Chicago, the city of big shoulders, has laid some of its most beautiful treasures in the least expected places.
Among them are the bas-reliefs that embellish many of the city’s bridges. Carved in art deco style, they depict various aspects and events in the story of Chicago with the economy and grandeur once employed to recount the legends of ancient Greece on urns and vases. The reliefs often have no titles. They tell their stories in allegories.
In a panel on the Ogden Avenue Bridge, for instance, Progress, portrayed as a goddess, celebrates the city as a crossroads for transcontinental travel as represented by a train, ships and, floating overhead, a dirigible. Another panel, another goddess this one bathed in sunbeams, shifting into gear the master control of Chicago’s industry.
Chicago is renowned for its public sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Henry Moore and others. Students of architecture about the historic Louis Sullivan facade of the Carson Pirie Scott Building on State Street, and the many commemorative statues in our parks are familiar landmarks even to out-of-town visitors.
But few pay heed to-or are even aware of-the sculptural works that grace many of our bridges. Worse yet, some of these sculptures, hardly noticed and underappreciated, are slowly wearing away in Chicago’s changeable weather.
The Ogden Avenue Bridge, which headed southwest across the North Branch of the Chicago River near Halsted Street, closed last year and is scheduled for demolition this spring. Fortunately, city officials are considering plans to save its art deco panels and reinstalling them elsewhere.
These were the panels that first caught the eye of free-lance photographer Ron Schramm three years ago while he was crossing the bridge during a walking tour sponsored by Friends of the Chicago River. He was so struck by their beauty that he set out to document those panels and other bridge sculpture across the city as well, though there is no inventory of the city’s bridges with ornamentation.
“I knew-and I’m very visually oriented-I had never seen anything like this recorded,” Schramm says.
A Vietnam veteran and graduate of Columbia College in Chicago, Schramm is an unabashed fan of the town where he grew up. He is known for the inventive perspectives he brings to his color photographs of the city that appear regularly on the cover of Where, a magazine for tourists. But in photographing the bridge sculptures, he works mainly in black and white, waiting for just the right time of day when sunlight and shadow throw every detail into clear view.
“Photographing is an act of preservation,” Schramm says. “It’s a way to tell people about something that is worth saving. And these reliefs are a chapter in Chicago history.”
Schramm’s mission of art preservation became a mini-odyssey that has sent him crisscrossing the city from one bridge to another, from the well-known Michigan Avenue Bridge to the less-familiar Damen Avenue Bridge near the Stevenson Expressway, with its memorial to Father Jacques Marquette. So far he has found and photographed five of these sculpture-embellished bridges.
The bas-reliefs on the Ogden Avenue Bridge are more than 60 years old and show subtle signs of wear from the weather. These panels date back to 1932 when the bridge-really two separate spans connected with a viaduct-was completed as the final link in a 12-mile thoroughfare diagonally connecting the Southwest Side and Lincoln Park.
That thoroughfare, Ogden Avenue, followed a path to the northeast and branched off from an old trail that led eastward to Ft. Dearborn. Built in 1803, the fort stood close to where the Chicago River flowed into Lake Michigan, and that, of course, is the site of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, with its own distinctive sculptures.
Completed in 1928, the Michigan Avenue Bridge is the oldest span that Schramm has documented. Among its bas-reliefs are depictions of the Ft. Dearborn Massacre of 1812 and the rebuilding of the city after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
In the Ft. Dearborn scene, Capt. William Wells, a scout who as a youth had been captured and then raised by a native tribe, is shown heroically battling to protect the settlers of early Chicago.
This relief, which slightly predates the heyday of art deco, carries on the immensely popular traditions of the late-19th Century French beaux-arts in sculpture. It portrays the scene with a classical flourish by including the Angel of Death hovering overhead. The artist was American sculptor Henry Hering.
At the Damen Avenue Bridge, the memorial to Father Marquette, cast in metal in 1930, offers a pastoral vision of early encounters between European and Native American cultures. In this case, it’s of the French priest coming as an explorer and missionary to Native Americans, including tribes of the Chicago area. He died among them in 1675.
Nothing is known about the artist of the Marquette sculpture except his name-E.P. Seidel-and even the names of many other public works artists have been lost.
Part of Schramm’s mission is to identify these artists. Working with preservationist Robert Sideman, he has tracked down the original blueprint for one carving for the Ogden Avenue Bridge at the city’s Department of Transportation. The blueprint was signed by Scipio del Campo, the city’s architect at the time, but the document doesn’t indicate whether Del Campo himself designed or executed the reliefs.
Schramm and Sideman have tried to follow Del Campo’s trail to the Indiana limestone company where the reliefs might have been cut. There they sought out elderly stonecutters who might have worked on the carvings, but so far all their inquiries have been fruitless, Schramm says.
A search of newspaper articles about the building and opening of the bridges has not been helpful either. Typical was the coverage of the opening of the Ogden Avenue Bridge. There were accounts of the ribbon-cutting ceremony, but not one story dealt with the art on the bridge.
Perhaps it was because such embellishments were then too common to receive special attention in a city that was home to innovative architecture. They were the same kind of ornamentation that was part of various public works projects in the 1920s and early 1930s, Sideman says. Only with the rise of Modernism in the late 1930s did the practice of embellishment that produced the bridge sculptures and similar forms of public art come to an end.
“Modernism called for simplified, severe, glass-and-steel buildings-no ornament of any kind,” Sideman explains. “The Depression was a factor, too. It lasted a long time, and its lingering effects combined with the new severity of style and resulted in architecture that drained a lot of character out of buildings. It has taken us 50 years for decorative ornament to come back in style.”
