Lee Bey: The Urban Observer

(photos by Lee Bey) 

I drove by the Purple Hotel in north suburban Lincolnwood a couple of days ago, fully expecting the structure to be in the throes of demolition. It had been reported last year that the shuttered hotel at Lincoln and Touhy was sold and not long for this world. And yet for now, she stands...

The hotel is also a landmark in Chicago's organized crime history. Insurance millionaire Allen Dofman was shot to death gangland style in the hotel's parking lot in January 1983. He received seven slugs to the head a month after he was convicted of defrauding the Teamsters Union Central States Pension Fund. The Chicago Outfit. presumably. got to him before he could tell anything else  he knew. You remember the scene in the 1995 masterpiece Casino when Alan King's character Andy Stone gets gunned down in the parking lot? King's character (and his death) was based on Dorfman.

Coincidentially, the Purple Hotel was built on the site of the Fireside restaurant which was burned down by the mob in 1958. According to reports, masked men hid in the restaurant until after closing, rounded up the employees at gunpoint then spent two hours prepping the place to be torched. They let the employees out just before burned the place down. Authorities said the restaurant was destroyed as payback for its owner testifying before a U.S. House committee on the relationship between the Outfit and the restaurant workers union.

(Above: a hotel courtesy van still sits in the lot.) 

Back to the story: The Purple Hotel was built as the Lincolnwood Hyatt when it opened--purple color scheme and all--in 1961. The $3.5 million building was designed by Hausner & Macsai with an assist from the architecture firm of Friedman, Alschuler & Sincere. The hotel boasted 160 rooms and a ballroom that could fit 700.

I'll do a little digging into the hotel's future and report back. 

Posted by Lee Bey at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

options

 (images courtesy of the Chicago Central Area Committee)

My day job is executive director of the 50-year-old Chicago Central Area Committee, a group of prominent business folk devoted to improving downtown.

I've held this post since August, 2007. One of the perks of the gig: rummaging through the files. Today's find is a 1959 brochure, published by the CCAC, extolling the virtues of downtown.

The book is a bit of a guided tour of downtown and some suburbs. The photos show a downtown that bustles like Manhattan in those 1950s movies. No racial or ethnic minorities are depicted, with the exception of the elegantly-dressed server at the Hotel Pearson whom I assume to be a fellow Brother. And the book shows no women unless they are accompanied in the photo by a man.

Now on with the show... 

Look at this guy lighting up in broad daylight outside of the Inland Steel Building. He's landed the big account and now celebrates with a smoke.

I didn't recognize this building at all and wound up having to do some research that's still incomplete. This is (was?) the America Fore Building, apparently built at  360 W. Jackson in 1957 and designed by Loebl Schlossman & Bennett. Still can't place this building. I am wondering if the address I found is wrong...or did this building get demolished to build the Sears Tower.

*The building is still there, but has been altered. Thanks to reader Michael Hill who recognized the building and provided a contemporary view via Google Earth.

Here is a group of businessmen--and a set of tailfins--outside of the Lakeshore Club.

Chicago's nightlife included swinging at the jazz-friendly London House at Wacker and Michigan and, apparently, sitting alone and getting drunk at the Wrigley Building Restaurant.

Something you won't see today: The photo below on the left lists the surface parking at Grant Park as a top amenity! This eyesore was later covered up by Daley Bicentennial Park. The photo on the right shows a couple breezing through the Calumet Skyway, later the Chicago Skyway.

The book concludes with a rousing call to the business community to relocate downtown. "There is a giant-sized future unfolding here. And there's plenty of room in that future for more businesses and businessmen. Chicago is going places. And you're invited to go along."

Posted by Lee Bey at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

options

An update to the Lake Meadows post from a few days ago... 

Pershing School (above) at Lake Meadows is the work of SOM architect Jim Scheeler, according former SOM'er Gertrude Lempp Kerbis FAIA in her highly-entertaining oral history documented by the Art Institute of Chicago. Kerbis herself designed an athletic club at Lake Meadows the National Trust said was demolished last month, but Draper & Kramer says only a private restaurant (scroll down to the comments section) on the site was taken down.

Meanwhile, preservationist Grahm Balkany tells me his research shows the Lake Meadows Professional Building (above) is also designed by Scheeler and that it was built in 1960, rather than 1971.

In addition, the late SOM partner Ambrose Richardson also worked on Lake Meadows and discusses it in his AIC oral history as well.

Posted by Lee Bey at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

options

(photos by Lee Bey) 

I took a look at Lake Meadows over the weekend. I'm always drawn to a fight and it looks like a good one is going to brew over real estate titan Draper & Kramer's plans to demolish the 50-year-old, 100-acre complex and replace it with an entirely new neighborhood.

Lake Meadows' is best known for its ranks of generously-spaced modernist residential high-rises (some of them seen above) designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill. These buildings would disappear under the plan. But during my visit, I was drawn to a small public school that appears untouched by the proposed redevelopment, and a professional building that might be in the way of progress.

 (above) John G. Pershing School

Pershing School is little modernist gem in the northeast corner of Lake Meadows, along 31st Street. The 10-room school was built in 1959 for $478,000 and was designed to house grades K-6. The school was built with a multi-purpose room and medical and psychological testing centers in addition to classroom space. What had to feel pretty revolutionary for an urban school in the late 1950s: each class had views and direct access to the outdoor court and gardens. The next three photos show a little more...

I can't find any info on the architect. I'll take a total guess and say Perkins & Will. 

The fate of the Lake Meadows professional building just west of Pershing School seems unclear--to me, at least. The plan, printed in the Crain's piece in the link above, shows a new structure on the building's site. Nevertheless, the building is a handsome, airy piece of architecture, built in 1971.

The building is still in use, by the way. This has to be the work of SOM.

Lake Meadows began in 1949 when old Chicago Land Clearance Commission condemned the former neighborhood at a price of $16 million and wrote down the land to $2.3 million and sold it New York Life Insurance Co., which built the development. When the complex was completed in the late 1950s, experts from around the world--including Russia--visited in hopes of learning more about the public-private partnership that built Lake Meadows and turned around the once-depressed urban area.

The irony is there was a neighborhood there--my late father grew up in it--but it was branded a slum and demolished in the 1950s to build middle-class Lake Meadows, which could now be demolished for an even more middle-class neighborhood. Life in the big city, I suppose.

Posted by Lee Bey at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

options

(photos by Lee Bey) 

Mad for Mod? Check out this link on the website of the preservation group Landmarks Illinois. School of the Art Institute graduate students, led by Landmarks Illinois' Jim Peters have surveyed 700 buildings built between 1935 and 1975 in Chicago's North Shore and northern suburbs. It's a fascinating collection of schools, industrial buildings, shops, etc. They even got one of my favorites, the Pedian Rug Co building on Lincoln Avenue in the town of Lincolnwood.

The Pedian building and that great sign, unfortunately, were demo'd in 2007--reminding us all of the fragile nature of modernism and the need for the SAIC study. But then again, there's always hope: Seattle just landmarked a boarded up Denny's restaurant from 1964.

Posted by Lee Bey at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

options

(photo by Lee Bey) 

You know what I like? The last scene of the original "Ocean's 11." The caper has gone wrong and the Rat Pack is walking down the Vegas strip, dejected while passing marquees with their real names on them. If I owned this cleaners, a film camera and a 1960s suit...

..for that matter, this place in Highland Indiana, too. In the meantime/in between time/EE-OO-ELEVEN....

Posted by Lee Bey at 08:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

options

(photo by Lee Bey) 

Modernism devotee Joe Kunkel of the great group Chicago Bauhaus and Beyond has turned me on to the work of an under heralded modernist, Edward Humrich, who designed a score of nature-embracing homes along Chicago's North Shore in the 1950s and 1960s. Above is a home he designed in south suburban Olympia Fields. Read more about him here and here.

Posted by Lee Bey at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

options