All Soul's Church, 1887

The first building that Frank Lloyd Wright worked on in Chicago was All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church (named for the Unitarian belief that all souls would grow into harmony with the divine), in what was still considered Kenwood at the time--at 39th Street and Cottage Grove. He had started out as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin when he decided that it would be faster to arrive on his uncle's doorstep unannounced. His uncle was the Unitarian pastor, Jenkins Lloyd Wright, who had hired an architect to build a new building. Wright figured he could convince the architect into taking him on as a draftsman in training.

The church was a blend of domestic and sacred architecture--starting Wright out on his sense of a house as sacred space. The architect was J. Lyman Silsbee, whose brother-in-law was ..., who was bringing information--and Japanese prints--back from Japan. Silsbee introduced him to Japanese art and architecture. At the church he came in contact with innovative thinkers such as Jane Addams who came to talk.

Below is a later picture of Jenkin Lloyd Jones, his wife Sarah, and his daughter Mary visiting Frank and Catherine, Frank's mother Anna, and his sisters Jennie and Maginel at Frank's Oak Park home.

Catherine Tobin Wright

One group at the church was reading Les Miserables with Pastor Wright. At the end, they had a party in which they were supposed to come in costume. Frank went as French officer Enjolras. He dropped his plate and bent to pick it up and bumped heads hard with a tall red-haired peasant girl in pink. In the apologies that followed, Frank managed to get an invitation to go to her house for Sunday dinner. She was Catherine Tobin.

Catherine lived on the corner of 47th Street and Kimbark Avenue in South Kenwood. Her father was one of the new professors being brought into the University. Kitty went to Hyde Park High School, for she was only 16 when they met.

This is a much later picture of her with one of their sons. That's a dress that Frank designed for her--one of the many difficulties he put her through was designing strange dresses for her to wear.

Louis Sullivan

In Silsbee's firm, Frank met Cecil Corwin, who let him move in with him until his mother and sisters moved down from Wisconsin. Wright quickly figured out that there were bigger more exciting fish to fry in Chicago and quickly wheedled a job with Adler and Sullivan, helped in part because Louis Sullivan was a neighbor of the Tobins in Kenwood. As he later said, "early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and dishonest humility. I chose the former and I have seen no occasion to change."

Wright was soon the head draftsman for Sullivan. He often did private homes as a courtesy for the wealthy clients, but the main business of Adler and Sullivan was public buildings, such as the Auditorium Building.

University of Chicago, 1891

While Wright was still with Louis Sullivan, the firm bid on the contract to design the University of Chicago in the heart of Hyde Park. The competition went however to Cobb's neo-Gothic vision. The founders wanted the instant respectability of taking on the appearance of the great British universities--even though the Indiana limestone was raw and white (though coal dust aged it fast) and when the wind blew from the west, the stench of the stockyards blew through the quads, and when the wind blew from the south, the acrid odor of the steel mills blew in from the South Works.

Adler and Sullivan lost the contract and the opportunity to build a university in a truly American style. As a result, Wright ranted for years about the detrimental effect of trying to train American minds in borrowed European architecture. In 1931, in Modern Architecture, he wrote, "Our Chicago University, a seat of learning, is just as far removed from the truth as steel frame skyscrapers dressed in stone to recall historical styles. If environment is significant and indicative, what does this highly reactionary, extensive, and expensive scene-painting by means of hybrid Collegiate Gothic signify? ... Why should an American University in a land of Democratic ideals in a Machine Age be characterized by second-hand adaptation of Gothic forms?"

It would have been truly marvelous to have had an Adler and Sullivan campus!

McArthur House, 1892

The first is the house of Warren McArthur, manufacturer, at 4852 S. Kenwood Avenue, just around the block from the Tobins. It's Dutch Colonial, with a gambrel roof and dormers, though Wright breaks up the design with bays on the corners, casement windows, a dado with Roman brick to get a banded horizontal effect. It was his first use of leaded glass windows, the corner dissolving into glass, and an interior of built-ins.

Blossom House, 1892

George Blossom, and insurance executive, commissioned a house for next door at 4858 Kenwood Avenue. It's a Queen Anne house with butter yellow clapboards, white trim, Palladian windows. There still are hints of Prairie School influence. The hip roof is flatter than was typical of the original style. He used Roman brick (long and horizontal and narrow) in the massive chimney and in the foundation, there is almost no wall space inside, having opened up the boxes of the rooms with doors and windows. (Behind the house on 49th Street is a garage built in 1907).

Transportation Pavilion, 1893

The Columbian Exposition of 1893 was another contract open to the great architects of the time. Unfortunately, the Beaux Art vision of Burnham and Root controlled the White City made of lathe and staph. Wright complained that the false classical won over "the ambitious ignoramuses in the architectural profession....America was captivated by this overwhelming rise of grandomania. I was confirmed in my fear that a native architecture would be set back for at least 50 years." Adler and Sullivan got the design for the Transportation Pavilion, a vast empty hall large enough to hold trains. One of the requirements of the Exposition was that all the main buildings had to have a 60-foot cornice, had to be classical or have arcades. Frank Lloyd Wright is said to have influenced the lowering center and the "golden gate" of the doorway, with its off-set stairs winding to the entrance. It was the lone Chicago School building at the fair.

The Ho-o-den (The Phoenix), 1893

There was another building at the fair that caught Wright's attention. It was the Imperial Japanese pavilion. It was the first example of Japanese architecture outside Japan. It was a 1/2 scale replica of a name sake temple in Japan, set among four tea houses on Wooded Island. The Island had been intended to be an oasis in the fair of willows, aquatic plants, irises, and ferns. The temple was set in a Japanese Garden on this oasis in the bustle of the White City. Wright was struck by "organic" Japanese architecture, which seemed "more nearly modern", more in tune with the "native conditions of life" and in touch with the "spiritual idea of the natural and hence organic simplicity"--ideas basic to Emerson.

The Ho-o-den had wooden post and beam construction with the structure exposed, the walls were sliding screens between roof and platform, it had unconfined spaces open to the garden and the air, only the shrine at ht eheart of it was solid. The wood was unpainted. He had already read the books and loved the prints he'd first encountered at Silsbee's.

It survived until the 1940s when vandals burned it down, not even realizing by that point that it was Japanese.

Heller House, 1897

The blow-up with Sullivan occurred soon after and Wright was fired. From 1893 to 1909, he ran his own studio out of his Oak Park home. He was swamped with work. One of his commissions was a house for Isidore Heller, a meat packer, who owned the lot at 5132 S. Woodlawn Avenue. It has Sullivan ornament on the third floor, carved by Richard Bock. It has a Romanesque or Richardsonesque door on the side. He is experimenting with this idea of the domestic as a mix of the sacred and the secular. There are elements that echo the Unity Temple in Oak Park.

Lora and Frederick C. Robie

It was also in 1897 that Frederick Robie happened to go to a dance at the University of Chicago and meet Lora Hieronymous. She had come to the Columbian Exposition in high school, and while riding the Ferris wheel, she had looked down at Foster Hall, the women's dormitory at the university, and announced that she was going to go to college and that that was where she was going to go.

Frederick's grandfather had run a boot and shoe shop in upstate New York. His father came to Chicago after the fire and started the Excelsior Supply Company for sewing machine supplies. Later he branched into the bicycle business (eventually the business became part of Schwinn Bicycles). At 16, Frederick had gone to Purdue but hadn't been a success. After 1895, he lived with his parents in Englewood and was taking part of his father's company into the motorcycle and automobile business.

Lora's father was the president of the Illinois National Bank, so she had gone back to Springfield after she graduated in 1900, and it was probably there that she first encountered Wright's work. He had designed the library in the school where she taught while he was working on the Dana house.

Robie continued to court Lora from a distance until they married in 1902. He brought her back to Chicago, where she asked to live near the university so that she could stay in contact with the women's and arts events there. She was the first woman in Illinois with a driver's license and one of the independent thinkers that Hyde Park/Kenwood seems to attract.

They moved to an apartment in the brick Georgian building at 5310-5312 S. Cornell--half a block from the Town Center commuter stop. Soon they moved down the street to the old Windermere Hotel, built for the exposition (now where the parking lot is of the current Windermere Hotel). In 1907, Fred Jr. "Sunny" was born and by 1908, they decided to build a home.

Lora wanted to move close enough to campus so that she could walk to events. There weren't building lots available close to campus, so they convinced a friend who lived on a very large lot at 5753 S. Woodlawn to slice off the very end of their lot and sell it to them. It was a strange lot--180 feet long by 50 feet wide and with two fronts--58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue.

(Sunny playing at the Robie House construction site.)

Robie House, 1910

The oddest thing about the lot was that it actually had open land--a prairie of sorts--on one side. As Sunny remembered, "one of the nicest things about the house was the beautiful view to the south from our raised living room and dining room, we could look out over a two-block vacant area to the Midway Plaisance. Father and mother remember enjoying watching the skaters from the distance and the central portion of the Midway was flooded in the winter time and people by the hundreds came out to skate."

Wright once called it "the cornerstone of modern architecture" and "the most ideal place in the world."

Mamah Cheney

Wright had a number of connections to the U of C. A number of clients were involved with the university: Mrs. Avery Coonley, a client, studied with John Dewey. Wright designed a summer colony in Montana for a group of professors that was unfortunately never built. He called Dr. Ferdinand Schevil, professor of modern history, his best friend, and he got very interested in Veblen--a fellow Wisconsinite.

But the connection in the winter of 1909-1910, while Robie House was under construction, was through another wife of a client--Mamah Cheney, who was studying at the university with Robert Herrick. Robert Herrick was a novelist at the university, known for his advocacy of high-minded rebellion and social reform. Here in Hyde Park, far from spouses and neighbors in Oak Park, Wright and Mamah decided to enact some rebellion of their own. Before Robie House was completed, Wright took off to Germany with Mamah--leading to scandal, the end of the first phase of his career, and eventually, tragedy.

Midway Gardens, 1913

When they got back from Germany, Mamah and Wright retreated to Taliesin in Wisconsin, while Frank moved on to other types of commissions--including his last Hyde Park structure, the Midway Gardens. The beer garden and entertainment center was on the corner of Cottage Grove and the Midway Plaisance at 60th Street. It covered three acres, surrounded by low masonry terraces, promenades, loggias, galleries, winter gardens and a dance floor. It was supposed to be a festival for the eye and ear, with areas for mystery and romance--a place for good music, good food, good beer, and dancing. It was mostly of concrete with scarlet and green flash glass in relief. But then the tragedy at Taliesin intervened.

The Midway Gardens opened before they were finished to a grand society opening. Pavlova danced there. But it had been underfinanced so it was sold to the Edelweiss Brewery, which badly altered Wright's conception of it. Soon after, Prohibition ruined the business since the open airy plan couldn't be converted into a speakeasy. After an attempt to convert it into a dance hall and skating rink it was torn down in 1929 and replaced with a car wash.

Midway Gardens was bulldozed into Lake Michigan as breakwall, but the building didn’t go down without a fight. Two wrecking companies went out of business trying to demolish the concrete structure.

One of the craftsmen that Wright collaborated with for the Midway Gardens was Alphonso Ianelli, who carved the Sprites that guarded the revelers throughout the Gardens.

It was assumed that all the sprites were lost with the Gardens until sometime in the 1950s, when word got out that a few of the Sprites were lying in pieces in a field in Lake Delton, Wisconsin. The farmer had been working on the third wrecking crew that succeeded in tearing the Gardens down and he'd saved the Sprites from the lake. Eventually, the Sprites found their way to the home of a client and friend of Wright's, who restored restored the three sprites--two six-foot Sprites and one 12-foot Sprite. Eventually they found their way to Taliesin West, which authorized reproduction. The sprites in this picture are copies of the six-foot tall, 450 pound Sprites. They stand at the Arizona Biltmore.

The Fight to Save Robie House, 1941 and 1957

The house pulled Wright back to Hyde Park five more times. Frederick Robie's father, the one with the money, died deep in debt. Ruined, the Robies sold the house to David Lee Taylor, president of an advertising company, who died 10 months after purchasing it. Mrs. Taylor sold it to Marshall Dodge Wilber, treasurer of the Wilber Mercantile Agency and commodore of the Chicago Yachts Club. They loved to entertain--inviting 200 guests to luncheon at the house, where Mrs. Wilber would whistle classical music to piano accompaniment.

Mrs. Wilber kept a diary of the house and she recorded that Wright came back three times while they lived in the house to look it over. He told her that "this is the best example of my work" and that he wanted to buy it himself and live there. But of course Wright never had any money.

In 1926, the Wilbers sold it to the Chicago Theological Seminary, which had just moved in across the street. They used it as a dormitory while waiting for the money to tear it down and build a real one. Twice they filed the plans to tear it down and twice Wright came back to defend the house.

The first time in 1941, Wright formed a Committee for the Preservation of Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House with refugees from the Bauhaus who had just moved to Chicago--Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Walter Peterhons. They held the project at bay long enough that World War II started--there were no building materials so plans were shelved again until 1957, when urban renewal throughout the neighborhood once more launched the urge to build a new dorm.

Wright, according to legend, recruited William Zeckendorf, the head of Webb and Knapp, to buy the house to save it, using it as office space for the firm in charge of the urban renewal. After the urban renewal was done in 1963, it was donated to the University of Chicago and registered as a National Historic Landmark under the new legislation.

Though over 20% of his works were torn down in his lifetime, it was here in Hyde Park that Frank Lloyd Wright fought to defend his legacy.