The Pattington Chicago
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INTRODUCTION The Pattington residential campus in the Buena Park neighborhood of Chicago is a picturesque record of the City’s ideals at the beginning of the 20th century. This was a time when residents of the young and gritty city dreamed of gracious lives in homes of quiet dignity where they could relax in parklike surroundings, even as they lived in densely populated neighborhoods. For dignity, Chicagoans constructed residences with architectural styles drawn from classical antiquity and the renaissance. For relaxation, they developed green spaces of every size from window boxes to Lincoln Park, Chicago’s largest park. They also developed the courtyard apartment building, which combined these elements in a multi-family dwelling. This picture booklet highlights features of the Pattington that provide glimpses of these ideals when the Pattington was new. It examines the place of the Pattington in the construction of Chicago’s green spaces and in the development of the city’s residential architecture. 1 THE PATTINGTON The Pattington residences are composed of two apartment buildings. One is a building with two courtyards that face Irving Park Road to the south. This building, built in the years 1902-1904, was designed by architect David E. Postle for the original owner, James E. Patton, and constructed by Telford and McWade Builders. The American Institute of Architects has described it as “Chicago’s best courtyard building.” Architecture historian Carroll William Westfall has said it is the closing monument of a Chicago “classical style” of residential architecture that lasted from 1893 to 1904. 2 The second Pattington building faces Bittersweet Place to the north. This building, completed in 1906, was designed by architect Andrew Sandregen for the next owner, Edward Shellaberger. Westfall has noted that the Bittersweet building is the first example on Chicago’s north side of a Tudor apartment building, the next prominent Chicago residential style after the classical period. 3 THE ARCHITECTS David Postle, who designed the Pattington courtyard building, also designed many fine buildings in Elgin, Illinois, where he lived. These included: The Elgin Public Museum The Lords Park Pavilion 4 Postle designed this prairie-style duplex residence at 54-56 North Liberty Street, Elgin. He lived in the unit on the right. Postle designed more than 25 homes in Elgin. Postle moved to the Los Angeles area in 1921, where he continued to design fine residences. One was the Gunther House at 1960 Mendocino in Altadena, north of Pasadena. 5 Westfall has described Andrew Sandregen, who designed the Pattington Bittersweet building, as “one of the important apartment designers in Chicago.” Sandregen designed hundreds of multi-family dwellings in the Chicago area. His buildings include 813-819 West Buena Avenue Chicago 6 The Aztec Fullerton and Lincoln Park West, Chicago 1235 North Astor Street, Chicago 7 THE CITY AND THE GARDEN Like many courtyard buildings in Chicago, the Pattington reflects an affection for green spaces. This affection is displayed not only in the Pattington courtyards, but also in the small park to the side of the Bittersweet building, which residents have used as a garden as well as a park. Chicagoans have admired green spaces from the city’s beginning. Promptly after the city was incorporated in 1837, the city council decided to create a municipal seal that would symbolize the city’s present and future. Among other things, the Chicago seal contained the motto “Urbs in Horto,” Latin for “City in a Garden,” placed on a banner under a stack of wheat. The wheat can be seen more clearly in the 1905 version of the seal, on the right, than in the original version, on the left. In 1837, the only existing garden near Chicago was the unspoiled Eden of tallgrass prairie that extended west and south of the city. In the words of the 1909 Plan of Chicago, this “boundless prairie carpeted with waving grass bedecked with brilliant wild flowers” (the dark green area of the map) covered two thirds of Illinois, as well as great parts of other nearby states. 8 The city fathers knew that Chicago’s primary garden of the future would be great fields of wheat, growing on the rich soil of the tallgrass prairie. This soil would become the energy source for a blaze of human activity as Chicago grew from a town of 150 in 1833 to a city of more than 1 million in 1890, the second- largest city in the United States. Chicago’s business district became intensely busy, without any place to relax in natural surroundings. Downtown Chicago in 1893 Chicagoans, however, expressed the “city in a garden” ideal through a proliferation of window boxes, small parks and large parks, including eventually the 1200-acre Lincoln Park. According to architecture historian Daniel Bluestone, gardens and parks became a key part of constructing Chicago. 9 In the 1800s some Chicagoans sought refuge from the intensity of city life in visits to Lake View, a town north of Chicago. Bluestone has noted the importance of these visits to the formation of Chicago’s Buena Park neighborhood. The town of Lake View, outlined here in an 1862 map, extended along the shore of Lake Michigan from North Avenue to Devon Avenue in Chicago today. For property tax purposes, Pattington residents and their neighbors still hold real estate in the Township of Lake View. The spirit of Lake View residents was described in an 1876 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune: Residents are so contented in a state of simple existence that no exertions are made for the sake of society, and an outsider would call it quiet. But the people of this town don’t propose to get excited just for 10 the sake of show, and, knowing their own capabilities for enjoyment, are indulging in the dolce far niente [the sweetness of doing nothing]. Beginning in the 1850s, many prosperous Chicagoans began to visit a hotel in Lake View known as Lake View House. Lake View House This hotel was located on Grace Street a short distance from present-day Lake Shore Drive. Lake Michigan then lay where Lake Shore Drive now passes Grace Street. Walter L. Newberry, an early visitor to Lake View House, looked at the lake from the hotel’s front porch and suggested the hotel’s name. Newberry, for whom Chicago’s Newberry Library is named, was president of Chicago’s first railroad, the Galena & Chicago Union. Some prominent Chicagoans began to reside at Lake 11 View House from April to September every year, making the hotel a multi-family dwelling for the summer, a precursor to the Pattington and other later Chicago multi- family residences. In the 1850s, a leading early Chicago real estate agent and developer, Samuel H. Kerfoot, created a 10-acre private park near the lake on the north side of Graceland Avenue (now Irving Park Road). The 3-acre Pattington campus now lies in the area once occupied by Kerfoot Park. Kerfoot noted that his park was the first work of artistic landscape gardening in the Midwest and the most thoroughly landscaped park west of New York City until Lincoln Park was beautified. According to Bluestone, the park featured “an extensive carriage drive, shaded by planted evergreens, artificial ponds crossed by bridges, and rustic arbors, steps, and seats.” Kerfoot opened his park to the public in its early years, and it became a precursor to Lincoln Park. Kerfoot later obtained the first authorization from the Illinois legislature to establish Lincoln Park, and he eventually turned his private park into a personal residence. 12 Lake View House and Kerfoot Park were early examples of several Chicago getaway destinations that would grow into the Buena Park neighborhood. Other destinations included Graceland Cemetery Established in 1860, Graceland Cemetery became a popular place for visits by Chicagoans. They followed a practice of many Americans in the 1800s, before the creation of large public parks, to treat cemeteries as parkland. U.S. Marine Hospital Located on the grounds of today’s Walt Disney Magnet School, the U.S. Marine Hospital was built in 1873 to provide health care to the merchant marine of the Great Lakes. Visitors used its landscaped grounds as a park. 13 In 1860 James B. Waller created a 53-acre estate he called Buena and built a residence called Buena House. Waller’s house stood on the present site of St. Mary of the Lake Church at 4220 North Sheridan Road. In the 1880s Waller turned part of his estate into a residential development of 50-foot lots called Buena Park. This development was part of an area annexed by Chicago in 1889. Buena Park Buena Park retained its suburban character after it became a city neighborhood. In 1896 the North Shore Suburban newspaper described Buena Park as one of “the imperial suburbs of Chicago.” Buena Park was said to be famed “no less for its natural beauty than for its refined, intellectual and god-fearing citizens.” The newspaper described residents relaxing on their porches in the cool of the evening and “listening to the plaintive melodies of the bugler at the Marine Hospital or exchanging confidences in horticulture.” 14 One Buena Park resident was the famed architect William LeBaron Jenney, who lived in a villa on Bittersweet Place. Jenney invented steel frame building construction, which he used to build the upper stories of the world’s first skyscraper, Chicago’s Home Insurance Building. The Home Insurance Building stood on the northeast corner of LaSalle and Adams before it was replaced by the art deco Field Building. Jenney as a young man studied architecture in Paris, where he learned about techniques used by medieval architects to build cathedrals with great windows.