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[William B. Ogden Elementary School, 24 W. Walton Street, 1956, Chicago, July 6, 2009 /Image & Artwork:
designslinger]

Sometime in the next few weeks, this little gem of a Chicago public school building will
be demolished to make way for a much larger, state-of-the-art school facility for future generations of young Chicagoans.

 
[Ogden School building, view east; Detail of Oak Street entrance /Images & Artwork: designslinger]

The current Ogden school building is kind of overwhelmed by all the new high-rise
construction that engulfs it, and although it doesn't make any significant architectural statements, the building has an endearingly, charming quality. Of course I don't have to go to school there, and the students are probably looking forward to the new, modern school that will be opening in a couple of years.

 
[Mahlon D. Ogden Residence, Walton Street, between Clark and Dearborn, built, 1859; Chicago Mansions, Images
of America series; Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton Street, Chicago, July 6, 2009 /Image & Artwork: designslinger]

William B. Ogden was Chicago's 1st mayor, the founder of the city's 1st railroad, the 1st
president of the newly organized Union Pacific Railroad, and one of the largest property owners
in the city. His brother Mahlon, also a real estate mogul, as well as a probate judge, owned a house that once stood directly across the street from the current Ogden School site.

Although he was a mover and shaker in his time, Mahlon's true fame and notoriety
comes from a fluke of wind direction during the big Chicago fire in 1871. The M.D. Ogden mansion stood prominently on a full city block. As the fire destroyed everything around this 3-story mansard-roofed residence, a sudden shift in the wind saved the house from destruction and the home became famous as the only surviving residence within the path of the inferno. The house eventually became the headquarters of the Union Club, and by 1893, the site was occupied by the brand new Newberry Library building.

 
[Newberry Library, Henry Ives Cobb, 1890-93 /Image & Artwork: designslinger]

The library was built in a style known as Richardsonian Romanesque by architect
Henry Ives Cobb. Walter L. Newberry's will provided the capital for this "uncommon collection of uncommon collections", and the building houses one of the country's preeminent research libraries.

 
[Newberry Library, detail of window bays and arched entry /Images & Artwork: designslinger]

The architectural detail around the window bays is in a different style at each floor:
transomed, arched, squared, and the entrance has three triple arches said to have been inspired by the 12th century Romanesque French church, Saint-Gilles-du-Gard.

 
[Detail of unfinished library /Image & Artwork: designslinger]

Ironically, the structure was meant to fill the entire block of the old Ogden property,
but the back portion of the building wasn't finished during the 1890s construction. The library had to wait until 1981, when an addition designed by architect Harry Weese was added to a part of the rear section. You can still see the unfinished edges of Cobb's design on both the Dearborn and Clark Street sides of the original facade.

 
[Ogden Slip, McClurg Court at Illinois Street, Chicago /Image & Artwork: designslinger]

Among William Ogden's vast real estate holdings was a 40 acre property at the Chicago
River and Lake Michigan. Ogden's land started on the north side of the main branch and extended north towards Oak Street and west to Michigan Avenue. In 1858, attorney Abraham Lincoln was paid a fee of $350.00 to draft the paperwork required to set up Ogden's Chicago Dock and Canal Trust Company. The Ogden Slip is a remnant of the areas original warehousing roots.

 
[Converted warehouse building and new construction, Ogden Slip; Cityfront Center, Ogden Slip /Images
& Artwork: designslinger]

The slip was dug in 1893 to connect cargo boats coming into the city via Lake Michigan
to rail lines that ran along the river's north bank. During the 1980s, the Trust, which was still controlled by Ogden's descendant's, transformed the former industrial/warehouse area into the upscale North Pier, River East and Cityfront Place retail, residential, commercial and hotel development. Look at the right hand side of the photo on the right. If the economy hadn't tanked, you would not have seen blue sky above the tree line, instead that area would have been filled with the base of the Chicago Spire. Perhaps someday; there is a large hole in the ground with a concrete foundation awaiting its building. 

 
[Limestone engraved panel, William B. Ogden School, July 6, 2009 /Image & Artwork: designslinger]
  

We recently went to see an exhibit at the Chicago History Museum featuring a selection
of clothing and jewelry from the collection of Bertha Honore Palmer. The museum wouldn't allow any photography so click here to see a slide show of some of the items on display.

 
[Gallery, Potter Palmer Residence, Chicago Daily News Collection, Chicago Historical Society, DN-0004562;
Potter Palmer and Bertha Honore Palmer Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago /Image & Artwork: designslinger]

Mrs. Palmer also collected paintings; especially French Impressionist paintings. In the
photo on the left you can see a portion of her art collection on display in the gallery of her mansion located in the city's Gold Coast neighborhood. In the right hand photo, several of her paintings now hang in the Art Institute of Chicago's Potter Palmer and Bertha Honore Palmer Gallery. In the photograph taken of her personal gallery you can't help but notice how she hasn't left a inch of space between the pictures. In the old days, it was considered the height of sophistication to fill your walls with as much artwork as possible, and unlike today, even museums once packed their wall surfaces from frame edge to frame edge.

 
[Claude Monet, On the Brink of the Seine, Bennecourt, 1868, detail; Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Seascape, 1879, detail;
Renoir, Near the Lake, 1879/80, detail; Monet, Stacks of Wheat, Sunset, Snow Effect, 1890/91, detail; Potter Palmer
Collection, Art Institute of Chicago /Images & Artwork: designslinger]

Mrs. Palmer became interested in the French Impressionists through her friendship with
artist, Mary Cassatt. Mrs. Palmer was the President of the Board Lady Managers of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and Cassatt painted a mural titled Modern Woman, for the Fair's Women's Building. Although Bertha was by all outward appearances as conformist as they come, she stood out from the conventions of her day when she embraced the controversial, new painting style emerging from Paris in the 1870s. The basis of the Art Institute's extensive Impressionist collection is attributed to Mrs. Palmer and her bequest to the museum. She liked to tell people that she was the person responsible for introducing the avant garde Impressionists to the United States.

 
[Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg), 1879, entire painting
and detail /Images & Artwork: designslinger]

Apparently her favorite piece was Renoir's, Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando. She liked the
painting so much that the artwork traveled with her from Chicago to her ocean liner stateroom, to her homes in Paris and London and back to Chicago again.

 
[Bertha and Potter Palmer Residence, 1350 (aka 100) Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, 1907, Library of Congress Online
Catalog, LC-D4-12409; 1350 N. Lake Shore Drive Apartments, June, 2009 /Image & Artwork: designslinger]

Bertha Honore came from money and married money. Her father Henry Hamilton Honore
was a leading member of the city's business and social elite. She married businessman and real-estate mogul Potter Palmer in 1871, and built one of the largest houses in the city on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. She ruled as the Queen of Chicago society from her castle on the lake, and when Mr. Palmer died, Bertha moved in the highest social circles in London and Paris. So much so that the local press speculated that Mrs. Palmer may think more of the nabobs in Europe than her hometown. She said that she would never forsake her Midwestern roots, Chicago was home, and would always be home. The house survived Bertha by 32 years, and finally met with its demise in 1950. The red brick, monolithic apartment blocks that replaced The Castle, still bear the Palmer's 1350 Lake Shore Drive address.

 
[Palmer Family Memorial, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago /Images & Artwork: designslinger]

When she died in 1918, Bertha was laid to rest in a memorial befitting a woman of her
stature. The colonnade of tall columns surrounds two, large, ornately carved sarcophagi containing the earthly remains of Mr. and Mrs. Palmer. Descendant family members are buried beneath the flat panels of marble flooring, leaving Bertha and her husband perched high above the rest.

 
[Bertha Honore Palmer, portrait; Memorial inscription on sarcophagus, Graceland Cemetery /Images & Artwork:
designslinger]

Palmer was a woman of her times and she was also a pioneer. She wore expensive
dresses from Paris' House of Worth, jewelry from Tiffany and Cartier, and lived in an over-sized mansion meant to be the physical representation of her vast wealth, power and influence. At the same time she was a feminist, or as much of a feminist as the times, and Bertha, would allow. She worked hard to insure that women were represented at the World's Fair in 1893, and she did the same for the Paris Exhibition of 1900.

When she collected artwork that was considered out of the mainstream of acceptable
society, and not appropriate for a person of her social standing, she went ahead and bought as much of it as she could. And in the end, Bertha showed how much of a connection she felt to the city of her birth, when she gave the Art Institute a group of paintings which became the catalyst for one of the largest and most renowned, Impressionist collections in the world.

 
[Medinah Athletic Club/InterContinental Chicago, lobby ceiling /Image & Artwork: designslinger]

If you enter the large, glassy, brass-trimmed entrance to the InterContinental Chicago
hotel on north Michigan Avenue, this is not what you will see. You will be in the correct hostelry, just the wrong lobby. To see this amazing piece of architectural detail, enter the building from the much smaller scaled, ornately brass-carved, glass canopied entrance a little further to the south. This is the original entryway of the former Medinah Athletic Club, built for the Shriners organization in 1929.

 
[Carved details, Medinah Athletic Club /Images & Artwork: designslinger]

The building was meant to provide Shriners with a men's club of the utmost luxury.
Unfortunately, the Depression and a rivalry between members, resulted in the club's closure soon after it opened. When it re-opened to the general public in the 1940s, the new owners left all of architect Walter W. Ahlschlager's fanciful details intact, which were inspired by the Shriners fraternal brotherhood, Arabic/freemasonry history. After all, the official name of the organization is the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. I think you might see the connection to nobles and knights in the column capitals which contain small, carved, medieval armored heads with an Art Deco flair.

 
[Mezzanine lobby area; Polychromed ceiling detail /Images & Artwork: designslinger]

Ahlschlager used the Middle East as the inspiration for many of the details in the hotel,
as well as 12th-14th century European heraldic imagery. The ceilings in the main lobby as well as a secondary mezzanine lobby and elevator corridor, have a series of richly painted, polychromed ceilings.

 
[Barrel vaulted, polychromed ceiling in mezzanine elevator lobby; Plaster and paint detail /Images & Artwork:
designslinger]

The building had a "modern" addition attached to it in the 1960s, but by 1985 its
doors were shuttered once again. However, unlike its closure in the 1930s, the hotel didn't sit unused for ten years and was taken over by the InterContinental Hotels Group in the late 80s. The office of architect Harry Weese & Associates oversaw the $130 million renovation of the hotel complex, which shines to this day.

 
[InterContinental Chicago, Medinah Athletic Club, 505 N. Michigan Avenue, Walter W. Ahlschlager, 1927
Images & Artwork: designslinger]

On the exterior of the building, if you take the time to look up, you can see more of
the Assyrian/Egyptian inspiration in the limestone carvings by Leon Harmart. And,if you look way up to the very top, next to the gold onion dome, you will see what looks like a chimney stack, which was originally built as a dirigible landing site. More on that portion of the building's history in our previous post here.
 
Of course there are other hotels in Chicago with beautifully designed interior spaces which
recall the era of grand, opulent hotel stays, but those will have to wait. There is just so much more I have discovered during our brief time living in this city, that I must move on - so, till tomorrow....