Just because the world-renowned Auditorium Theater Building is architecturally famous doesn`t mean people don`t rummage around in its basement.
Just like any grandmother`s musty old house, the building has held treasures over the years for those such as Harry Price and Charles Simmons who, curiosity having gotten the better of them, delved into the depths of the Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler behemoth.
The stained-glass panels and light fixtures that have been found on these forays have helped Roosevelt University restorers recapture the grand design of the structure that is now the school`s home at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway.
It has also led Price, Roosevelt`s assistant director of development, and Simmons, the associate dean of students, into the role of de facto experts on the historic building and the efforts to rehabilitate it.
It has been 35 years since the board of trustees of Roosevelt University set out its high-spirited policy for the restoration. Calling it a public obligation, the trustees said they would ”to the best of our ability and resources . . . preserve the basic structure and architectural and decorative features . . . of one of the great artistic, architectural and engineering achievements of the 19th Century.”
In that vein the not-for-profit institution has quietly and painstakingly restored bits and pieces of the building`s original grandeur since moving in during 1947. Although some public money has been funneled to the school, the bulk of the renovation work has been carried out through private fundraising efforts and without the benefit of the tax breaks developers have enjoyed in rehabbing historic properties.
”We knew we were occupying an architectural treasure,” said University President Rolf Weil, an assistant economics professor when the university moved in in 1947. ”But our primary interest was in finding an appropriate home for the university.
”There are those who would see the building be a museum and never be used and on the other hand there are those who say we should be concerned with the functional aspects of a school only. The university has walked a tightrope in between and probably will forever.”
The most noteworthy of the work, completed in 1967, was the $3 million reclamation of the theater itself, which in its artistically worst days was converted into a bowling alley for servicemen who used the building when it was a World War II induction center.
Nonetheless, other rooms in the building have not been foresaken even if their renovation has not been accorded the fanfare of the theater. Several smaller rooms, with as much or more architectural significance as the theater, have taken a beating over the years and are only now re-emerging as gems.
”It`s been basically a long, not very exciting process, of going through layer after layer–20 or more in some cases–of paint,” Simmons said.
In the lobby, the Italian tile floor was paved over with asphalt. The stained-glass windows in the banquet hall were painted black, and the carved mahogany pillars in the dining room were painted or chopped down.
”It wasn`t always easy to tell what was there,” Simmons said. ”For instance, there was plywood covering the staircase that led to the private apartments on the third floor, and there had been some water leaking through on the 10th floor, causing icicles that eventually crashed all the way down.
”When we removed the first plywood panel, we didn`t find anything above the staircase. There was nothing back there to lead you to believe there was anything there. But what was there–and we have now copied it–was a stained- glass panel skykight. It seems an icicle had broken the one panel we had chosen to look at first.”
Over the years, the building`s tenants contributed to the headaches.
”When the university first took over the building, it still rented out some of the first-floor space,” Price said. ”There was an art gallery in one corner, and they had installed a small elevator at some point. It was boarded up and left for years until the lobby restoration began. Then, when the elevator was opened, there in the middle was an overstuffed chair and sitting on it a Tiffany lamp.”
Old black-and-white photographs formed the basis for much of the restoration of the building. The photos didn`t always show the detail of stenciling and obviously don`t show the color of patterns, but architectural researchers can use them to get a general sense of how the rooms originally looked, Simmons said.
In addition, the flowing newspaper accounts of the gala opening of the theater, attended by President Benjamin Harrison, and a later reference book describing the structure in the flowering prose of the day have provided clues to architects seeking authenticity.
Their own curiosity about the building led Price and Simmons to conduct tours for architecture students who come from around the world to view the last remaining example of Adler and Sullivan`s work, which has been acclaimed as one of the finest examples of the emerging Chicago School of architecture. The building they know stretches from the uppermost balcony of the Auditorium Theater, where patrons look down on a a stage six stories and half a block away, to the subasement, where Adler`s hydraulic systems still raise and lower sections of the stage.
”One of the most amazing things is the way Sullivan coordinated the designs–in the iron work, on the floors, in the glass and in the carvings,” Price said. ”It wasn`t just a whole bunch of designs thrown together, and yet the patterns are almost never repeated.”
In the former banquet hall, such a late addition to the plans that Adler and Sullivan had to place it on the roof of the theater, the tops of the 17 columns of Michigan birch that line the room each bare unique carvings. Even the pattern inlays in the wall panels that surround the ventilation ducts are different from one another.
The restoration of that room, now the Rudolph Ganz Recital Hall, was the precursor to the theater itself. Mrs. John Spachner, who later headed the private foundation created by the university to renovate the theater, began private fundraising efforts in 1957 to renovate the hall, which had served as an officers` lounge during World War II.
Even with the $150,000 she raised and the $450,000 the university spent in 1980 on roof and ventilation repairs, it would still require replacement of the light fixtures, stenciling on the beams and arches and stripping of paint on the ceiling scroll work to return the room to its original splendor.
The other major public area where the university has undertaken renovation is the school`s library, once the main dining room of the hotel. Only the south end of the room, with its rich mahogany panels and intricate ceiling stenciling, has been restored. That work, which represents only about one-fifth of the area of the room, cost $186,000 when it was done five years ago.
”If only two examples of Sullivan`s work existed–Ganz Hall and the library–he`d still be known as a great architect and master of interior space,” Simmons said.
To reclaim that greatness, Roosevelt has spent $14.5 million on the Auditorium Theater Building, nearly $10.5 million of it outside the theater itself. Of that amount, Weil said, ”it would be fair to say almost all came from private sources.”
”It would be nice if Congress would do something that would assist the not-for-profit operations,” Weil said of the tax breaks afforded for-profit renovators of historic properties. ”It has become increasingly difficult to get funds for restoration work, and we make it a part of every fundraising campaign we engage in.”
Perhaps as important as the restoration work the university has done is the fact that the school bought the building at all. At least twice prior to 1946 demolition bids were solicited for the stucture, but the cost exceeded the land value and so the bankrupt building was never torn down.
”The building has proven imminently suitable for use as a school,” Weil said. ”Much of the work that has been done was more in the form of preservation–a new roof, window replacement–than of restoration. It`s not true that a landmark is protected just by its designation; if the funds are not available to maintain it it will go downhill very fast.”
Officially declared a National Historic Landmark in 1975, the Auditorium Theater Building has been hailed for both its architectural and engineering significance almost since the gargantuan project began in January of 1887. Opened in 1889, the building cost $3.2 million, six times the normal cost per square foot in that day.
The structure, with 63,300 square feet of floor space (the theater rises six stories in the interior of the plan), weighs 220 million pounds and reaches 270 feet in the air at the top of the 17-story tower that was built to house the tremendous hydraulic system. At the time, the building was the tallest in Chicago.
In a sense, the Auditorium Theater Building was also Chicago`s first mixed-use development. Ferdinand Peck, a prominent Chicago businessman who wanted to create an opera house and theater for the city, realized his artistic dream would provide little financial support for the ambitious development he had in mind.
So when he commissioned Adler and Sullivan to design the building, Peck asked them to combine the theater with a hotel and dining room that theater customers would patronize and office space that would provide rental income to keep the project in the black.
The tower contained 136 offices and additional offices and shops were added along the Wabash Avenue side of the building. The hotel`s 400 rooms were built around the theater to help insulate it from street noises. Permanent apartments were created on the third through seventh floors along Michigan Avenue, giving the building commercial, residential and office clients, the three categories that would later characterize such landmark mixed-use developments as Marina City and Water Tower Place.
The hotel rooms and offices now serve as classrooms. The university administration is housed in offices added into what was an inner eight-story courtyard, whose ventilation function was made obsolete by the advent of air conditioning.
”The classrooms and other nonpublic spaces were remodeled basically to bring them up to (the city building) code,” Price said. ”The university had to quickly convert those so it could get in business.”
The first historic renovation the university accomplished in 1953 was in its Sullivan Room, once the ladies` parlor for theatergoers. (The former men`s smoking area is now the faculty lounge.)
The old hotel lobby is still a lobby, serving as a reception area for the university. It was restored in 1973.
