A large, metal panel the color of molasses sits on a ledge — alongside pieces of the Wrigley Building and Navy Pier discarded during restorations — in a hallway leading to the office of Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s cultural historian.
It was once light tan, once part of the ceiling at the 708 Club on 47th Street, where Muddy Waters served up his brand of the blues in the ’50s. Decades of cigarette smoke have added a dark, syrupy layer.
“I wouldn’t wash that piece for anything,” says Samuelson, who rescued it several years ago while showing the club to a German journalist. “I liked the idea that this was part of this club and this environment and that it once vibrated to the sounds of the early electrified blues.”
That piece embodies — if a sheet of metal can possess such powers — Samuelson’s passion for preserving Chicago’s architectural and cultural history, its glamor and its grit. A Louis Sullivan-designed baluster, removed after a 1968 fire, from Carson Pirie Scott & Co. A chunk of Frank Lloyd Wright’s long-gone Francis Apartments on 43rd Street. Eliot Ness’ handcuffs. A back-flush toilet. Veg-O-Matics and Pocket Fishermans.
He is Chicago’s super-saver. Been at it since grade school.
Chess Records, the legendary recording studio at 2120 S. Michigan Ave. still stands, thanks to Samuelson. So do nine buildings that make up the city’s Bronzeville District.
“There’s not a major street corner in Chicago where he couldn’t tell you not only what buildings used to be there, but who the architects were, who financed them, what their wives did, what businesses used to operate, who was killed there, how much a beer would’ve cost,” says cartoonist Chris Ware, who’s collaborating with Samuelson on an opening-in-December Louis Sullivan exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center.
“He is,” as Ware puts it, “the living hippocampus of the city of Chicago.”
No need to look it up: It’s not a critter at the Lincoln Park Zoo but part of the brain tied to emotion and memory.
Samuelson’s office is on the second floor of 72 E. Randolph St., a 1975 structure with an angled street-level facade. The “L” rattles in the background.
That is where you’ll find Samuelson when he’s not organizing exhibits, serving as a resource for TV or documentaries, giving tours (he’s the guy who took the 2016 U.S. Olympic site selection folks on a bus tour), providing historical context for other city departments such as Zoning or doing any of the other multitude of things a cultural historian is called on to do.
A player piano owned by the city dominates a nook outside his office. Master rolls found by Samuelson and created in the early ’20s by jazz pianists (Jelly Roll Morton included) to make extra money, sit atop the piano. “I give concerts with it,” he says. “As you play — as the keys go down — it’s their fingers.”
Paper diagrams for the coming Sullivan show hang on the walls. A nearby room holds plaster trim from the Garrick Theatre, a damaged gold leaf capital from the Auditorium Theatre and an iron structure, part of a bridge that once connected the old Carson’s to the “L.”
“Sometimes you wind up taking things out of wrecking sites because they need to be preserved. And in many cases, they are works of art in themselves,” he says. “In some other cases, I save them for documentation of, say, a lost technology in the building arts.”
A shared interest in the “intangibles” of old buildings (particularly 19th Century architecture), as well as ragtime and old newspaper comic strips, is what connected Samuelson and Ware when they met through friends in the mid-’90s. Eventually, the duo teamed with National Public Radio’s “This American Life” host-executive producer Ira Glass for “Lost Buildings,” a 2004 WBEZ-produced show that married Ware’s art with Samuelson’s passion for Sullivan. Samuelson is the story’s “Tim.”
The affection Samuelson and Ware share for Sullivan drives their efforts on the Cultural Center exhibit. They just need to figure out how to get a piece of the cornice of the Chicago Stock Exchange in there — “tantamount to deliberately beaching a whale,” says Ware — and to rebuild the altar arch from the burned Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv Synagogue, now known as Pilgrim Baptist Church.
Samuelson has had a love affair with Chicago for 58 years. His other great love: artist Barbara Koenen. The two met over stained glass. She was working on a project that needed his approval.
He says: “We fell in love instantly.”
She says: “He did. … He had to court me for a couple years.”
They married in 2000. The two squeeze both their passions into their Hyde Park home, two condominiums (one above the other) in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s first building in Chicago.
A rich blue canvas with yellow dots (called “Blue Sky” by Koenen) hangs on one wall of the dining room; a trio of artist Charles Turzak’s black-and-white woodcuts depicting Chicago scenes hangs on another. The living room, its 15th-floor windows facing Lake Michigan and Promontory Point, holds works by contemporary artists Carolyn Ottmers and Adelheid Mers, Teco pottery, pieces from long-gone buildings by Sullivan and Wright, and Ness’ handcuffs.
“I curate through eBay,” says Samuelson with a laugh, explaining how he found the handcuffs (engraved with the initials E.N.). He initially dismissed the claim with a “yeah, right.” But his interest was piqued. He traced the cuffs’ provenance from the eBay seller to the previous owner who was from Coudersport, Pa., Ness’ last home, then checked with a Ness biographer.
He defers to Koenen on how these bits and pieces of Chicago are arrayed in their home. “Barbara has a good sense of contemporary things and what goes well together. So it lends an expertise and a counterpoint, which I would never be able to do. And the one thing I have never wanted to do was live in a museum.”
“Ha! This is kind of a museum,” she says, laughing.
“Really, there are some wonderful, wonderful things, and it’s a joy to live with them,” Koenen says. “It’s really nice to mix them up and move them around.”
Take a Sullivan stencil that hung on the wall above a glossy, black credenza — until it fell. “The frame came apart,” Samuelson says. “I took it to a framer, and the next thing I know there [in the empty space on the wall] was one of Barbara’s pieces.”
“I said, ‘Hmm, there’s a nail there. … I’ll put one of my things up,'” says Koenen, 49, who’s director of the Chicago Artists Resource of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs.
Up went three framed pieces, components of Koenen’s much larger work “Buddha at the Hot Dog Stand”: one a grid of poppy seeds, another of lavender seeds and a third of bottle caps collected during an excursion with her husband to the former site of Little Nikos Pizza/BBQ/Ribs/Gyros/Shrimp.
Samuelson says he thinks their home in the 1949 Mies building is “probably the most original unit,” citing light fixtures to cabinets to the bathroom plumbing by industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss.
“The curious thing is that it’s a back-flusher,” he says, heading to the bathroom. “You have to lean back,” he says, positioning himself on the commode, then leaning back as the toilet delivered a strong whoosh.
In the kitchen, a Veg-O-Matic and Whip-O-Matic — two of Samuelson’s many appliances that prompted his 2002 book, “But Wait! There’s More! The Irresistible Appeal and Spiel of Ronco and Popeil” — await dinner prep.
“If we have Thanksgiving dinner and we have pumpkin pie, no guests are sitting there waiting for whipped cream,” he says, holding the Whip-O-Matic aloft. “Not with this little puppy.”
The first preservation battle for this kid from Rogers Park? Cast brass doorknobs with the seal of the Chicago Board of Education. He was a student at the George B. Armstrong School, a 1912 building on West Estes. Not long after the 1958 fire at Our Lady of the Angels School, a carpenter removed the doorknobs.
“I got really upset, so I printed a letter to the principal,” he remembers. He was called to the principal’s office, who explained the reason for their removal (the fire), then presented Tim with a set of doorknobs. And, yes, he still has them.
After school, he worked in used-book stores and antique shops, as well as with the renowned photographer Richard Nickel. “I was still a teenager, and he would take me down to Sullivan buildings doing salvage,” he says. An English degree from Roosevelt University and a fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design were followed by work on architect John Vinci’s restoration projects.
Samuelson became a historian and restoration adviser with the Commission on Chicago Landmarks before moving to the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum) as curator of architecture. In 2002, he became Chicago’s first cultural historian. He celebrates the city’s history with what his boss, Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Lois Weisberg, says is “a wonderful sense of humor.”
Samuelson’s passion for preservation is wide-ranging. “When I was [at Landmarks], a lot of the emphasis was on buildings of architectural significance,” he says. “But I was also very interested in the ones that were not architecturally significant but had great historical or cultural significance.”
Building such as Chess Records, a two-story terra-cotta-faced building where legends Chuck Berry, Koko Taylor, Buddy Guy and many others made music.
And buildings such as Victory Monument and Unity Hall, two of nine buildings erected on the South Side by social organizations and black entrepreneurs in the early 20th Century. It was Samuelson’s personal interest in this area that fueled his research, prompting him to write a historical report and make a recommendation to the commission that helped create a historical designation now called the Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District.
His big regret? The Jordan Building at State and 36th Streets that was built by ragtime composer Joe Jordan, one of Chicago’s black pioneering real estate developers. It was supposed to be part of the Black Metropolis. “I’d board it up with hammer and nails and make little signs about the history of the building,” he says. “I saved all the buildings, and the only one that ended up collapsing was the Jordan Building.”
Samuelson’s interests may favor the past and Koenen’s the present, but it is her studio — perfumed with spices that are her current medium and located one floor below their condominium — that she says “accommodates the messy side of our passions.” It is where she works and Samuelson goes to clean paint off discarded pieces of buildings he brings home. “There isn’t one piece that I couldn’t say who I got it from or where I got it from,” he says.
“Something that’s been around a long time, it not only has a story if you research it, but I think it has a connection or a vibe,” Samuelson says. “I don’t believe in mystical things like that, but I think … they [older pieces] have a connection to the past that’s more than the written history.”
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jhevrdejs@tribune.com
