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Observations and Images on Architecture, Culture and More, in Chicago and the World. See it all here.
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Happy 150th Birthday Louis Sullivan - We've Burned Down Your Third Building This Year! |
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-by Lynn Becker
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A true child of my time, checking my email is the second thing I do after rising each morning and today, after sleeping late, was no exception. The usual assortment of spam and substance - weight loss, stock tips, another comment on a story I did on Adler and Sullivan's endangered George M. Harvey House in Lakeview, but, no, not a comment. As I began to read the message, sent via a Blackberry from a distaught Harvey House neighbor, my heart caught in my throat:
That's right. Less than two weeks after a massive fire consumed Adler & Sullivan's landmark 1887 Wirt Dexter building in the South Loop, the house the firm completed a year later for George Harvey, in what was then the Chicago suburb of Lakeview, has been gutted by a midnight blaze, its tall brick chimney sent crashing into the building next door. I had written about the house back in July. The owner had told the local alderman she was going to apply for a demolition permit, and a later story by Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin revealed she had also commissioned drawings for a new condo development on the site. In that same story, owner Natalie Frank stated she had now decided to work to restore the house. Victory was declared, and we all congratulated ourselves on our fine efforts and went back to our lives. Except, what did we really have? Nothing. Non-binding assurances. The Harvey House was not even an official Chicago landmark. It was on the massive "Orange" laundry list of 9,600 might-be, could-be potential landmarks. An effort to include the The cause of this morning's fire is undetermined. The Chicago Tribune story quotes Fire Department spokesman Kevin MacGregor as saying there were no injuries, and no one was in the house at the time of the blaze. The house has not been occupied by its owner for some time. According to a report on WBBM radio today, there were reports of a loud argument just outside the home not long before the blaze began, and that police "believe the fire was suspicious." By all accounts, Harvey House owner Natalie Frank is a very nice lady. As I'm sure is Lorraine Philps, the owner of the Wirt Dexter who never was able to scrap This is Chicago. "Nice" doesn't cut it. Not in a city whose attitude to the destruction of its architectural treasures is often a lazy indifference. This is a city where a Tribune report made it appear that the anger of Richard M. Daley over the Wirt Dexter's loss was confined to the nearly $1 million it cost to put out the fire. This is the city where alderman Burton Natarus, whose 42nd Ward covers much of the city center, will tell anyone in the range of his voice that If a landmark building already has an owner commited to keeping it in good shape - Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott, Marshall Field's or the Palmer House - the city can slap a plaque on it, police renovations, and the building endures. If a landmark is troubled or neglected, however - Wirt Dexter, or the Uptown Theater - the city doesn't seem to have a clue. The plaque stands; the building is left to rot - the only visible activity is the city's bureaucrats calling press conferences to proclaim how it's all somebody else's problem. Nowhere is the city's chronic neglect more poignantly documented than in a splendid, just-published book, Richard Nickel's Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City, by Michael Williams and Nickel "The city Richard Nickel photographed is mostly gone," says Cahan in the book's introduction. Now Wirt Dexter and the Harvey House have also, needlessly, crossed the river to join that haunted lost city. Cahan ends with in an injunction that he draws from the testimony of Nickel's poignant images. Today, returning from the embers, disgusted and sick at heart, I can't quite bring myself to believe it. But again tomorrow, I know I must. Value art. Value life. The opportunity is here.
Join a discussion on this story. © Copyright 2006 Lynn Becker All rights reserved.
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