The handsomely refurbished Bloomingdale’s home furnishings store in the old Medinah Temple revives the visual pleasures of a downtown Chicago treasure that is delightfully exotic, from the copper-clad onion domes atop its Moorish palazzo facade to the Arabic letters that garnish its exterior like vanilla icing on a chocolate cake.
The store at 600 N. Wabash Ave., which opens to the public Thursday, is a splendid survivor amid the brute residential towers that are transforming the River North area into a concrete forest. So beguiling is its freshly tuckpointed exterior that it almost looks like a Disneyesque exercise in make-believe, surreally out of place amid the blockbusters.
Yet it easily beats what a Chicago developer was proposing for the property five years ago — demolishing the temple to make way for a 400-room luxury hotel and a 40-story residential condominium tower. Mayor Richard M. Daley stopped that plan even as he let a thousand condo dandelions bloom around the Medinah. Today, the temple and the neighboring Tree Studios, an artists’ enclave just to its west, are official Chicago landmarks.
The interior of the new Bloomingdale’s is a skillful, high-quality yet ultimately imperfect marriage of Chicago history and New York modernity, centered around a corkscrewing atrium likely to remind visitors of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.
Credit for this adventurous exercise in architectural recycling goes to Chicago architect Dan Coffey, whose credits include the restoration of the Chicago Theatre, and New York architect James Harb, whose portfolio includes the Ralph Lauren restaurant at 115 E. Chicago Ave. The developer was Albert Friedman of Friedman Properties, who is directing the still-to-be-completed renovation of Tree Studios.
The project is the latest in a series of designs that strive to give new life to old buildings without obliterating their original character. In Chicago, the approach has exquisitely transformed the former Reliance Building, a century-old office tower at 32 N. State St., into the Hotel Burnham. But it has also led to such compromises as the demolition and rebuilding of the Art Deco McGraw-Hill Building at 520 N. Michigan Ave., which saved only the skin of that office building as it was turned into stores and a hotel.
The Medinah renovation occupies the brighter side of this spectrum — not up to the standards of quality and historic integrity set by the Reliance, but far better than the exercise in architectural taxidermy at the McGraw-Hill.
More gut rehab than fine-grained redo, the Medinah project largely succeeds at enhancing the historic identity of the 90-year-old building, once home to Shriners’ conventions, circuses and concerts, while meeting the needs of a New York-based retailer whose name is synonymous with trendiness.
That is an outcome to be celebrated, especially when one considers that developer Steven Fifield in 1998 had a contract with the Shriners fraternal group to buy the block on which the temple and Tree Studios sit.
Daley stopped the plan and eventually turned to Friedman, who has smartly renovated several historic buildings in River North. Friedman, in turn, proposed to Bloomingdale’s parent company, Federated Department Stores, that the temple be turned into a home furnishings store. It was an unlikely gambit, considering the retailer’s reputation as a bastion of Manhattan chic, but Federated went for it, perhaps because all the new condo towers give the store a built-in market of new homeowners just blocks away.
In connection with the opening, Bloomingdale’s has closed the two floors of home furnishings at its store in the 900 N. Michigan Ave. mall, where it intends to expand its fashion department.
The most important thing about the new store is the most obvious: This Bloomingdale’s is a building, not a store trapped in the back of a vertical mall, like the one at 900 N. Michigan. Because it is a building, the store is obliged to play a part in the life of the street, and it does this capably, with big display windows that grab the eyes of passersby.
But the new windows, which extend the original frames downward and therefore closer to the level of the sidewalk, are only grace notes in the operatic design of the temple. The highly eclectic building, whose influences stretch from Moorish architecture to the eccentric, multi-colored brownstone buildings of the 19th Century Philadelphia architect Frank Furness, was done by the firm of Huel & Schmid in 1913.
Eyesore transformed
Before the renovation began, the building’s exterior was dirt-ball ugly, covered in soot and conspicuously unloved. When the green onion domes were stripped from the roof in 1995, the Medinah looked like Fred Astaire without a top hat.
Now, because of Coffey’s fine work, it is a revelation.
Check out the blue, red and gold glazed terra cotta that frames the main entrance with bold interlocking ornament. Against a backdrop of brown-gold brick, it pops out wonderfully, as do those Arabic letters and the copper-clad onion domes, which form the renovation’s crowning touch. (The domes are expected to turn brown, not green, as the previous domes had done. Thanks to air pollution, patinas aren’t what they used to be.)
In addition to these showstoppers, there are good subtle strokes, like the lighting that accentuates the swelling curve of the Medinah’s exterior, the black banners and exterior signs that tastefully announce the store, and the new, glass-roofed sidewalk canopy that recalls the temple’s past as a performing arts venue.
The lone exterior misstep comes in a gold-colored mortar that lends an unnecessary vertical accent to an exterior whose details were also influenced by the continuous horizontal lines of Wright’s Prairie School.
Still, this quirky, colorful building now stands as a blessed antidote to the bland hulks rising around it. Even if there is no great invention in Coffey’s rehab, the building seems remarkably fresh. If nothing else, it should help the retailer to draw customers two blocks west from North Michigan Avenue’s main shopping drag.
For its part, the store’s interior store is full of invention, with Harb making the risky decision to relate to the temple’s historic architecture by contrast rather than copying. Imagine a chic rehab of a Near West Side loft apartment and you have some idea of what has transpired.
Some give-and-take
The theater’s balconies and sloping floors are gone, as are its organ pipes. Among the features still present: the main arch, the theater’s dome and two ornate columns that helped support the roof. Within this historic context, Harb has inserted a four-level interior — essentially, a building within a building. It is as sleekly modern as the original temple was gaudily traditional.
The centerpiece, located near the back of the store, is an ellipse-shaped atrium, whose slanting walls coil outward as they rise. Rising within the atrium is an elevator with an exposed structural frame, a homage to Chicago’s tradition of structurally expressive architecture. Crisscrossing escalators are deftly tucked behind the big open space.
Initially, the store’s first floor seems little different from its counterparts in suburban malls. Another quibble: The atrium could have been bigger, revealing more of the dome above. But a tour reveals that Harb and his clients have shown considerable sensitivity to the original Medinah.
Around the perimeter of the upper floors, openings keep the floor structure from bumping awkwardly into the temple’s restored stained-glass windows. Plates and other merchandise are arranged to open see-through views of the windows and even echo their symmetry. Aisles are based on the old building’s curving geometry.
Keeping Medinah alive
The interior is at once daring and respectful, free for the most part of superficial stylistic gestures to the former theater and energized by an edgy contrast between old and new. There is just enough of the old Medinah to keep its memory alive while the store carries out its chief mission — driving customers to the merchandise.
The lone literal gesture to the old theater comes in the void of the proscenium arch, now covered by a silvery synthetic curtain and lit by theatrical footlights. One wonders if there was a more creative approach.
A more fundamental weakness comes in the colors chosen for the historic portions of the interior: a neutral palette of white, off-white, silver and celery green. The colors are designed to accentuate the temple’s architectural ornament while keeping the decoration from overwhelming the interior. Yet they tame the multicolored oomph that makes the exterior such a knockout, softening rather than sharpening the contrast between old and new.
Too bad, but as they say in the preservation community, the colors are “reversible” — they can be changed someday because the historic features remain intact. For now, there’s a victory to celebrate: The Medinah Temple is saved, and, amid the glum new high-rises of River North, a small patch of the cityscape is the better — and the brighter — for it.
