Srivastava, who has given me permission to use the photographs you see here, taken earlier this month.  You can see her entire Nalanda photoset here.

� Jyoti Svrivastava - all rights reserved

Dormi - to sleep, torium - a place. From the Latin dormitorium, the word dormitory dates only from the 15th century, centuries after the first great European universities were founded.   More than half a millennium before Oxford, or Cambridge, or the Sorbonne, however; there were the dormitories at Nalanda, in Bihar in Northern India.

??????. In Sanskrit, nalam means lotus, symbol of knowledge.  Da means giver. Beginning in the 5th century A.D., a succession of Gupta emperors began the development at Nalanda, 88 kilometres southeast of Patna, of a series of monasteries that would become a great seat of learning. Much of what became Tibetan Buddhism originated from the teachers and traditions of Nalanda.  The scope of the curriculum was universal- not only Buddhist and Hindu studies, but science, astronomy, medicine medicine, and foreign philosophies.   Subjects were both studied and thrown open to discussion and investigation. Universal/university.

� Jyoti Svrivastava - all rights reserved

Those seeking to study at Nalanda were stopped by the keeper of the gate and quizzed on their knowledge of both the old and new books.   Like Harvard and other elite universities today, only a small number of applicants - as few as 2 out of 10 - gained admittance to Nalanda.  Also as at today's elite schools, Nalanda attracted scholars from far-away lands - Tibet, China, Greece and Persia.  To be able to say you studied at Nalanda opened doors throughout the world.  Nalanda was both an evangelizing force for Buddhism throughout Asia, and a powerful mechanism for intellectual exchange.  The mathematician Ayrabhatta, sometimes credited with originating the concept of zero, is speculated to have been an early leader of Nalanda University.

From its early beginnings - none of the original buildings appear to have survived - Nalanda evolved as a planned community.  The Chinese monk Xuanzang, who spent 17 years in India, wrote a portrait of Nalanda in the 7th century as a complex surrounded by a brick wall, and having eight separate halls, each with a large courtyard surrounded by a continuous veranda fronting small, 10 x 10 cells for the monks, often with a small adjacent niche for storing documents.  Monks slept on stone platform beds.

� Jyoti Svrivastava - all rights reserved

Some of courtyards functioned as lecture halls, with a speaker's platform on the lower level, large enough to let the lecturer spread out manuscripts around him. And occasionally some sandwiches.

Xuanzang wrote of . . .

richly adorned towers and fairy-like turrets . . . dragon-like projections and colored eaves, carved and ornamented pearl-red pillars, richly adorned balustrades and roofs covered with tiles that reflect the light in a thousand shades.

The individual four-story college structures were set within landscaped gardens and mango groves.  Red-flowered shrubs contrasted with the blue lotus flowers floating on pools that ran throughout the complex.  Mynahs, peacocks and other birds could be found on the grounds.

� Jyoti Svrivastava - all rights reserved

Nalanda was a technology center for terra cotta, which was used extensively throughout the complex, along with carved granite columns.  Wood was used to construct the upper stories of the college

image: Wikipedia

structures.  Floors and pavements were laid upon a layer of lime concrete.  The omnipresent well-baked red brick, made with mud and local produce such as rice, barley, or cow dung, has proved to be especially durable.  Broken bricks were mixed with lime to create the stucco used for the ornamental images.  In later years, bronze spires and accents were added to the towers.

By the time Muslim invaders from Turkey overran India in the 12th century, Buddhism was already in the throes of a long decline.  In 1193, an army under Bakhtiyar Khiji, seeking to expunge India of Buddhist influence, sacked and burned Narandal, including the great library, which is thought to have held hundreds of thousands of texts, each wrapped in cloth and carefully placed on metal stacks.  It was said that at the center of the immense library complex the nine-story tower known as the Ratnadadhi - Ocean of Gems, for its richly bejeweled and gilded surfaces that glowed in the glint of the sun - burned for weeks, the smoke from the destroyed manuscripts hovering over nearby hills like a lingering ghost.

� Jyoti Svrivastava - all rights reserved

After some abortive revivals, Nalanda largely disappeared from memory, even its very name, to be replaced by the name Bargaon.  It wasn't until 1860 that archaeologist Alexander Cunningham again identified Bargaon as the site of historic Nalanda.   Meaningful excavation didn't begin until 1915, but by 1982, remains of six major temples and eleven monasteries were revealed.  Work is ongoing.

In 2006, a consortium of nations including India, Singapore, China and Japan announced plans to create a new 450-acre Nalanda International University at Rajgir, 10 kilometres from the historic site.  The new Nalanda was officially established in 2010, with Nobel-Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen as it's first chancellor.  Its seven schools will include religious, historical, scientific and business studies.

In May of this year, Vastu Shilpa Consultants - the firm founded by 85-year old architect Balkrishna Doshi, who worked with Le Corbusier in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad  -won out over seven other finalists, and 79 initial entries, in an architectural competition for the design of the new campus, which is to be modeled after the principles of ancient Nalanda.

The design is intended to be zero-energy and zero-pollution.  Automobiles are to be banned. Mechanical air conditioning is to be replaced with a natural Devap system to cool and dehumidify outside air.  In old Nalanda, brick walls, in many places six-feet-thick (the same as at the base of John Wellborn Root's 1891 Monadnock Building in Chicago) kept heat out of the rooms.  In new Nalanda, double-skin facades will provide similar insulation.  The new library will be housed not in a tower, but under a great dome.  A pond will be dug and the mud from the excavation used for making bricks as part of a program of local sourcing.  Lily pads will, as in ancient Nalanda, float on the pond. Solar cells will be erected above it to provide electricity.  The new campus, scheduled to come on-line in 2014, will initially accommodate  2,500 student and 500 teachers, and eventually expand to 7,000 inhabitants.

Next:   A Century of Dormitories on the University of Chicago campus

Art Alone Endures: A Night at the Fine Arts Building

click images for larger view

Last Friday was the fourth annual A Night at the Fine Arts Building, a holiday event that opens up the ten-story structure to allow visitors to explore both its architecture and its honeycomb of arts-related tenants, from painters, to vocal coaches, piano and violin teachers, architects, digital designers, and more.

The Fine Arts  was originally built in 1885 for the five Studebaker brothers, who transformed a small blacksmith shop in South Bend, Indiana into a maker of cover wagons and, eventually, one of the country's most prominent carriage manufacturers.  The huge windows on the main floor brought light and attention into the elegant showrooms, while the rude work of warehousing and assembly was accomplished in the floors above.

Architect Solon Spencer Beman had assigned the project to his employee Irving K. Pond. In his autobiography, which we wrote about last week,  Pond recalls . . .

The Studebaker warehouse which I designed for Mr. Bemen in 1884-85, while heavy, in a way, as became a warehouse building and a display ground for fine vehicles- this accounting for the great windows- was not Richardsonian in mass or in detail. but had the springy lilt which might be expected from one whose pulse beat in rhythms.  I leaned more to the lighter, airier forms of the Tuscan, then to the heavy stocky forms of the Northern Spanish Romanesque.  The carvings on the Studebaker were an adaptation to granite of the leaf forms and convolutions of the Pullman [building] court stairway, and undoubtedly were the inspiration of much of that type of ornament which was soon to follow.

The rough-boned design was not universally loved.  In an 1891 edition of Harper's Magazine, critic Montgomery Schuyler wrote, �The Studebaker building is one of the show buildings of Chicago, but it cannot be said to deserve this particular praise in so high a degrees as several less celebrated structures.  It partakes--shall we say?--too much of the palatial character of Devonshire Street and Wall Street to be fairly representative of the severity of commercial architecture In Chicago.�

It took not much more than a decade for the Studebakers to outgrow their new space, and in 1896, they commissioned Bemen to design another building for them at 623 South Wabash, across from Adler and Sullivan's Wirt Dexter Building.  The ten-story structure, with it's open glass facade, was later owned by Brunswick, before being acquired by Columbia College in 1983.  The Wirt Dexter was destroyed in a spectacular 2006 fire.

The Studebakers sold their former home on Michigan to the �Corporation of the Fine Arts Building�.  In Pond's account . . .

The Studebaker warehouse was, some years later, to be remodeled, as to its interior, for office, studio and theatre uses, while the exterior was to be robbed of a quality of quaintness and naivete, by the addition of any extra story or two, crowned with a heavy over-hanging corning, in the New Mode, which destroyed an aspirating vertically peculiar to the original design.  This was the first,  and for many years, the only, Chicago building to individualize the bays and unify the composition by sending the piers up through, and capping them above the coping.

Curtiss Hall Ballroom

The new corporation also purchased the land beneath the building - which the Studebaker's had been leasing -  from three separate owners.  Just two of the properties cost $100,000 to acquire.  Music publisher and developer Charles C. Curtiss redesigned the building as  a kind of artists colony.  The skylit studios on the 10th floor became home to many of the city's leading artists, including Lorado Taft, and the painters of the murals that line the stairway.

Woman and Angels, Frederic Clay Bartlett

Nymph with Angel and Bird, Oliver Dennett Grover

 You can find a complete inventory of the murals on Jyoti Srivastava's indispensable Chicago Architecture and Cityscape blog here.

The Fine Arts was also home to literary magazine The Dial and Poetry.  Famed cartoonist John McCutcheon was at one time a tenant.  Frank Lloyd Wright rented studio 1020 in both 1908 and 1911.  Memorist Anna Morgan recalled . . .

In the beginning years of The Fine Arts Building, there was a blending of the social with the artistic life in the studios that was truly delightful.  We were all prosperous, with plenty of work to do, yet somehow there seemed to be time to exchange visits with our co-workers and take an active interest in the work which each was doing . . . It was a show place in the town, a rendezvous where you were sure to see interesting people.  The samovar was in daily service between the hours of four and seven, and for a few years it was almost a continuous party.

And while at the Lambert Tree Studios, the artists the building was created for have long since been replaced by offices and chic retailers, the Fine Arts remains an active artists enclave.  In 2005, developer Robert Berger bought the 200,000-square-foot building for $10 million.  The Studebaker Theater, where I saw Peter O'Toole, Ralph Richardson and Henry Fonda (in separate productions, unfortunately) remains closed, as does the smaller Playhouse . . .

. . . where I was among the small audiences bowled over by Orson Welles' Falstaff many years ago. 

Berger has put money into restoring the building, cleaning up the facade and revealing the subtle pink hues of the stone for perhaps the first time since it was covered in coal dust over a century ago.  And while some of Berger's high-tech visions have remain unrealized, tenants now include digital design and marketing firm Clique, whose offices offer a commanding view of Grant Park.

The Fine Arts is a bit of a shaggy dog of a building, down to the much-loved Artists Cafe on the main floor . . .

For all of Pond's pride, the exterior is interesting rather than elegant.  Berger, however,  has made good on his promise to keep the roster of tenants arts-focused, preserving what the building website claims to be"The Nation's Oldest Artist Colony."  Walking into the warmth of the womb-like, amber-colored lobby . . .

 . . . and swooping up the glass-enclosed shafts in one of the manually-operated elevators . . .

 . . . is to enter a world far removed from the generic commerce and architecture of our Supply Chain Age.  Behind the doors of the long corridors . . .

 . . . tenants struggle, as always, to make their way through the world, but as they spill out into the hallways and mingle with their guests, Anna Morgan's "continuous party" again takes life.