You could say businessman Aaron Montgomery Ward liked a room with a view. He built the original Montgomery Ward company headquarters in 1899 on Michigan Avenue, affording himself a spectacular vista of Lake Michigan.
Nearly a decade later, he moved company operations west to overlook the roiling Chicago River.
Now both sites are being restored to their former glory, which would no doubt bring some joy to Ward, even as his main legacy, the department store chain, has filed for bankruptcy after a century of operations.
The company’s original headquarters at 6 N. Michigan Ave., designed by Richard E. Schmidt, is undergoing a massive overhaul that will convert the 21-story office building into a total of 104 residential condominiums. Global Real Estate Investors will restore the building’s 1899 exterior, as well as that of a 1923 addition, designed by Holabird & Roche, that wrapped the original edifice.
The true glory of the Michigan Avenue structures was effaced more than half a century ago, so that most Chicagoans under the age of 60 have no recollection of it.
The restoration work has made a difference. “It’s nice to see the building cleaned up; it was a building slumbering under layers of dirt,” says Tim Samuelson, architecture curator at the Chicago Historical Society. “It’s different than the way I’m used to seeing it.”
But prepare for more. “The terra cotta is going to resemble what was done in 1923,” says Bassam Haj Yousif, principal with Global. There’s even talk, he says, of restoring the famed statue of a woman that doubled as a weathervane and once crowned the building.
First a little background. Ward established headquarters on Michigan Avenue because the street was then lined with factories and other related businesses. The 21-story building, then considered the city’s tallest, was catalog central, the place where orders were shipped out all over the nation.
But the building was no ordinary warehouse. Ward had his executive office at the top (it has been said one of the reasons that Ward fought to establish Grant Park was that he didn’t want any buildings to obscure his view. But that’s another story.) This building had an observation deck, accessible only to out-of-town visitors, who had to show proof that they weren’t Chicago natives. While on the observation deck, they could buy postcards depicting Chicago’s tallest structure and send them to the folks back home.
“A lot of [the postcards] had the same writing,” Samuelson says. “They were for the farmer who couldn’t write very well. Montgomery Ward would write little poems on the postcards about the height of the building.”
But not every one liked the Chicago-style warehouse, which was constructed with an Italian Renaissance accent. Legendary architect Louis Sullivan ripped it in a kindergarten ditty he composed, essentially calling the building vulgar.
“It seems an ill-compounded salad, with a rather rancid New-Yorky flavor,” Sullivan wrote in a 1901 article published in “Interstate Architect and Builder.” “I can’t see the connection between a building and salad. But I can see the connection between a salad and a building, for I know how buildings are made — as a rule. . . . Your salad is too peppery and too sour. You might omit the Tabasco, use a milder vinegar, and add oil it seems to me. It would improve the flavor quite a little, to my thinking.”
Sullivan didn’t have good things to say about the scantily clad statue/ weathervane either. “Would she not look more modern in some kind of suit?” he asked in his article. “More `Chicagoey,’ so to say.”
But the statue wasn’t supposed to be dressed for the Windy City’s weather. “Many assume that it was a statue of Diana; it is not,” Samuelson says. It isn’t exactly clear who the copper statue represented — some said it was Temperance lightening the load of labor — but this much is known: the figure, crafted by sculptor J. Massey Rhine, held a torch in one hand and a caduceus (the medical profession emblem) in the other.
Sullivan may not have liked the statue, but others did. The gleaming weathervane was so bedazzling that in 1911 it bewitched an airplane pilot participating in an aeronautical exhibit. The pilot’s plane brushed the weathervane, setting it spinning. Thankfully, neither statue nor observation deck was seriously damaged.
So beloved were the weathervane and deck that when the two were scrapped in 1947, people requested pieces of the statue, “including one confidential request for the breast,” Samuelson says.
The city has asked Global to draft a budget for restoring the 394-foot observation deck and the 22.5-foot weathervane. “It was such a prominent part of the city skyline,” says Jim Peters, the city Planning Department’s deputy commissioner in charge of the landmarks division.
But Haj Yousif seems doubtful. “It would be a huge undertaking trying to reconstruct it,” he says. “In this day and age, it would be quite expensive and given that the building is on Michigan Avenue, it could be a logistical nightmare.”
Ward moved company operations to Chicago Avenue in 1908 as Michigan Avenue became more of a high-class operation and less appropriate for shipping. The visionary catalog magnate decided to build a model plant at Chicago Avenue, on the east bank of the Chicago River, an area largely undeveloped at the time. He wanted to consolidate operations so that railroad trains could pull in and out of the building with goods. Boats could pull alongside for the same purpose.
“He wanted to be able to store goods in an orderly fashion, pull [them out of] bins, and send them down a chute in one central location,” Samuelson says.
There was also room for expansion at the Chicago Avenue location, lots of it, which Ward’s would need in the years to come.
At the same time, Ward wanted a building that his customers could trust. “Ward depended on the public to send their hard-earned money to Chicago,” Samuelson says. “He wanted them to be comfortable, and know they wouldn’t get cheated, that they would get quality goods.”
Toward that end, Ward hired a firm founded by Schmidt, the architect who designed the original Wards building. The firm, Schmidt, Garden & Martin, already had a solid reputation, having designed the Chapin and Gore building, the Schoenhofen Powerhouse brewery and more than 300 hospitals nationwide, including Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital.
But the firm’s legacy would be the new edifice, which is now known as the Catalog Building. Not only is the 2.2 million-square-foot building one of the largest ever constructed using reinforced concrete, it also represents one of the most creative uses of that material. “It has a strong geometry with horizontal windows that kind of straddle the Chicago School of Architecture and Prairie School,” Samuelson says. “It’s a highly original building.”
That strong geometry is most evident in the ribbons of red brick that score the building, hidden under layers of paint until now. Main architect Hugh M. Garden is responsible for the brickwork as well as the scrollwork, most evident on the building’s south entrance. The curlicue scrollwork, often affectionately called Gardenesque, pays homage to Louis Sullivan’s style.
Since the original building was constructed in 1908, there have been three additions. An Art Deco-style administration building was constructed across Chicago Avenue in 1929 by an in-house Montgomery Ward architect. A Spirit of Progress statue weathervane, a close cousin to one that once crowned the Michigan Avenue building, tops the administration building, which is being converted into residential lofts.
Mostly vacant in recent years, the Catalog Building, a designated landmark, is also under development. It will house a combination of retail, residential and telecommunications tenants. The bulk of the building will be used for telecommunications. Many of the qualities that Ward considered cutting edge, such as the reinforced concrete, in 1908 are still considered state of the art. “This building is a great structure that we are able to bring into the 21st Century with multiple uses,” says developer John McLinden. “It is cutting edge again nearly 100 years later.”
