They are magnificent anachronisms, jock palaces with drop-dead dining rooms, grand marble staircases and swimming pools fit for a laurel-wreathed Olympic champion. And their allure extends from inside to outside, from private to public. For they are bricks in two of the great walls that define the face that Chicago shows the world, one directly across Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park, the other more than a mile to the northeast on Lake Shore Drive. Both face an uncertain future.
One, the Lake Shore Athletic Club at 850 N. Lake Shore Drive, the perfect Beaux-Arts foil for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s exquisitely skeletal 860-880 Lake Shore Drive residential towers, would be demolished for an 18-story condo high-rise whose design is supposedly not yet cooked. The other, the Chicago Athletic Association at 12 S. Michigan Ave., would be transformed into an Omni hotel, its richly layered Venetian Gothic facade and extraordinary front rooms restored to their original splendor, but its back hacked off for a 19-story tower that could blight views from Millennium Park.
Both proposals are now moving through the City Hall review process. And both demand the highest level of scrutiny as Chicago girds for the latest of its periodic battles over whether (and how) to make the past a part of the future.
The timing of this “tale of two athletic clubs” is fascinating, not only because Chicago is forging ahead with its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, but also because there’s a new force to contend with downtown — Brendan Reilly , the freshly sworn-in 42nd Ward alderman. Reilly ousted veteran Ald. Burton Natarus with a pledge to promote “balanced, responsible growth.” Now we’re going to see what that campaign slogan means.
Whatever the outcome, an era is clearly passing. The private athletic clubs were the legacy of a late 19th and early 20th Century movement that celebrated the betterment of the body and merged physical culture with social aspiration. The clubs “created these buildings that were quite elaborate and quite elegant — not necessarily the sweaty gyms you might think,” says Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s cultural historian. “They often had the means to build impressive buildings. In some cases, it was one club trying to outshine the other through their architecture.”
In the past, as is the case today, dwindling membership and a desire to cash in on prime real estate have separated the clubs from their architectural showcases.
Confronting the legacy, some developers and architects found creative ways to recycle the old buildings and preserve their visual bounty.
In 1989, for example, the Chicago firm of Harry Weese & Associates sensitively transformed the old Medinah Athletic Club at 505 N. Michigan Ave., into the Hotel Inter-Continental Chicago, saving its astonishing amalgam of Egyptian, Spanish, and other styles.
The Weese firm restored the exterior of the 42-story Jazz Age skyscraper, with its exotic bas-relief sculptures, and gave new luster to the club’s polychromatic interior, which feels like an old movie palace. The public remains free to roam inside and take in the splendor of the lobby, corridors and other grand spaces.With that high standard of historic restoration and improved access in mind, it is hard to muster very much enthusiasm for the plan by developers Fifield Realty Corp. and Chicago architect Lucien Lagrange to tear down the 80-year-old Lake Shore Athletic Club, which was designed by Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt, whose other works include Kansas City’s Beaux-Arts Union Station and the neo-Gothic office building at 30 N. Michigan Ave.
Good, but not great
Used since the late 1970s as a graduate school dormitory by Northwestern University, and vacant since 2005, the 19-story club is a good building, not a great one, its muscular limestone base relieved by scalloped, fan-shaped arches, its top a severe cliff of brick. But what it lacks in architectural refinement it makes up in solid urban design, turning the corner with sharply cleaved wall planes and deep recesses that give it the feel of a stripped-down castle.
In 1951, a scant 24 years after it was built, the club provided Mies with just the right backdrop for his revolutionary 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive towers — a mass of masonry that came right down to the ground versus their skeletal, steel-and-glass construction, raised on stilts.
Inside is the kind of quality they don’t build anymore — a lobby sheathed in marble, plus a swimming pool adorned by colorful murals of golfers, runners, high jumpers and other athletes in the heat of competition.
The Fifield-Lagrange plan would wipe out all that for a luxury condo building, 217 feet high with up to 100 units. There would be a green roof to keep Mayor Richard M. Daley happy, yet the public would have no access to it. And what will the building look like? A Beaux-Arts number right out of the history books, if you peruse the developer’s application to the Chicago Plan Commission. But Fifield Senior Vice President Alan Schachtman downplays those drawings, saying they are merely place-holders and that Lagrange will work up something more sophisticated.
Perhaps he will, but until we see the goods, it is impossible to tell whether the plans mean we are trading up or trading down in design quality.
I’m not convinced that the Lake Shore Athletic Club has the stuff to qualify as an official Chicago landmark, as the preservationists who demonstrated last Sunday claim, but it clearly brings real value to the cityscape. With the city’s 90-day delay period on Fifield’s application for a demolition permit set to expire in mid-July, the key is to deliberately explore how to reuse this building, not to hastily slap a landmark plaque on it. And that is what public officials, including city landmarks chief Brian Goeken and new alderman Reilly included, seem to be doing.Besides holding community meetings, Reilly said in an interview, “I’m also investigating other possible options for the site in the event that we determine this [plan] is not the best use for the property.” He’s also looking at the 1999 planned-development agreement that governs the site and whether it limits options for reuse.
All of which means he’s hedging, but these are at least thoughtful hedges.
As the Lake Shore Athletic Club case comes to a boil, things are simmering at the Chicago Athletic Association, where the members are engaged in a messy fight over who could share the proceeds of a sale of the club’s two linked properties.
The first of them, the original 11-story Venetian Gothic building at 12 S. Michigan Ave., is the right match for the frivolity of the Crown Fountain at Millennium Park. Designed by Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb, it put on a show for the crowds visiting the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, not just by evoking the picturesque Doge’s Palace in Venice but also by flaunting stylized carvings that spoke to its identity as a cathedral of sweat — lacrosse sticks, balls, rackets and other athletic equipment.
Thirteen years later, Chicago architects Schmidt, Garden & Martin designed a handsome annex at 71 E. Madison St., which grew to 18 stories in 1926 and remains a rare Chicago example of the iconoclastic Vienna “Secessionist” style of the early 20th Century.
Historically protected
The buildings, which form an interconnected “L,” are safeguarded because they belong to the city’s Historic Michigan Boulevard landmark district, which covers the clifflike wall of skyscrapers that faces Grant Park between Randolph Street on the north and 11th Street on the south. But except for individually designated landmarks within the district, that protection extends only to facades. And that is where things get tricky.
Designed for Songy Partners of Atlanta, whose development partner is Snider-Cannata Interests of Cleveland, the proposal from Chicago architects VOA is not a “facade-ectomy,” one of those save-the-skin-and-destroy-everything-else exercises in architectural taxidermy that make a mockery of preservation. But neither does the plan save the entire building.
It calls, instead, for restoring the front 64 feet, which would preserve several major interior features. The most notable are the 2nd-floor “Cathedral Lounge,” with its richly layered Venetian Gothic decoration, and the equally stunning 8th-floor main dining room, which once sported plaster ceiling decoration shaped like stalactites. As part of the deal, these features would be granted full landmark protection. They also would be open to the public.
But the remaining 100 feet of the building would disappear, to be replaced by a 19-story tower whose floors would align with the 18-story building on Madison and provide an extra floor to get the developers the 300-plus hotel rooms they say they need. The interior of the Madison building, meanwhile, would be rebuilt to modern hotel standards. The architects also promise to reconstruct the club’s opulent pool, which sits in the targeted part of the building.
The appeal of a hotel at this showcase site is undeniable, but the proposal nonetheless represents a Faustian bargain: Even with two major setbacks from Michigan Avenue, the tower could stick above the original Venetian Gothic building like a ridiculous periscope. The city’s landmarks staff needs to press the developers for additional drawings that will reveal precisely what thousands of visitors to Millennium Park are going to see when they look westward — a disruptive eyesore or a quiet insertion.
More broadly, the plan could set a terrible precedent, encouraging more developers to save only the front sections of buildings in the Historic Michigan Boulevard District and erect condominium or hotel towers behind them. Millennium Park’s soaring popularity makes that prospect a real possibility. The now-coherent district could easily become a visual patchwork.
On both Michigan Avenue and North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago has to run the design equivalent of an Olympic marathon before it satisfactorily resolves the future of its two endangered athletic clubs.
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bkamin@tribune.com
See more photos online at www.chicagotri bune.com/walls.
