Archaeologists are at work in Chicago’s Gold Coast, the city’s ritziest neighborhood for the past 120 years, digging for buried relics that might describe everyday life 100 years ago inside the area’s magisterial mansions, row houses and town houses.
They have been finding just what they wanted to see: lots of old trash, the stuff that the lords and ladies of the Gold Coast were tossing out back then. It is a mix of broken dishes and crockery, metal pots and kettles, junked medicine jars and bottles. But it is high-class trash — often gilded in gold, such as shards of fine, hand-painted China and decorative vases from Europe and Asia’s most exclusive makers.
It has been coming out the ground right next to one of the city’s most enigmatic private residences, the Charnley-Persky House, built in 1892 at 1365 N. Astor St. Architecturally it is one of the world’s most famous houses because of the architectural geniuses who designed it, Louis Sullivan and his then-chief assistant, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Wright called the striking three-story, 4,500-square-foot, four-bedroom, six-bathroom home — one of the earliest to be fully wired for electricity — “the first modern house in America.” Eventually he claimed that he designed the home almost entirely by himself, with little input from his mentor Sullivan, setting off an argument that continues to this day about who should get credit for the revolutionary design.
“It’s such an interesting story,” said Pauline Saliga. She is executive director of the Society of Architectural Historians, an international organization that has been headquartered in the home since 1995.
“About 10 years ago we got some money to do some work on waterfproofing the basement of the house, which had some seepage. As workmen dug a trench along the foundation on the rear (east) side of the house, they found a 19th century trash pit with broken teapots, ink bottles, all kinds of china from France, Germany, England and Asia, things that would be in very fine households.”
Some of the china dated to the 1850s, but most of the debris appears to date to the 1890s. Saliga said it’s unlikely the cultured family that moved into the house in 1893 would have buried trash next to the house.
“We had all these questions,” she said, “of whose trash it was, how it got there and what did the artifacts tell us about 19th century life on the Gold Coast?”
This summer she invited two University of Chicago Ph.D. archaeology candidates, Rebecca Graff and Mary Leighton, to bring in teams to dig again along the foundation.
Graff and Leighton are adjunct professors who run DePaul University’s Urban Archeology Summer Field School. In past years they have used teams of student archaeologists to extract artifacts from the sites of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the Pullman community.
Urban archaeology has been around for about 50 years in the U.S., Graff said, but is much more common on the East Coast, where some cities even have municipal archaeologists. The idea is just beginning to take root in Chicago.
“Studying cities and how they came together and function is very important,” she said.
Late in June she and Leighton brought in 21 undergraduate students. For five weeks they opened three excavation holes next to the house, each 2 by 1.5 meters (6.7 by 4.9 feet), and recovered hundreds of artifacts to a depth of about four feet. A team of more highly trained volunteers over the last week helped complete the excavations for the season.
The earliest theory of the trash was that the house was built on the private household dump of one of the most celebrated couples in Chicago history, hotelier Potter Palmer and his art-collecting wife, Bertha.
The house’s lot sits at the rear of an oversize city block that once was the grounds of the Palmers’ “castle,” a gargantuan turreted mansion built in 1883 at Lake Shore Drive and Banks Street. Until it was torn down in 1951, it was the city’s most fabulous house.
The Palmer mansion was built in an empty wasteland of marshes and sand dunes that stretched from the lake inland north of Oak Street. Nobody saw value in the land until Palmer, a canny speculator, began buying up large tracts of it and built his sprawling home on it.
Palmer inveigled Chicago’s richest citizens to build near him, creating a “Gold Coast” neighborhood that concentrated the city’s most prominent families.
One of the first to buy was James Charnley, a young entrepreneur who had grown wealthy buying and selling lumber and steel. In 1890, he paid Palmer $27,500 for a parcel at the rear of the castle grounds, 125 feet fronting on Schiller Street and 83.5 feet fronting on Astor Street.
Charnley quickly sold 80 percent of his lot for $27,000, leaving him the 83.5-foot frontage on Astor and 25 feet on Schiller. He asked his close friend, Louis Sullivan, by then one of the world’s most sought-after architects, to design a townhouse that filled the property to the lot lines.
Charnley, his wife, Helen, and their 18-year-old son, Douglas, moved in in 1893. Little is known about them, and Saliga hopes the excavations might shed more light on their lives.
“It is a very rich site in comparison to any other site I have seen; it is so dense with artifacts,” Leighton said.
Though the archaeologists have not had a chance to analyze the artifacts, Graff said that because some bottles bear dates after 1893, she is fairly certain they are not digging in Potter Palmer’s trash, but something later, perhaps left as landfill.
Besides luxury china, they found metal pots, beverage bottles and glass and ceramic food, medicine and cosmetic containers.
There are perfume bottles, bottles of Listerine (when it was a floor cleaner and not a mouthwash), and early Vaseline jars, including one still partially filled and greasy. There are old buttons and bone-handled, boar-bristle toothbrushes and even jars of “Salicylated tooth paste.”
Graff, who is doing a doctoral dissertation on the Charnley-Persky House excavations, said she hopes to return next year to dig up areas not touched by this year’s team.
The Charnleys moved to South Carolina in 1902, eventually selling the house, which subsequently went through a series of owners. In 1995, Chicago philanthropist Seymour Persky offered to buy it for the architectural historian society if it would move its headquarters from Philadelphia to Chicago. It accepted.
When it was built, the house immediately became famous among architects as a revolutionary departure from the excessively decorative Victorian designs then most popular. It later became regarded as an important precursor to architectural modernism.
Wright claimed that Sullivan was distracted by other, much bigger projects and left Wright to do all the design work on it. Many historians now credit the house as one of Wright’s early masterpieces, but others, such as Chicago’s cultural historian, Tim Samuelson, disagree.
“I suppose the simple answer is that they both designed it,” said Samuelson. “Louis Sullivan and James Charnley were dear friends, and when Charnley asked Sullivan to design a new home for him, there is no way Sullivan would hand the job over to an assistant.
“He would have come up with the overall design and attended all the meetings and weighed in on all the decisions, though it is obvious he also left a lot of detail work for Wright to do. In the house interior, especially, you see a lot of elements and flourishes that seem identifiably as Wright’s.”
