Like the dazzling array of buildings it surveys, the most important thing about “Landmarks of Chicago and New York: A Tale of Two Cities” is simply that it’s there. Four decades ago, as mayors in both cities failed to halt the destruction of architectural treasures, it would have been unthinkable for public officials to mount such an exhibition. Now, in an unmistakable sign of change, the press release for the show bears the name of Richard M. Daley.
There’s a lot to like in this exhibition of 150 black and white photographs, which was organized by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and is on display at the Chicago Cultural Center. You’d have to be stone-hearted not to be captivated by pictures of the Rookery or the Chryslern Building or by a well-written wall text that explains the off-color, architecture-related origins of a familiar phrase.
When the Flatiron Building, designed by Chicago’s D.H. Burnham and Co., went up in 1902 on a triangle-shaped Manhattan site bounded by Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, the Beaux-Arts skyscraper reportedly caused downdrafts that made the skirts of female passersby billow upwards. To clear the sidewalks of gawkers, police would shout “23 Skidoo.”
But good vignettes do not a good exhibition make. There has to be a coherent theme and clear organization. Both are absent here. So even as the exhibition symbolizes a sea change in the way the nation’s two great cities treat the past, it fails to illuminate the interplay between New York and Chicago or to chart a course for the future of landmarks. By all means see and enjoy it; just don’t expect to be especially enlightened.
In both cities, the postwar building boom endangered significant structures and ignited the preservation movement. The defining moment in New York was the 1963 demolition of Pennsylvania Station, the Beaux Arts train station by McKim Mead & White. In Chicago, the near-demolition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in 1957 and the 1960 destruction of Louis Sullivan’s early skyscraper, the Garrick Theater Building, galvanized preservationists.
After these traumatic events, each city established a landmarks commission to protect key buildings. New York’s has designated more than 1,000 individual landmarks and 73 districts, Chicago’s, upwards of 140 buildings and sites, as well as 31 districts. The wall text explains this disparity by citing New York’s greater size and age, glossing over the fact that New York’s landmarks commission has greater power to safeguard buildings than Chicago’s.
Two column capitals from the now-demolished Automat Building at 18-22 E. Van Buren St. frame the introductory text. When it was constructed in 1899, the Automat was a low-cost hotel that the police raided to roust prostitutes. Then, a multicolored, terra cotta facade was added in 1917 to create a Chicago home for New York’s famous Horn & Hardart restaurant. As the text wryly notes, patrons of the Automat searched not for prostitutes behind its doors but sandwiches behind small glass doors.
What makes this material work is the way it directly compares New York and Chicago — and the way it infuses architectural history with human drama. We sense the action and energy of the big cities, the raciness of urban life. These aren’t just inanimate buildings on the walls; they are peopled with characters. And so they tell a story, showing how landmarks convey our collective memory.
If only the rest of the exhibition were so strong. With one singular exception, a short film about the destruction of Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Building in 1972, it isn’t. And that, in all fairness, is due as much to the way this show came about as to the way it has been curated.
The 75 New York photographs (there are an equal number on Chicago) first appeared in a 1998 show that coincided with the publication of a book on New York landmarks by the noted preservationist and author Barbaralee Diamonstein. When she and Chicago’s cultural affairs commissioner, Lois Weisberg, dreamed up a new show on landmarks from both cities late last year, curators here had to scramble to organize the exhibition — and their hands were tied by the material from New York.
The New York photos are 8 inches by 10 inches, so for the sake of coherence the Chicago pictures had to be roughly the same size. Yet in the show’s setting — three spacious, tall-ceilinged rooms in the Chicago Cultural Center — the pictures look teeny, even postage stamp-sized. That’s hardly the right way to evoke the machismo of two urban heavyweights that for years sparred for the title of world’s tallest building.
A further hurdle was the quality of the pictures, which varies widely. Those from New York, taken by young photographers that Diamonstein commissioned for her book, are workmanlike, documentary efforts. They seem prosaic and punchless in comparison with their Chicago counterparts, like Richard Nickel’s stunning view of Adler & Sullivan’s Auditorium Theater interior, which were taken by accomplished photographers for Chicago’s landmarks commission.
Even with these obstacles, the exhibition coordinator, Kenneth C. Burkhart, might have salvaged a decent show. Instead, he gives us a mishmash, arranging the photographs neither chronologically nor, with a few exceptions, by style. Instead, the format seems to move from the best-known buildings to the least known.
The New York photographs occupy one side of the three rooms, with the Chicago pictures opposite them. While there’s an underlying tension to the basic arrangement, one city facing off against the other, the exhibition never exploits that tension. Instead of conversing with one another, as they do in the show’s introduction, the two cities veer off into parallel universes.
Because the text for the New York pictures was written for a show exclusively about New York, it hardly mentions Chicago. Meanwhile, the new text that explains the Chicago pictures makes few references to New York. As a result, numerous chances to explore the aesthetic cross-currents that flowed between the two cities are lost. Did the skeletal, cast-iron facades of lower Manhattan, which date from the 1850s, influence the art and technology of the bare-boned, early skyscrapers that rose in Loop in the 1880s? Yes, but the show doesn’t say so.
Burkhart has ably edited the Chicago pictures, choosing unfamiliar views, such as the skyscraperlike staircase in the courtyard of the Rookery Building. And there are delightful, little-known landmarks out in the neighborhoods, such as the Laramie State Bank Building at 5200 W. Chicago Ave., its terra cotta panels encrusted with decoration portraying coins, beehives, squirrels and other symbols of thrift.
But ultimately, the show falls flat, particularly on the crucial issue of protecting landmarks of the recent past, like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive apartment towers, now 48 years old.
Because the photographs of these buildings are mixed in with those of other landmarks — the Unisphere, the giant stainless steel globe of the New York 1964 World’s Fair is on the same wall as a 1764 church — their collective visual impact is minimal. Thus, so is the case for saving them.
Far more potent is a short film by Wayne Boyer, which documents the demolition of Sullivan’s great Chicago Stock Exchange Building and which appears in the last of the three exhibition rooms.
Its grainy, black and white footage shows Nickel, a preservationist as well as photographer, and the architect John Vinci dismantling the Stock Exchange Trading Room that later would be reassembled in the Art Institute. With the sounds of wrecking machines echoing in the background, they’re heroes on the barricades — Nickel, who would die when part of the interior collapsed, is a tragic hero.
Viscerally powerful, the movie recalls the finely textured human drama with which this show about landmarks began. In between there are some fine moments, but, mostly, the exhibition is a jumble that doesn’t do justice to the timeless treasures of two great cities.
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“Landmarks of Chicago and New York: A Tale of Two Cities” appears through May 30 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.
