On a sunny but brisk late-September morning, Alice Sinkevitch and Laurie McGovern Petersen are walking around in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, eagerly pointing out-doesn’t everyone?-the architectural sights.
“My husband says I’m a source of unending, boring trivia,” Petersen says with a grin. “I’ll get going at parties, and he’ll have to nudge me. I mean, eyes glaze over. The thing is, when you start looking at these buildings, everything on the street pops out as an example of something.”
“One of our colleagues on the book called it `The Syndrome,’ ” says Sinkevitch. “Once you started working on this project, every building started to look interesting. You tried to find out when they were built, and why they were built.”
The book-Sinkevitch and Petersen are the editor and associate editor, respectively-is “AIA Guide to Chicago” (Harcourt Brace, 1993), a reader-friendly package of walking-and-driving tours of the various neighborhoods (along with the central city), from Pullman/Roseland and Beverly/Morgan Park to Garfield Park/Austin and Edgewater/Rogers Park.
At the moment, Sinkevitch has stopped across the street from the Urania Foundation structure (1908) on Diversey Parkway. “Architecture buffs have had their eye on this for a long time, but no one knew much about it,” she is saying. “It’s of interest because it has such a beautiful facade, including Art Nouveau, which is real unusual for Chicago. It turned out to be designed by Frommann & Jensen, one of those firms that pop up everywhere when you least expect it, like (Woody Allen’s) Zelig.”
A few minutes later, Petersen is standing in front of the handsome Commodore Apartments (1897) on Surf Street. “Edmund R. Krause was a Chicago School architect who did some really nice, very modern buildings with a crisp look to them. Even the way the bricks above the windows are laid vertically gives a nice emphasis to the tops of the windows but without introducing a different material.” Across the street is the Surf Hotel (1925), which, to a layman, may look like kiss-it-off Early Miami Beach but which is known for its monochrome terra-cotta facade. Says Petersen: “It’s also incredibly narrow-a bowling alley.”
Later, there is a grouping of 1891 rowhouses on Pine Grove Avenue. “One of the things I love about architecture in Chicago is our proximity to different materials because of the waterways and the rail lines,” says Sinkevitch. “It had never occurred to me that these porch railings are really huge pieces of limestone, a high-quality material that give us a sense of solidity and richness to buildings really built as middle-class housing. In fact, I’ve suggested we have an historic stoop district.”
The notion of still another book about Chicago architecture may seem like the consummate conversation-killer, but the two are quick to talk about how their work is different. They do have a point. It is doubtful that published counterparts have items about not only the John Hancock and the Rookery but railroad bridges, a grain elevator, a motel, two Schlitz Brewing-commissioned saloons and an Amoco gas station. (To be precise, the Archway Amoco at Clark and LaSalle, 1971, George W. Terp Jr., supervising architect. Page 171: “Standard Oil used the prominent location to make a bold corporate statement with a space-age gas station, while placating developer Arthur Rubloff, who did not want unattractive views from his planned high rise across the street.”)
“The other books focus on the Loop and some of the lakefront communities,” says Sinkevitch, executive director of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), who worked with Petersen when both were in the marketing department at the architectural firm of Holabird & Root.
“Although a lot has been known by individual researchers and scholars about places like Rogers Park, Austin, Pilsen and Garfield Park, that information hadn’t been put into an anthology until now. We also tried to tell something about the building materials or some detail that doesn’t hit you in the face, and avoid the obvious that doesn’t tell you anything. You know: `Notice the handsome lines of this building.’ “
Available at book stores, the guide was compiled under the auspices of the AIA Chicago, the Chicago Architecture Foundation and the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois. Between them, Sinkvitch and Petersen wrote about 90 percent of the items-the rest were by volunteers, many of them docents for the Foundation-and others wrote longer essays about particular entries. Research was directed by captains in charge of each chapter.
The guide covers the city, along with one suburb, Oak Park, and not just because Sinkevitch lives there. (Petersen, after all, lives in Winnetka; would you really want an architectural guide to Winnetka?) “Originally, it was to be a guide to only Chicago, but my editor at Harcourt Brace insisted on Oak Park because so many people have heard of Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Sinkevitch.
According to the introduction, “the criteria for selecting buildings, landscape and park features, bridges, public art and cemetery monuments included not only quality of their design but also the degree to which they either exemplified a style, trend or functional type or stood out as unusual. Other important factors included visibility, historical significance and the `what the heck is that’ curiosity factor.” (One noticable “heck” example: the Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop.)
“We didn’t just do buildings,” says Sinkevitch. “It’s really the whole environment. There’s more about parks in this book than others of its kind, because there was a tremendeous change in the philosophy of open space and how it should be used. The progressive reform-era parks around 1900 were smaller and probably programmed for a social purpose for the neighborhood rather than just being lovely to look at. Bridgeport and Pilsen had the heaviest concentration. A lot even had public bath houses, and there were also libraries in the fieldhouses like the one in Sherman Park in Canaryville/Back of the Yards.”
As is also noted in the introduction, “no pretense is made of objectivity.” The entry for the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library brings up “concrete brutalism,” adding, “Fortunately, two of the seven floors are underground.” The writer commenting on the Illinois Center concludes, “The urbanistic amenities are nil; the project lacks even a meaningful relationship to the river.” The State of Illinois Center gets a mixed review. The massive atrium is “a resounding success”; the building’s colors “look tawdry and ill chosen.” Readers are advised to check out the high-rise at 345 W. Fullerton but to “beware of the fierce spikes of the needlessly hostile fence!”
“There’s a wonderful block on South Claremont on the Near West Side that has Queen Anne brick cottages, and right near them are the Campbell Flats on West Bowler Street,” says Petersen. “There are long rows of these brick and Italiate rowhouses, and they don’t even seem like they’re in Chicago. I felt I’d wandered into 19th Century London.”
“I find things interesting like the entry for Erickson Jewelers (on North Clark Street, which has a modernized Main Street storefront,” says Sinkevitz. “In the mid-1930s there was this national movement to clean up and improve retail stores that were old and dowdy. The Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company sponsored a competition in `Architectural Record’ to promote the use of their brand of pigmented sstructural glass, Vitrolite. It’s a shiny material you see in black a lot and you see it on these storefronts all over the country. Erickson’s is one of the few that is still well preserved. It also happens to be a block away from the Trumbull School designed by Dwight Perkins and on the route to something else, so we could include it.”
The book warns, rather delicately, “Neighborhoods that are off the usual traveler’s itinerary do not always treat every tourist well.” (“That’s a standard entry in most guide books,” says Sinkevitch. “It doesn’t break down into a racial thing either. If you’re one color, you might not get the best reception in a certain area.”) Buildings that are “prominent but dull” are not included. For openers, she cites the Apparel Center. (“I mean, do you really need for us to tell you it’s not a very good building?”) In addition, few buildings of historic rather than architectural interest are included. “Walt Disney’s home is an example. But the place in Ravenswood where Carl Sandburg lived made it because it’s right across the street from two other things.” Sinkevitch laughs. “And we had to work in his poem somewhere.”
“If something is not located within a critical mass of interesting buildings, it would have to be really spectacular to be included,” says Petersen.
