They are gems of the prairie, a brilliant series of buildings the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan tucked in hidden corners of the Midwest at the bitter end of his enormously influential career.
The buildings — mostly banks but also a department store and a church — remain stunning works of architecture, small in scale yet monumental in presence. In the iconic black-and-white photographs of Richard Nickel, who recorded them in the 1950s, they seem fixed and frozen in time. Yet as I learned during a roundabout tour of four of them in Iowa, they continue to evolve. Indeed, in order to survive, some have been forced to reinvent themselves by the very free-enterprise system that produced them.
As Memorial Day weekend approaches, the time is right to see this quartet as well as the fifth Sullivan building in Iowa, a former land and loan office in Algona, which a brutal early spring snowstorm forced me to skip. And the year is right, too. For 2006 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sullivan, who his chief draftsman Frank Lloyd Wright called “lieber meister,” beloved master.
At the height of his powers, Sullivan was a colossus of American architecture, joining with his partner, Dankmar Adler, to shape skyscrapers, exposition buildings and innovative, multipurpose structures such as Chicago’s Auditorium Building. But he did much more. He shaped a profession’s ideas. And with them, he helped give birth to modern architecture.
Yet after Sullivan broke with Adler in 1895 and the winds of architectural fashion blew in favor of the Beaux-Arts classicism he despised, the uncompromising visionary found himself desperate for commissions. Imagine Helmut Jahn, today’s architectural top gun in Chicago, reaching into the small towns and cities of Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin for jobs, and you have some idea of Sullivan’s humbling circumstances before he died penniless in 1924.
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Sources: “Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture,” Hugh Morrison; “Louis Sullivan His Life and Work,” Robert Twombly ; news reports.
1. John D. Van Allen & Son Store
Driving west from Chicago on Interstate Highway 88, passing through a quintessentially Midwestern landscape — vast stretches of rich farmland dotted by grain elevators and farm buildings — it is easy to envision Sullivan heading west on a train from Chicago to Clinton, a Mississippi River city only 143 miles from the Loop.
Amid the jumble of Victorian buildings in Clinton’s struggling but still-intact business district, Sullivan’s John D. Van Allen & Son Store stands out immediately, a sand-toned cube with three large pieces of terra cotta pinned to its front like brooches. Besides leavening the building’s squat horizontality, the vertical mullions create the illusion of symmetry when, inexplicably, the easternmost windows of the principal facade are wider than those on the west.
Completed in 1915, this is a small-town version of Sullivan’s renowned, steel-framed Carson Pirie Scott & Co. store in Chicago, finished 12 years earlier. Indeed, the ground-floor interior, where the white columns are capped with Sullivan’s distinctive, nature-inspired ornament, feels like a miniature version of the State Street store. But the parallels are broader, especially considering the crisis the building faced after the last department store to occupy it closed its doors in 1986.
Had the building been demolished, says Clinton City Councilman Michael Kearney, much of downtown Clinton might have been transformed into parking lots. Instead, because of the heroic efforts of preservationist Crombie Taylor, the former head of the Institute of Design in Chicago, the building reopened in 1991 as a Sullivan museum and community center.
After that effort failed, the city of Clinton sold the Van Allen store to a non-profit affordable housing developer, Spencer-based Community Housing Initiatives. By 2003, its architect, Dale McKinney of Sioux City, had effectively transformed the building’s upper floors into high-ceilinged, sun-washed apartments, some with views of casino boats and barges along the Mississippi. “I live in what used to be ladies ready-to-wear dresses,” jokes Kearney, a resident of the building. A pharmacy occupies the ground floor.
Just as Carsons has provided an anchor for State Street amid the flight of other retailers to the suburbs, the Van Allen building has helped the center hold in Clinton against fierce competition from a Wal-Mart and other chains on the edge of town. Due to the Van Allen building’s successful transformation, other old buildings in downtown Clinton are being converted into apartments, and the area finally has some upward momentum. The town has been good to the building; now the building is being good to the town.
2. Merchants’ National Bank
Another tale of architectural recycling has unfolded in Grinnell, about 150 miles west of Clinton, this one at Sullivan’s Merchants’ National Bank. The building, which holds down a prominent corner in the prosperous downtown, is affectionately known as “The Jewel Box.”
An extraordinary burst of terra cotta ornament, with layers of circles, diamonds and squares, relieves its severe brick block. The decoration surrounds a circular stained-glass window that soars above the main entrance like a Gothic rose window. Appropriately for a bank, the composition recalls a strongbox, a sturdy chest for preserving money or jewels.
Local lore has it that Sullivan bought a pad of yellow paper from a drugstore on Broad Street, walked across the street and sketched the bank, which was completed in 1914. For years, even as the bank changed hands, its use remained the same.
Then, in the late 1990s, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank decided it wanted to operate solely out of a 1970s addition to the bank, whose arched facade weakly echoes another Sullivan masterpiece, the National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna, Minn. In 1999, it leased the bank to the Grinnell Area Chamber of Commerce for a below-market rate. The shift, while an act of corporate generosity, has turned out to be a mixed blessing.
Today, with the chamber’s cubicles occupying the spaces where tellers once doled out cash to merchants and farmers, the bank’s two-story, skylit interior seems strangely quiet — more a museum than a real working building.
Still, the interior, highlighted by a row of 10 stained-glass windows and their peacock-blue accents, retains its churchlike power. Tourists flock there by the hundreds, lured by two billboards the city of Grinnell has put up along Interstate Highway 80 to advertise the bank’s presence. It’s all part of the trend toward cultural tourism, in which cities use spectacular buildings, both new and old, to put themselves on the map.
But like the Van Allen store, the Grinnell bank offers a refined brand of spectacle. It at once accepts the surroundings of its Midwestern Main Street and enobles them. In this era of shrieking, look-at-me buildings by star architects and wannabes, Sullivan’s buildings teach this enduring lesson: Architecture should be a conversation, not a shouting match.
3. Peoples Savings Bank
My last stop is Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s second largest city after Des Moines and home to two Sullivan buildings, the Peoples Savings Bank and St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church. The bank, which rises across the Cedar River from the downtown core and was completed in 1911, is easily the better of the two–a radical break, like the Grinnell bank, from the model of the bank as a classical temple.
Above its low mass of ground-hugging tapestry brick rises a small tower, set back from the property line, marked by stained-glass windows and piers decorated with griffinlike figures of red terra cotta. The proportions are exquisite. The bank simultaneously communicates citadellike strength and houselike approachability.
The interior is equally impressive after a painstaking 1991 restoration by Chicago architect Wilbert Hasbrouck and bankrolled by Norwest Bank, then the building’s owner. It now is a Wells Fargo Bank.
The restoration stripped away insensitive additions, such as a dropped ceiling in the soaring bank hall that was deviously set below Sullivan’s art glass windows. Now, a visitor can again view the light-filled, two-story interior, which includes regionalist murals and a Sullivan geometric pattern — an oval with four legs extending outward from it — that the bank tellers have nicknamed the “road kill frog.”
In this age of cookie-cutter branch banks and faceless Internet banking, it is a delight to see customers streaming through this custom-designed building, meeting the tellers face to face and giving Sullivan’s grand interior some of the bustle that’s missing from the Merchants’ National Bank building in Grinnell.
4. St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church
The church, about a mile from the bank, is not entirely Sullivan’s, but it is still worth a visit. In the wake of the January fire at Adler and Sullivan’s Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago, it provides a revealing glimpse of what another Sullivan-designed church means to a once-prosperous neighborhood that’s now part of the inner-city.
Completed in 1914 and now known as St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, the church marked a major shift from conventional, steeple-topped designs with its semicircular, brick-faced sanctuary; a squarish tower; and an attached rectangular block with church offices and other facilities. Sullivan envisioned it as “a modern church for a seven-day program,” including a Sunday School and a gym.
Trouble was, Sullivan’s design cost far more than the church felt it could afford, and he resigned as architect rather than slash key aspects of the design. The church nevertheless held onto Sullivan’s plans and hired Chicago church architect W.C. Jones to redraw them. Sullivan’s longtime draftsman, George Elmslie, rescued the project, serving as a consultant and ensuring that its plan and overall outlines remained Sullivan’s.
Outside, the result is solidly handsome, if not quite up to Sullivan’s lyrical standards. Inside, the sanctuary is stirring though it is marred by a mishmash of classical and Prairie Style details. The tiered curvilinear seating area, which breaks from the custom of having a central aisle, creates a space that is at once grand and intimate.
To come here is to sense the majesty of Pilgrim Baptist’s destroyed interior. But it is also to see a church that has adapted to meet the needs of the area around it. Originally built on “country property,” the church is now surrounded by tattered wood-frame homes that have been carved up into apartments. Most of its members live in more prosperous parts of Cedar Rapids or in its suburbs.
In response, as member Susan Thompson told me during a tour, the church provides services, including meals for children and a telephone, set on a table outside the church office, which local residents can use to make local calls without charge. In a way he surely never anticipated, Sullivan’s seven-day-a-week church now ministers to the poor seven days a week.
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In 1956, marking the 100th anniversary of Sullivan’s birth, the Art Institute of Chicago mounted an exhibition “Louis Sullivan and the Architecture of Free Enterprise.” Given the shadow of the Cold War and the all-encompassing conflict between capitalism and communism, the title was not surprising. Sullivan’s buildings — office buildings, shops, hotels, theaters and the like — were celebrated as exemplars of free enterprise.
“He was among the early architects who saw in such tasks a challenge to their art as worthy as [yet notably different from] that offered by the needs of church, government or education,” the curator of the show, Edgar Kaufmann Jr. wrote.
Five decades later, in the post-Cold War era, the architectural legacies of the free enterprise system appear more complex. We have witnessed the destruction of Sullivan masterworks such as the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, which came down in 1972 (photographer Nickel died the same year when a portion of the building collapsed on him as he recorded its demolition). Some of Sullivan’s Iowa buildings had to reinvent themselves to ensure they did not meet the same fate. Today, we know, the same free enterprise system that builds landmarks also can destroy them.
But Sullivan’s artistry — and, most of all his principles, which called for a building to grow from a single impulse or idea — live on, undiminished. “What the people are within, the buildings express without,” he wrote. Even as the people and the uses have changed, his gems of the prairie continue to sparkle.
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bkamin@tribune.com
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If you go: Tour information
The four Iowa buildings by architect Louis Sullivan are open to the public, though, in some cases, visitors must call in advance to view the interiors. Here is information about each building:
– John D. Van Allen & Son Store, 200 5th Avenue South, Clinton, Iowa. To arrange a tour, call Clinton City Councilman Michael Kearney, a resident of the building, at 563-242-0414.
– Merchants’ National Bank (now home to the Grinnell Area Chamber of Commerce), 833 Fourth Ave., Grinnell, Iowa, open Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. Call 641-236-6555.
– The Peoples Savings Bank (now a Wells Fargo Bank), 101 Third Avenue Southwest, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call 319-364-0191.
– St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal Church (now St. Paul’s United Methodist Church), 1340 Third Avenue Southeast, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Tours are available by appointment only. Call 319-363-2058.
For those who want a more intensive look at Sullivan’s architecture, the Chicago-based Society of Architectural Historians is offering a two-part study tour led by the architectural historian H. Allen Brooks.
Part one, which costs $195 per person and is scheduled for June 18-19, covers Sullivan’s architecture in Chicago.
Part two, a bus tour scheduled for June 19-25, will venture to all five Sullivan buildings in Iowa, including the former land and loan office building in Algona. The tour also will take in Sullivan banks in Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as other Prairie School masterpieces. The cost is $1,495 per person, including double-occupancy.
The registration deadline is June 1. Call the society at 312-573-1365 for more information.
— Blair Kamin
