ORAL HISTORY OF WILBERT R. HASBROUCK

Interviewed by Susan Benjamin

Compiled under the auspices of the Architects Oral History Project The Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings Department of The Copyright © 1995 Revised Edition Copyright © 2005 The Art Institute of Chicago This manuscript is hereby made available to the public for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of this manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface iv Preface to Revised Edition vi Outline of Topics vii Oral History 1 Selected References 180 Curriculum Vitae 181 Index of Names and Buildings 182

iii PREFACE

To spend time with Wilbert Hasbrouck is to receive an education in a facet of architecture available nowhere else. As yet, little has been written on the history of the preservation movement in Chicago. So Bill's recollection as one of the few architects active in preservation and restoration in the early years are particularly valuable. Bill knows all the players—the architects, historians, educators, journalists, and developers—who have occupied Chicago's preservation stage, and he enthusiastically and candidly provides us with his observations and opinions on their activities in this interview.

Hasbrouck's involvement in Chicago's preservation efforts dates back to the fall of 1959, when he and his wife, Marilyn, went for a walk in Hyde Park and happened upon the notice of a meeting of the Chicago Heritage Committee, which Bill describes as the grandfather of all subsequent preservation organizations in the city. Joining that group, he picketed the demolition of the Garrick Theatre. Subsequently, he played an instrumental role in the formation of the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation (founded to save H.H. Richardson's Glessner House in the mid-1960s), and served on the first advisory committee to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks (in the late 1960s). As Executive Director of the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, into the 1970s, Bill became versed in the dynamics and politics of architecture in Chicago.

An interest in historic architecture had been more than an avocation to Bill. For fourteen years, beginning in 1964, he and Marilyn published Review, which showcased the work of many of the Midwest's little known, as well as highly significant, architects. As one of Chicago's earliest and most important restoration architects, he has applied his expertise and knowledge of the history of architecture and technology to such well known structure as the Rookery, the Manhattan Building, the Delaware Building, and Solider Field in Chicago; the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo, New York; and the Dana-Thomas House in Springfield, .

Between June 1 and July 14, 1994, Bill and I met in his office on South Dearborn Street in Chicago's Printers Row to record his memoirs. Our sessions were taped on six ninety- minute cassettes that have been transcribed, edited, and reviewed by Bill, Marilyn and me

iv for accuracy and clarity while maintaining the flow, spirit and tone of our exchange. Most research for my preparation for this oral history is based on my first-hand knowledge of preservation and on my long-time professional association and personal friendship with Bill Hasbrouck. Published sources I found helpful are appended to the text.

It is with appreciation that I thank Bill for the pleasure of sharing his memories and for the invaluable documentation he has imparted to those interested in historic preservation. I extend an equal thanks to his wife Marilyn for many warm and lengthy conversation we had, and to Bill's office staff for their time and help. Special thanks go to Betty Blum, of the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, for her encouragement and guidance, and to Joan Cameron, of TapeWriter, for her skill and care in transcribing and shaping the final form of this document.

Susan S. Benjamin June 1995

v PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

Since 1995, when the previous preface was written, advances in electronic transmission of data have moved at breakneck speed. With the ubiquity of the Internet, awareness and demand for copies of oral histories in the Chicago Architects Oral History Project collection have vastly increased. These factors, as well as the Ryerson and Burnham Library's commitment to scholarly research, have compelled us to make these documents readily accessible on the World Wide Web. A complete electronic version of each oral history is now available on the Chicago Architects Oral History Project's section of The Art Institute of Chicago website, http://www.artic.edu/aic, and, as before, a bound version is available for study at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago.

In preparing an electronic version of this document, we have reformatted it for publication, reviewed and updated with minor copy-editing, and, where applicable, we have expanded the biographical profile and added pertinent bibliographic references. Lastly, the text has been reindexed and the CAOHP Master Index updated accordingly. All of the electronic conversion and reformatting is the handiwork of my valued colleague, Annemarie van Roessel, whose technical skills, intelligence, and discerning judgment have shaped the breadth and depth of the CAOHP's presence on the Internet. This endeavor would be greatly diminished without her seamless leadership in these matters. Publication of this oral history in web-accessible form was made possible by the generous support of The Vernon and Marcia Wagner Access Fund at The Art Institute of Chicago; The James & Catherine Haveman Foundation; The Reva and David Logan Family Fund of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region; and Daniel Logan and The Reva and David Logan Foundation. Finally, to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at The Art Institute of Chicago and its generous and supportive director, Jack P. Brown, we extend our deepest gratitude for facilitating this endeavor.

Betty J. Blum February 2005

vi OUTLINE OF TOPICS

Early Years and Attending College 1 Working for Central Railroad 4 Interest in Chicago Architecture 6 Chicago Heritage Committee 8 Saving and Adapting Glessner House 18 As Executive Director of the American Institute of Architects, Chicago 23 Striking Out on His Own 34 1900 South Prairie Building, Chicago 36 The Prairie School Review and Reprint Editions 39 Opening the Prairie Avenue Bookshop 57 Restoration of the Widow Clarke House, Chicago 59 Other Projects 63 New Quarters at 711, Chicago 68 Three Restoration Projects: Prus-Nelson House, Chicago 73 Delaware Building, Chicago 74 Manhattan Building, Chicago 80 Hasbrouck's Office 88 Honolulu House, Marshall, 90 Training for a Career In Restoration 91 Dearborn Street Station, Chicago 96 Historic Structure Reports 101 Prairie School Buildings: Dana/Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois 104 , Chicago 113 Peoples Savings Bank, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 123 , Chicago, Illinois 126 Soldier Field 129 Adaptive Use and New Work 135 Work in Thailand 136 Historic Preservation Programs 141

vii Testifying For and Against Landmark Status 146 The Lloyd House, Winnetka, Illinois 150 Designing from Scratch 151 Buildings Most in Need of Saving 154 Opinion of the Landmarks Preservation Organizations 156 More About Glessner House, Chicago 158 The Economy and Preservation 159 Selected Successful Projects 164 Opinions and Observations 165 Appraisals 174 The Hasbrouck Archive 175

viii Wilbert R. Hasbrouck

Benjamin: Today is June 1, 1994, and I am with Wilbert R. Hasbrouck in his office. It is situated in the heart of the Printers Row Historic District, an appropriate location for an architect involved in preservation from its very inception in Chicago. Downstairs is the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, one of the country's foremost resource for architectural books. It is owned by Bill's wife Marilyn, his lifetime partner in the world of architectural preservation. We're going to explore together Bill's long and fruitful architectural career, talking about a great many of his numerous restoration projects, including one of Chicago's earliest , the Manhattan building, and one of Frank 's foremost residences, the Dana/Thomas house in Springfield, Illinois. We will delve into the Chicago story of historic preservation, its successes and failures, and try to understand the forces that have historically driven the preservation movement in Chicago. We'll talk about the cast of characters. No one knows them better than Bill. Preservation has been Bill's vocation and avocation. In a city that has often been described as an architectural mecca, Bill Hasbrouck has played a significant role in preservation from the onset of the movement in the 1950s. Through Bill's story will unfold the story of preservation in Chicago. I guess there is no better place to start than the beginning. Where did you grow up and how did your life begin?

Hasbrouck: I was born on a farm in western Iowa near a little town called Mapleton on December 17, 1931, the only person I know who was born in his father's house. I lived on that farm throughout my childhood until I went away to college. In fact, my brother still lives there. Growing up in Iowa is kind of a strange background for a preservationist in that architecture is not a big thing in Iowa. But I think traditionalism and understanding our roots and so forth is a big thing in Iowa. Maybe that has something to do with why I got involved in what I did. But in any case, I went to high school in Mapleton,

1 Iowa, graduated in 1949 and went off to Iowa State College. At that time architecture was taught in the School of Engineering.

Benjamin: When you were really young and growing up in Iowa, did you give any thought to your future? Go back to high school. Did you think, "Well, architecture is interesting to me, buildings are interesting, history turns me on?"

Hasbrouck: I was really more interested in technology and engineering in that period of my life. Architecture was part of building, but I think I thought more in terms of being an engineer than I did of being an architect. I was interested in mathematics, and I was a kid in high school who, when I was a junior and took physics, read the book the first week for the pleasure of it and then didn't read it again and still got straight A's in the course because I enjoyed that sort of thing. On the other hand, I was not a particularly great student in some of my more mundane subjects like English and sociology and so forth. They never turned me on very much. But I think when I really decided to study architecture was in the summer after I graduated from high school and before I went to college. I had a job with a construction company. I was a mason's tender.

Benjamin: What's a mason's tender?

Hasbrouck: A mason's tender is the person who provides the stone setter with stones and mortar and materials to lay up a wall of stone. We were building a church—or the contractor was building a church—in my hometown, and I worked all summer. We worked from seven in the morning until six in the evening with an hour for lunch. We had a ten-hour day, and we worked six days a week. I remember my salary was fifty-seven dollars and some cents a week. I got a dollar an hour, which was very good pay.

Benjamin: That doesn't sound bad.

2 Hasbrouck: I made enough money that summer to pay for my first year of college. Anyway, I went off to college that fall to Iowa State, and I got very interested during that summer in the whole idea of architecture because the plans for this church had been prepared by a reasonably prominent architect from South Dakota. I was fascinated with the idea of planning the whole building, and all the details were there. I thought, "This is for me. It's more interesting than engineering per se." And so, I enrolled in the School of Architecture in the College of Engineering, and I was there at Iowa State for five years and graduated in the spring of 1954. I've never been sorry. In fact, one of the strange things that's happened to me in the last two or three years is that I'm now on the alumni advisory committee for Iowa State College's Department of Design. And I go out twice a year and spend three days on juries and talk to the faculty and the students. I just came back a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact. It's great fun because, you know, I was just one of the crowd when I was there, and now the president of the university knows me and calls me by my first name. A little side story: There was one professor I always credited with making sure I stayed in school and making sure that I tended to my work instead of the pinochle table. His name was Claire B. Watson—C.B. Watson—and Professor Watson was a superb teacher who really worked hard with his students. I remember at the end of my second year I was really struggling, wondering whether or not I was going to be an architect or whether I should go off and join the army. Through a series of events he convinced me I should stay, and he helped me get over some difficult times. From that time on I did much better in school, and I always appreciated that. This last time, two weeks ago, when I was out at Iowa State, Professor Watson, who is now in his eighties, showed up at a dinner that we had. I'm sure somebody must have prompted him, because when I walked over to him, he called me by name. We chatted a few minutes about my days in his classes. We were chatting, and he said, "What year were you?" I said, "I was the class of 1954." He said, "You know, Bill, I remember all of you, but you've all just merged into one great big class." I thought that was an interesting thing for a professor to say. As I said, I'm sure somebody must have prompted him, because I'm sure he could not have remembered. It's been forty years since I saw the man. But he did remember a number of incidents

3 that he couldn't have been prompted on, and we chatted for maybe thirty minutes before we all had to sit down and be nice to our table mates. It was an interesting experience to go back to school. Iowa State was an interesting period of my life. Oddly enough, I don't have a great soft spot in my heart for my old alma mater. I've said this before. I've said it to the president of the university. At Iowa State I remember my principal feeling when I left there was one of great relief because Iowa State was a difficult school, and they really made us earn our degree. I think it was a good education because I did learn a great deal there, but I never felt a kind of camaraderie with them until the last three or four years when I've been going out on this advisory group. But I kind of enjoy it. I remember I graduated on June 11—I don't know why I remember that—and I came to Chicago ten days later and went to work for the Illinois Central Railroad. I think you and I met when I was with the railroad, didn't we?

Benjamin: I remember visiting you at the Illinois Central, and my strongest recollection was your file drawer.

Hasbrouck: What was that?

Benjamin: I remember you had what I viewed as a whole lot of treasures.

Hasbrouck: Oh, yes. I remember that, too.

Benjamin: You were a collector.

Hasbrouck: Of stuff about Chicago. Well, I came to Chicago and worked for the railroad. I had some family history. Some of my relatives had worked for other railroads, and it seemed like a good job. Besides that, they offered me a very generous salary at the time, I thought.

Benjamin: That's compelling.

Hasbrouck: I was there, actually, for thirteen years, with two years out for the army.

4 Benjamin: Tell me how you came to work for the railroad.

Hasbrouck: Well, I was interviewed.

Benjamin: Did you have a relative?

Hasbrouck: I had a relative who worked for another railroad. He worked for the Milwaukee Road, an uncle who was just a little older than I was, so I was always kind of interested in railroads. I graduated in 1954 at a time when it was really quite easy to get jobs.

Benjamin: It was?

Hasbrouck: Yes. It was a fairly small class. It was one of the smallest classes since the Second World War. The big move where so many of the G.I. Bill people were in school had pretty much gone away, and it was before the baby boom started. I think there were only twenty people in my class, and we all had several job offers, mostly from industry rather than from architectural offices.

Benjamin: Did you have other job offers?

Hasbrouck: Oh, yes. We all had several. But I wanted to come to Chicago because I just did.

Benjamin: Why?

Hasbrouck: It didn't have anything to do with the so much as the idea of coming to a big city. I wanted to get away from a tiny town, and so I came to Chicago and literally never left except for brief trips. My education in the restoration of historic buildings, when you come right down to it, can be traced to my work at the Illinois Central Railroad. At the time, I was there in the building department. I sort of progressed through the ranks and ended up as architectural engineer just before I left. We had, if memory serves,

5 something like seven or eight thousand buildings all over the Midwestern , many of which were extremely well built and designed by fine architects. The Illinois Central was, as far as I know, the only client that ever hired three times.

Benjamin: Tell me about that.

Hasbrouck: Sullivan built two suburban stations and the passenger station in New Orleans for the Illinois Central Railroad. In fact, when I was there I looked up the drawings.

Benjamin: That's interesting. Did that spark your interest?

Hasbrouck: My interest in the history of Chicago architecture really started when I was still single and I was living in Hyde Park. On a weekend, I'd walk around and look at buildings of various kinds. One of the things that I was interested in was Louis Sullivan, because his brother Albert had been a vice-president with the Illinois Central, and anyone in architecture was interested in Sullivan, although there was very little information available about Sullivan in those days. I did see a couple of Wright's buildings in Hyde Park. Oddly enough, I didn't go to the Robie house—not at that time.

Benjamin: What did you see?

Hasbrouck: I saw the and the Blossom house, and I walked up to roughly Forty-third Street one day and saw Louis Sullivan's own house that he actually built for his brother Albert, which was still in very good shape in those days.

Benjamin: This would have been when?

Hasbrouck: Either the fall of 1954 or the spring of 1955. Then I was drafted and I went off to the army for a couple of years. While I was in the army, I was in most of the time, and I read a few books on . We all knew

6 about Wright, but I had not been greatly enamored of him. When I came out of the service I remember going to Kroch's and Brentano's shortly after I got out, and Frank Lloyd Wright's book The Natural House had been published, and I bought a copy. It was not about Wright's earlier work; it was about his later work. I still have that book, by the way. I read that and I got interested in Wright a little further. One thing led to another, and I started haunting the used book stores around Chicago and buying things about early Chicago.

Benjamin: I probably saw some of that in your bottom drawer.

Hasbrouck: Probably. I don't know if you know this or not, but in the late fifties and early sixties, there were probably half a dozen major out-of-print book shops in the Loop where you could go on your noon hour and dig around and find things. I used to do that quite a bit. About a year after I got out of the army, Marilyn and I were married, in August of 1958. Marilyn, who was a teacher at that time, came back to Chicago with me, and she taught here in Chicago.

Benjamin: How did you meet?

Hasbrouck: I went home at Christmas, and my uncle who worked for the other railroad actually introduced us because his fiancée—later his wife—was a close friend of Marilyn's. We met in my hometown. I had a pass on the railroad so I could to see her on a regular basis. I used to get on the train on Friday night, go to Iowa and come back on Monday morning. But after we were married a little over a year, I suppose, we took a Saturday afternoon trip downtown. Marilyn really didn't know downtown very much. We were living in Park Forest at the time. I think it was about a year or so after we were married. Anyway, we had our firstborn son with us. It was a beautiful fall afternoon, and we went to the University of Chicago because Marilyn wanted to see the University of Chicago, just to see the campus, and we went to the Robie house. That was the first time I saw the Robie house. It was probably in the fall of 1959, October or November or something like that. We looked at the house. I still have a picture of Charles, the baby, sitting on the wall next to the Robie house. You can only look at the outside of Robie house for so long—we

7 couldn't get in—and we walked down the street to the Oriental Institute, which is still at the university, and looked at all the Egyptian things and just had a pleasant afternoon. As we were leaving, there was a bulletin board, and on that bulletin board was a postcard inviting people to come to a meeting of the Chicago Heritage Committee. The Chicago Heritage Committee was the grandfather of all of the preservation groups in Chicago. I knew some of the people who were already in this group because I had in the year or so before, from time to time on my noon hour, gone down into the Loop and spent some time carrying a picket sign in front of the Schiller building and Garrick theatre.

Benjamin: How did you happen to do that?

Hasbrouck: I was interested in Wright and Sullivan, and we were getting a lot of newspaper publicity about the Garrick being torn down. I'd go down on my noon hour, and that's where I met John Vinci and Richard Nickel who were heavily involved in this sort of thing.

Benjamin: So you just took it upon yourself to do that.

Hasbrouck: Just for the fun of it because I thought it was terrible that they were tearing this building down. By the way, I never went in the Garrick before it was torn down. I've always regretted that. But anyway, we saw this sign saying that they were having a meeting of the Chicago Heritage Committee, and they were going to talk about the Garrick theatre. It was at Ben Weese's office—Harry Weese's office—which was when Harry's office was on Michigan Avenue, roughly at or somewhere like that. Anyway, we went to this meeting and we met Tom Stauffer. Remember Tom Stauffer?

Benjamin: Yes.

Hasbrouck: Tom Stauffer was a strange, wonderful man. He was very interested in the whole idea of preservation of historic buildings, but he wasn't very knowledgeable about historic buildings. He was much more interested in the

8 political process than he was in the buildings per se. He had kind of an interesting background. He was the—I don't know what they called him—the administrative assistant or something like that to Congressman Barrett O'Hara. Barrett O'Hara was an old-time Chicago pal who had represented the Hyde Park community for many years, and Tom was his local representative. Tom was very interested in the whole political process of trying to save buildings. He had already been interested in the Garrick theatre because of the several movements of trying to save the building. Mayor [Richard J.] Daley had been approached by a number of people. There were several attorneys involved. Cal Sawyer was involved, Len Despres was involved, Richard Nickel was involved. All of these various people had tried very hard to get the mayor to save the Garrick theatre, but, of course, eventually it was torn down. Tom and Dick Nickel formed this group called the Chicago Heritage Committee, which was to be a group of interested civic- minded citizens who were supposed to help save the Garrick. I remember Tom saying at a meeting at his house, "We'll never save the Garrick, but we may be able to get a law so they won't be able to do this kind of thing again." And he was right. We didn't save the Garrick, but they did get the enabling legislation at the state level, and, later on, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks was organized as a result of that.

Benjamin: Who were some of the people on that committee, like Richard Nickel?

Hasbrouck: The committee, there weren't a lot of people. Alfonso Iannelli was a...

Benjamin: The sculptor?

Hasbrouck: The sculptor. He was heavily involved, as was Ruth Blackwell, his longtime companion.

Benjamin: Who was she?

Hasbrouck: Alfonso's wife was ill in a mental institute for twenty-five or thirty years. He was never divorced, but he lived as husband and wife with Ruth Blackwell,

9 who was a graphic designer and sculptor in her own right. She was a delightful person. They're both gone now. Ben Weese, of course, was involved. There was a guy named Ted Barber who was a close friend of Ben's from his days in the military. I never knew what ever happened to Ted.

Benjamin: Who was he?

Hasbrouck: I don't even know what Ted Barber's work was, but he and Ben had become friends when they were both conscientious objectors from the military during the Second World War. There was Jeanne Alinsky—Saul Alinsky's ex-wife was heavily involved in this.

Benjamin: You mentioned Saul Alinsky.

Hasbrouck: Saul Alinsky was a radical community organizer who worked in Hyde Park, and Jeanne Alinsky was his wife for a long time. Then they had a falling-out and she continued to do this kind of thing on her own. But she was not a radical person, as Saul was. Let's see, who else? Carl Condit was very much involved. At that time he was a professor of technology, I think he called himself. Carl was at that time writing The Chicago School of Architecture, which has become sort of the basic book on the history of the big buildings in Chicago, and he was very interested in the idea of finding a way to preserve historic buildings. Maurice English was very much involved. Maurice was the senior editor at the University of Chicago Press. He published Carl's books. I'm sure that's why the two of them were there. As I said, Nickel was there. There were some news people who always showed up. Let's see, who else?

Benjamin: Was Harry Weese involved?

Hasbrouck: Harry was never involved. Harry was never on the Heritage Committee.

Benjamin: Why do you think he wasn't?

10 Hasbrouck: I don't know. I had never even met him during that period. I used to see him from time to time in the office, but I didn't meet him during those days. Ben was the one that did all this. Let's see, there were others.

Benjamin: Ruth Moore?

Hasbrouck: Ruth Moore used to come regularly. She was with the Chicago Daily News. But there were two other women from the press who showed up very regularly. Gigi Geyer used to show up—Georgie Anne Geyer.

Benjamin: What did she do?

Hasbrouck: She was a reporter for the Daily News at the time, and she now, of course, is a syndicated writer and appears from time to time on things like "Washington Week in Review" and so forth. Lois Wille used to show up, who recently retired as—what was she? She was the editor of the editorial page for the Tribune. These people used to write about historic preservation issues.

Benjamin: Lois Wille wrote the book Forever Open, Free and Clear on the lakefront. These were pretty significant people.

Hasbrouck: But they were all in their twenties and thirties. None of them were prominent at the time. I remember there was an attorney.

Benjamin: Cal Sawyer?

Hasbrouck: Cal Sawyer used to show up, but he's not the one I'm trying to think of. He was interested in the idea of putting together a law that would protect architectural heritage. As a matter of fact, the enabling legislation in Illinois was written by Cal Sawyer. I think he also had a great deal to do with the original Chicago landmarks law, although that was later revised substantially. But he used to show up. As I said a moment ago, there were never huge groups of people, and there would be people who would show up for a little while. Ben Weese and Ted Barber and me and Tom Stauffer and

11 Dick Nickel and people like that were the ones who kind of always showed up.

Benjamin: Where did you meet?

Hasbrouck: We met for a long time in Ben's office, or Harry's office, which was up on Michigan Avenue. I remember we did other things after the Garrick was gone. We quarreled with the Art Institute about the use of the Ferguson Fund money to build the Morton Wing of the Art Institute. They built two wings on the Art Institute, and they used Ferguson Fund money. We took the position that that should not be done.

Benjamin: Why?

Hasbrouck: Because the Ferguson Fund money was left to provide public sculpture. We actually kind of won that argument. It was too late because the money was already spent, but they agreed not to do it again and they don't do it anymore. I don't know where the Ferguson Fund money is today, but at that time it was… I remember Marilyn and I were picketing when she was about two or three weeks short of delivering our second child, and we still have a picture of her out in front of the Art Institute picketing. She may not approve of my talking about such things, but it helps date the event. It was 1961. Anyway, the Heritage Committee did a lot of things, trying to make the public aware of our architectural heritage. I remember once we had a long meeting where we decided that we should encourage the to have an architectural critic.

Benjamin: Were there no architectural critics?

Hasbrouck: There was no architectural critic in Chicago. The nearest thing to it was Ruth Moore. We sent off a letter to them—I think it was over Stauffer's signature—telling them that they reviewed books so why can't they review buildings, and there was a short letter back. The editor wrote back and told him that they had tried it in the past and found that there was hardly any

12 interest at all and so they weren't planning to do it. Obviously, since then we have had some very distinguished critics.

Benjamin: At this time were there critics in New York? Was Ada Louise Huxtable writing?

Hasbrouck: I don't know if Ada Louise was, but I know that there were several distinguished critics writing in New York, and St. Louis had a fine critic. But Chicago did not have a critic.

Benjamin: What did Ruth Moore cover for the Sun-Times?

Hasbrouck: She wrote primarily about planning issues and public policy issues. She rarely wrote about individual buildings, but sometimes she would. Bill Newman started writing at about that time, and Bill used to show up at these meetings. He's still around.

Benjamin: I know.

Hasbrouck: Although he never really was a critic in the usual sense. He didn't want to be. He wanted to be a reporter. He didn't think of himself as a critic, although he became a critic almost by default. I always thought he did a pretty good job. He wrote for the Daily News. But anyway, we failed at getting the Tribune to put on a critic.

Benjamin: Was this in the late 1950s?

Hasbrouck: The early sixties. Then during the mid-sixties, the Chicago Heritage Committee continued to do various things. We never had any money, so we decided that a way we could both raise the level of interest in architecture in Chicago and to raise money was to have a walk showing Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Oak Park, so we decided we'd have the first Frank Lloyd Wright house walk. I think this was in 1963.

13 Benjamin: Was there nothing like that before?

Hasbrouck: There had not been, no. I don't remember who did it, but one of the guys knew Bill Walker, who at that time owned the Winslow house. Mr. Walker died recently, but he and his wife were very, very generous. They said, "Oh, we think it would be a good idea to have a Frank Lloyd Wright walk. We'll open the Winslow house." There were a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright houses for sale in Oak Park, so we went to the real estate agent and said, "Look, we can bring a hundred people to look at your houses if you'll let us open them." We went to the and got them to open it. We agreed to split the money with them. We eventually, I think, had five buildings either open or partially open. We had the Unity Temple, the Winslow house, these two houses that were for sale, and I think the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. They let us walk around but not inside. We thought maybe we'd get a couple hundred people. Then we borrowed Frank Lloyd Wright artifacts from various people. I remember we borrowed some furniture from Mrs. Lloyd Lewis who built the Lloyd Lewis house.

Benjamin: That was a later house.

Hasbrouck: Yes. And we borrowed some of Iannelli's material. At the last minute, somebody had the idea—I think it was Stauffer. He said, "We ought to get the Robie house furniture," and somebody said, "Where is it?" and he said, "Well, it's in the attic of the Chicago Theological Seminary."

Benjamin: Which owned the Robie house at that time.

Hasbrouck: Yes. I don't even know how he knew this. But Ted Barber borrowed a truck from his employer, and Stauffer and Barber and I went out to the University of Chicago on a Saturday afternoon and carried out about twenty pieces of Frank Lloyd Wright's furniture that had been stored in the attic of the theological seminary for I don't know how many years. We carried this down the stairway, piled it in the back of this truck, took it all out to Oak Park, put it in the Unity Temple meeting room, and all of us brought our wives and

14 girlfriends and others. The stuff was terribly dirty, and we spent all of Saturday afternoon and Saturday night washing it. We had all this wonderful furniture, which nobody cared about except us, and we had this marvelous exhibit of material.

Benjamin: Up until that time had there ever been an exhibition of Prairie School furniture?

Hasbrouck: No, I don't think so, not as far as I know. We also borrowed some furniture from the Thurber Art Gallery. The Thurber Art Gallery was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in roughly 1910. I don't know the exact date. It was in the Fine Arts building, and he designed several pieces of furniture for it. Later when the Thurber Gallery moved, they took the furniture with them, and it was in a little shop on Van Buren Street. At that time the original owner, or one of the owners at that time, had died and they were going to dispose of this furniture, so they thought it would be a good idea to let us use the furniture and get a little advertising out of it. So we had some of that stuff, too. We must have had forty or fifty major pieces of Wright furniture in this show. Anyway, Sunday morning comes, and we couldn't start the thing until after the church service. When the church service was over, it started to rain and it poured the rest of the day. We still had hundreds of people come and stand in the rain.

Benjamin: This was all free?

Hasbrouck: No, we charged a dollar a person. Our net was about $350, so for the first time in history, the Chicago Heritage Committee had some money. We used it for all kinds of things; among other things, a newsletter of which Marilyn was the editor. But in any case, we did it again the next year and then we didn't do it anymore, but it's still done. It's called Wright Plus today. That's how the Wright thing got started. We only did it two years, but we had great luck.

Benjamin: At that time, what was the state of Wright’s home and studio?

15 Hasbrouck: It was essentially abandoned. There was a lady named Mrs. Nooker who owned his building. She occupied a portion of it, as I recall, but it was in terrible shape. It wasn't until at least five or six or maybe ten years later that the National Trust got involved. But in any case, what those few hundred dollars did for us was it permitted us to start publishing a newsletter. We did this newsletter for a couple of years.

Benjamin: Are copies available anywhere?

Hasbrouck: Well, I have some of them. I may even have them all. We did a number of things. We would write articles about buildings that were endangered and things of that nature. I remember one time someone found out that you could still go to the Chicago Tribune and buy a copy of the Competition. Remember that book with all the competition drawings?

Benjamin: Yes.

Hasbrouck: If you found one today it would be like $1,500. Then they were still selling them for two bucks, and they were in their original package. So we bought about twenty of them, and we offered them for four bucks and raised a few dollars that way. We were always doing things like that. Among other things we did, we assembled all of the clippings about the demolition of the Garrick theatre into one scrapbook. Marilyn and I did that at home on our dining room table. We did that after the first meeting of the Heritage Committee. I remember Stauffer told me years later that after he gave us this big box full of clippings and told us to bring it back in a month all put in a scrapbook, he wondered who in the world these crazy people were whom he was giving this wonderful treasure of material to. But we had fun doing that, and we assembled all that stuff.

Benjamin: Where is that scrapbook now?

Hasbrouck: It's at the Art Institute library.

16 Benjamin: Was Garrick the first great loss?

Hasbrouck: Not really. I think the Republic was the first great loss.

Benjamin: How did that come down?

Hasbrouck: I don't remember for sure, but it was at about the same time. It may have been a little later, but the Republic was in there, too.

Benjamin: What was the first loss that made people take notice?

Hasbrouck: I think the Garrick was the first time people really made an issue of the loss of an historic building, yes, and it sort of coalesced people. It got the enabling legislation passed, and it got the landmarks law in Chicago passed. It was a key element in the whole preservation movement in Chicago.

Benjamin: How did it lead to the passing of the enabling legislation?

Hasbrouck: Because everyone was angry. Cal Sawyer agreed to write the basic legislation, and it was passed.

Benjamin: So it seemed like the committee was pretty effective.

Hasbrouck: The Heritage Committee had a lot of people who were willing to work very hard and through Tom Stauffer's efforts got an inordinate amount of publicity for their activities. We used to get in the paper all the time because Stauffer knew a lot of people in the press, and it just gradually built up kind of a public reservoir of interest.

Benjamin: What was Mayor Daley's role in all of this then?

Hasbrouck: A lot of people condemn Mayor Daley because he didn't save the Garrick theatre, and I really don't know what his position was at the time of the

17 Garrick because I wasn't there, close enough. I'm not really fully familiar with how Mayor Daley acted or didn't act on the Garrick Theatre. I suspect he could have done more—I'm sure he could have done more—but I think he learned from it. The reason I say that was that some years later in the late sixties when the Chicago Stock Exchange was being destroyed, I was a lot closer to it. I came to work for the American Institute of Architects in January of 1968 when the destruction of the Stock Exchange was an issue and we were losing the battle. I remember meeting from time to time with the mayor to talk about this, and I always had the impression that Mayor Daley really wanted to save the building but that he couldn't figure out how to do it. He knew that he would alienate some of his developer friends and powerful business interests, but he couldn't figure out how to save it without alienating these people, and people like me really didn't have any influence. But I got the impression that he would have liked to. Whether I'm right or wrong, I just don't know. We'll come back and talk about my relationship with Mayor Daley on other matters later on. But anyway, the Heritage Committee, which I said earlier was the sort of grandfather of all the preservation groups. Most of those people were involved in things like the Society of Architectural Historians.

Benjamin: Was that group strong in Chicago at all then?

Hasbrouck: The SAH? No, not really. It was a group of people who were just interested in architectural history. It's where I first met a number of people who were later involved in all these things. But in the mid-sixties, the biggest boost to preservation in Chicago was a success story that was essentially the Glessner house. Some people would argue with that statement, but I believe that the activities in saving the Glessner house probably brought more interest to the preservation movement than anything else because there were so many people who finally got involved in it.

Benjamin: How did that happen?

18 Hasbrouck: The Glessner house was kind of an anonymous historic building for a long time in Chicago. It was a Henry Hobson Richardson building, of course, and it was lived in by the Glessners until the mid-thirties. Oddly enough, Mr. Glessner actually left the house to the American Institute of Architects, and they had to refuse to accept it because they had no money to maintain it. Eventually it was sold to the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation, which was an organization or a professional society of lithographers—sort of an experimental thing—and they used the house from roughly 1940 until roughly 1965, about twenty-five years. During that period, they didn't damage the house much, but they didn't do very much for it, either. They did funny things like they converted the kitchen into a darkroom because it was all painted black. But they used it for offices and things of that nature. Other things happened down there, too, and I'm truncating this story. In the mid- sixties, they moved to Pittsburgh, I believe it was, and left the house vacant. There were a few people, primarily Harry Weese, who were very concerned that this building was a major national treasure, and it was in grave danger of being bought by a developer and destroyed. The price was $70,000. That's what they wanted for it. Someone, probably Harry, got in touch with Philip Johnson in New York. Philip at that time was really at the heyday of his architectural practice. He was a wealthy man who was very interested in this sort of thing. Philip said that he would put $70,000 up to buy the building if somebody would take the house and maintain it in perpetuity. That's when a group of people, mostly from the old Chicago Heritage Committee but others as well, got together and decided that we had to make this happen. There was Ben Weese and Paul Lurie and Wayne Benjamin and Jim Schultz and myself and a young man named Richard Wintergreen, who was working for Mies at the time.

[Tape 1: Side 2]

Hasbrouck: We were trying very hard to find a way to save the Glessner house. The prime mover in all of this was Ben Weese, and, of course, behind the scenes was Harry, who obviously was an important international figure in architecture who couldn't spend a lot of time on this. But anyway, Ben spent

19 a lot of time on it, and we talked to numerous people. We talked to the Art Institute of Chicago and we talked to the University of Chicago and we talked to the Chicago Historical Society and we talked to lots of groups. Finally, we got the University of Illinois at Circle, the Department of Architecture, to agree to take this house. The chairman at that time was Don Hanson, and Don was kind of a flamboyant guy who thought it would be a great coup if the university took this building and incorporated it into the university. So everything was going well until, believe it or not, the whole thing was shot down because the janitorial staff at the university refused to maintain the building, which was not on campus. At least that's what I was told. So the whole deal fell through and we didn't have a buyer and Philip's six-month commitment on the $70,000 was running out. In fact, it did run out, so we were really at a loss as to what to do. So then we decided, well, if we can't get anybody else to do it, we'll form our own organization. I don't remember all the circumstances, but several people got together and we talked about it over and over, usually at the house.

Benjamin: Was the house vacant at this point?

Hasbrouck: The house was vacant, right. Eventually, there were some key people who got involved. Marian and Len Despres got involved. Marian, of course, is the daughter of Alfred Alschuler, who was a prominent architect and actually was a partner of 's son. She has two brothers who are architects. She did it anonymously at the time, but she and Len put up $5,000 to help organize this group. Phyllis Lambert of the Bronfman family, who was in Chicago at the time, had been heavily involved with Philip Johnson in New York with the Seagram building. She agreed to help.

Benjamin: Was she working for Mies van der Rohe at the time?

Hasbrouck: No, she never worked for Mies but she had an office in Chicago. She had taken her master's degree at IIT and she had an office here. The Murphy family at that time controlled the Graham Foundation, and they put up $5,000. I think SOM put up $5,000, Perkins and Will put up $5,000 and Harry

20 Weese put up $5,000. In $5,000 increments there was roughly $25,000 raised, which was about a third of what we needed to buy the house. So Ben and Harry went to New York and met with Philip Johnson. Ben tells the story much better than I, but I understand they were walking down Fifth Avenue in a big hurry because Philip was going somewhere, trying to convince him to put his money back in the kitty. Finally, to get rid of him I suppose, Philip said, "I'll put $10,000 up, and that's it." And so now we had $35,000, which was half of what we needed. We met at the house, and there was a wonderful man named Irving Berman who was Paul Lurie's father-in-law. Mr. Berman said, "Look, you guys, you've got thirty-five grand. They have no other buyer. Why don't you just tell them, 'We'll pay you the $35,000 and we'll take the house off your hands'?" Well, why not? We've got nothing to lose. Now, how to get our representatives to Pittsburgh to make the offer, and Mr. Berman put $500 up.

Benjamin: Pittsburgh was where the...

Hasbrouck: Where the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation was headquartered. So Mr. Berman put in $500, and we bought a couple of airline tickets. I believe Paul Lurie and Richard Wintergreen went out, and sure enough, they made the deal. We bought the house. We then owned the house. We didn't even have an organization yet, I don't think. But in any case, in a very short time we formed the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation, and the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation then owned the Glessner house and we moved forward on preserving it. It was, in my judgment at least, a direct outgrowth of the old Chicago Heritage Committee. I don't think the CSAF would have happened if we had not had the Heritage Committee before. It was a different organization, but mostly or a lot of the same people.

Benjamin: What happened to Tom Stauffer?

Hasbrouck: That's a good question, because some time about then Tom had some various kinds of problems which caused him to move out of the city. He went to and lived out there for fifteen years and died a few years ago. But

21 Tom has to be looked upon as kind of a catalyst for this whole thing. He didn't personally do these things, but he made other people do them. That's what Tom did. He was a catalyst, and I'll always remember Tom for doing that. But in any case the foundation was formed. They took the word "school" out of it, but it still exists. It's probably the foremost preservation-oriented group in Chicago, but it's not the only one. Because a short time after that foundation was formed, and in response to the fact that the Chicago Stock Exchange was being destroyed, there was another equally important and parallel group formed called the Landmarks Preservation Council. The Landmarks Preservation Council was formed by a guy named Richard Miller who was an attorney with no architectural background that I remember. His wife Joan was heavily involved in all this, too. The two of them were very concerned about this, and Richard was kind of a bulldog. I mean, he didn't give up on anything.

Benjamin: How did he come to preservation?

Hasbrouck: I don't know. I really can't remember. But I think he was a little bit like Stauffer in that he was more interested in the process than he was in the product, and he was interested in it from a legal point of view. How can you save a building legally? How can you force the public to do the right thing? Richard had some problems. He was not a very diplomatic person. He managed somehow to alienate a lot of people, but he was a doer and he organized the Landmarks Preservation Council. As a matter of fact, I was on the original board. The original purpose of the LPC was to save the Stock Exchange. Like many other buildings, the Stock Exchange was destroyed, but the idea lived on in LPC.

Benjamin: And the Stock Exchange arch is the logo of the Landmarks Preservation Council.

Hasbrouck: Yes, it is. Of course, it was during the Stock Exchange fiasco that Richard Nickel was killed because he was trying to salvage pieces out of the building. But in any case these two groups have survived and probably done more for

22 the whole preservation activity in Chicago and Illinois and the United States than any other similar groups that I know of.

Benjamin: It's interesting to me that it started out of Richard Miller's legal interests, and today LPCI—now it's Landmark Preservation Council of Illinois—has a very strong role in advocacy.

Hasbrouck: Yes, they do. That's true.

Benjamin: What did you do in relation to the Landmarks Preservation Council?

Hasbrouck: I didn't do a great deal with the LPC. What I did there was primarily lend the mantle of respectability because I was then the director of the American Institute of Architects. We tried very hard when I was with the AIA. I joined the AIA as the executive director in January of 1968 after thirteen years with the railroad. I had two tasks—well, actually three. One, I had to serve as administrator; two, I was to prepare for the national convention in 1969, and, three, I was to see what I could do about the problem of landmarks in Chicago, essentially the Stock Exchange. There were a lot of architects at that time in Chicago who really didn't want to be associated with the landmarks preservation movement.

Benjamin: Why?

Hasbrouck: Because they thought they would cut themselves out of potential development prospects. There were some, on the other hand, who didn't think like that. I remember one of my favorite stories. There is an architect who is now retired, I believe, named Hans Neumann. Hans Neumann in those days was with C.F. Murphy Associates, and C.F. Murphy Associates was the to be the architect for the new project on the site of the Stock Exchange. Hans took great pride in the fact that he was the one who walked across town and told the developer that they wanted no part of it.

Benjamin: Who was the developer?

23 Hasbrouck: The guy's name was Bill Friedman. He was the prime developer. I remember debating Bill Friedman in the lobby of the Stock Exchange one day in front of TV cameras on why the Stock Exchange should be saved. This was one of the most insensitive human beings I ever met in my entire life. He had absolutely no understanding of why we were trying to save this building, and eventually, of course, they succeeded in tearing it down. The only satisfaction I ever got out of any of this was the fact that the building that they built went bankrupt later on. Nevertheless, the Stock Exchange was lost. Hans Neumann was one of a few who felt that the preservation movement had merit.

Benjamin: Who were the others?

Hasbrouck: Ben and Harry, Larry Perkins, people like that. I'm not going to name the ones who testified against the Stock Exchange, but there were some.

Benjamin: Were there many?

Hasbrouck: Yes, quite a few. This was a source of considerable problem for me when I was with the AIA.

Benjamin: Why?

Hasbrouck: Well, I was hired to take the heat off of the profession by being an advocate for preservation, but there were a number of architects around town who didn't believe in preservation, and they were paying my salary. Now, oddly enough, it didn't take very long for the architectural profession to realize that there was a lot more benefit in being on the side of the angels than there was to being on the side of those who demolished buildings. As time went by, gradually the movement gained strength from some unlikely sources.

Benjamin: Such as?

24 Hasbrouck: Well, like various people at SOM, for example.

Benjamin: The partners?

Hasbrouck: The partners. Well, William Hartmann eventually became a supporter of the preservation movement.

Benjamin: What did he do for preservation?

Hasbrouck: That's hard to say. I don't know how to define this. In fact, I can't give you specifics, but he no longer objected to it. I think that's an important point. People like Bill Dunlap who originally thought it was just silly eventually came around to agreeing that it was important.

Benjamin: Was he a partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, too?

Hasbrouck: Right. Some people like Walter Netsch always were in favor of it but never did much for it. I hate to say this, but Walter paid a lot of lip service to preservation, but he never understood preservation. I'll give you an example. Walter was the architect for the Adlai Stevenson Institute, which took over the Robie house in the mid-sixties. I don't remember the exact date. Under his direction, there was a major effort made to renovate the Robie house—not restore it, although he referred to it as restoration. They converted the garage to offices and they converted the servants' quarters to offices and they revised the kitchen and so forth and so on. Many years later my office had the task of doing a master plan for the restoration of Robie house—we just finished it a few months ago—and our plan calls for a genuine restoration of the house, which is what should be done. It's one of the most important houses in the world. A few months ago, I had lunch with Walter, and we were talking about all the work we had gone through to define the boundaries and what had to be done on this restoration. Walter's comment was, "I don't understand why you need to do this. We did it before. We did it several years ago, and it was an excellent plan then and it still is." I said, "Well, what do you think about converting the garage to offices?" He said, "A wonderful use,

25 ideal, a perfect situation." But it wasn't, in my opinion. You don't convert the garage of one of the great original urban houses to office space. It just isn't done. I don't mean to criticize Walter, because he's done some great things, but the point is that a restoration architect, a preservationist, has to understand that what you're preserving is what the original architect designed. It's very important to understand this. You don't have the right to improve 's work or Frank Lloyd Wright's work or Louis Sullivan's work. The reason it's important is because of what they did, not because of what I did. If you don't understand that, you shouldn't be involved in it. There aren't very many buildings that require…

Benjamin: What do you think about what happened at the Glessner house in those years?

Hasbrouck: Some of the same problems happened at Glessner house.

Benjamin: There was a lot of remodeling.

Hasbrouck: There was some remodeling. There were two things done at Glessner house that never should have been done, one of which can be reversed and the other which probably can't. In order to make the Glessner house work, shortly after we got it—a couple of years, I suppose—we needed tenants. We needed somebody who could pay rent to keep that house open. My involvement was twofold. One, I was the president of the Glessner House Foundation at that time, but I was also the executive director of the American Institute of Architects for Chicago and Illinois. The AIA lost its lease at the U.S. Gypsum building. We had been paying $750 a month in rent, and they doubled the rent and wanted to give us a short-term lease, and we simply couldn't afford that. So I sat down with myself and negotiated a deal to move the AIA to Glessner house. The deal was that the AIA would continue to pay $750 a month and they could use the house or a certain portion of it for offices and meeting rooms, and the rest of the house could be used from time to time for receptions and things of that nature. Part of the deal involved members of the AIA paying for the renovation that had to be done to make

26 this space habitable. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill did the primary work. What happened was, the second floor bedroom wing, if you will—there were four bedrooms on the second floor front that were essentially converted to offices, and the two middle bedrooms, which had a wall between them, were converted into one large room. I remember discussing that with the powers- that-be at SOM and insisting that the materials that were taken out of the space be stored in the basement of Glessner house so it could be put back. I don't know if those pieces are still there or not, but that was done at the time. So these four rooms were converted to one big room plus two smaller rooms, and it served its purpose very well. The AIA was there for six years. It was an expedient measure to a certain degree, but the fact is that if we hadn't done that, the Glessner house would not have had enough money to stay alive, so we did that. The other change, which was unfortunate, was to a room that was Mrs. Glessner's garden room, for want of a better term, on the second floor. It was essentially kind of a greenhouse in the center of the building, with a glass skylight, that had never been finished, in the usual sense, as living quarters. It was a place where she raised plants and did her hobbies and had a potter's wheel. A good friend of ours, Jim Hammond, who was a fine architect and a wonderful man, offered to redesign that space into a little auditorium, and he did that with, I presume, the help of Tom Beeby, who was his partner. They designed an elegant little auditorium that's in that space in the Glessner house, and I've always argued that it was a terrible program. It was a beautiful room but a terrible program that should never have happened because that changed the house. This is too important a building to add something that was never there, and the fact is that it will never be reversed now. It can't be, I don't think, reversed anymore. It made a change to the second floor of Glessner house that never existed when the Glessners were there. That wasn't necessary. We should not have permitted it to happen. I've always been disappointed about that. There were some other things done at Glessner house that were also bad. Dan Brenner, who was one of the great architects of Chicago, elected to make some major changes in the garden of Glessner house. He put in a fountain and a granite paved area and so forth, which really has no historic relation to the house at all. Though it's a pleasant area to have meetings and walk around and have a glass of wine.

27 Benjamin: Why did he do it?

Hasbrouck: I don't think it was all his idea. I think various people thought it would be a good idea to have the garden set up so that they could have outdoor meetings. But I don't know that for certain. I really don't know who made that decision. But again, there we had a situation where they provided an elegant design for a terrible program. That could be reversed. That could be put back, and I frankly hope that it will be put back someday. But the rest of the Glessner house is essentially intact. It could be restored quite well. I understand that a historic structures report has just been finished on the house.

Benjamin: Walker Johnson just completed that.

Hasbrouck: Walker is a fine architect, so I'm going to guess that he probably did a pretty good job. But I haven't seen it, and I'm looking forward to seeing it. The Glessner house is one of the very few buildings that really deserves to be properly restored and continued in use. I don't really believe in house museums very much, but Glessner house is one that could be and should be a house museum.

Benjamin: Do you know that the foundation is thinking that they want to sell the property?

Hasbrouck: Yes, I've heard. I know a good deal about that. The Chicago Architecture Foundation owns Glessner house, and the Glessner house was the root of the foundation. The foundation was organized to buy it, and a few years after they bought it, in order to support Glessner house, they started giving tours of Chicago architecture, for which they charged fees. They were very successful, and they're still successful. They do very well. They take thousands of people on tours of Chicago architecture every year. They actually organized an office—an outlet, if you will—in the Loop, which is called the Archicenter, and the Archicenter sells books and conducts tours.

28 They also have lectures and things of that nature. Anyway, the idea of having these tours and lectures was to generate money to support Glessner house. Now the downtown operation has become so successful that the current board of trustees looks upon Glessner house as a drain upon their funds. They forget that the whole reason for their being was Glessner house. So they have suggested that perhaps there ought to be two organizations, one to operate Glessner house and another to continue the educational aspects which are carried out by the Archicenter. At first I was very disturbed by this, and I thought it was wrong for them to do it, but it didn't take very long to realize that this was going to happen whether I liked it or not. So rather than struggle with it and fight it, I think those of us who are interested in Glessner house should find a way to turn this into an opportunity.

Benjamin: What would you suggest?

Hasbrouck: Let's see if we can't make Glessner house what it was originally intended to be in the first place; that is, a center of activities in the history of architecture. Whether or not we can do that, I don't know, but we have a lot going for us. The biggest problem with Glessner house is the old real estate problem of location, location, location. It's never been located in the mainstream of activity in Chicago. It's at Eighteenth and Prairie. Nobody goes there, you know. They have relatively few visitors there, less than 10,000 a year, I think, which is not very many. But in the past few years that area has begun to change positively. You know, Mayor [Richard M.] Daley only lives a couple of blocks away from Glessner house.

Benjamin: Where does he live?

Hasbrouck: He lives at Fourteenth and . There is quite a large and elegant development where the mayor lives, and it's only a few blocks from Glessner house. Furthermore, McCormick Place has now moved across the Illinois Central tracks at Twenty-third Street, and there is no question in my mind that the development at Central Station, as they call it, where the mayor lives, and the development at Twenty-third and King Drive, which is McCormick

29 Place, will eventually close in. Glessner house is right in the middle. I think there is a tremendous opportunity here, and I think it's time for those of us who are interested in Glessner house to find a way to capitalize on that. I have that in mind. As a matter of fact, I got a call just recently from the current executive director of Glessner house asking if I would be willing to serve on a new board if they form one, and I said yes. But I haven't been on a board for a long time. I'm tired of being on boards, but I think we have to turn this into an opportunity rather than quarreling.

Benjamin: Do you think it's doable?

Hasbrouck: Well, it's doable if enough people are willing to try it. Yes, I think it is doable. I certainly hope so.

Benjamin: At the same time that you were so active in getting preservation off the ground in Chicago, you were making a career for yourself, too. What preservation opportunities were there for you at the railroad? How did you leave?

Hasbrouck: I really didn't want to be at the railroad. After a certain number of years, I had learned all the technology of restoration—how to deal with older buildings—and I was kind of tired of it. In late 1967, or early 1968 actually, when the opportunity came to be the executive director of the American Institute of Architects for Chicago, I took it.

Benjamin: How did that opportunity come about?

Hasbrouck: Well, oddly enough I had been active on the AIA's Historic Resources Committee for several years, and early in 1967 the longtime executive director left and another person was hired. Actually, Paul Gapp was hired to be executive director.

Benjamin: And he went on to become an architectural critic.

30 Hasbrouck: Yes, he did. Paul was good friend of mine, but he only stayed with the AIA for a few months and he left because he was frustrated; he was really a journalist. He was not an administrator. A man named Tom Battles came on board, and Tom also stayed only a few months. It's interesting because when both Gapp was hired and when Tom was hired, I remember saying to my wife, "Gee, I wish I had known about that job. I would like to have had it." When I heard that Tom Battles was leaving, I said, "I'm going to try to get this job," which I did, and I got the job. I left the railroad at the end of 1967 and joined the AIA in January of 1968. I was there for eight years. It was a long time, but it was a good period in my life because I was hired to deal with preservation issues, to organize a major international convention in 1969 and to generally do other things. We were trying to revitalize, and did revitalize, the Inland Architect magazine.

Benjamin: What role did you and the AIA play in revitalizing Inland Architect?

Hasbrouck: Well, the Inland Architect, the modern Inland Architect, was actually started by the AIA in the fifties by Harry Weese and Ray Ovresat. About the time that I joined the AIA, it was having all kinds of financial trouble because the journal couldn't get advertising or writing.

Benjamin: Was it important?

Hasbrouck: Not really. It was kind of a newsletter. Harry recognized it wasn't important. It could be important and should be, but it wasn't. So he called on his old friend Bill Dunlap, who was with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and the two of them decided through sheer willpower to get this thing going again. Bill took this as a personal crusade and got a guy named Bud Mabry, who was a superb graphic designer, to come in, and got Bill Newman, who was with the Chicago Daily News at the time, to advise us on editorial policy. I was helping put together a format, and we all agreed that we would try to turn the Inland Architect into a major Midwestern magazine of architecture. So we put together a couple of mockup issues. I still have one of those. It was graphically beautiful. The photography was great. Then my effort was to talk

31 to as many potential suppliers or advertisers as possible to see if we could get advertising, and we did get some fairly decent advertising. We never got enough to pay for the magazine, and Harry and Bill both put personal money into the thing for a long time. But one thing led to another and, of course, the magazine is still alive. We worked very hard to get advertisers and to get authors and to get articles that were of interest to our members. We worked very hard on this out of the AIA office for about four or five years, but finally after four or five years it was actually moved out to another office...

Benjamin: Harry Weese's?

Hasbrouck: Yes, and Harry continued to support it until relatively recently. But the magazine got better and better. I think it's pretty good today. I hope it continues to survive. I know it's been sold. Somebody else has it now. I don't know who. But it was a fun period in my life.

Benjamin: During that time you must have met and worked with many really interesting and significant people.

Hasbrouck: I think of all the things that happened during the eight years when I was with the AIA, the most interesting and valuable thing was meeting everyone. I knew every architect in the city, every partner in the city. Almost every day I had lunch with somebody, and I learned what was going on in architecture, who was successful, who was not, which partners spoke to each other and which didn't. It was an incredibly interesting period of my life. I also continued my interest in the historic buildings.

Benjamin: How?

Hasbrouck: As a representative of the AIA, I was asked by Governor [Richard] Ogilvie to serve on a citizens committee to do the work that was mandated by the Preservation Act of 1966. This was federal legislation whereby each state was mandated to organize a group of people who would survey individual states for historic buildings and set up an agency which would then review historic

32 problems and designate buildings for the National Register and so forth. We met several times in Springfield and in Chicago. Actually, the first meetings were held in 1968, and we continued to hold meetings on an ad hoc basis. The AIA paid my expenses. I was one of the few people in that group who actually had an expense account. Then after the thing got moving along fairly well, they actually organized under the Department of Conservation and had a budget for this commission, as they called us, to meet and organize a survey of the state of Illinois. It was under a man named Dan Malkovich. Dan Malkovich was the—what do you call him, the director of the Department of Conservation. It was under his auspices that this survey was done. It all ties back into Glessner house, because after the AIA got there, it wasn't enough to support Glessner house, so again I put on my hat as president of Glessner house and talked Dan Malkovich into renting some space in Glessner house for the Illinois Historic Structures Survey. It was headed by Paul Sprague in Chicago and Bill Farrar in downstate Illinois. The committee reviewed monthly the activities of these surveyors, who surveyed the entire state and looked at thousands of buildings. I have copies of all that stuff right there. This one is dated October 1972. There were several hundred of these done, identifying historic buildings throughout the state of Illinois.

Benjamin: Did the committee that Ogilvie appointed you to become the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council and was it also responsible for the formation of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency?

Hasbrouck: Yes to both. Eventually it grew into that.

Benjamin: What happened?

Hasbrouck: When Ogilvie was not reelected and Dan Walker came in, we continued, and at that time legislation was set up. The commissioners—I think there were twelve of us—agreed that we would serve three-year terms. We drew names out of a hat to see who would have one-, two- or three-year terms, and I got a one-year term. That was roughly 1974 or 1975, I suppose. So I served that one term. I didn't go back on the commission again because it was the mid-

33 seventies and I was just about to leave the AIA and go into private practice and I thought there would be a conflict. But in the late seventies under [James] Thompson, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency was organized and the preservation efforts were taken out of the Department of Conservation. Illinois is one of the very few states that has a cabinet-level preservation agency at the state level headed up by a director.

Benjamin: Was the survey conducted when preservation activities were under the Department of Conservation?

Hasbrouck: Yes.

Benjamin: What else did they do? Did they oversee National Register nominations?

Hasbrouck: Yes, they did. They were responsible for reviewing National Register nominations and eventually were responsible, and still are, for what they call Section 106 process and for reviewing investment tax credits. The program eventually became so involved that the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency was formed. Today it not only administers preservation issues but also administers historic sites throughout the state of Illinois. There are something like fifty or a hundred sites administered by this organization. Grant's home in Galena and the Douglas monument here in Chicago and Dana/Thomas house in Springfield are administered by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

Benjamin: You were working for the AIA when you decided that perhaps you would like to strike out on your own.

Hasbrouck: Well, at the end of 1974, Harry Weese was made president of the AIA. I had been there for seven years. I had decided then, through my experience with the Illinois Historic Sites Council and doing various consulting tasks on historic projects, that there was a place for somebody who concentrated on historic architecture. I met with Harry, and I said, "Harry, I'm going to leave, but I'll leave in a few months so that there will be a good transition." He said,

34 "How much work have you got?" Well, I didn't have any work. He said, "You can't quit."

Benjamin: You mean you didn't have any jobs?

Hasbrouck: Some tiny jobs. He said, "You've got to have work," and so without going into great detail, Harry sat me down and said, "Here is what you do in order to organize an office." This was around December of 1974. He said, "Now in six months we're going to have another lunch, and you tell me how much progress you've made. In the meantime, you're going to stay on this job," which I did. He said, "You can look around for work during this time." One of the things that happened in that next six months was that I got the job to do the restoration on (Widow) Clarke house. I never was sure but I was always reasonably sure in the back of my mind that Harry must have put in a word for me because there was no reason for the city of Chicago to give me that job.

Benjamin: Was Harry Weese influential to the city government?

Hasbrouck: Absolutely. He knew everyone and he was respected, he was intelligent and he was a superb architect—just superb. He was one of my heroes. He's many people's hero. But anyway, six months later I came back and we had a lunch again and I had this job and I had a couple of others, and he said, "Well, you still haven't got enough to really go out yet, and the Clarke house doesn't start for another few months. So," he said, "here's what we're going to do. I want you to stay on until the end of the year. You can use up your vacation and you can start spending part of your time in your office and part of your time here. We'll pay you a daily stipend on days you work for the AIA and other days we won't pay you. We'll keep you going until the end of the year." That is exactly what I did. My wife and I had bought the building at 1900 South Prairie, and I set up an office over there and hired an employee. So at the end of 1975, I had an office established with enough work to go to do, and I've been in business ever since.

35 [Tape 2: Side 1]

Benjamin: Why did you buy the building at 1900 South Prairie? How did you happen to open an office down there?

Hasbrouck: That's a good story, a totally different story. Actually, I went to Glessner house in 1971 or 1972, when we had the AIA office there for several years. Lots of people involved with the AIA were also involved with the development of the Prairie Avenue Historic District. One of the things that happened as we began to think about the eventual future of Prairie Avenue was the fact that the owners of the Kimball house, the Coleman-Ames house, the house at 1900 South Prairie and the piece of property immediately south of Glessner house were offered for sale. I can't remember the name of the firm, but they published a whole series of magazines having to do with building design, construction and engineering. Anyway, they did all this work on these buildings that essentially surrounded Glessner house, and they moved their operation out to the suburbs, near Arlington Heights. These wonderful properties, particularly the Kimball house and the Coleman-Ames house, were vacant, and 1900 South Prairie, which was a block south of Glessner house, was vacant. And they had the empty lot right next to Glessner house. Ben Weese and I discussed this at some length. At that time Ben was the chairman of Glessner house and I was the president of Glessner house, and we worked very closely on this. We wanted two or three things. First, we wanted the Kimball house and the Coleman-Ames house to be preserved. We didn't want them picked up by a developer and destroyed. Second, we wanted that piece of property adjacent to Glessner house to belong to Glessner house so we could maintain the wall of the garden. And third, we thought it was a good idea to see to it that 1900 South Prairie was retained because it was one of the few pre-fire buildings still surviving in Chicago. There were really only two parties, if you will, who were potential buyers of those properties. One was Glessner house and the other was Donnelley Corporation. So we went to see Charlie Haffner, and I was very quiet because I didn't know Charlie Haffner but Ben did. Charlie Haffner was one of the senior people at Donnelley Corporation at the time. He was a son-

36 in-law of the Donnelley family, I believe. Anyway, Ben in effect said, "Look, we think you ought to buy this on our behalf and get it for us."

Benjamin: Which property?

Hasbrouck: All four of these properties. I don't remember all the financial circumstances in this, but I do remember that the asking price for all four properties was a half million dollars. Of course, we didn't have any money. On the other hand, Donnelley Corporation had all the money in the world, or at least that's what a seller would think. So Mr. Haffner said, "Look, they think that we have all the money in the world. We have to take the position that we don't want it. You want it and don't have any money. Offer them half price, fifty cents on the dollar." That's what Ben did. Ben offered them $250,000 for the whole thing.

Benjamin: Was Donnelley actually paying for it?

Hasbrouck: Donnelley was paying for it, and the deal was that Donnelley would get the two buildings, Kimball house and Coleman-Ames, Glessner would get the property immediately south of Glessner house, and we had to have a buyer for the 1900 South Prairie. My wife and I decided to buy 1900 South Prairie at fifty cents on the dollar because we were looking for a place for a bookshop and an office for me and we were hoping to have a real estate investment. When you're offered a piece of property at fifty cents on the dollar, it's a pretty good deal. So that's what happened. The property was purchased, and Glessner got the property next door and Donnelley owned the property across the street and I ended up with 1900 South Prairie. I had absolutely no money at the time to pay for this.

Benjamin: Had you left the AIA yet?

Hasbrouck: No, I was still with the AIA. This was probably in 1974. It was a couple of years before I left the AIA.

37 Benjamin: Were you practicing?

Hasbrouck: I was doing some consulting at the time. From time to time I would consult on historic districts or I would look over a historic house and suggest to owners what work might have to be done if they bought the building and things of that nature. But it was very limited practice. I had done the historic district for Oak Park, and I did some consulting out in Woodstock on the Woodstock Opera House. A lot of this I did with Paul Sprague who was an old, good friend and at that time was involved with the Illinois Historic Structures Survey, which was headquartered at Glessner house. Anyway, within a week or so after we did this, Mr. Haffner went to John Montgomery, who at that time was president of the Lakeside Bank, and told him the deal and suggested that it would be a good idea if they made a loan to me to buy this building. So they made me a one hundred percent loan. Then something really interesting happened. Before any of the documentation was done, there was a small fire at 1900 South Prairie. It damaged a bathroom and two or three things in there. Of course, I didn't own the building yet. They did, and their insurance covered it. They said, "Well, we'll get the insurance company to fix all of this. In the meantime, would you mind taking care of the building?" Well, I didn't mind. I went out and found some tenants and put tenants in the building, so I had income coming in for about six or eight months before I had to take over and actually buy the building.

Benjamin: Were you living in Park Forest?

Hasbrouck: Well, I was living in Palos Park at the time, but that's a little sidelight. I actually didn't buy this building for about eight or nine months after the deal was made because they brought in their workmen and fixed the fire damage. Then Marilyn moved the Prairie Avenue Bookshop into the ground floor, and we had tenants in the basement, the second floor, the third floor and the coach house. We retained half of the ground floor for my office, which was to come a year and a half or so later. That's how I got to 1900 South Prairie. Marilyn operated the Prairie Avenue Bookshop from that time forward, and as time went by, the bookshop continued to grow.

38 Benjamin: Maybe this would be a good time to talk about the origin of the bookstore and your involvement with publishing and the Prairie School Press.

Hasbrouck: It probably is, because it was a parallel thing with the AIA. Actually, it started before my work with the AIA. The Prairie School Press started in 1961 when I was still with the Illinois Central Railroad. I had a good friend named Rob Cuscaden who was the editor of the Illinois Central magazine and a self- proclaimed poet. Rob loved to write poetry, and he was a pretty good poet. He published a little magazine, à la Harriet Monroe. It was called Poetry Midwest. Rob would write a couple of poems and he would solicit poems from people all over the Midwest and he'd publish this thing three times a year. He had about two or three hundred subscribers. Marilyn and I were fascinated with the fact that somebody published their own magazine, although it's fairly commonly done in literary circles, and it was done much more in the past than it is today. Anyway, we decided we would publish a little journal of architectural history. We were very interested then in the whole Prairie School movement—that is, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan and their contemporaries—partly because we were good friends with H. Allen Brooks who had done his Ph.D. at Northwestern on the Prairie School of Architecture. At the time, I was still involved with the old Chicago Heritage Committee, and we had done their newsletter. While we were running tours at the Robie house to raise money for the Chicago Heritage Committee, one of the people who came to the Robie house was a guy named Bill Rudd, J. William Rudd. He had a degree in architecture. Bill Rudd came to the Robie house—he had never seen it before—and we started talking about the house and Wright and the Prairie School, and he said that he had decided to do his master's paper on George Maher. Before he left the house, we got him to agree to write the first article for The Prairie School Review, which he did. He delivered it to us three or four weeks later, and, sure enough, the first issue of the magazine was "George W. Maher, Architect of the Prairie School," by J. William Rudd. In addition to that, we scrounged up an article that Maher had written, an obscure thing, and we wrote a couple of book reviews and so forth. We printed about 2,500 copies of that first issue of

39 The Prairie School Review, and we sent them to a list of names we had assembled.

Benjamin: For free?

Hasbrouck: For free, all over the United States. We sent libraries five copies, we sent large offices three copies, we sent individuals one copy and so forth. Within a couple of months, we had a few hundred subscribers. The list had been generated partly because before doing the magazine we had published a reprint edition of A System of Architectural Ornament by Louis Sullivan. We did that in 1961.

Benjamin: How did that come about?

Hasbrouck: I tried to find a copy but couldn't, so Marilyn and I borrowed one, had photo plates made and published a facsimile. Then, we were going to publish Frank Lloyd Wright's Ausgefiihrte Bauten und Entwiirfe, which was the great Wasmuth folio. We thought that would be a great thing to reprint because it was very rare and we'd never seen a full copy except at the Art Institute. We were going to publish it. In fact, we even went so far as to have a few sample pages made. Then we wrote some letters to various people, including some of the people at , and we got a letter back from Ben Raeburn, who at that time ran Horizon Press, asking us not to do it because he already had a deal before Mr. Wright died to republish it and had done all the work and he would really like to do it. So he came to Chicago and talked us out of it. We didn't really want to do it very badly because we didn't have enough money. It was going to cost close to $10,000, and we were going to do it all on credit. But we had quite a number of people who had already ordered copies, so Mr. Raeburn said, "Look, if you don't do it, I'll let you distribute it and give you a good price on it," which he did. So eventually we did distribute his edition. But then we had done all this preliminary work, so we said, "Well, let's find something else to do," and we decided to do The House Beautiful, which was Frank Lloyd Wright's first attempt at publishing in the winter of 1896-1897.

40 Benjamin: I would imagine that up until this time these had been buried in libraries and nobody ever saw them.

Hasbrouck: Oh, yes. Nobody ever saw them. In fact, the copy of A System of Architectural Ornament we used to make our edition we borrowed from the University of Illinois Library at Navy Pier. They had no trouble at all with our borrowing it. They didn't even care. They didn't even know what it was. They just let us take it home with us. It was out of copyright. We were very careful to find out whether or not it was still copyrighted. So we did 250 copies. The first [original] edition had 1,000, so our edition is actually more rare than the first edition. Then a year or so later we did another 250 copies, so there are actually about five hundred copies of our edition out there. There is slight variance. Anyway, we did that and it was fairly successful. We sold them for fifteen dollars a copy.

Benjamin: Did you make money on these deals?

Hasbrouck: Well, we got more money than we spent. But we didn't get paid for any of our time. So then we decided to do something else. I had discovered that Frank Lloyd Wright and William Winslow had published a book called The House Beautiful in 1896-1897. They had set the type and printed it on a hand press in William Winslow's garage in River Forest. There was one copy of it at the Art Institute library, but they wouldn't let me borrow it to copy, so I made arrangements to borrow one from the Oak Park Public Library. Barbara Ballinger was the assistant librarian then, and Les Stouffel was the librarian. They were very generous. They were going to let us borrow this book so we could make a copy of it. Literally a day or two before we were going to do it, I was talking with a wonderful gentleman, who is long gone now, named Ija Adler. Ija Adler was the rare book man at Marshall Field and Company, and I used to go see Ija once or twice a month and he would save architecture books for me and I'd buy them. One day I was talking to him about the fact that we were going to do this, and he said, "I have a copy of that." I said, "Would you sell it?" and he said, "Well, I don't know, but I'll show it to you." So on Sunday afternoon Marilyn and I drove to Evanston, went to Mr.

41 Adler's home and he brings out this literally perfect copy. I remember for certain what he asked for it. He asked $250 which was an incredible amount of money then, for us. This was twenty-five, thirty years ago. So we gave him a check for that amount, knowing the next day was payday or something, and took it home with us. When we opened it on the way home, we discovered that it was copy number one. We used that to reprint The House Beautiful. We did a thousand copies. They sold for $22.50 apiece, which we thought was an outrageous price, but we had really not too much trouble selling it. We kept the names of the people who bought that, and then when we did The Prairie School Review, they were the ones that got the free issues of The Prairie School Review because they were ideal candidates to be subscribers. And so, with this first issue that we sent out free, there was actually in the back of it a little subscription card. It was five dollars a year in the United States and six dollars a year overseas.

Benjamin: How often was it published?

Hasbrouck: We did it quarterly. We actually got quite a few subscribers fairly quickly. I know that by the time the second quarter's issue was ready, we had over three hundred subscribers, and by the end of the first year we had, oh, seven or eight hundred subscribers. So it actually generated enough money to pay the printing costs most of the time—not all the time. But in any case, we kept The Prairie School Review going for a long time. We did discover that we couldn't generate quite enough money, so Marilyn and I started selling books.

Benjamin: There were many scholars who wrote for The Prairie School Review. How did you get your writers?

Hasbrouck: Oh, yes. That was an interesting thing. People like Bill Rudd and Allen Brooks. Most of them came to us. We would go to meetings of the Society of Architectural Historians and the AIA and to various things of that nature, and we'd sent copies to colleges and universities. There were a lot of people, particularly master's candidates and Ph.D. candidates, who desperately

42 wanted to be published, and they would ask us to publish their work. Ken Severns was one writer who, at that time, was an associate professor of fine arts in Charleston. He wrote for us. I have a whole bunch of issues here.

Benjamin: Were articles always published with bibliographies?

Hasbrouck: We demanded a lot from our authors. Very early on we realized that we didn't have time to do a great deal of research and editing and so forth, so we set up a standard format for manuscripts. We gave them "Notes to Contributors," as we called it, and we insisted that the body of the manuscript be presented to us in columns that were fifty characters wide. Now, they could be forty-six or fifty-two or something, but it had to average fifty characters because that's how many characters there were in a column in our magazine. Footnotes could be sixty characters. Captions for photographs, which were in italics, could be sixty characters. We insisted that authors provide the photographs and show us in the margin where they would be coordinated with the text. We insisted on a bibliography. We would not take an article without a fairly extensive bibliography. They had to provide all this material to us, and then we would edit it because sometimes it wouldn't be quite right, you know, or they would miss a footnote. Sometimes we knew more than they did about certain things.

Benjamin: I'm not surprised.

Hasbrouck: Occasionally, we'd get a really good article by someone who was very much of an amateur. I remember, for example, we got one about Hugh Garden. We were one of the first people to publish Hugh Garden, and the article came from a man named B.C. Greengard. Mr. Greengard was very old. He was in his eighties, and he furnished us this manuscript in a combination of typescript, pencil, and pen and ink. But it was quite interesting. I mean, he knew Hugh Garden personally and worked for him for something like forty years. So we said okay, fine, we'll take the manuscript, and then we did all the footnoting. There are a lot of footnotes in this one. I have it here in front of me. He brought a number of things to our attention that no one had

43 realized before. For example, he knew when Hugh Garden had come to Chicago. He knew that Hugh Garden's two brothers came with him. He knew all sorts of things of that nature, and so when you read this particular issue, you will find many editor's notes and footnotes, which meant that we put them in after we got the manuscript. We would confirm or verify his dates and his comments in this article. I always thought that the issue on Hugh Garden was one of the really important issues that we did. But he was not a scholar like some of these other people, like the thing on Alfonso Iannelli, which was written by Joe Griggs. Joe was a fine scholar and went on to do other writing. Oddly enough, Mr. Greengard came back to us later and did the issue on the Krause Music Store. Then he died, so we never really got to do any more with him. Lots of things like that happened. We would get articles from people. Sometimes we'd never meet the author, like Peter Goss who did an article for us in 1975 called "The Prairie School Influence in Utah." Mr. Goss was a professor of architecture at the University of Utah. We had never heard of the Prairie School influence in Utah before. But he was talking about people like Taylor Wooley. Taylor Wooley, of course, was an important architect in Utah who actually worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and was one of the people who did drawings for the portfolio that Wasmuth published. Later on, Wooley was studied and became part of the whole literature on the Prairie School. A lot of reference to Taylor Wooley is included in Anthony Alofsín's book Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years 1910-1922, which, by the way, is one of the best books of its kind I've ever read. In any case, we got a lot of manuscripts from people, some of whom went on later to do great things like Donald Hallmark. He did two issues for us on . Of course, Donald went on to become the director of the Dana House Foundation and the Dana house, and he's done lots of other publications and is doing a book on Bock. I think he actually edited one and is going to do another. Paul Sprague did two or three articles for us. Paul is the admitted authority on Louis Sullivan's ornament. Who else? Well, Allen Brooks, who is our good friend who did the ultimate book on the Prairie School called The Prairie School.

Benjamin: How did you meet Allen Brooks?

44 Hasbrouck: Allen was kind of an icon to anyone who was interested in the contemporaries of Frank Lloyd Wright. He had already finished or was very nearly finished with his Ph.D. at Northwestern—he's older than I am—when I first came to Chicago, and I used to hear about this six-foot-six guy who wandered around looking at Frank Lloyd Wright houses, which is what he did. I wrote him a couple of notes and asked him a few questions. I remember I got a letter back from him once, saying something to the effect that "it's so nice to get a letter from somebody asking a sensible question." We became friends and finally he came to Chicago and had dinner at our house. He was the first of many who would talk into the wee hours about our mutual interests. Allen worked on his book for years and years and years, you know. The Prairie School was not written overnight. I'm sure he worked twenty years on that book.

Benjamin: Was that the first book that tied all of the Prairie School architecture together?

Hasbrouck: It was. I don't know if Allen will remember it in exactly the same way, but he came to our house when we were still in Park Forest and our boys were very small. His manuscript was almost finished. He wouldn't let us read it, but he talked about it a lot. We talked about what it should be, how the book should look, and we showed him various books that we thought were graphically well produced. I always thought In the Nature of Materials was well produced, but I didn't like the idea that the photographs were all in one area. So we made several suggestions. We suggested that the illustrations be interspersed throughout and coordinated with the text so that when the text talked about John Smith's house, John Smith's house would be pictured on the same page. We also said, "You must find a way to get the footnotes on the same page," which he did. They're not only on the same page but he has them in the margin so you can actually look at the footnote without losing your chain of thought. Many of these ideas were Marilyn's because she is very into that sort of thing; I am, too, so we were always delighted to see that he took our advice. He insisted on these kinds of things and his publisher agreed. So the book has always been graphically superb. I remember when the book was

45 first published—it must have been in the early seventies—I got a prepublication copy. That meant a copy that didn't have its casing. It was sewn but not bound. It was just the sheets that were sewn together, and it was for a review. I reviewed it.

Benjamin: For The Prairie School Review?

Hasbrouck: No, I reviewed it for Architectural Forum. I worked very hard on that review, and it was published as a lead review. It was the only time I was ever the lead reviewer in the Forum. Among other things I said in it was that the book was the finest work of its kind that I'd ever seen, and when the book came out that was quoted on the book jacket. But anyway, I remember the Society of Architectural Historians was meeting that year in , and Allen and I were both on the board of directors at that time. So we went off to San Francisco, and when I saw Allen in San Francisco he said, "I don't believe it. I don't know how to even talk to you about this. I got on the airplane in with my copy of Architectural Forum, sat down to relax on my way to San Francisco, opened it up and there is your review. I read it over and over for four solid hours." So I was always delighted. It was then, and I think it is still, one of the best books of its kind. It's just a wonderful book. Were you still publishing books while you were publishing the magazine?

Hasbrouck: Oh, yes.

Benjamin: What were some of the other books that you published?

Hasbrouck: There were always some important articles that were constantly being referred to that nobody could find, like "The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright," by Robert Spencer, which was originally published in the Architectural Review of 1900. It's a long article, heavily illustrated, about Wright's work when he was only thirty-three or maybe thirty-four years old, and Spencer wrote this article about Wright and his work. It's probably ten or twelve pages of tightly packed type, along with some wonderful, foldout illustrations. So we borrowed a copy of the journal from IIT, had those pages copied and

46 reprinted this in a little paperbound book. Actually, it wasn't small. It was the same size. The pages probably were ten by fourteen. It's very hard to find today. Anyway, we did that. We did two or three thousand of them, and they sold for $2.50 apiece.

Benjamin: It sounds like you kept printing larger and larger numbers because the demand was going up.

Hasbrouck: I think that was probably the most we ever published of anything, although the next year we did a thing called Essays from the Chicago School, which was similar to that. The lead article was an item called "The Chicago School" which first appeared in the Architectural Review in 1906, 1907, 1908, somewhere in there. That's the first time the term "the Chicago School" was used. It was by Thomas Tallmadge. We added to that a couple of other articles and some drawings by Louis Sullivan. I think the book was important because it made those articles available to people.

Benjamin: Oh, yes, and it still makes them available to people.

Hasbrouck: Yes, it does. We also did two books that I've always been very proud of because of the quality of the reproduction. The first one was Henry Hobson Richardson and His Work by Mrs. Van Rensselaer. Henry Hobson Richardson and His Work was published in the late nineteenth century—I think it was about 1888 or 1890—in a very small edition of, I believe, five hundred copies, and they were numbered. This book was extremely rare because it was printed on heavy, poor paper and only five hundred copies in the first place, so the few copies that survived, for the most part, were in libraries. For a long time I couldn't even find one. I did find a copy, though. Our old, mutual friend L. Morgan Yost had a copy of this book in his library, and when he heard I was looking for one, he very kindly offered to let me borrow it. I did, and we used that. Oddly enough, I found another copy just a few weeks later, which I was able to take apart and that made it easier to copy. But I used Morgan's copy to reproduce the book cover, which was very ornate. Our cover is identical to the original. One of the important things about that book was that it was

47 beautifully illustrated using the heliotype or gelatin type photograph process that was used before they had halftones. So the photographs of Richardson's work in that book were just superb. They were big, nicely done, beautifully toned and everything, and our printer was able to duplicate them almost perfectly. We did a thousand copies of that book, and we could have probably sold two thousand. We never did, but we could have. At about the same time we also republished John Wellborn Root by Harriet Monroe. That was kind of a fun book, too, because whenever you do a book like this, you want something to bring it into the twentieth century, so to speak, and in the case of the Richardson book we had James Van Trump do an introduction. Jim Van Trump was an old-time architectural historian from Pittsburgh who knew some of Richardson's Pittsburgh work firsthand. But the introduction for the John Wellborn Root book was written by the English writer, Reyner Banham. I remember he was in Chicago for some other purpose—I don't remember what—and we went to dinner at the Cliff Dwellers. He brought up the subject of the book, which he had just read, in connection with another book that he was writing. I said we were going to republish it. I don't know whether he suggested it or I suggested it, but one of us said, "Well, you should do the introduction," and so he agreed to do it. About six or eight months later when the book was finished and he'd gone back to England, I sent him six copies of the book. I got this beautiful letter back from him, thanking me and telling me that he had forgotten that he'd even written the introduction to the book. So, he was very happy to have it. But that was an important book, too, because John Root had essentially been forgotten and overshadowed by Burnham. Burnham never was forgotten, but Root was. Root was a superb architect, and he deserved more attention than he was getting. Then, of course, there were a lot of other things that suddenly happened about Root. Don Hoffman did a couple of books on John Root, and eventually we began to look into Root's work a lot more closely when we worked on the Rookery. But anyway, getting back now to the 1900 South Prairie, we had this magazine which we had published.

Benjamin: Did you publish that out of your townhouse?

48 Hasbrouck: We did it out of our home. We did it out of the townhouse in Park Forest where we pasted it together on the dining room table. Then when we went to Palos Park, we had more room, but we still did it on the dining room table. When we bought the building at 1900 South Prairie, we had an outlet and we started selling individual copies. That was a great help to us because we could generate a little money. We never, ever got any grant money at all to run it.

Benjamin: Did you ever think of applying for support?

Hasbrouck: We tried a couple of times but never really got anyplace. We almost got a grant—in fact, once we did get what might be called a grant. We put together an issue of our magazine on Harvey Ellis, and it was written by Roger Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy is now the director of the . Roger was an incredible guy with great interest in architectural history and in Harvey Ellis in particular. He sent this article to us on Ellis, unsolicited. He just sent it to us and asked if we'd be interested. It was extremely well done, and we said yes, we'd be glad to do it. We had it all set in type and everything, and he called to tell us that he thought we should publish with his article an article that had appeared in the Architectural Review in the late nineteenth century on Ellis and his work, which was maybe twenty or twenty-five pages long. I said, "Well, Mr. Kennedy, I'd love to do that, but I simply don't have enough money." He said, "Well, how much would it cost to print that?" I said, "I'll let you know," and I called the printer and it was going to be $750. So I called him back and told him. A few days later in the mail came a check from the Minnesota Historical Society for $750 to defray the cost of printing this article.

Benjamin: What was Roger Kennedy doing then?

Hasbrouck: At that time he was the senior vice president of Norwest Bank Corporation. But I'm sure that was his own money. He never discussed it. But what he did, I'm sure, was to make a contribution to the historical society with the proviso that it come to us. So we put that in, and that was the thickest issue we ever

49 did. It was fifty-some-odd pages because that reprint was in there. But I think it was a good idea because it told the story better. That's the closest we ever came to getting a grant. From time to time we did get requests for reprints. Some issues were reprinted thousands of times. The issue that was reprinted the most was the issue on the Greene and Greene house in Pasadena, California, the Gamble house. The Gamble house issue was written by Randell Makinson, who was the curator of the house at that time. After the issue appeared, the docents at Gamble house decided they should sell it, so every three or four years they would write to us and say, "We need five thousand more copies," and we would print them and we'd add on something for ourselves and send off these copies. I'm going to guess there were probably fifteen or twenty thousand copies of that particular issue that were reprinted. There were a couple of others that were used like that, such as the one we did on Mason City. Largely, it had to do with and was written by a man named McCoy. Dr. McCoy was a homeowner who lived in one of the houses in Mason City and did a massive amount of research and wrote this article. That was a thick issue, too. The Mason City Historical Society used to order reprints from time to time, but I don't think they sold nearly as many as they did in Pasadena.

Benjamin: More people go to Pasadena, I suspect, than Mason City, Iowa.

Hasbrouck: Right, I would say so. You know, that Mason City issue was interesting because Bob McCoy, who was an orthopedic surgeon, was kind of a workaholic. He would do his orthopedic surgery from six in the morning until nine at night and then come home to relax by researching his house and his neighborhood. I remember when the manuscript came it was about three times as long as we could possibly use. It was just much too long, so Marilyn and I had to spend several days trimming it and consolidating it and getting rid of certain things. He didn't mind. He wanted us to do that. But we had great fun. Part of the pleasure of doing the magazine was editing it into final form. Two other issues got a lot of reprints. One was on the Louis Sullivan Russian Orthodox church here in Chicago, which we did in 1972. It was written by Theodore Turak.

50 Benjamin: His name is familiar to me. What did he go on to do?

Hasbrouck: Well, Ted Turak, at the time he wrote the article, was an associate professor of art history at the American University in Washington, D.C. He later became a tenured full professor of art history there. He died last year. But he did a great deal of research on William Le Baron Jenney's work and on the Coonley family of the in River Forest. He wrote quite a good deal on various subjects. He did a book on Jenney. He wrote about the Manhattan building. Ted was a good guy, a good researcher. He was Russian, and that's how he happened to be interested in the Russian Orthodox Holy Trinity Cathedral. He had Russian ancestry, and so he wrote an article for us. The church asked for and received a lot of reprint copies, which they sell to tourists. To this day they sell them.

Benjamin: I stopped to see the church and they gave me a copy.

Hasbrouck: Yes, well, that was nice of them. Most of the time they charge a donor's fee.

Benjamin: I gave them a donation.

Hasbrouck: Good for you. I think at first we used to print the price on the cover when we had them reprinted, and later we stopped printing a price so that the people could charge any price they wanted to. The last one was the issue that was on the Auditorium theatre. That was reprinted. I think they gave it away. I'm not sure. Oddly enough, that's one we have very few copies of today. Nevertheless, we did all those things. We had a lot of fun doing that, and, of course, the magazine and the bookshop were parallel things.

Benjamin: How did the bookshop evolve?

Hasbrouck: When we were doing the magazine and our other publishing, I was always interested in the whole early modern movement in architecture; that is, the Chicago Architectural Club and Daniel Burnham and Frank Lloyd Wright

51 and Louis Sullivan and all these people. There wasn't a lot of contemporary or current literature on these people so I used to haunt out-of-print bookshops and buy things when they became available. As we did the magazine, the word got around that we would buy libraries or I would buy books from libraries.

Benjamin: Did you ever buy a whole library?

Hasbrouck: Yes, several times. In fact, the bookshop evolved out of the fact that we bought a library from Joseph C. Llewellyn's estate. J.C. Llewellyn was an important architect in Chicago who was not famous.

Benjamin: What did he design?

Hasbrouck: Hundreds of things—schools, banks, etc. J.C. Llewellyn was the first of three generations of Llewellyns. J.C. started his practice in about 1885 or 1890.

[Tape 2: Side 2]

Hasbrouck: Llewellyn was an important architect who nobody ever thinks about. He practiced architecture in Chicago, and he was the first president of the Architectural League of America.

Benjamin: What is the Architectural League of America?

Hasbrouck: The Architectural League of America was a loose organization of architectural clubs throughout the United States, and he was the president. I believe it was in 1900. The Chicago Architectural Club and the New York Architectural League and the Boston Architectural Club—there were about, I would say, twenty-five of these clubs throughout the United States. Louis Sullivan made a couple of his very important speeches before this group. Anyway, J.C. Llewellyn, because of his position, would get copies of architectural club catalogs from all over the country. In roughly 1972 or 1973, his grandson decided to move out. His grandson was still living in his

52 grandfather's house and decided to move out of this house into an apartment. He offered me the books, and so I went out and went through his house. He wouldn't let me have all the books, but he had no interest in the club catalogs. So we got probably a thousand books and we brought them back and we did a catalog and we offered the things in this catalog to various universities. We got a letter from the University of Texas offering to buy everything for something like $10,000—more money than we'd ever heard of in our lives—so we sold the entire collection to the University of Texas and took that $7,000 and started the bookshop at 1900 South Prairie. That's how we started at the bookshop. Oddly enough, about five years later, J.C. Llewellyn's grandson, J.C. Llewellyn III, died and the rest of the library became available. We bought that, too.

Benjamin: Did you sell mostly collection books or recently published books?

Hasbrouck: When we opened the Prairie Avenue Bookshop in 1974, we thought the shop would be devoted primarily to out-of-print architecture and that we would sell new books just as a favor to our customers. The fact of the matter is, the out-of-print books disappeared very quickly and we were not able to maintain a good supply of them. Also, we discovered then that there was a renaissance, if you will, in the publication of new books on architecture.

Benjamin: How did you know how to price these books?

Hasbrouck: I had been haunting book shops for years, and they were based on whatever I paid for them. I looked back at some of the collections I bought, and in those days we probably bought at least a dozen major libraries. By major libraries I mean a thousand books.

Benjamin: What were some of those?

Hasbrouck: I can remember two or three that were important. There was an organization in Chicago called the Chicago Architects' and Businessmen's Association, which later became, and still is, the Illinois Society of Architects. The Chicago

53 Architects' and Businessmen's Association was organized in the late nineteenth century, and in the early twentieth century they employed a man named H.L. Palmer as their secretary. Mr. Palmer ran the Chicago Architects' and Businessmen's Association, which changed names slightly from time to time, from about the turn of the century until about 1945 or 1950. Then his son took it over, so the Palmer family ran this thing for a long time. Every year they published a thing called The Handbook for Architects and Builders, and they started it in 1897. This little handbook, which grew as the years went by, had among other things the code. It had a chapter or two on various kinds of engineering problems, but I think the most interesting thing it had was a complete list of all the registered architects in Illinois. It had a list of all the members of the AIA, a list of the members of the Chicago Architectural Club, city officials and so on.

Benjamin: With addresses?

Hasbrouck: With their addresses, even for the ones out of state. You know, the state of Illinois was the first state to license architects, so these things are a tremendous resource.

Benjamin: Where are those available?

Hasbrouck: There are three complete sets that I know of.

Benjamin: Where?

Hasbrouck: I have a set, there is a set at the Burnham Library and there is a set in the Avery Library at Columbia University. I assembled all three of those. Mr. Palmer used to get review copies of books, but they didn't have a library per se so he would wrap these books up in newspaper and stick them in a big walk-in safe that he had. One day in about 1972 or 1973, I got a call. Palmer's son, who ran this thing, had died, and two or three years later I got a call from a man. I thought it was the son who had died because his voice was just like his father's voice. He was actually the third generation with the same

54 name, and he said, "No, you're thinking of my father. I'm in town because I have to sort out Dad's affairs. He died, and he's got an office downtown and it's full of all this stuff and we've got to get rid of it." So I said, "Okay, let's go look," and here was this room filled with all kinds of mostly junk. His father and his grandfather had been in this same building since the turn of the century, running this professional society, and as part of his pay, he would edit, publish, distribute and sell these booklets and manuals that he had. That's how he made his living. But there were extra copies of them lying around, and the grandson said, "I'm going to throw these away." I made a deal with him to buy all the books in the room, and I did. We got a messenger to come and haul them away, and there were some just incredibly good books in that collection—German books and English books and books that were published in 1909 that were still in their original book jackets and so forth. So there were probably four or five hundred books that I bought in that one collection. I wish I had kept them all, but I didn't. I had to sell them.

Benjamin: That must be one of the most difficult things to do, to part with some of these books.

Hasbrouck: Oh, yes. Every once in a while somebody will come into the bookshop and offer us some incredible thing, which I'd love to keep, but you can't afford to keep it. You have no place to keep it, for one thing. Nevertheless, that was one of the collections I remember buying.

Benjamin: Do any others come to mind?

Hasbrouck: Small collections. I remember one time a fellow came in to Marilyn's bookshop and he had about a dozen big plat books of Chicago, and there was a five-volume set of early fire insurance atlas books of Chicago like Sanborn. They were like Sanborn but they were another kind of map. I knew they were valuable, and I said, "Well, what do you want for this?" and he named some figure. I don't know what it was. I knew there wasn't a huge market for it so I called the University of Illinois Library, and they said, "Oh, we'd just give anything for this," and I sold it to them for five hundred dollars for the five

55 volumes. Later I discovered that some of these individual maps sell for as much as I sold them the whole set for. I've never really been sorry because I made some money on it—or the bookshop did.

Benjamin: And for those of us who do research, those are invaluable.

Hasbrouck: Yes, they are. But other things show up from time to time.

Benjamin: What about architects who have died? Do architects tend to have pretty good book collections?

Hasbrouck: Particularly architects of the generation that began practice in the late twenties or early thirties. I've bought a lot of books, and from time to time we would run across these libraries. I think there was a period from about 1945 to 1960 when people did not buy many books.

Benjamin: Why?

Hasbrouck: I don't know. The period 1945 to 1960 in my mind was kind of a period when there really wasn't a great deal happening in architecture. But there was a lot of non-architecture happening even though Mies was here and he was doing some pretty good work. There was some work by the Keck brothers, you know, but there wasn't a lot of feverish activity. Even today you see a great deal more of it. And people didn't read books. There was an awful lot of modernization of existing buildings. We destroyed more great architecture in the period 1945 to 1960 than any other period that I can remember. I mean, whole blocks of storefronts were destroyed by covering them with aluminum siding and storefronts. There was an awful lot of destruction of fine architecture during that period.

Benjamin: What accounts for that?

Hasbrouck: Mostly high-pressure salesmen from aluminum storefront companies.

56 Benjamin: Probably.

Hasbrouck: But then in the early sixties, as we were talking about, when the Chicago Heritage Committee and others like them got interested, that trend began to reverse. You don't see much really decent architecture being destroyed. Most people today—most architects and many clients—are beginning to understand that a building in place that has some aesthetic value has more value because it has the patina of age an ordinary new structure doesn't have. I think the whole attitude about existing buildings has changed a great deal in the last decade or so.

Benjamin: Do you think that is driven by the economy?

Hasbrouck: A lot. People began to realize about twenty years ago or so that it was less expensive to adapt an existing building to a new use than it was to tear it down and rebuild. When I began practice in the fifties and early sixties, construction costs were very low, and it was unusual to be able to adapt an old building to new use for less cost than you could tear a building down and rebuild it. That's no longer the case.

Benjamin: A lot of people need to be educated about that.

Hasbrouck: That's right, because some people still believe it's cheaper to tear down than build new, but it's not anymore. But where were we? We got the bookshop started.

Benjamin: You got the bookshop started and Marilyn was running it.

Hasbrouck: Well, Marilyn was running the bookshop.

Benjamin: Was it a success from the beginning?

Hasbrouck: Yes, the bookshop always was successful. It didn't make much money in the early days, but it was able to stay alive.

57 Benjamin: Were there any other architectural bookstores?

Hasbrouck: Not at that time.

Benjamin: Anywhere?

Hasbrouck: No.

Benjamin: I didn't think so.

Hasbrouck: There are a few now, and there have been a number that have sprung up over the past twenty years—I'd say a dozen or more—which failed. Today there are two or three bookshops that are similar to hers. There is Bill Stout in San Francisco, and there is a bookshop in New York that is still operating. There are a couple of others, but none where the owners really devote a lot of time to it to make a success of it.

Benjamin: What is the secret of your success?

Hasbrouck: Not being greedy. I think that a lot of the people who look at the Prairie Avenue Bookshop see five thousand titles and lots of customers and lot of mail orders every day, and they say, "Oh, I can do this," and they go into business. Number one, it takes a lot of time and effort to assemble the stock, and, number two, they demand a huge salary for themselves and there just simply isn't enough there to do it from day one. You have to ease into it. Marilyn has been doing this for over thirty years. That stock wasn't there when she opened the shop. When she opened the bookshop she had sixty titles. Today she's got over five thousand, so it took a long time.

Benjamin: You must have a pretty long mailing list today.

Hasbrouck: I think there are over twelve thousand people on her mailing list, and not every one of them has bought a book. That's the way it works. But anyway,

58 you can't just leap into it and expect a huge amount of profit out of it. You can take a modest profit, and as the years go by you can get a little more and a little more. But you're never going to get rich running a bookstore.

Benjamin: So these early publishing ventures and The Prairie School Review evolved into the bookstore. Why did you decide to stop publishing the magazine?

Hasbrouck: It went fourteen years. The bookshop and my private practice all kind of meld in together. In 1975 I guess it was, I went out and scrounged up a few clients.

Benjamin: What were the jobs you scrounged?

Hasbrouck: Mostly little houses and surveys.

Benjamin: New?

Hasbrouck: No, mostly restoration things. But the thing that I scrounged and got that was the most important was the Clarke house. I had the Clarke house before I left the AIA.

Benjamin: How did you get that job?

Hasbrouck: I've never been sure, but I'm always tempted to say that Harry Weese probably suggested to Lew Hill, who was then the commissioner of planning, that I was going into business and that I could do this job and he ought to give it to me, because I got the job with very little effort. Maybe it was because I just bid a very low fee. But anyway, I got the job.

Benjamin: Who suggested that the Clarke house be restored and moved? How did it happen?

Hasbrouck: Believe it or not, there is one man who can really claim more credit for the Clarke house than anybody else, and that was Sam Lichtmann. Sam

59 Lichtmann was the first chairman of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks when the commission was made an official city agency. Sam was an incredible guy.

Benjamin: What year was that?

Hasbrouck: It was in 1967 when I was chairman of the Chicago chapter of the AIA Committee on Historic Buildings, and Sam was on an advisory committee of some sort for the city of Chicago to set up a landmarks commission. I will never forget this. Sam invited me to go with him to see Mayor Richard J. Daley, and I was a very young man at the time, but I went because I wanted to meet the mayor. And so, off we went to City Hall, and we were received with great courtesy. The mayor was an elegant man. I mean, his reputation doesn't do him justice, I don't think. Anyway, we went into his office and had a little small talk for a few minutes, and then the mayor said, "Well, Sam, what can I do for you today?" He was very much in control. Sam said, "Well, Mr. Mayor, we've been working in this landmarks commission thing for some time now, and we really need some help." "Well, what kind of help do you need?" "We need at least one staff person and an office so that we can get things done," and the mayor said, "Well, do you think that's going to do it?" "Yes, one will be plenty, and maybe a little secretarial help." The mayor turned around and looked at a man who was sitting over in kind of the corner of the office who was absolutely quiet but was taking notes. He looked at that man, and he said, "Put $50,000 in the budget for next year's landmarks commission." In all my life I have never before or since seen anything where absolute authority and power was exercised. He didn't ask the City Council; he didn't ask anyone. He just said, "Put $50,000 in the budget for a landmarks commission." That's how the Commission on Chicago Landmarks got started. I went back a little too far here because over the next few years Sam was the chairman of the landmarks commission, and he did a great job. When the mid-seventies came, 1974, 1975, in that period, the landmarks commission wanted to do something for the bicentennial. Sam suggested that it would be a good idea to bring the Clarke house back to its original location. At the time, Sam didn't realize that its original location now had a filling station on

60 it or something like that. One thing led to another and there were several people who made suggestions. I think Ruth Moore was very much involved and Marian Despres and others. Eventually it was decided that the house would be moved to the location just south and a little bit west of Glessner house, and this would become part of the whole Prairie Avenue Historic District. Sam was the key person in all this. We talked about it in the commission, and later on I got the task of planning the move, of working out various techniques of moving the house. The problem with the house was that it had been moved out to around 4500 South Wabash about the time of the of 1871, and after it had been moved, they built the elevated and they built the expressways, so you couldn't bring it back. It was landlocked. I know Sam suggested somehow getting it over to the lake and bringing it on a barge. Well, we couldn't do that because we couldn't get it over the elevated. He suggested cutting it up in pieces and bringing it up by helicopter. We looked at that fairly seriously, believe it or not, but the only helicopter in the world at the time that could carry it was a Russian helicopter. It was a Russian helicopter that could carry a huge load. We thought about putting it on a train and bringing it up alongside the Dan Ryan Expressway. There was a young man named Dan Majewski who was with the Department of Architecture with the city of Chicago. He worked for Jerry Butler who was the city architect at the time. I have to tell you that Dan had as much to do with getting the Clarke moved as I did, ultimately. But I remember Dan and I took an automobile and we drove all around the neighborhood around the Clarke house and all the streets between the Clarke house and Glessner house, trying to figure out a route. We got out all the maps. There was no route that did not have two great barriers. The first barrier was the elevated tracks, and the second barrier was the Stevenson Expressway, the arm that went over to McCormick Place. Finally the conclusion was reached that we had to move it over both of those things, and so the plan then evolved around moving it. We figured out a way with the help of some moving consultants. Most of this was my thinking, although Dan was deeply involved, particularly in the route. We figured out a way to put two huge beams under the house. The house was on a raised basement. We built a platform under the house and then we pulled out the foundation

61 and let the house sit down on this platform, and then we moved the platform. We took off the cupola, which, by the way, had been added later anyway and was not even anchored in. When we pulled it out, we found there were no nails. It was just sitting on top of the house. So then we moved the house on its platform—I think we had thirty-two tires under it—over to the elevated at, I think, Forty-first, and then the movers gently jacked up the house until it was raised some forty-odd feet, I believe it was. No, not quite that far, but the scale is maybe thirty feet it had to be raised. It went pretty high. We had it on these piers and it was clear up, and then we built identical piers on the other side of the elevated. Then at midnight, after the trains had all stopped, we put two huge beams across the elevated tracks, put rollers on it and rolled the house across. It took a very short time.

Benjamin: Had this ever been done before?

Hasbrouck: No. We were all just terrified.

Benjamin: It's ingenious.

Hasbrouck: I had no errors and omissions insurance then, and I was very concerned. There was a huge crowd. To this day I have hundreds of slides and photographs of that move. I have a little slide show I give about it once in a while. So anyway, we moved it across. It took two or three weeks to raise it, and then it took a couple of weeks to lower it again. Then we put it on wheels again and took it up to the Stevenson Expressway.

Benjamin: And you did that there, too?

Hasbrouck: At the expressway, we added wheels under it so that we could spread the load, and then we pulled it across the expressway with a cable so that it would move at a smooth, even pace. In both cases, of course, we could not stop traffic, so the traffic was still there.

62 Benjamin: Do you mean the cars were going by while you were pushing the house across the road?

Hasbrouck: Yes, they were. The cars were going by while we were pushing it across. After we got it across the road, the rest of the day we took it over and put it above the foundation where it is now. After it was set in place, we built the foundation up to meet it. Then, of course, during the next several months the house was restored, and today it is restored.

Benjamin: Was the plan to make it part of a complex?

Hasbrouck: The plan was that it would be the centerpiece of the Prairie Avenue Historic District, with the Glessner house being the terminal at the north end, the 1900 South building at the south end and this more or less in the center. That's what's there now. It's unfortunate that there is not more activity at the whole complex, but I think there will be. Nevertheless, this was the first task that my office did. I am the first to give credit to people like Dan Majewski and Jerry Butler and people like that who helped, but it was under our wing.

Benjamin: Was this the first large-scale restoration project in the city?

Hasbrouck: Yes. It was the first time the city of Chicago spent money on a landmark. It cost about a million dollars, as I recall, to move it and to restore it—maybe a little more. But it was the first time the city had ever spent money on a landmark.

Benjamin: Interesting. And that was the job that got your office going.

Hasbrouck: What it did for us was to get a lot of visibility. The only time I was ever asked for an autograph was when we were moving it over the elevated tracks and this nice lady standing beside me came up and asked for an autograph. But it was fun to do that.

Benjamin: And where did that job lead?

63 Hasbrouck: Well, it led to other things. We then began to actually get other requests to move buildings. We moved a couple of other smaller buildings.

Benjamin: What else did you move?

Hasbrouck: We moved a schoolhouse out in Long Grove and we helped move a couple of other buildings. We moved a three-story apartment building for DePaul University up in the DePaul area north of Lincoln Park, and we did a massive plan for the city of Chicago to show how to move the McCarthy building. Remember the McCarthy building?

Benjamin: Yes, but you might want to recap.

Hasbrouck: The McCarthy building was at the corner of Washington and Dearborn and was, in fact, while it survived, the oldest building in the Loop. When they did what we now call Block 37, it was in the way. It was a Chicago landmark, and there was a strong pressure from the development community to destroy it so they could develop this block. There was almost equally strong pressure from the preservation community not to destroy the building, and one of the suggestions was that they would move it to the opposite corner. The architect at that time was, and still is, I suppose, if the block is ever developed, was Helmut Jahn. So we were asked to see if the building could in fact be moved. One of the young people in my office and I worked for about a month and a half, figuring out all the problems that were involved in moving it. In fact, we did a very comprehensive plan including a forty-five-minute slide show that we presented to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks and various City Hall dignitaries and so forth. It could have been done.

Benjamin: So what was your position on the issue?

Hasbrouck: There is no question in my mind it could have been done. I always prefaced my statement that I didn't think it should be done, because I don't think a

64 landmark should be moved. I think part of a landmark's importance is its site.

Benjamin: Yes, the National Register recognizes that, too.

Hasbrouck: As soon as you move a building it goes off the National Register. In any case, it could have been done. The cost would have been very high, and by very high I'm talking about maybe a million dollars just for the move. But that wasn't the real cost. In order to move it, we had to move it over lots of underground utilities. If we moved it on the street, which was the preferred route, it would be to push it out into Washington Street, move it over to the intersection of State and Washington, move it north on State and then back onto the corner lot. If we followed that route, we'd have to go over the subway, and we couldn't find an insurance company that would insure against damage to the subway. Insurance would have cost millions of dollars. Yet it wasn't even the money that stopped it. The decision was made not to do it because the argument was that even if the move was covered by insurance, they couldn't risk disrupting subway traffic for weeks if there was damage. I'm sure there were other reasons, too, but that was the main reason this was not done. It was an incredibly interesting project. I still saved that slide show. I've never given it again. It would be kind of fun to do it sometime.

Benjamin: Yes, it would be informative.

Hasbrouck: But we did those kind of moves. Then we started getting into other kinds of architecture. Shortly after I left the AIA and started my full-time practice, we did a master plan for Glessner house.

Benjamin: Tell me about that.

Hasbrouck: Glessner house at that time was in desperate need of all kinds of remedial work. It was sort of a hurry-up master plan that we did in a few weeks, but it was a good master plan and a lot of it was eventually implemented.

65 Essentially, what we did was to identify those areas in the house that were sacrosanct, that could not be changed. There were three kinds of areas. There were areas that absolutely had to be retained and restored. There were areas that could be adapted where the basic structure could be restored, but we would change the wall surface, perhaps, or the furniture and so forth and use it for offices. The third kind of space was space that we felt could be changed and made into new space, like the basement, some of the servants' rooms and spaces like that. Then we did projections of what should be done first. For example, we thought that the master bedroom suite, the library, the dining room and the kitchen suite all should be done relatively early because most people don't remember that the Glessner house was really in pretty sad shape, cosmetically at least, when the foundation acquired it. So there were several architects who were working on Glessner house. Jim Hammond did some work on the little auditorium on the second floor, which I never thought really should have been done, and the library was done by the Alschuler brothers, John and Al Alschuler, with the help of their sister, Marian Despres.

Benjamin: And the library was a restoration?

Hasbrouck: A restoration and a good one. They did a nice job on that. John Vinci did work on the dining room and the parlor and the front hall. I did work on the master bedroom suite. The thing I was most proud of was that we did the kitchen suite in the Glessner house, which was an accurate and well-done restoration. In addition to that, we did a number of small house restorations, adaptations and things like that.

Benjamin: Have you done other restorations that you take pride in?

Hasbrouck: I remember doing a double house that dated from 1883 in Wicker Park when Wicker Park was really a difficult area. We did it for two families—one was Prus and the other was Nelson. I remember they were in real estate, and these two men bought this wonderful Victorian double house for $14,000. It had nine thousand square feet. We restored it and had a good time doing it.

66 We won a couple of awards for it. They were fairly well off, and they spent at least a half a million dollars on it. About five or six years later on Christmas Eve one of the two houses caught fire and was badly damaged, and we did it again. We did the same house again. Another interesting sidelight to this is that about three years ago, my son Charles and his wife Susan, who live in Wicker Park, bought one half of that house and now live in it. So I can still go back to one of the buildings that I worked on in those days. The other kinds of things that we did, we did a number of house-museum-type things. We did the Palatine Historical House Museum (formerly the George Clayson house), and we worked on the Barrington Area Historical Museum. We did the Grosse Point Lighthouse in Evanston. We had fun on these things. We went out to Highland Park and worked up what I thought was a splendid master plan for the Highland Park Historical Society. It never got executed. The plans are still here on my shelves. A little offshoot of that was that we did the Highland Park music gazebo, the Bob Robinson Bandstand.

Benjamin: The bandstand is still used in the summer. How did that come about?

Hasbrouck: That was a fun project. My good old friend David Dubin called me one day—he lived in Highland Park—and he said, "Listen, they want to do a bandstand out there, and I don't have the time and I don't really know how to do a bandstand. If you'll do it, I'll pay your fee."

Benjamin: Isn't that unusual?

Hasbrouck: Oh, Dave was a good guy and still is. So we designed this bandstand, and sure enough, it was built. There were some minor changes made in the roof from our plan, but I didn't really worry too much about it. They made it a little heavier than it needed to be because they were worried about it falling apart. A couple of years later I got a call from the mayor of Sandwich, Illinois. It's a little town maybe fifty or sixty miles southwest of here. He said that they'd like to build a gazebo and they had heard that I had built one. I said, "Yes, I built one." They said, "Well, could we see what you can do?" So I made copies of these drawings on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper and I sent it off

67 to them. I never heard another word until about two or three months later when I got a call from a contractor, telling me that he was building this thing and he couldn't understand the plans. Then I said, "You're not supposed to be building that thing. I didn't do this. I didn't get any fee." So I wrote the mayor a letter and complained. I told him I felt that he owed me a fee for this. I was pretty upset because you just don't do things like that. Anyway, to make a long story short I got this long, rambling letter back from the mayor, telling me how he so much appreciated having these plans to use because he couldn't afford to pay for them. But if we were to come out, he would be glad to introduce me to the people of Sandwich and tell them how much we had contributed. Well, I never did any more. But I have gone out several times and looked at it, and what's really interesting about it is that the one in Sandwich is exactly according to our plan, and the one in Highland Park is a little bit of a variation. You can buy a postcard in Sandwich with the Highland Park bandstand on it. But anyway, we didn't do all small jobs. In about 1978, I had my office at 1900 South Prairie and Marilyn had her bookshop in the same building, and we had a business manager at the time who helped us plan our taxes and things like that. He said, "You know, you ought to sell this building. You could probably do pretty well on it." We put it on the market for what we thought was an outrageous price, and after a couple of false starts somebody came in and offered us full price without a contingency.

Benjamin: Who bought it?

Hasbrouck: It was bought by Steve Pratt, who is a city editor of the Chicago Tribune. Steve and Joy Pratt still live there and as far as I know have been very happy. Anyway, if we didn't sell the building, we still had to pay the commission to the real estate agent and we didn't want to do that, so we started looking around. My old friend Harry Weese suggested that we move the bookshop and my office to the Donohue building at 711 South Dearborn Street. At that time the Donohue building was, in effect, vacant. It was a loft building that Harry was very excited about. He had this plan that he wanted to revitalize the whole south Loop, but there was nothing there but empty buildings.

68 was abandoned, the Donohue building had maybe one or two funny old tenants in it, and several of the buildings in this neighborhood were totally abandoned. It was kind of a derelict street, but he made us an offer we couldn't refuse. I'm not going to tell you the price, but he sold us the space next door to the front door of the Donohue building for the bookshop.

Benjamin: He sold you the bookstore space? Was it like a condominium?

Hasbrouck: It was a condominium.

Benjamin: Oh, Harry Weese owned 711?

Hasbrouck: Harry Weese owned 711. He sold us that space next to the front door of Donohue—that was the only space he would sell to the bookshop—and the stipulation was that we had to have our entrance off the lobby of the building so that we could guard the front door, you know. He had no security here at all. So we did that, and the other stipulation was that I could have any space in the building I wanted for my office. So I chose the space above the bookshop where we are today. I actually have twice as much space as the bookshop has. We also chose to buy some of the space that was in the basement, so we actually have almost six thousand square feet.

Benjamin: So, interestingly enough, this building, 711, is a condominium mix of commercial—is there any residential here?

Hasbrouck: It's commercial and residential. In fact, I believe there are about a hundred units in this building of various sizes, and I think well over half of them are residential.

Benjamin: Did you do the building?

Hasbrouck: No. I did some of the units in the building. I suppose a half a dozen of these units were done by my office at various times, including the bookshop, of course, and this space and that of several of our friends who live here. But at

69 the time we did this, you know, Harry was selling these for a very modest price. He sold them over a period of two or three years, and the price gradually went up. It was one of the best investments I ever made because it was quite inexpensive. The kind of people who moved into Printers Row were essentially people like ourselves—people who liked to live in the city, people who were professionals, for the most part, and who enjoyed the idea of a loft building. This was, I believe, the first live-work condominium in Chicago. There are lots of others now. Anyway, we moved here, but I actually didn't move into my space for about a year. We moved here in September of 1978 with the bookshop and me. I had a temporary space upstairs until the space where my office is was vacated. There were some printers in here, Linotype operators. One of the areas of this office was a painter's storeroom. It was full of five-gallon cans of paint. So it was a pretty weird situation.

[Tape 3: Side 1]

Hasbrouck: In 1980 we acquired the last of the space we now occupy on the second floor and built it out as an office. It's been a very comfortable office ever since. But at the time we came over here, we were just beginning to get some projects that were of fairly decent size. Three projects which were essentially done at the same time were the Prus-Nelson house, the Delaware building and the Manhattan building. The Prus and Nelson property was, and still is, a building built in the early 1880s which was a double Victorian house, and it was Second Empire mansard roof and brick and so forth, which had been allowed to turn into sort of an SRO, a single room occupancy hotel. It had sixty or seventy people living in it, and these two real estate people bought the building and evicted the tenants and asked us to restore this building, which we did. It was a wonderful building, full of all kinds of carved details and fireplaces and parquet floors, most of which was under a dozen coats of paint. It was one of those projects which you very often find where the original building is still intact; it's just all covered up with things. For example, we found on the main floor of both halves of the building—it's a two-family house—these wonderful, big sliding carved doors, still there and

70 still intact in the walls. We restored it, and the Prus family moved into the larger half. It was about nine thousand square feet. One half of the building was about fifty-five hundred square feet and the other about thirty-five hundred square feet.

Benjamin: It sounds like you did a lot of archeology there.

Hasbrouck: We did a lot of archeology on that building.

Benjamin: Would you describe that as part of the restoration process?

Hasbrouck: Very often on a building, particularly a private home, you have to remove the later elements that have been added. The people have put drywall over old walls and many coats of paint, and they put on wallpaper, usually because it's less expensive to do that than it is to tear things out. And, of course, a lot of times you save things. Sometimes things will be destroyed. In the Prus- Nelson house there were two wonderful staircases, and the newel post in both cases was gone but the staircases had survived. They were enclosed to make them fire-protected to meet codes, but they had to get rid of the newel posts, so we had to go out and find similar period newel posts for the house.

Benjamin: Where did you find them?

Hasbrouck: You go to places like Salvage One and Architectural Artifacts and places like that. It's really not very hard to find Victorian artifacts in Chicago. There are other companies that actually supply things through the Old House Journal and sources like that. But anyway, we did this building and the two families moved in.

Benjamin: You mentioned your son Charles. Isn't he an architect?

Hasbrouck: Charles is an architect with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

Benjamin: How did all this happen?

71 Hasbrouck: Well, Charlie went off to the University of Illinois to study architecture when he graduated from high school in 1977, I guess it was, and he was a good student. He went to school for a couple of years, summers and all, and then his third year he went to France on their Versailles program. He was there for a year and actually graduated in France. He stayed in France for three months after he graduated to serve as a teaching assistant to Larry Perkins on two sketch trips, which he loved. He always said he learned more from Larry than he did from anybody else at school. He came back to Chicago at the end of that summer and came to work for me, here, and worked for me for two years.

Benjamin: Did he always want to be an architect?

Hasbrouck: From the time he got out of high school. He entered architecture school right away at the University of Illinois. He went through the undergrad program very quickly, in only three years, and I always said he got a degree without really finishing his education. But then he worked here for a couple of years. He actually worked on that Prus-Nelson house the second time, some years before he moved into it. After he was with me for two years, he went back to graduate school. He went to Yale, and he was there for three years. It was a three-year program. I thought he got a superb education at Yale. It was when Cesar Pelli was there. Pelli was very much involved in the program in those days. When my son came back to Chicago when he finished—I guess that was 1985—he wanted to work on big buildings. He interviewed with a number of firms around town and had job offers from all of them, but he wanted to work, actually, for Adrian Smith or Joe Gonzales who were both at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. So he went with SOM, and he has now been there for nine years and continues to grind away at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. He and I actually have worked on a couple of projects.

Benjamin: Really? What have you worked on together?

72 Hasbrouck: SOM and I consulted together on an early project for the . I was on a team once with SOM to do some work on the Cleveland Public Library, where Charles had a small part of it. We haven't really worked a lot together, and I don't anticipate that we will, but I'd love to. But he does a different kind of work than I do. He likes huge projects and he likes new buildings and so forth. We do a different kind of thing, and maybe that's best. His brother, John, is not in architecture. I always thought John would be an architect because he drew when he was a little boy. John is two years younger, and he at first insisted he wasn't going to go to college, and then his brother came home from the University of Illinois after two years and convinced John to look at Northern Illinois University. Marilyn and I took him out there and got him enrolled, and so he went to Northern for a couple of years, majoring in music. John is an excellent musician. In his third year he called us to announce that he was going to join a band and travel with it. He traveled with the band for about three years. He is a good musician. He plays the guitar. He traveled all over the Midwest in a radius of probably six or seven hundred miles and visited every college campus you can imagine. After three years—roughly October, I suppose it was—I got a call one Sunday morning from John, saying, "Dad, I don't want to do this anymore." I asked, "What do you want to do, John?" "Well, I want to go back to college, and I'd like to go to Wisconsin." So he went to Wisconsin and a couple of years later got his degree in graphic arts and computer work, and he now works in an advertising firm doing computer graphics. So the boys are both in something like what I do.

Benjamin: Related to the arts.

Hasbrouck: Yes, and we all get along fine these days. But anyway, we moved over here, and about the same time we got the Prus-Nelson house project, we also got a project to work on the Delaware building.

Benjamin: Tell me about that.

73 Hasbrouck: The Delaware building actually today is the oldest surviving office building in Chicago. It's at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn. At the time we got the job, which was, I believe, in about 1980—it may have been a year or so before we actually started—there were two other buildings in the Loop that were older, the McCarthy building and the Burnham building, I think it was called, on the corner of State and Randolph. Both of them are gone now. So the Delaware is actually the oldest building in Chicago. The Delaware building was started just two or three months after the Chicago fire. It was called the Bryant Block, and it was a six-story building, built for a man named Bryant by Wheelock and Thomas. It was an interesting building for a lot of reasons. Right after the fire, Chicago officials declared that buildings had to be built fireproof. The Delaware building, the Bryant Block at that time, was designed to be built with the ground floor in cast iron and glass and the upper four floors out of precast concrete. The precast concrete was designed in such a way that for many years a lot of people thought the Delaware building had a cast iron front. It does not. The Bryant Block then survived for several years.

Benjamin: Isn't that a very early use of precast concrete?

Hasbrouck: It's the earliest use I know of. It's the oldest precast concrete building in the United States that has survived that I know of. We were shocked to discover that it was precast concrete. It was an important thing to discover, though, because concrete can be restored. You can put new concrete against old concrete and it will adhere. It has a bonding characteristic. In about 1890 or 1891 in downtown Chicago they started raising the streets. They changed the streets.

Benjamin: Yes, they laid infrastructure and then put the street over it.

Hasbrouck: That's right. The ground floor of the Delaware building—originally the Bryant Block was four or five feet above the sidewalk level—became the same level as the sidewalk, and they excavated somewhat to put a new basement below it. Then they inserted another second floor in the building

74 and added two floors on top of the building. It sounds very complicated, but nevertheless, the Delaware building at the end of 1892 or 1893 when they finished it was eight stories plus a basement, all of which were occupied. Now, you see, the first two floors were cast iron and glass, the next four floors were precast concrete with windows set in, and the top two floors, which were added in the 1890-1892 period, were actually made out of pressed metal that we tested and found to be zinc, which is extremely unusual. It was a very Victorian building. When we got there, it was in terrible shape. By the way, in that 1890-1892 period they also carved out an atrium in the center. The Delaware building still to this day has a marvelous atrium on the inside, with staircases and cast iron decks and glass block.

Benjamin: That's not a very well-known fact.

Hasbrouck: No. People don't know about this. When we got there the building was, for all practical purposes, abandoned. There was no activity above the first floor.

Benjamin: Who was your client?

Hasbrouck: Our first Delaware client was J.B. Duke. We did a plan for the restoration of it, and I'll be darned if our client didn't go bankrupt, so the plan never went on. A few weeks later somebody else took over the building and they brought in another architect. Bernheim, Kahn and Lazano came in, and they asked us then to continue as their consultants for the restoration. We did the drawings for the restoration of the building, and they did the mechanical, electrical and that sort of thing in the building. They also coordinated the on- site work. It was a good relationship.

Benjamin: When you do a restoration of a building of that age, walk me along the path that you would follow.

Hasbrouck: That building is a good example of what you have to do. A building is a living thing. It changes all the time. You have to decide what is the most

75 significant period, what's the most, for want of a better term, valuable period of the building.

Benjamin: This building went through a lot of changes.

Hasbrouck: Yes. In 1890 not only was it raised—I mean, the two floors added to the top and the ground floor altered—but there were a couple of bays added to it on the east side, so the building got to be quite large. Then within a relatively short time, the bays that had been added to the east were taken off and elevators were changed. Lots of things were changed on this building. We did a substantial amount of research, and we found a number of photographs of the building at various times.

Benjamin: Was the Chicago Historical Society a good source?

Hasbrouck: That was one of the sources. The architect who altered it in 1890-1892 was Holabird and Roche. Oddly enough, at the time I was doing the Delaware, I was also doing some appraisal work for the drawings of Holabird and Roche, and I ran across these drawings.

Benjamin: Serendipity?

Hasbrouck: It must have been. They were very helpful to us, but we never were able to find really good drawings or a photograph of how the ground floor looked. It occurred to me that the building next door to it, north, was the Oliver building, so I went to see Dave Phillips, who is a photographer here and has Chicago Architectural Photography, and asked him if he had a glass negative of either the Delaware or the Oliver building. He had the Oliver building but not the Delaware. He got it out and we looked at it, and there was a strip on the edge of the Oliver building photograph showing about three or four feet of the Delaware building, and so Dave printed the full frame of the glass negative and blew it up. It was a superb negative, and we were able to derive almost exactly what the ground floor cast iron front looked like from that

76 photograph. Of course, in earlier photographs that had always been cropped off.

Benjamin: Is this photography collection available for research?

Hasbrouck: Oh, sure. I use Dave's things a lot. But in any case, we determined that the building should be restored and not remodeled. This building, by the way, was the first building done under the tax act that gave the twenty-five percent investment tax credit. It was the first one in Chicago. I don't know if you remember this or not, but that tax act passed in 1981. The act provided that if you began work and finished it before the end of that year, six months, the investor got a twenty-five percent investment tax credit and did not have to reduce his depreciable base. Later on, if you took the investment tax credit, you had to reduce your depreciable base by the amount of the investment tax credit. This was an incredibly large bonus.

Benjamin: But it didn't last for very long.

Hasbrouck: It was over after six months. This was the only building I know of that ever got it. It's certainly the only one in Chicago. For the Delaware building, we determined very early that the restoration date would be 1900 because in 1900 it looked the way it does today. The bays to the east hadn't been added yet, the top was on, and we had a reasonably good photograph of it in 1900. So we determined that that was the date, and all concerned agreed. The drawings were prepared that way, and we got it certified that way. The building was certified by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the National Park Service. It's the only landmark building, by the way, in Chicago that I know of that was made a landmark after it was restored.

Benjamin: A local landmark?

Hasbrouck: It's now a Chicago landmark, but it was not at the time we were doing it. It was on the National Register. It was made a Chicago landmark afterwards.

77 Benjamin: And what qualified it?

Hasbrouck: Local landmark status does not qualify for the investment tax credit, per se. You have to be on the National Register. There are other points about that also. But anyway, once we determined the date of the restoration and prepared the drawings, it then became a matter of finding the materials and determining the basic form of the building. When you restore a building of that nature, it's really not necessary to restore elements that are no longer functional. For example, when you restore a building that was designed to be lit by gaslights, you don't put gaslights back. You put back an appropriate type of electric lighting. So really what we did was restore it to its original appearance, or to its appearance in the year 1900, circa 1900, and we tried to put the original colors back, which we did.

Benjamin: How did you research the colors?

Hasbrouck: The color on that building was quite easy. There were an awful lot of colors on it. But we have facilities here to take color samples off a building and look at them under our stereo microscope.

Benjamin: In your office?

Hasbrouck: Oh, yes. We have the Munsell catalogs here, so we can identify colors very nicely. We believe that the colors that are on the building now, essentially green and gray, are the colors that were on at the time of the restoration. We never were absolutely certain, but we know that it was within a year or so because we never found any evidence or any documentation of when the colors were put on. All we could do was estimate. The green was the second color, for example, on the building, and it was ten years after it was built, so we assume that it was the color that went on around the turn of the century. I believe it's reasonably accurate. It's probably not absolutely accurate. The Delaware building was the first big building, I guess you might say, that we did. It had good luck. It won a couple of little awards.

78 Benjamin: To put your work in perspective, who else was doing this kind of work at this period?

Hasbrouck: Nobody—oh, John Vinci. John was doing some of it. Very few people in the late seventies or early eighties understood what restoration meant. For one thing, it was looked upon as kind of a dilettante's profession. Architects who did it would offer to do it for nothing, as a favor. There was always the argument that restoration was going to cost a lot because you didn't know what was going to happen. These arguments annoyed me, and I didn't agree with them. I also was delighted when the investment tax credit was made available, first through the Tax Act of 1976 and then later on with the revisions that came. Ultimately, the Tax Act of 1981 I think was the one that was the most valuable because for the first time it gave owners and developers a financial incentive to restore an historic building. No matter what anyone says, ultimately in order to restore a building it has to be financially acceptable and pay its own way. I've argued and been criticized for making the argument that successful restoration usually involves making a rich man a little bit richer. Some people think that's too bad. I don't because making a wealthy man wealthier usually generates jobs and all that sort of thing.

Benjamin: Do you believe there is a lot of public benefit?

Hasbrouck: Yes, but most important, you preserve some of our heritage. I mean, the rich man might lose his money but the historic building is generally in pretty good shape when he finishes.

Benjamin: That's a nice way to put it.

Hasbrouck: But we had good luck with that building. While we were working on that building, a friend of mine, who I actually met at your house…

Benjamin: At my house?

79 Hasbrouck: Yes, Richard Gsell. He came to me. I don't remember exactly the circumstances, but he came to this office and said he wanted to develop a loft building and did I know of a loft building in the Printers Row area or anywhere in the South or Near West Side that he could develop. We spent a whole day going around looking at various loft buildings, none of which he cared for.

Benjamin: What was the situation on Printers Row at that time?

Hasbrouck: At that time most of Printers Row was either not under development or just beginning to be developed. There were several buildings, like the Transportation building across the street, which hadn't even been started. The Pontiac building was still unstarted, the Transportation building was not started, and the Dearborn Station was vacant. So Printers Row was pretty much vacant. Richard was not enthralled by any of these buildings. He had told me that he could invest a few hundred thousand dollars. I don't recall exactly how much. I had heard within the previous month or so that the Manhattan building was for sale for a million dollars, and that was more than he had offered. At the end of the day I said, "Look, Rich, I know one more building we can look at. It's not really a loft building and it's more money than you're talking about, but you might like to look at it." He said, "Fine, let's go look." So I called up the representative of the building, the owner's rep, and we went over there about four or five o'clock in the afternoon. He fell in love with it. The Manhattan building, of course, is a marvelous building. It's 1889, a Jenney and Mundie building. At the time it was built, it was the tallest building in the world. It's got two fronts, you know. It's got a front on Dearborn Street and a slightly variant front on Plymouth Court, and it had this wonderful, iron ornament in it and so forth. Interestingly enough, the building actually came with a little building next door to it. The building next door was under the same ownership.

Benjamin: Were they connected?

80 Hasbrouck: Yes, they were connected, and on some of the upper floors, say, six or seven or eight, there were holes through it so you could walk through from the north building.

Benjamin: Did Jenney design that building, too?

Hasbrouck: No, not the building to the north. Anyway, these people wanted a million dollars for the building. It was on the National Register, and it could be developed. Within just a few days, Richard bought the building. I don't know where he got the money. He made a down payment, fairly substantial, thousands of dollars, and he had no financing. He had nothing. He had no plan, but Richard was kind of a visionary. He was pretty smart. This was like in September or October.

Benjamin: Of 1982?

Hasbrouck: It must have been either 1981 or 1982. I don't remember. He had some deadline when he had to buy this building. He had an option or he would lose his money, and he pulled it off. He got his money together and he bought that building. I know he got it just hours before his option ran out, and then we went to work and developed a scheme to convert it to housing. For lots of reasons it worked for housing.

Benjamin: How? Why? The building was built as a speculative office building.

Hasbrouck: It was built as an office building, but it's a narrow building and it's got a central core. You could have a double-loaded corridor with apartments on both the east and west side. There were big windows, etc. We worked out a scheme for, as I remember, about ninety-two or ninety-three apartments. They were big apartments. They ran from one bedroom to four bedrooms.

Benjamin: That is big.

81 Hasbrouck: We went through all kinds of machinations to get this done, and he went after Housing and Urban Development financing, and after several months of working on this—the drawings were finished and we had contractors on board and so forth—the HUD financing wasn't quite enough. HUD financing, without going into too much detail, is based on a number of things, including the number of apartments and the mix of apartments. We were told that one of the reasons the financing didn't work was because there were no efficiency units in this thing, and there weren't really enough apartments to get the financing that we needed. It wasn't based on square footage; it was based on numbers of various types of apartments. So Richard came to me, and he said, "We've got to do something about this." His original scheme, you see, didn't have any efficiency apartments.

Benjamin: Was it intended for some low-income families?

Hasbrouck: No, it was never intended for low-income. It was intended to be middle- income, even kind of higher—upper middle-income housing, and the plan was to eventually condominium it.

Benjamin: How do you get HUD money for that?

Hasbrouck: You could do that in those days. There was a program for getting housing for this. We did not have to go for middle income. So anyway, I literally locked myself in this room where we are today for a day or two and figured out a way to chop a bedroom and bathroom off of about twelve two-bedroom apartments at each end of the building so that we could have efficiency apartments. We turned the bedroom and bath into a bedroom, bath and kitchen, and instead of ninety-two apartments, we ended up with a hundred and five, I believe, of which something like a dozen were efficiency apartments. It required very little change to the working drawings. It required adding a kitchen and moving a couple of doors and so forth. We had probably fifty or sixty sheets of drawings on this thing and we didn't want to have to change everything, and we didn't have to. We had a relatively small amount of change, and with this new mix the formula

82 worked and the financing was available and we went ahead on that work. Corrigan Construction was the contractor.

Benjamin: Was there much housing in the Loop at this time?

Hasbrouck: There wasn't anything in the Loop. The nearest thing to the Loop was . There was no housing in the Loop at that time. None. The Manhattan is considered to be in the Loop even though it's just outside.

Benjamin: Oh, yes, of the Elevated.

Hasbrouck: We put these one hundred and five units above the first floor, and the first floor was to be commercial.

Benjamin: Whose idea was it to make it residential?

Hasbrouck: I'd like to claim it, but I think Richard originally wanted it to be housing, and I agreed to it.

Benjamin: Was it driven by the financing?

Hasbrouck: No, it was driven by Richard and I talking about it and thinking this was a good idea.

Benjamin: That's was very forward looking, and risky.

Hasbrouck: We were pretty naive at the time. There is no question about it, both of us were. Eventually, Richard had to bring in other partners. Charles Strobeck became a major partner and eventually bought out the whole deal. Strobeck, of course, was financially astute. A lot of interesting things happened in the Manhattan building.

Benjamin: What, for instance?

83 Hasbrouck: For one thing, the project went forward—I don't remember the exact numbers. It was like a six- or seven-million-dollar project, which was a pretty good-sized project but not outrageous, and the apartments were very nice—they still are to this day—and they rented fairly well. I think the Manhattan building has always been reasonably full. Oddly enough, the ground floor has never really been a successful commercial operation, partly because Mr. Strobeck, through his personal convictions, refused to permit any restaurant or bar owner in there that had liquor. He didn't believe in that. But that did make it difficult to rent the ground floor. But now there are a couple of commercial operations on the ground floor, and I understand they always have done fairly well.

Benjamin: Is he a building manager?

Hasbrouck: Well, it used to be Strobeck-Reiss. His firm was and still is an important building and real estate management firm in Chicago. And, of course, they got the investment tax credits in those days. But an interesting thing happened on that building. As I said earlier that Richard paid a million dollars for the building, and I'm pretty sure that's absolutely correct. While we were working on it, as we dug into the building and started demolishing, sometimes portions of the buildings are covered up. We discovered in the Manhattan building that the original elevator shaft and elevator cabs, which were magnificent wrought iron ornament designed by Jenney and Mundie, were all there—hundreds of pieces of this magnificent ornament. The workmen were breaking them up with sledge hammers and carrying them out, and I was on the site and I said, "Rich, you can't do this! This stuff is worth a lot of money." I remember he said, "Look, I'll sell you the whole thing for forty thousand bucks." I didn't have forty thousand bucks. Nevertheless I did convince them to remove the ironwork carefully, and they eventually removed about two thousand of these wrought iron pieces that are about six feet long and twelve or fourteen inches wide.

Benjamin: What has happened to them?

84 Hasbrouck: What I did was convince them to do it, and then I had to justify it, so I checked with about a dozen museums throughout the world, the Smithsonian, the Tate—or not the Tate. What is another museum in London?

Benjamin: The Victoria and Albert?

Hasbrouck: The Victoria and Albert, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Smithsonian, the Building Museum in Washington, the High Museum in . I wrote to all these people and said that this ornament was available and would they be interested. They were interested across the board. Everybody wanted that stuff. So then we arranged to have the material appraised, and fortunately, some of these pieces had actually gotten out of the building before and there were auction records to help establish a value.

Benjamin: I was going to ask how you would put a value on it.

Hasbrouck: Well, there were auction records on it. These pieces were valued in the range of a thousand to two thousand dollars apiece, so we were looking at well over a million dollars' worth of ornament. All of the pieces, then, were given to these various museums. The Art Institute has a panel of this on permanent exhibit in their architectural fragments exhibit today.

Benjamin: Were they given or did the museums buy them?

Hasbrouck: They were given. None of it was bought. It was given, and the tax credits that the investors got for giving away this iron was almost enough to recover the full amount of money that they paid for the building. It was an incredible windfall. Later on there was actually a dispute by the IRS against the partnership, and I had to testify as to the value of these things. The partners won the case, and it was upheld by the IRS. But the Manhattan building, more important than that, was saved. The Manhattan building was vacant. It was literally in danger of being destroyed.

Benjamin: Was there no possibility of utilizing the elevator because of code and so on?

85 Hasbrouck: The original elevators in the Manhattan building were water-powered ton elevators. They had this huge piston in the basement, about three feet in diameter and about forty feet long. They had pumps that would pump water in and push this huge piston back, and that would force cables to raise and lower the elevators. There was no way we could use it—they're still there, by the way.

Benjamin: You'd have a hard time getting me on that elevator.

Hasbrouck: We tried very hard to get some of those pulled out and put in a museum, but we could never get anybody to finance it, so they were abandoned in place. But to answer your question, the elevator system was not one that we could salvage.

Benjamin: And the ornamental treatment, could you reuse it?

Hasbrouck: The cabs themselves were not particularly attractive. It was the ornamental surrounds and doors. By the way, if you look in the lobby of the Manhattan, quite a number of those pieces of ornament have been reinstalled, so the essence of the original is still there, but we just couldn't utilize them because the elevators had to be enclosed for fire protection.

Benjamin: They were originally those old cage elevators.

Hasbrouck: Yes, these were cage piecework.

Benjamin: Are there any of those left in the city?

Hasbrouck: If there are, I can't think of one offhand. There might be. You know, I think there is. What's that building up on the North Side that's a landmark?

Benjamin: The ?

86 Hasbrouck: The Brewster. I think the Brewster had open-cage elevators. But in any case, the Manhattan was done. I'll tell you one more story about the Manhattan, one of the most exciting days I ever had. We decided to take off all of the extraneous material around the entrance. The entrance had been remodeled time and again, and there were about four or five generations of steel and plaster around the entrance. We started peeling this off, and at the bottom at the south end we discovered that the original bronze M in Manhattan was still over the door. I said, "Be careful of that. Maybe the whole thing is there," and sure enough, as we peeled it off, the entire original sign was there, and it's there today. I remember some of the people said, "Oh, we've got to take that off and put up a better sign," and I just absolutely refused to let them do it.

Benjamin: When you work on a project like this, does it require an incredible amount of hands-on supervision so that somebody doesn't mess up?

Hasbrouck: It does. You know, that is one of the worst fears I have, that I won't be there when something important happens.

Benjamin: How do you handle that?

Hasbrouck: You try to be there when something important happens. But in that case we did save it, and it's there today. I remember the sign cost less than $2,000 to clean and polish. It would have cost ten times that much to make a new one.

Benjamin: Is that building a financial success?

Hasbrouck: As far as I know it is, yes. I didn't get involved in the financial end.

Benjamin: Is it residential today?

Hasbrouck: It's residential today. It has never been condoed. It's still rental apartments. I presume someday it will be condoed.

87 Benjamin: Are there many rental apartments in Printers Row?

Hasbrouck: Well, it's about fifty-fifty, I'd say. After the Manhattan was done, we continued to grind away on various projects.

Benjamin: Now, you say "we." At this point when you were working on the Delaware and Manhattan, they were big projects. How many were "we"?

Hasbrouck: I had about six or seven people in my office at that time. Steve Knutson was working for me. He practices by himself now with some helpers up in Evanston.

Benjamin: Who else did you have working for you?

Hasbrouck: Harry Hunderman was with me. My son, Charles, was with me for a while. A guy named Jim Hollis was here. It's hard for me to remember. Ann Sullivan was here—she is now with Walker Johnson. Deborah Slayton was here. A fellow named Richard Monastra was with me for several years. We all worked together and were all very interested and excited about restoration.

Benjamin: How did you pull together a team like that?

Hasbrouck: It started very slowly. When I first opened my office out on Prairie Avenue, I had two employees. I had Mark Browning, who was my first employee. He is now with Vic Vickrey—he's Vic's computer guru. I had Barbara Roches. She was a new graduate from the University of Illinois who was essentially my draftsperson. We grew very slowly. The first person I hired who had considerable experience was Harry Hunderman who had a master's in preservation from the University of Michigan and had also spent some time at the Rome Centre in Italy. Harry and I got along fine. He was a good technical man. He was with me, I'd say, from 1978 until the middle of 1986 when he left to go with Wiss Janney. I've had a number of people in this

88 office who are just great. Carl Giegold worked for me for several years. He is now with Solomon, Cordwell, Buenz. Let's see who else...

Benjamin: Do people find you?

Hasbrouck: Yes. We get an awful lot of resumes from people who want to be involved in restoration.

Benjamin: What better training?

Hasbrouck: Well, that's true. And you know something, restoration still hasn't found its proper place in the scheme of things. There are a lot of people with no training at all who would like very much to be in this field. There are an awful lot of people who look upon restoration essentially as a fix-up, paint- up business, and they don't understand that true architectural restoration involves two areas of expertise that are just indispensable. The first is a thorough, complete understanding of the architectural history of the buildings that you're going to work on and their predecessors. In other words, you have to understand how a building was designed and what it looked like and why it was done the way it was when it was designed in 1875 or 1900 or 1920, for that matter. In order to do that, you really have to understand their predecessors. So you really need a pretty firm foundation in architectural history with special emphasis on the last century or the last century and a half. You have to understand the architectural history, and you have to appreciate the aesthetic of that period. Second, you have to understand the use of materials, the technology of construction. You have to know what happens to materials, how they were used, how they have aged and how they are today. Restoration is much more technological than it is design oriented. Design is always an advantage to an architect, but in restoration, a reliance upon design can actually be a deterrent to a good restoration project.

89 [Tape 3: Side 2]

Hasbrouck: It's interesting that in restoration an architect and his staff get to work on buildings that are already great buildings. You don't restore a building that's a dog, you know. You work on buildings by and Jenney and Mundie and Wheelock and Thomas and Frank Lloyd Wright and so forth. The reason you're restoring these buildings is because they were at one time, and still are in many cases, buildings of great merit. You simply do not have the privilege of redoing the entrance to the Glessner house, and I'm using that as a generic term here. So you have to restrain yourself when it comes to using your design ability. You have to be able to recognize good design and leave it alone, and that's a difficult thing for some people to understand and to do. But that's what is done in our strange field.

Benjamin: That's really important.

Hasbrouck: After we had finished the Delaware and the Manhattan, we had very good luck for a while, and even still do today. We began to get some reasonably good projects. We did the Honolulu House in Marshall, Michigan.

Benjamin: What is the Honolulu House?

Hasbrouck: The Honolulu House is a building built by a former ambassador to the Hawaiian Islands, and he came back to the United States in the 1860s and built a house that was inspired by the architecture of the Hawaiian Islands. It was interesting largely because the interior was encrusted—I supposed that's the right word—with beautiful, painted ornament on plaster, and this ornament was literally falling off the ceilings and walls. The plaster had deteriorated, and some of it was being held together by the paint. They wanted to save this, and so they asked us to look at it. We developed a system to stabilize the plaster, or reharden the plaster, if you will. We injected an epoxy in it and hardened it again, and then we glued it back onto the lath with the paint still on it. Then after the plaster was glued back onto the lath, we had a painter restore the paint. It was quite an achievement. We won an

90 award for technical achievement on that project. It is still standing today, and it's a great tourist attraction.

Benjamin: So you do a lot of the research into solving these difficult problems.

Hasbrouck: Right, we do. It's been my practice for twenty-five years now to find and acquire documents and books, both contemporary books and historic books, on methods and means of doing buildings. You look around here in the library. We have probably fifteen hundred books, mostly on subjects of technology, and at home I have another twenty-five hundred books on architectural history of the early modern movement and so forth. So we can do a lot of our research right in our offices. But you're right, we do a lot of investigation, and there is a lot more to do. I've probably said this before, but there are two things I'm always amazed at. Number one is how little I know about this world of restoration and how to do it, and the other is how much more I know than anybody else. It's kind of a contradiction, but it's true.

Benjamin: While we're on the field in general, what about schooling? How was one trained ten years ago, and with an increase in interest in restoration and rehabilitation are there more places to learn? Are there better places to learn? What's your overview of the history of education in this field?

Hasbrouck: It's interesting that, say, seventy-five years ago, in the early twentieth century, an architect in a normal architectural school was trained in the historic styles and in historic techniques and so forth.

Benjamin: Was a Beaux-Arts training a pretty good foundation for restoration and rehabilitation?

Hasbrouck: Architects had good training in this sort of thing and they understood some of the technology and how to prepare the drawings and so forth. But as time went by and the modern movement came to pass—by the modern movement I mean the work starting in 1930 up through 1950—there was a trend away from historic styles, and everyone wanted to get into the International Style

91 and the clean look. Consequently, architects were no longer taught how to deal with the historic styles. In fact, it was looked upon as being passé or an inappropriate thing for an architect to do.

Benjamin: Do you think that was the influence of the Bauhaus?

Hasbrouck: Partly. It was the result of lots of things. I don't want to blame the Bauhaus because the Bauhaus had some good things, too. The apex of this period of the rejection of historicism and the rejection of historic buildings as having no value came essentially right after the Second World War, in the late forties and in the fifties. Then everything was aimed at modernism and clean lines. I've argued, and I think I make a good argument, that more damage was done to historic architecture of the United States between 1945 and 1960 by men who were trying to modernize things than any other period in our lives. I mean, hundreds of wonderful storefronts and wonderful Baroque architecture elements were literally destroyed or covered up or painted over or damaged or something. I have a slide show I give where I show a before and after of a bank that was published in a 1956 issue of Architectural Record. The before, which was very elegant and ornamental, looked so much better than the after that people just don't realize that was what was being done in those days. I mean, they were dropping ceilings left and right and they were covering up all kinds of detail. That's what was happening. But then in about 1965 there was a kind of a backlash to this and there were some people who began to say, "We've got to save some of our architectural heritage." Now, this had not always been done. I mean, there had been Jim Fitch at Columbia and Charlie Peterson, who is still alive, by the way. He had been with the National Park Service in the thirties and continued to preach all through those years about why we should maintain and restore our heritage. But in roughly 1965—I don't remember the dates exactly—Jim Fitch started a movement to begin the education program at Columbia, and the Columbia program was, if not the first, certainly one of the earliest programs to teach architects of today how to restore historic buildings.

Benjamin: The technological means?

92 Hasbrouck: Both the technology and the history. They did a lot of things like paint analysis and mortar analysis and things like that, laboratory work, and they sort of set a tone of how to do this. Other schools began not too long after that. The University of has a good program under Blair Reeves, who has since retired. The University of Virginia had a good program. Various other schools began to have these programs, and eventually Pennsylvania established a program which I believe is one of the best today. But they began to teach how to do historic preservation. There were really two tracks that they were teaching. One was what I call the restoration track where you were actually taught to be an architect who dealt with older buildings and restored them, and the other is the preservation track where you taught people to deal with the politics and the financial end of preserving a historic building. The two are not necessarily separate. They are parallel tracks, and sometimes people do both. They are two different fields and you need both in order to survive. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, for example, is on the preservation track. They really don't deal very much with the restoration of historic buildings. What they're concerned about is saving a building from being demolished and preserving it after it's restored. But the National Trust has never been involved in the technology of restoration, which I think is too bad. There are organizations, however, that are devoted to the restoration track, like the Association of Preservation Technology, which is a super organization. It was actually started in Canada. The Canadian National Park Service prompted a number of their staff to get this started, and then it was their people who started it. The whole idea of preservation and restoration came late to the United States. It started in Canada before it started here, and it started in Europe long before it started there. In Vienna and Paris and London and Italy, for example, there have been programs for the training of restoration for a long time, but not in the United States. Nevertheless, in the sixties these programs got started. Part of the reason I got involved in this and started learning about it was that in the mid-sixties I was a member of the AIA and I was on what we called then the Preservation Committee of the AIA. It later became the Historic Resources Committee of the AIA, and it's still called that. We used to regularly meet and discuss why this was

93 important, and the word began to slowly get around. Actually, my first firm was called Historic Resources, named after that committee.

Benjamin: Did the movement in the country affect education in Chicago?

Hasbrouck: Not very much. Until very recently there really hasn't been any formal training in Chicago in the field of restoration or preservation, certainly not at the University of Illinois or IIT. There just simply hasn't been.

Benjamin: And at the University of Illinois downstate?

Hasbrouck: Downstate there is a program, and has been for about a decade now or maybe a little more, where you can get a master's in historic preservation. It's run by a man named John Garner, and they do a fairly good job. I've had a couple of people here who were graduates of that program. But it wasn't until about a decade ago that it got started down there. Now, as you probably know, there is a master's program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Benjamin: How did that get started?

Hasbrouck: This sounds very self-serving, but about three years ago I met a man named Peter Brown, who at the time was the financial officer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He introduced me to Anthony Jones, who was the president of the school. Tony was and still is a big fan of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. My wife and I had acquired at an auction a painting by Frances Macdonald who was actually Mackintosh's wife's sister. There were the four Macs—Mackintosh, McNair and Frances and Margaret Macdonald. Mackintosh and McNair married the Macdonald sisters, and they were all artists. Frances Macdonald was probably the least known of them, but she did paintings and we acquired a painting of hers. Tony Jones was fascinated with it, so we invited him over one night for drinks and dinner to look at our painting. He enjoyed that, and we did, too. So the Browns and Tony and his lady came over, and in the course of the evening the subject came up that I

94 had great difficulty in finding trained people to hire in my office. One thing led to another, and we said, "We really ought to have a program like that at the Art Institute," because it would fit in with a couple of other program they were thinking about on conservation of paintings and museum management. In a weak moment I said, "Okay, I will write up a proposal of what the program ought to have," and so I did. It was three or four pages long. One thing led to another and we met a few months later. Actually two years ago this January we met at the Cliff Dwellers Club with a couple of faculty members and Peter Brown and Tony and I. They looked over this proposal I had made and said, "Let's do it." Don Kalec, who is a faculty member at the Art Institute, was asked to essentially be the inside guy, and between us we prepared a program of classes and what classes should be taught. We modeled it somewhat after the University of Pennsylvania's program, but we also looked at a lot of other programs as well. We looked at what's going on downstate at the University of Illinois and in Florida and at Columbia and Virginia and various places of this nature. All of these places have pretty good programs. Some are better than others. What we did was try to model it after the best of all of those. A little over a year ago now we had this all in place and so, fools that we were, we said, "Let's do it," and so a year ago last fall was the first class. I think there were a dozen students that came, all of whom had undergraduate degrees, some in architecture, some in literature, and there was one who had a degree in journalism. We started the class, and they were a good class. I taught the class on historic structure reports because that's my primary area of interest. I'm going to teach it again this coming year. So right now there is a program in Chicago, and I'm hoping that it eventually becomes a very prominent, worthwhile program, and I think it will. We've got some good teachers.

Benjamin: Who are the teachers?

Hasbrouck: Well, Kalec teaches, Kevin Sarring teaches. Kevin used to be with Harry Weese, as you probably know, and he worked for me for a year or so. He still is on our list of people available here at the office. Ann Sullivan, who works for Walker Johnson and worked for me before she was with Walker.

95 Benjamin: I know Vince Michael teaches.

Hasbrouck: Yes, and there have been some part-timers. Mike Jackson comes and helps in my class, as well as various other people from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. We've had very good luck in finding people to help out, both on a full-semester basis and on a one-time basis.

Benjamin: Must you be a registered student or can someone audit?

Hasbrouck: I think you have to be a registered student. Actually, I think it's very expensive. The tuition to go to the classes is fourteen or fifteen thousand dollars a year. That seems expensive to me because when I went to school it cost a thousand dollars a year. We got a little off the beaten path here, didn't we?

Benjamin: Well, we did, but that's okay because we covered an important aspect of your interest and career. We were discussing your work on the Manhattan building...

Hasbrouck: And the Honolulu House. Well, in the early eighties we did some other things, like Dearborn Street Station, for example. It was important.

Benjamin: Is it one of the few, or is it the only station left?

Hasbrouck: Well, Union Station is still here, but North Western is gone.

Benjamin: Dearborn Street Station still looks like a railroad station even though there are no trains.

Hasbrouck: Right, it's the only adaptive reuse of a railroad station. When we got Dearborn Street Station, it was just in incredibly bad condition. It was empty.

Benjamin: How did you get the job?

96 Hasbrouck: Actually, the building was purchased by a man named Herb McLaughlin. Herb McLaughlin was the McLaughlin of Kaplan, McLaughlin and Diaz. They were a San Francisco firm who did primarily hospital work—a big architectural firm—and Herb was a wealthy man who invested in buildings and was looking for the tax credits, among other things.

Benjamin: So it was an architectural firm but they also did development?

Hasbrouck: Yes, but he did this personally. This was not part of his firm. One thing led to another, and he actually had a couple of partners from time to time, but it ended up Herb was essentially the sole owner of this building. It was an interesting project, because, as anyone who has looked at the Dearborn Street Station can quickly tell, the old historic station is sort of a U-shaped structure that faces Dearborn Street at Polk Street, and behind it where the used to be is a brand-new, high-tech sort of mall area. Herb asked us to do the restoration of the historic building, and he and his staff did the design of the addition to the building in the rear. We were then asked to administer the construction contract. We actually got together and agreed on which sheets of drawings each firm would do. I did sheet one, he did sheet two, I did sheet three, he did sheet four, and then we had match lines to tie these together. We conferred regularly from San Francisco. He would send things to us and we'd send things to him. It went very smoothly. And it was pre-fax. We had no modems or anything. But we did this with some care, and his principal designer would come out from time to time. I never went to San Francisco because it would have been foolish to go the other way. But the drawings were finished. Jim Peterson did the structural engineering for both the existing building and the new building.

Benjamin: How did you come to take on Jim as a partner?

Hasbrouck: Jim Peterson and I got together in the early eighties. I didn't know Jim. He called me one day to say that someone had suggested that I might be someone who could help him on a historic project. It was for a courthouse in

97 Traverse City, Michigan. Jim had this job, and it was an 1890s courthouse which had been scheduled for demolition because they built a new courthouse. When they finished the new courthouse, they discovered it wasn't really big enough, and they had a million and a half dollars left over in their budget and wanted to restore the old courthouse for that amount of money. They had already had another architect on board, and this other architect had said no, they couldn't do it. We looked over the plans of the other architect, and what he was doing was essentially gutting the old courthouse and building a new building inside the old walls, which is exactly the wrong approach to an historic building. What we did was look at the old building; we left all the walls in place and massaged the program to fit the building, rather than the other way around. That's one of my favorite things to tell clients. The difference between a new building architect and a restoration architect is that a new building architect starts with a blank sheet of paper, an empty lot, and he designs a building to fit a program of use. You tell him what you want to put in this building, "We're going to design it and the rooms are going to...." With a restoration architect, the architect takes an existing building with a program and then massages the program to fit into the building without changing it, because the fewer changes you make, the more economical it's going to be. You'd be surprised how often you can avoid making changes. You know, I've seen restorations by unsophisticated restoration people where they wanted to move a door six inches, which is ludicrous. I mean, you leave the door where it is and do something else rather than move it six inches because the costs are just unhandy. Anyway, that's what we did at the Grand Traverse County Courthouse. Oddly enough, when the building was finished, there was still fifty thousand dollars left in the kitty. It was done very economically. We still use it as one of our jobs that we show potential clients. It's won several awards. But Jim and I worked on that building for a year or so together with our staff, and got to be friends, and in about 1985 we started talking about the possibility of getting together. In roughly 1982 or 1983, I had asked Harry Hunderman if he would like to come in as a partner, and Harry declined to become a partner but did become an associate. For a while the firm was called Hasbrouck, Hunderman, but Harry never had an ownership position in the firm. He really didn't want

98 that, so I continued to be the sole proprietor, but his name was on the door. Then when Jim and I started talking, we were considering a number of things. Jim also had a young guy working for him who was an associate named Jack Murchie, and the four of us were going to get together. In, more or less, January of 1986, Jack had an opportunity to go with Ken Schroeder and he did, so then we had only the three of us. Then in midsummer of 1986, Harry Hunderman decided to move on and went with Wiss, Janney, Elstner, which is a firm that does a lot of building investigations and so forth—not full architectural services. That left Jim and I, and we said, "Well, let's do it just with the two of us." So Jim and I became Hasbrouck, Peterson in the fall of 1986. We stayed Hasbrouck, Peterson then for the next several years. Then I think it was three years ago we needed some additional help, and we had some contractual help from Henry Zimoch, who had his own office up the street. He was doing production work for us. It worked out real well and so toward the end of 1991, we all sat down and said, "You know, we could do better if Henry just brought himself and his staff over here and we only had to pay one rent and one insurance bill." At the same time we asked Jay Sirirattumrong, who had been with Jim and I for a long time, if he'd like to come in so we'd have two seniors and two regular partners. The four of us have been together ever since. It's a genuine partnership. Jim and I have a little bit bigger piece of the action, but everybody has got the same vote, so to speak.

Benjamin: Who has what expertise?

Hasbrouck: Well, that's the reason it's a good partnership because we have four very different skills, you might say. We all overlap. Sometimes we tell clients on organization charts this and sometimes we change it a little bit, but generally speaking, my task is director of restoration services. I also handle the bulk of the marketing for the office. Jim is director of technical services and engineering. Jim has a structural engineer's license as well. He does a great deal of investigation of building failures. He does a lot of expert witness work, and he is a superb structural engineer. Henry Zimoch is director of production. He is the one who assigns the work in the office to the staff and

99 sees to it that the work gets done on time, on schedule, and Jay is our principal designer. All of us overlap into the other's areas. For example, right now we have a good deal of work in the Far East in Thailand and Laos and Hanoi because of Jay Sirirattumrong's contacts. He is a native of Thailand, and most of that work he brought in. I had a small amount to do with it, but he did the marketing on that. On the other hand, Henry, for example, at some time got heavily involved in the technological aspects of the restoration of Soldier Field that Jim might have normally done. But Henry was there and he did it. I get involved in a certain amount of production just because sometimes each partner will take on a job as project manager. So this is a real partnership and it has worked very well, largely because we don't do the same thing. My experience has been that when you have two or three or more partners who are the same, who are clones, they don't get along. But if you have to depend on your colleagues to support and help you on certain aspects of your work, it works much better. That's what I think. That's the way it has worked for us.

Benjamin: I agree.

Hasbrouck: But anyway, we keep getting off the subject, don't we?

Benjamin: Can we go back to projects following Honolulu House? What was your next one?

Hasbrouck: There were a number of relatively small projects in the early days. The Honolulu House was not a big project. We also did things like the Grosse Point Lighthouse in Evanston. I think we already talked about the Highland Park gazebo, and we did several small historical societies. We did the Palatine Historical Museum, we did the Sunderlage house, which was an historic house museum in Hoffman Estates. It was interesting not so much because of the farmhouse that we restored but because there was an 1845 smokehouse on the site which was put on the National Register. The smokehouse is on the National Register, but the house is not.

100 Benjamin: How did you find these projects, or did they find you?

Hasbrouck: Well, you know, when we started winning a few awards for restoration, people started coming to us and so we got quite a number of projects just by word of mouth, and we'd sometimes show up in the newspaper. Every time there was an article in the paper, we'd usually get a few calls. We also did quite a bit of work from time to time for the federal government.

Benjamin: Did you bid on contracts or bid on RFPs [Request for Proposal]?

Hasbrouck: Bidding is maybe not the right word. We would respond to requests for a proposal.

Benjamin: You would submit a proposal?

Hasbrouck: Yes, through the Commerce Business Daily advertisements and things like that.

Benjamin: So you, as marketing head, would do that?

Hasbrouck: Oh, yes, I do a great deal of that sort of thing. For example, for the General Services Administration, we've done about ten major historic structure reports for federal post office and courthouse projects. We did the Federal Center in Battle Creek, Michigan. We did the Peoria, Illinois, courthouse and post office. We did one for Minneapolis; one for Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We did one in Springfield, Illinois; Danville, Illinois; and in Dubuque we did one. We've done quite a number of these rather extensive studies, which may run three hundred pages or more, of a federally owned historic building.

Benjamin: Do you do an analysis of the history and condition?

Hasbrouck: A historic structure report really tells you what was planned, what was built, what's happened since it was built, what's there now and what should be there in the future. You combine this with budgets and scheduling and so forth. See, the federal government has a mandate that if they own a property

101 that is either accepted as an historic property or a potentially historic property, they must employ a qualified historic architect to review and analyze the building to see if it is a cultural property. That's the law. That's what these things generally involve, and they become planning tools for the federal government.

Benjamin: That's a comprehensive and useful system.

Hasbrouck: Yes. We've done quite a number of those. One big project we also did was a study and analysis of the historic property at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Great Lakes, as you know, was built at the turn of the century, essentially between 1900 and 1910. It always has been, and is to this day, one of the largest naval training centers in the world. It is today the largest in the world. In roughly 1982 or 1983, we started work there, and we didn't finish until last year. But we did a study of the entire base, and one of my staff and I actually went out to Great Lakes and traveled up and down every street, took pictures of the buildings and prepared forms on each one and identified the properties which had some historic significance. The core of Great Lakes has about forty-five buildings that were built in the early twentieth century. They are magnificent. They were built by Jarvis Hunt shortly after he finished the University of Chicago. These buildings are still in use today and will continue to be. We identified a historic district, nominated it to the National Register, and we continued to get our contract expanded. We prepared small historic structure reports on forty-four of those buildings to identify problems, potential problems, maintenance problems, etc., for the navy to use to maintain these buildings. We also prepared as a separate but parallel contract, a maintenance manual, which was a document that identified all the various materials used in the historic buildings. We then suggested and wrote specifications for maintenance; for example, for bronze, for terra cotta, for brick, for concrete, for glass, for wood, for zinc, for tile, for lead, all of these materials. There were about thirty or forty materials that were used there, and we prepared this document which they could use. This document is actually used all over the United States. I got a call the other day from a

102 contractor in Des Moines, wanting an interpretation of one of the paragraphs that he was using.

Benjamin: Could you market that?

Hasbrouck: Well, it belongs to the navy, of course, but we use it from time to time. That was an interesting project, and we've always been pretty proud of the fact that we did that for the government. We also did a massive study of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which is the largest lighthouse in the United States and perhaps the world. It's over two hundred feet high.

Benjamin: Is that the one that the water was moving in on?

Hasbrouck: Yes, right. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was originally built more than a thousand feet from the shore—I think it was more like fifteen hundred feet from shore—and as time went by, the ocean ate away the shore until when we were there it was like twenty-five feet away.

Benjamin: What did you do?

Hasbrouck: We didn't do anything. The Corps of Engineers has developed a dozen plans to try to stop this, and I understand it's sort of stabilized now. But there is actually a potential plan to move the lighthouse some fifteen hundred feet away from...

Benjamin: Did you work on that?

Hasbrouck: We have offered to work on it, but they have never actually implemented that plan. We did a huge amount of work on putting together a plan for the restoration of the lighthouse, some of which has been implemented. Our consultants on that were Wiss, Janney, Elstner, but we were the lead firm on it.

103 [Tape 4: Side 1]

Benjamin: You've worked on so many wonderful Frank Lloyd Wright projects. Why don't you talk about those a little bit?

Hasbrouck: Yes, we can do that. We've already talked about some of the projects we did in the late seventies and early eighties and even into the middle eighties. I think my practice sort of reached—I don't know if maturity is the right word, but we reached a state in the early eighties when we had the experience and the personnel and the ability to proceed on major projects. We were fortunate in that we got several, essentially at the same time over a period of five years. In 1983 I learned that Governor James Thompson was negotiating to buy the Dana/Thomas house in Springfield, which, of course, is a very important Frank Lloyd Wright house. It was built in the period 1904-1905, and it had been occupied by a publishing company for some twenty-five years or maybe more. The governor, who is an antique buff, recognized the value of this building as kind of an artifact representing Frank Lloyd Wright and architecture in Illinois. He negotiated to buy the building. He paid a million dollars of public funds for the Dana/Thomas house. As I understand it, the owners, the Thomas family, negotiated to give the furniture in the house at a value of a million dollars, so they in effect had a tax-free transfer because they gave a million dollars worth of furniture and got a million dollars for the house. I'm not absolutely sure of that, but I believe something like that happened. At that time I had just finished a tour of duty on the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council. Dr. David Kenney was the director of conservation at the time. Later preservation was put under the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. David asked me to meet with him in Chicago to talk about how to proceed with the restoration of Dana/Thomas house. He and I went to dinner one night over at the Old English Pub on LaSalle Street. We got there about seven-thirty or so, and I remember we stayed until the place closed at two o'clock in the morning, sitting in one of those wonderful booths which are now gone. He said, "What should we do?" and I said, "Well, this is an incredibly important house. It has all the original furniture, but the building is very shabby. It needs a lot of work. It's a perfect candidate for

104 restoration." So we talked about this at great length—what its importance was and its period and who Mrs. Dana was and so forth. He was a historian but not an architectural historian, and he told me towards the end of that evening, "I can't give you this job because it's a public project. You're going to have to make a proposal like everybody else. We don't even know how to write the request for proposal. Would you mind putting together a proposal the way you would do the house and let me have it?" I said, "Surely." So over the next two or three weeks I worked with some of my staff, and we put together a proposal—actually, I did most of that myself—the way we would deal with an important Frank Lloyd Wright building dating from that period, and we sent that off to David in Springfield. A few days later I got a phone call from Bill Farrar, who at that time was the chief operating guy for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency or what became the agency. Bill said, "I'd like to talk to you further about this in person, and I want to write letters and so forth." I had to make a speech in Champaign at the University of Illinois. They had a series of lectures and my lecture was coming up, so I said, "Look, I'm going down there next Tuesday. I'll go a few hours earlier so we can get together to talk about this." And so we did. He drove up to Champaign and I drove down, and we spent two or three hours reviewing the proposal I had already made. He was writing a request for proposal to do the same thing. We talked about what should be included and whether it should have HABS drawings, whether the furniture should be included, how the art glass should be handled and all that sort of thing. We suggested that he should, as phase one, have a complete historic structure report made with separate portions for the art glass and furniture. This would include an estimate of future costs, but it would not include construction documents because they had a relatively modest budget for all this. It's a big house, and at that time we didn't know what the budget was going to be. Bill was very frank. He said, "Listen, I think you guys could to this job beautifully, but I have to put out a request for proposal. Since you helped me put the request together, you'll have sort of a leg up on this." So he did put out the request for proposal, and we did respond to it, and I understand there were a total of four legitimate proposals. I don't remember any more, or if I did I wouldn't tell you, but they were all my old friends who responded to this proposal. I

105 learned that the prices were pretty broad, and ours was actually the highest price. The prices went from something like $100,000 to $165,000 to do this whole thing. Ours was $165,000. Farrar called up, and he said, "Look, your firm is the only one that includes everything, but it's over our budget. We don't have that much money." We had included at his request certain things like a video system that we would use to record the house, which would revert to the Department of Conservation when we were finished. That was $5,000, more or less. We included various other things that were beyond the scope of what he really wanted, so he suggested that we take some of these things out, and we did. We reduced it to something under $150,000, which is a lot of money in my pocket, but it's not a lot of money for a two-year historic structure report. We won the job and we got it, I'd like to think, strictly on merit because the other firms didn't include as much work as we did. So this was in 1983; I don't remember the exact time. I believe it was actually very early in 1983, and I think we actually talked to David in the fall of 1982. And so in 1983, probably close to midyear, we started work and we did an intense investigation of this wonderful house. We found two partial sets of working drawings, though none were the plans from which the house was built.

Benjamin: Where did you find them?

Hasbrouck: In the house.

Benjamin: Oh, you mean the owners had them?

Hasbrouck: The previous owners had them. I think there were about eleven or twelve sheets, but they weren't the plans from which it was built. In fact, we didn't find the original plans from which the house was built until after our construction documents were completely finished, and we discovered that Taliesin had them. Taliesin was very helpful during our work. They loaned us lots of photographs and sketches and so forth, but they didn't tell us that they had the construction documents, probably because they were not terribly well organized at that time. But we took hundreds of photographs. We looked at every inch of the building. We videotaped the building. We

106 took paint samples. We had a number of consultants. We had a heating- ventilating-air conditioning consultant. We had a landscape consultant. We had an electrical consultant and a security and fire consultant. We worked with a local architect, Carl Fischer of Fischer-Wisnosky in Springfield, a good relationship. He loaned us one of his staff, and we were able to use his office while we were in Springfield. We also had a paint consultant. Henry Chambers did our paint consultation. David Hanks of David Hanks and Associates was our art glass and furniture consultant. He did an inventory for us. Now, I say we had all these consultants, and we did, but it's important to remember that we controlled this project. We told them what to do. We coordinated all the work and we gathered all the information together and we prepared a lengthy, comprehensive, historic structure report.

Benjamin: Where is the report and the video and all of this?

Hasbrouck: I still have all that material. I have probably the most complete record of an investigation and a restoration of any historic building that I know of.

Benjamin: It's probably the best prototype around.

Hasbrouck: Well, at the time we were doing this, there really weren't any models to follow. There were a few. People had been doing historic structure reports but mostly for government. We, in a way, reinvented the wheel because we did it our own way, so to speak. We were very careful with the graphics and we identified everything. We set up a coding system so that you could find things and we kept track of all the photographs. When we got this all done, we did a careful estimate of what it might cost to do all this work, which proved later to be reasonably accurate, although the program changed somewhat later and added some costs. When we finished the historic structure report and presented it to the state of Illinois, our contract was over. We were finished and no work had been done. The house was occupied by the state—they were taking tours through it—but only a minimal amount of the barest maintenance was being done on the house. Then the Illinois

107 Capital Development Board asked for proposals to do the actual construction documents and field work and supervision, if you will.

Benjamin: What is the Illinois Capital Development Board?

Hasbrouck: The Illinois Capital Development Board is the state agency that controls construction on anything that involves state of Illinois money—anything. A large part of their work is on schools, office buildings—any kind of building construction. I don't believe they're involved in highways and things of that nature, but they're involved in anything that has to do with architecture. It's a huge agency. Literally billions of dollars are spent through that agency.

Benjamin: So they work in tandem with architects on state properties.

Hasbrouck: Oh, yes. They will have at any one time a hundred projects underway. We responded to this request for proposal, and this time I don't know what the other people bid. I don't even know who the other people were.

Benjamin: Was this to actually do the work?

Hasbrouck: Actually do the work. We were given this project, so we went to work. It was to be done in phases. We were told in no uncertain terms that phase one was to cost—I don't remember the exact numbers—something like $1.2 million. We knew that the whole project, the construction cost, was going to be $3.5 million to $4 million. But phase one was $1.2 million. So on that phase, we prepared the drawings very carefully and recommended that we should do the demolition of the elements that needed to be removed, and we would do the mechanical systems; that is, the heating, the air conditioning, the plumbing, the electrical work and that sort of thing.

Benjamin: How did you decide which elements needed to be removed?

Hasbrouck: Well, fortunately there wasn't very much to be removed because the Dana/Thomas house survived almost intact. There had been a few

108 temporary walls put here or there and a few windows had been boarded up, but not many, usually because of air conditioners being put in the windows. But the house was so big and so complicated that it would have been very difficult to remodel, so nobody ever remodeled it. The Dana/Thomas house actually survived. It was all shabby throughout. Everything was shabby and dirty and there had been things nailed to the walls, but it was not destroyed. The same way with the furniture. There were over a hundred pieces of the original furniture still in the house being used every day by the Thomas family. The Thomas Publishing Company owned it. So anyway, we did the mechanical and electrical and security work and got that finished. Then phase two was to be the rest of the thing. We did the drawings and advised the Capital Development Board that there simply was not enough money in the budget to do the entire job, so they asked us for a number of alternates. You can do alternates and leave them out, not knowing where the money was going to come from. The bids went out, and they came in too high even if we eliminated all the alternates. Actually, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise because since they couldn't change anything and the Capital Development Board won't let a contract that comes in over its budget—they won't try to cut the contract—they split it into two, so that instead of two phases, there were three. Then they asked us to revise the drawings so there could be two more phases. It was kind of a trauma for a while, but we discovered a way that could be done relatively easily, and we did, and the second phase of work came in just a few percentage points under the total. I'm talking about the second phase. It was in round numbers about $1.2 million or $1.3 million, and it came in within $25,000 or $30,000 of the amount available. So we went to work on that second phase, and that second phase involved everything but finishes. I'm speaking broadly here. We did the replastering. We did the closing-up of the walls that we had to open for heating and ventilating. We were doing floor sandings. We were doing a lot of things of that nature. We were doing a lot of work in the coach house and on the site. We were doing the exterior work. We cleaned the building in that phase. We put up the missing plaster frieze that was on the exterior of the building. While this was going on, we also let bids for phase three, which was the final phase. It really involved two things—the finishes, that is, the

109 painting and the glazes and things that had to be done for the house. Somewhere in there—I think it was in phase two—we also did the protection for the windows.

Benjamin: How did you protect the stained glass?

Hasbrouck: We put an extra sheet of glass, almost like a storm window, on the outside of Dana/Thomas house. It was a very controversial decision, one which I still agonize about, because we put this sheet of glass over the exterior of the windows to protect them from damage from rocks and BBs and things like that and also to cut down on the enormous heat loss in the house.

Benjamin: Are these extra sheets of glass removable?

Hasbrouck: Yes, they are. They are removable but are not intended to be removed. Put it this way, it's a reversible change.

Benjamin: There is much controversy about what to do with windows in Frank Lloyd Wright houses.

Hasbrouck: Yes. Oddly enough, while there was a great deal of controversy about this and people objected to it, there have been a number of BB shots and rocks that have hit those outside protective pieces and damaged them, but none of the windows have been damaged. The windows are worth millions of dollars, so the fact is that they're serving their purpose. You can't tell they're there from the inside of the house. You can from the outside. They changed the surface. In phase three we stripped the old paint off the interior plaster walls, refinished the interior, and we built a parking lot, which a lot of people don't realize is part of the total budget. There is a little parking lot. Well, it's not so small. It's probably for seventy-five or eighty cars and about a half a block away. We did various things in the yard like install exterior floodlighting and automatic sprinkler systems. It was an extremely complex project. When it was finished, the gross budget, including purchase of the house, was $5 million. That's the amount of money allocated by the state of

110 Illinois. There was left in the kitty a little less than $5,000. We wanted them to use that to take pictures of the house, and they wouldn't do it. Nevertheless, the house was finished and, of course, it took a long time. It was finished in the fall of 1990, so we worked actually a total of seven years on this house, almost all the time. Not every minute of that time. There would be weeks when we wouldn't do anything. It's important to remember that we had a good core group of people who worked on this house.

Benjamin: You worked with the state architect, too?

Hasbrouck: We worked with the state architect. Michael Jackson was the representative of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, almost to the extent of being—I suppose some people could say he was a collaborator. But he did not make decisions on what to do. He reviewed what we proposed and in almost every case approved of what we proposed. He sometimes made suggestions for improvements, which we would take or not take, but it was not an adversarial situation at all. Michael is a good man.

Benjamin: He is a good guy, and that is the way it generally works on these historic rehabs if it works well.

Hasbrouck: I have to say also there were a number of people who worked on this. In the early days Harry Hunderman was with me. He worked on the house. Deborah Slayton was here. She did a good deal of the writing in the historic structure report. Joe Hoerner, who is now with the Chicago Park District, worked during the early days on the set of first construction documents, phase one. Then Joe left us, as did Harry and Deborah. Kate Klein was with us for several years before she left to have two wonderful little boys. Kate was the project architect and was responsible for preparing the bulk of the construction documents. The job was under her general direction on a day- to-day basis. Other draftsman worked on it, but Kate did the bulk of that work. Then when the actual construction started, Leslie Gilmore joined us straight out of grad school at the University of Illinois. She helped Kate on some of the construction documents and then moved to Springfield and was

111 our on-site superintendent for somewhat over two years in two different stints. She was down there for nearly a year, and then she came back for a few months and went back again for the final stint.

Benjamin: Is the house open to the public now?

Hasbrouck: The house is open now. It opened in the fall of 1990, I believe, and in the first twelve-month period there were just a few hundred short of 120,000 people who went through that house. It was an incredibly successful project. People signed their name, not everybody, but I'd say half of them did. We looked to see where they came from, and about fifty percent of them were from out of state, and more than eighty percent of visitors that first year were from outside of Springfield. The Springfield people came the first month or so, so the fact is that something like—I don't remember the exact numbers—half of the people who visited Dana/Thomas house in those days and to this date come from out of state specifically to see the house. If you do a rough calculation of how much money these people spend for just gasoline taxes, hotel taxes and sales taxes, we've estimated that the state nets from this source several hundred thousand dollars a year.

Benjamin: Now, did the state close the house for a little while?

Hasbrouck: Yes, the state closed it. It was about three years ago when Governor [Jim] Edgar first came on board. It was strictly a political situation. I wrote to the governor a very carefully worded letter outlining the costs to the state of closing the house, and I got a very nice letter back from one of his senior staff, saying, "We know all this is true, but the political realities are that we can't leave this house open and pay a staff to be there at the same time we can't afford to fund children's services," or something of that nature. Even though having it open did generate a lot of income for the state, it was not something that the media would understand, and so for almost two years it was closed. Then several people suggested that they could open it again if they charged a fee for entry, and that's what they do now.

112 Benjamin: Oh, that's good.

Hasbrouck: So there is a small fee for entry. The fact of the matter is, it probably costs just as much to collect the money as the amount of money collected, but it's a psychological thing. People think, "Well, it's paying for itself." But the real advantage of Dana/Thomas house is, like lots of tourist attractions, it encourages people to visit and spend money in the state of Illinois. So it's been very successful. The Dana/Thomas house was an incredibly interesting and important project for us, but literally at the same time that we started work on the Dana/Thomas house and got the requests for proposal, we got an unsolicited request to respond to doing a similar study on the Rookery. It was very exciting to me because the Rookery, of course, was done by Burnham and Root in 1886, and in 1904 and 1905, at the same time the Dana/Thomas house was being built, Frank Lloyd Wright remodeled the Rookery. So the Rookery and the Dana/Thomas house were on Frank Lloyd Wright's drawing boards at the same time, and they were on our drawing boards at the same time. We did a massive historic structure report for the Rookery. In fact, most people don't realize it, but the Rookery was built on land that belonged to the city of Chicago, and the original developers—E.C. Waller was the prime mover—had a ninety-nine-year lease on this land and the lease was quite specific. At the end of ninety-nine years, any improvements on the property reverted to the city of Chicago. When we got involved in 1983 there were only two years left to go on the lease. We got involved because the Continental Bank, who had purchased not the building but the land under the building from the city of Chicago, purchased that land with the proviso that they would do two things immediately. One, they would clean the building, and, two, they would provide a plan for the long- term restoration of the building. The building itself was actually owned by the University of Chicago, which had nothing to do with any of this planning.

Benjamin: Who was your client?

113 Hasbrouck: Our client was Continental Bank. The first thing we did was a study of the exterior of the building. The building was incredibly dirty. You may remember that ten years ago, it was black, and we didn't really know what color the building was going to be. We did an analysis of the exterior of the building and devised a system of cleaning it, and in the process of doing so discovered that the cornice of the Rookery was literally ready to fall off. So before we cleaned it, we reconstructed the cornice from the backside. They wouldn't let us put up scaffolding, so we did it and the public didn't even know we were doing it. The cornice had to be rebuilt before anything else could be done. That was done, and then we proceeded to clean the building. There were lots of problems. We had to get rid of the contractor midstream because he was using the wrong techniques, but ultimately the building was cleaned. It was an incredible thing to watch as the cleaners came down the side of the building, and the building just kind of emerged from under this coat of black soot. It was really coal dust and residue from the steel mills on the South Side of Chicago that was held onto the building with a lead-based material that was a result of automobile pollution. I'm oversimplifying here, but the point is that the building had in some places as much as an eighth- inch of black crust on it. But the building itself was in quite good condition. Very, very few pieces of the terra cotta needed to be replaced, less than a hundred.

Benjamin: Did you replace them with terra cotta?

Hasbrouck: Yes, they were replaced with terra cotta. Most of the damage to the exterior of the building was manmade. For example, there had been a fire escape added, and for that fire escape, they drilled holes into the brick and damaged the brick. That had to be taken care of. But in any case, while we were cleaning it we also did a massive study of the building. We had the original drawings, and the building was not built with great fidelity to the original drawings. A lot of changes were made during construction, mostly for the better. The building looked better than the drawings would make you think. We also had a partial set of drawings of the changes that Frank Lloyd Wright made in 1904 and 1905.

114 Benjamin: Did you get those from Taliesin?

Hasbrouck: We got them from Taliesin. They were very generous, and the drawings were accurate. We found during the research—and I'll never forget the day—we found two things. One, we found a set of blueprints rolled up and stuck behind a furnace in the basement showing the changes that were made in 1929 and 1930 by William Drummond when Drummond added a little staircase and he enclosed and eliminated the two-story entries on both Adams and LaSalle Streets.

Benjamin: Did he do the elevator doors?

Hasbrouck: Yes, he did. He did the elevator doors and eliminated the wonderful, open- cage, decorative designs that Frank Lloyd Wright had done, twenty-odd years earlier. Oddly enough, Drummond was actually Wright's chief draftsman when he did the work in 1904 and 1905, so he was quite familiar with the building. Drummond made a lot of changes in the late twenties and early thirties, most of which were code changes for fire protection. There were other changes made to the Rookery that sometimes we could date and sometimes we couldn't. For example, the original atrium area had a marvelous mosaic floor which apparently was damaged due to differential settlement. Very early on it was actually scraped up and the mosaics were, for the most part, thrown away and a marble floor was put on top of it, kind of an ugly marble floor. I say it was scraped up because we found the residue of the mosaic in an old ash pit in the basement. We did find some pieces of the mosaic. We know it was done after 1929 because the stairway that Drummond put in was put over the mosaic flooring. It was still there. In fact, today that piece of the mosaic is still in place, which I thought was a wonderful idea. But we did this study and we did all our scheduling and our estimates and so forth, and then the Continental Bank decided to ask for proposals for what they call a base building architect. They wanted an architect who would do all of the construction documents and so forth, and they said that they didn't think our firm was large enough to do this. We

115 were very disappointed until I got a call from the project manager for the Continental Bank who said, "Well, we don't think you should be the base building architect. We want you to be on all of these proposals."

Benjamin: Who did they hire as the base building architect?

Hasbrouck: I think five firms were chosen to propose. It was Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; Solomon, Cordwell and Buenz; Holabird and Root; Nagle, Hartray; and Booth/Hansen. They were all asked to do proposals. I did the same proposal for the historic restoration consultation services to each one of these firms. It was an extremely interesting period of my life, because they were all answering the same RFP and the only thing they had in common was they had nothing in common. They all intended to approach this from a very different point of view. They were all competent, highly skilled firms; it was just that they all had a different point of view. Ultimately, Booth/Hansen was hired to do this, and we entered into an agreement with Booth Hansen to prepare the construction documents. For the next several months we, the team, prepared hundreds of sheets. I think we prepared about forty sheets of drawings for the restoration of the historic areas of the building. Mostly the first and second floor exterior and the ground floor street level drawings were ours, and a few other things here and there. The rest of the drawings of the upper level and the mechanics and all that sort of thing were prepared by Booth/Hansen and the other consultants on the team. We were working with Stein and Company as a potential contractor, trying to get a certain budget. The budget was, in round numbers, about $25 million. We were ready to go in for a permit—I think it was in the fall of 1985—and the bank told us to stop work. A few weeks later we learned that they had sold the building to Tom Baldwin. The sale was made in late 1985—I think it was 1985; I can't remember for sure—and then he took over and they brought on a different team of development people. Their development adviser was Robert Meers, who had a relationship with one of Baldwin's senior people, and Meers had some difference of opinion with Larry Booth at Booth/Hansen, and so Booth/Hansen was not asked to continue. They brought on McClier Corporation as the base building architect, but we were asked to stay on as

116 the restoration consultant, and I had a contract directly with Tom Baldwin. My relationship with the group was pretty good. In fact, much of the forty or so drawings that we did for the restoration of the historic portions were just scanned into McClier's computer and used exactly. Some of them weren't even scanned. They just used them directly and changed the title block. We continued to meet with their people and to help them put this plan together, but we had really very little to do with the actual execution of the work. From time to time they'd call and we'd go over and answer some question, but that work was actually executed by McClier Corporation. But I was delighted that they followed the plan that we originally suggested. In fact, the plan that McClier put in place was closer or was almost identical to the plan that we recommended originally in our historic structure report. There had been certain changes made when Continental Bank was trying to get their budget together that I never did approve of. They were changing the configuration of the elevators and so forth, which made it impossible in some cases to restore the original shape of the building. One of the first things that Tom Baldwin's group asked me was, "How can we save a million dollars? We're a million dollars over budget." I said, "Go back to the original plan. Don't change the elevator shafts. You don't need to." They looked at it, and they did exactly what I had suggested. So what you see over there now is the plan that we proposed, and I'm delighted. The only change that was made that I didn't approve of, and still don't to this day, was they took out the elevators on the Adams Street entrance side. There used to be five elevators serving the Adams Street entrance. There are none today, and I thought that was an unfortunate decision. They built another elevator back just fifty or sixty feet away. I understand that decision was made from a marketing point of view, although that's all I really know about it. In my opinion, if a person who officed in that building in 1910 were to walk in that lobby today, he'd recognize it. That's the way the building looked.

Benjamin: So you restored it back to circa 1905?

Hasbrouck: To 1910, yes, which coincidentally is the same date to which we restored Dana/Thomas house.

117 Benjamin: Why did you choose five years after Wright's remodeling?

Hasbrouck: Because if you want to restore a building to when it's brand new, it has to be brand new. Any historic building gains what I call kind of a patina of use. It looks better after it gets a few fingerprints on it here and there, a few scratches and rough spots.

Benjamin: Like fine silver.

Hasbrouck: Yes, exactly the same thing. So in both cases we chose 1910. With Dana/ Thomas house, for example, we chose 1910 partly because it was when the house was completely finished, but it was also because Mrs. Dana made some little minor changes in the house in 1908, 1909. She put screens on the house, for example, in 1909. When she put those screens on, she had to put stops, little strips of wood, around the window to keep the screen in place, and it was under those stops that we were able to find the original color of the wood. The wood in Dana/Thomas had all turned black because it had been shellacked and shellac turns wood black. But under these wooden stops she put in to hold the screens, there was no shellac and we could tell the original color, which was kind of a reddish brown. It was a way to understand what the actual color of the wood was. Little things like that happen. Investigating the color of Dana/ Thomas and the Rookery was very complex because Frank Lloyd Wright was a superb colorist, and most of his buildings of this period were very elaborately colored. The Dana/Thomas has something like thirty colors in it. The Rookery has some very colorful elements in it, too.

Benjamin: Was his palette close to nature?

Hasbrouck: Very much. It was a lot of ochres and browns and beiges and ivories as kind of base colors, and then accent colors of reds and greens, even a little bit of blue here and there, but not much. He didn't use blue very much. In the Rookery, of course, he used a lot of gold leaf, a lot of white marble. When he

118 was asked to do it, he was really responding to a program in the Rookery. In the previous twenty years lots of things had happened. Most buildings had begun to have elaborate electric lighting. The Rookery when it was originally built had very minimal or hardly any electric lighting. It was also fitted for gas lighting. When the restoration was underway, we found all kinds of gas piping in the building. By the turn of the century and a little after, there had been probably thirty or forty great Chicago School office buildings built, most of which offered spaces that were more attractive than the Rookery at that time. So the investors said, "Frank, fix this," and he came in and looked at the building. I have to really hand it to him. He understood that the architecture of the building—that is, the configuration of the space and the forms and the shapes and the three-dimensional quality of the Rookery on the interior where people worked—was incredibly well thought out. John Root was a superb designer. So Wright to his credit to this day didn't make any changes in the basic architecture of the building. What he did was change the surfaces. He essentially turned a dark interior into a light interior. He added a lot of electric lighting and the white marble and more gold leaf. There already was some gold leaf. But even the gold leaf designs were an adaptation or an evolution, you might say, from what Root had put there originally. You can identify the parts of the Rookery that were done by Wright and those done by Root. Wright didn't copy anything of Root's, but what he designed was extremely compatible with what Root did. When he finished, the Rookery was one of the premier office buildings in the world. It was very attractive. In fact, the Rookery never had a bad year when it lost money in its whole life up until the time that it was closed for refurbishment. It was always one of the premier buildings in Chicago and still is today. I'm not sure of this, but the Rookery might be the most expensive rental building in the Loop today.

Benjamin: More so than the newer ones?

Hasbrouck: I think so. It has the amenities that make it competitive with almost any other building in the Loop. Of course, it's got a wonderful location and a great history and the facilities in there are just wonderful.

119 Benjamin: Did the Rookery need a developer with deep pockets?

Hasbrouck: Well, you know, the Rookery was not an inexpensive building to restore. I mean, ultimately I suppose the cost was ninety to one hundred million dollars.

Benjamin: What do you think Tom Baldwin's motives were?

Hasbrouck: I don't think Tom's motives were greed. I mean, his greed motive is satisfied over in the trading pits, and he makes a great deal of money over there. But he is an admirer of architecture and he loved this building, and I really believe that's the right word. I think he loved it and he wanted to do it. He wanted to do it right. While he was careful with the way he spent the money, money was not really a problem with him. In the early days he did most of the financing out of his own pocket. As time went by, he got mortgages to handle some of this, but he was the one who guaranteed the cost. Well, if it was greed it was enlightened greed. I greatly admire Tom. He wanted to do it and he wanted to do it right and he did.

Benjamin: And now he's doing it with the Reliance building.

Hasbrouck: Well, on the Reliance building the jury is still out.

Benjamin: Why do you think the jury is still out?

Hasbrouck: Well, you know, that's a very touchy subject with me because I worked on the Reliance building for over ten years for my client, Harvey Oppman, who owned the land under the Reliance. I put in a proposal that in my judgment was certainly the best proposal that was put before the city, and it was not accepted, partly, I think, because Tom Baldwin had the Rookery on his track record. But then we did, too, and I thought we should have gotten an opportunity to show how we could have done the Reliance. But we'll see what happens. I hope he does a good job. You know, I said that we were

120 doing the Dana/Thomas house and the Rookery at the same time, as was Frank Lloyd Wright, and while we were doing those two buildings, six or eight months or maybe a year down the line, we got a similar proposal from the State University of New York at Buffalo to do a study of the Darwin Martin house. We did a massive study and restoration plan for the Darwin Martin house in Buffalo, which was also on Frank Lloyd Wright's drawing boards at the same time as the Dana/Thomas house and the Rookery, and it was on ours, too. So we went to Buffalo with the Rookery and the Dana/Thomas experience behind us.

[Tape 4: Side 2]

Hasbrouck: We were extremely fortunate in having this experience behind us because we were then able to do a historic structure report that I think had all of the elements that it should have. I said this once before, I think. A historic structure report tells what was planned, what was built, what's happened to it since it was built, what's there now and what should be there in the future. That's what we did. Kate Klein helped me a great deal on that building. Leslie Gilmore went out a couple of times and did some of the work, too. But I probably got more deeply into the Martin house personally than the other HSRs.

Benjamin: Why?

Hasbrouck: Because I loved it. I just enjoyed it. It was out of town. Oddly enough, it's easier to do work of that nature when you can't go home at night. You're out of town and there are no telephones to bother you. You're focused. So we did this study and eventually presented our findings in a public forum.

Benjamin: Who was your client?

Hasbrouck: The State University of New York and also the Division of Parks and Recreation of the state of New York were involved, although they don't own the building. Eventually the plan is for them to move in. We did this massive

121 study, very much like we did at the Dana/Thomas house but a little more thorough. The report was done a little bit better, I think. The house was very similar to the Dana/Thomas house. The color scheme was almost the same, the furniture was very similar, the scale of the house was the same. But there were some huge differences. The plan was very different. The two houses have no similarity in the architecture at all but great similarity in the decorative elements. You can tell they're both by Wright.

Benjamin: What accounts for the differences?

Hasbrouck: Two different clients.

Benjamin: Two different clients and also two different settings?

Hasbrouck: Well, the setting I don't think had as much to do with it as the program requirements of the client. You know, Mr. Martin was married and he had a family. It was a seven-bedroom house, 10,000 square feet. The Dana/Thomas house had twelve thousand square feet and had only two bedrooms, although it had servants' rooms.

Benjamin: Do you think Wright paid attention to his clients' needs?

Hasbrouck: Oh, absolutely. I've said this before—Wright's clients all have three things in common.

Benjamin: What?

Hasbrouck: The clients say, "This is our house. We designed it and it's perfect. All Frank Lloyd Wright really did was prepare the drawings, and it's his favorite." I never met a client of Wright's who did not think that his building was Wright's favorite. I often say I'd just give anything if my clients felt that way.

Benjamin: Maybe they do.

122 Hasbrouck: I don't know. I've never asked one. But anyway, we did this Martin house design and later on they asked for proposals to do the actual restoration documents. We were not part of that. There is a firm out of Buffalo who is doing phase one. We get questions from time to time and I would be glad to help further, but the guy that's doing it is a very competent guy. His name is Lownie. While we were sort of winding up, before we were finished on any of these three projects, we got another building which I'm very proud of. We were asked to do the restoration, or a study, of a building in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a bank building by Louis Sullivan. It was Sullivan's second bank building. His first was the National Farmers Bank in Owatonna [Minnesota]. In 1909, Louis Sullivan was asked to design a small bank called the Peoples Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the Peoples Savings Bank was finished in late 1911. It survived almost intact until after the Second World War, when they put a huge addition on one side of it. People were always complaining about this addition, but the fact is that it's scaled and built of the same materials as a big warehouse that used to be there, so the setting of the bank was not really disturbed. It's essentially in the same configuration, but the interior of the bank was grossly changed at that time. They dropped the ceilings and covered up all the stained glass and literally covered up every surface in the bank that Sullivan left. There were some wonderful decorative columns, for example, that had very Sullivanesque column capitals, and only two of the original eight survived. The entrance was revised. Everything was changed to some degree. So we did a study of the building. I was there for about a week, and I looked at the building from top to bottom and discovered that if we were very careful we could figure out everything that was there originally. It had all been covered up but I actually found the original drawings of the building that had been lost.

Benjamin: Where did you find them?

Hasbrouck: They were in the vault. We found more than one set, but we actually found the set of drawings that was used by the contractor to build the building. They were blueprints on linen, and they had the contractor's notes on them, so it was very interesting. We also found a total of, I think, thirty-four sheets

123 of drawings of the bank. There are only six of those sheets at the Art Institute of Chicago. And we found various other things. We found some wonderful photographs that nobody had seen before. I realized that some of the published photographs that were done in 1912 in the Architectural Record had been copyrighted, so I called a friend at the Library of Congress who had responsibility for photographs and asked him if these could be tracked down. He said, "Well, maybe. Give me the date and the city," and I did. He called me back in about thirty minutes, and he said, "You won't believe this, but those pictures were on top of the pile." I found, I think it was a total of four interior photographs of the bank when it was brand-new, eight-by-ten glass negatives.

Benjamin: Does the fact that they were copyrighted mean that they would be at the Library of Congress?

Hasbrouck: Yes. Copyrighted photographs have to be deposited at the Library of Congress. I use that source quite a bit. But in any case, after the study was done, the bank decided to proceed with this restoration, and we did a complete set of working drawings using the old working drawings as a base. In fact, some of the restoration drawings were actually photocopies of Sullivan's original drawings. Not a lot of them but several of them were. We got the column capitals redone. The building had been badly tuck-pointed, and we cleaned all that out and put it back.

Benjamin: Now, did they come to you?

Hasbrouck: Yes.

Benjamin: Did they come to you because of your track record on these other buildings?

Hasbrouck: I'm sure that was the case. I don't remember exactly why they came, but when the bank was done we had a big celebration. It was interesting because we were proud of it and we were proud of the Dana/Thomas house. So we entered both the bank and Dana/Thomas house in the National Park Service

124 annual awards program and we won in both of their categories. The President's Historic Preservation Award, which is the highest award you can get from the government in restoration in the United States, went to the Sullivan bank. That's an award that's given to buildings and clients and architects for buildings that are done without federal funding. Then they have a National Historic Preservation Award that is essentially the same award that had federal funding. The bank got the President's Award and the Dana/Thomas house got the National Historic Preservation Award. It was the first time in the history of this award, which had been going on for many years, when one firm got two awards, and I was very proud. We had our picture taken and had a nice black tie dinner in Washington. George Bush was supposed to give us the award, but unfortunately he was defeated a few weeks before the awards ceremony, so we got it from the secretary of the Treasury, Nicholas Brady, who was incredibly courteous. Mrs. Brady was there and we had a very nice day. As we were winding up our work on the Martin house and the Peoples Savings Bank, the last in this series of five interesting Prairie School buildings came to us when the University of Chicago asked us if we would do a master plan for the Robie house, which was funded by the Getty Foundation. Our first task was to help the university get the funding. We had given a lot of help to other clients on grant applications, so we helped the university put application together, and then we went ahead with the historic structure report. We built on everything we'd done before. The report is probably closest to the Martin house but with little improvements all the way through. So the Robie house study was finished about three months ago. An interesting thing about the Robie house study was that we were required by our contract to do several things I'd never had to do before.

Benjamin: What were they?

Hasbrouck: One, we had to hire student interns, and we did.

Benjamin: From the university?

125 Hasbrouck: We could get them anyplace we wanted. We had four. We had two from the University of Chicago graduate program in art history, two women, and we had two, a man and a woman, from the School of the Art Institute Interior Architecture Department.

Benjamin: What did they do for you?

Hasbrouck: The students from the School of the Art Institute did drafting, and the ones from the University of Chicago did library research and some on-site investigation. When our window consultant needed a helper for a week, one of the young ladies stayed with her the whole time and made notes. They were, all four of them, enthusiastic and very helpful. The other thing we were required to do was give four public presentations of our work at Robie house. We were required to give one public presentation before we started where we had to tell people what we were doing.

Benjamin: Who was to be your audience?

Hasbrouck: The audience was to be the public, and we did it at the Art Institute of Chicago in Fullerton Hall. We told them what we were going to do. Then we did two presentations during the course of the work, one after we finished the exterior work and the other after we finished the interior work. Then we did a final report after we were all done. We did a two-screen slide show. It lasted an hour. It had a big audience, almost a hundred people for that second show. That's a big audience to me.

Benjamin: Why were you required to make presentations to the public?

Hasbrouck: The Getty Foundation is very oriented towards public education, and so that was a requirement. I didn't mind doing it. One of the things I did when I was doing the Robie house was to use the Robie house as a class project, and I took my SAIC students out there. It was very helpful. You know, we've done many HSRs, but one thing that bothers me about all this is that people are beginning to look at our firm as a firm that does Frank Lloyd Wright

126 buildings, and that's not at all true. It's true that we do Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, but we do a lot of other things, too. In the same period that we were doing the Wright buildings, we were doing historic structure reports for a number of federal agencies—the National Park Service, the General Services Administration and various public and private agencies.

Benjamin: For what kind of buildings?

Hasbrouck: For example, we've done HSRs for the Peoria courthouse and post office, the Springfield post office building, the Minneapolis courthouse building, the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, courthouse building. We did the federal complex in Battle Creek, Michigan, and the Kalamazoo courthouse. We did the Duluth courthouse.

Benjamin: I would imagine that one of these jobs leads to another. Do they?

Hasbrouck: They do. In fact, these historic structure reports, which are essentially a book of anywhere from two hundred to four hundred pages that describes the things that we talked about before and gives budgets, are a planning tool. They're used by the government to decide what they're going to do in the next four or five years. They have, interestingly enough, now stopped doing historic structure reports, and they have a new system which we are hoping to work with them on where they use a computer-generated report system. It's called the Historic Building Preservation Plan. It's a computer program where you input information so that the computer then generates a report that tells you such things as how many square feet of roof need replacement.

Benjamin: Do you think that's a good idea?

Hasbrouck: I'm not sure. I haven't seen it yet. We've done some similar work for the park service using a computer-generated program on national historic landmarks. They called it the National Historic Landmark Assessment Program. We did one of those for the Reliance building, we did one for Henry Ford's home in Dearborn, Michigan, and we did the Plum Street Temple, which is a Jewish

127 synagogue in Cincinnati. These are all national historic landmarks. For the report that was generated in each of these cases, we had a fifty-page booklet to fill in the blanks with various kinds of information, some numerical, some verbal. Then you send this off to Atlanta, , and the park service does the inputting and you get back a computer-generated report.

Benjamin: Do you feel that you're able to supply them with adequate information doing it that way?

Hasbrouck: Not as well as I'd like to. But I think, like almost any kind of a computer- generated thing, as it evolves over the next few years, it will get better and better. I am told that the Midwest office of the General Services Administration owns several hundred buildings that are more than fifty years old. Any building owned by the federal government that's more than fifty years old must be reviewed by a qualified historic architect to see if it's eligible for National Register status. In order to do that, they have to hire people like me to do this analysis. They can't do it in-house. I think the mandate is that they have to get an outside evaluator. The plan is to do these computer-generated reports on as many of these buildings as possible so that they can, by having all this information in the computer, ask the computer how much money they need to set aside in the next year, five years or ten years to replace roofs.

Benjamin: Can they pool the information?

Hasbrouck: Yes, they can pool all the information and get a broad-brush budget and they can schedule things. Now, obviously on an individual building, this would be a tool, but it wouldn't be the final answer. But if you had a hundred buildings, it would probably give you a pretty good idea of what your commitment was going to be in the next several years, so from that point of view I think it's a good idea and I'm hoping to be part of this thing. I'm working very hard right now to get on the team that's going to do some of this work. We've also done a lot of work in addition to these high profile historic structures, which I love, but the fact is there are other buildings that

128 are sort of our bread and butter. We've done some high profile bread-and- butter things, too, like the one we've just finished on Soldier Field.

Benjamin: What did that entail?

Hasbrouck: Well, Soldier Field in Chicago is a huge arena. It was built in the twenties. It never was really built for football. It's too big for football. I don't know if you've been over there or not, but Soldier Field has actually been shortened substantially. The north end of Soldier Field is not even used anymore, and they've reconfigured the seating to make it work for football. As we speak, they're having the World Cup soccer matches at Soldier Field, and when they got them, the political elements in Chicago felt they wanted to put Chicago's best foot forward, so they decided to restore Soldier Field and make it very handsome.

Benjamin: There was some talk of tearing it down.

Hasbrouck: There has been a lot of talk of tearing it down, but it's a national historic landmark. You can't just casually decided to tear down a national historic landmark. So they elected to do some restoration on the building, and we were asked to join a team headed by Lester B. Knight to do this. Deborah Doyle was on the team to do interior work, the restroom facilities and so forth, and Globetrotters Engineers did the mechanical and electrical work. There were some other very much smaller people involved, but those four, Lester B. Knight, Deborah Doyle, Globetrotters and Hasbrouck Peterson Zimoch Sirirattumrong, were the prime people, with Lester B. Knight being the coordinating architect. Our task was to devise a system to identify the deterioration on the exterior elements of Soldier Field and devise a method of repairing them in a very short period of time. We had an absolute deadline—I think it was the first of May of this year—when the work, not just the drawings, had to be finished.

Benjamin: In time for the World Cup matches.

129 Hasbrouck: We had to get off the site on that date because they needed to set up security systems and sweep the building for bombs and all that sort of thing, which is not very commonly known. On about, I think, January of 1993, they were soliciting proposals and eventually we were selected as part of the team. Since we had the largest part of it, we had to devise a system to identify the damage on the building and a system to provide construction documents. We went over and we took a long, careful look—I mean two or three days—at the exterior of Soldier Field, and there were hundreds or thousands of the blocks that the building is made of that were deteriorating. Soldier Field was crumbling away in front of our eyes. The corners of the roof of the colonnades, for example, were all encased in tarpaulins because pieces of the building were falling off and they were afraid somebody was going to get killed. The acroteria, the ornamental elements on the roof, had all disappeared because they had cracked and broken and fallen away. Some of the entrance gates had deteriorated so much that they were literally falling apart. There was differential settlement as much as six or eight inches in these blocks. The building was in terrible shape. But we went over the building and we identified, I think, ten basic problems—you know, spalling, cracks, tuck-pointing problems, broken pieces, etc.—at least ten basic problems that existed over and over and over everywhere on the building. We just said, "Okay, we've got these ten basic problems and we're going to identify each one with a code number or a code letter, then we're going to inventory the building and show where each incident of these codes is. If there is a spalled block up here we'll put an S there."

Benjamin: Could you do this on a computer?

Hasbrouck: Well, we devised a system to repair each one of these concerns. Then we went into the field and we identified where all these things were. We fed this information into a computer which generated the drawings and would tell us exactly how many pieces of each kind of damage there were, and we developed a system for repairing each one of them. For example, if you had a broken block and you had to put in a piece of a block, that's called a "Dutchman" and these were Ds. We knew exactly how many of these there

130 were, and it was shown on the drawings. Once we worked out the system and got the computer started and got everybody in the chain of command, so to speak, the guy on the field would feed it to the guy here who would feed it to the computer guy who would send it back to the guy on the field who would check it out. This proved to be an extremely efficient system of doing this work, and consequently, the work went quite rapidly once we got a contractor on board who could do it. That was another problem we had. We had to deliver our drawings, I think, on the fifth or sixth of July of last year, and we delivered them on the day they were due, one hundred percent finished. A month later the contract was let and a month after that the work was to start, roughly the first of September. We were very disappointed when a contractor got this job who we had worked with before and had had bad luck with, but in the public sector you have to take the contractor who has the low bid and who has satisfactorily completed all the paperwork. We recommended against acceptance of this contractor, but nevertheless he was hired and in three months he was two months behind. It was clear that there was no way this was ever going to get done, and so through the mayor's office—we had nothing to do with this—that contractor was replaced and a second contractor came on board. We were then asked to do more work in the field in helping to direct this work. The results were that the building was finished on time, and I think that it speaks for itself. The contractors did a good job, the Lester B. Knight people did. The interior is very nice. But we are particularly proud of the way the masonry looks. It's a good job. It should be. But, you know, that's the kind of thing we do.

[Tape 5: Side 1]

Benjamin: Before we go on, how did the team get put together?

Hasbrouck: That is a pretty common way for a huge project, you know, a multimillion- dollar project. Our portion of the work, the masonry, was in round numbers about $15 million. The rest of it, I don't really know what the total was, but it must have been up near $25 million or $30 million total. The public building commission asked for proposals from people, and it could either be from an

131 individual or a team. There really aren't very many firms that have all of these skills in-house, particularly the restoration skills. Restoration skills are a little bit skimpy around town. There aren't very many firms that have them. So we were asked by Lester B. Knight to be on their team, and we worked with them for several weeks in preparing this thing. Our team was interviewed and got on a short list, and then we were on a short, short list where there were only two firms left, and we finally got the job. I was told later that the reason the firm got the job is because we, with the help of Lester B. Knight, were able to define how we would approach this project in much more detail than anyone else did. In other words, we knew what we were going to do and we did it.

Benjamin: Because of your restoration background?

Hasbrouck: Because of our experience. I mean, we've had a number of projects that, while they weren't the same, had elements of similarity. We do know how to approach a restoration project, and the real restoration project was to replace crumbling elements of the exterior shell of Soldier Field. Soldier Field is made out of an artificial stone called Benedict stone, and there are thousands of these blocks of this stone—big, concrete blocks.

Benjamin: Is Benedict stone concrete?

Hasbrouck: Benedict stone is made out of concrete with a special aggregate to give it a certain tone. It looks very much like limestone. But we also had to redo the colonnades and the roof over the colonnades and the sculpture and the entries and so forth. There were literally thousands of elements that had to be done. We were under great time pressure because of the World Cup soccer meet. Actually, as we speak today there is a little bit of work left to do, and we'll probably be finishing that after the soccer meet is over. There are some little dribs and drabs left to do and we'll do that. But Soldier Field was a classic example of how several firms that really have no relationship to each other, except they have specialized areas, can get together on a team. We've done that a number of times. We're on a couple of teams now. We're on a

132 team with A. Epstein and Dubin, Dubin and Moutoussamy where we're doing the Refectory building in Washington Park. It is an 1891 building that was a D.H. Burnham building when Dwight Perkins was his head designer. We're actually on three teams right now to do an historic study of Fort Sheridan. We sometimes do that. If there is a small part that has to do with history or historic buildings—you know, it's only maybe five, ten, fifteen percent of the total—we will be on more than one team for the same project.

Benjamin: Is that cricket?

Hasbrouck: People do it. We always advise the participants that we are on more than one team. We don't tell them what other teams we're on. Sometimes we're asked to do an exclusive. We used to do that quite a bit, but we don't do it as much anymore. We'll go exclusive if we think the leader of the team we're on is so far superior to other teams that we know about that it would be foolish to waste our time with other teams. I mean, we're in business to get the work, so we go with the best one. But if there are several teams that have similar qualifications—maybe they're approaching it from different points of view—we'll very often be on more than one team. That's the case on Fort Sheridan and, of course, that project hasn't been chosen yet. We may not get it even though we're on three teams. I think there are about a dozen teams vying for that project. We also are on a team where we were selected, to do some work on the Abraham Lincoln Interpretive Center in Springfield. That team is led by Dan Coffey, and Lester B. Knight is also on that team. It's quite a big team, about seven or eight firms. It's a big job to do what amounts to a presidential library and museum. Presidential libraries are a relatively new thing. They started with Hoover, and now they're planning to do this Abraham Lincoln Interpretive Center in Springfield, although that work has not started yet. But we've been chosen. We're on a team to do some work at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. We've done a lot of work out there on our own, but now a team has been put together. I don't need to go into all the details, but we're doing the historic work out there. So that's one of the approaches we take, but there are other ways to do it, too. We often take projects alone. This week, for example, I'm working on a proposal to adapt a

133 historic building as a bank. It is not a bank now. It's a restaurant building in Chicago where a new bank is being organized. They purchased this building and we're going to convert it to a bank.

Benjamin: Is it a historic building?

Hasbrouck: Yes, and the client doesn't want to be named right now. We don't even know if we'll get the job, but if we do, this bank may turn out to be a very handsome building. Let's see, other things—oh, yes, there is a very interesting project we're proposing on right now where we would be the lead. The General Services Administration now has a new program called Historic Building Preservation Programs. HBPP they call it, and this is a program of computer-generated reports whereby you go out and inspect a building. For example, you would inspect the post office and courthouse building in Peoria, which might be a building that's two stories high and a block square and made out of limestone and built in 1914 or something like that. It's a building of some merit, local historic interest and sometimes major historic interest. If the federal government has a building that might have historic merit, they are required by law to employ a qualified historic architect—and there are some rules for that—to investigate to see if the building merits preservation. They now have this computer-generated HBPP program to do an investigation. It's sort of a fill-in-the-blank type of thing, and you insert data—the number of windows and condition of the floor and the roof and all of the various elements of the building—into this computer program, and then it generates a report. Part of what it does is calculate the square footages and potential costs in the future. The idea being that if the federal government in the upper Midwest region, for example, where they have something like eight states—say they owned a hundred buildings and they want to plan for their long-term maintenance program. If they have all this information in their computer, they can say, "Well, in 1997 we're going to have to do $20 million worth of roofs. In 1998, we're going to do only $18 million," or something like that. These programs are tools for long-term maintenance of these properties. So we're really looking forward to being considered for that kind of thing. But we already do a great deal of that. One

134 of the hazards of being in the historic preservation business is that you work on buildings which are highly visible, and people begin to think that that's all you do. I mean, they think, "Well, those people did the Rookery, so they won't be interested in our building, which is a very ordinary building." That's not the case at all. We will work on almost any kind of building so long as it has some merit and is worth working on.

Benjamin: You mean you will do projects that are not necessarily restoration?

Hasbrouck: That's right, adaptive use.

Benjamin: What are some of the adaptive-use buildings that you've worked on?

Hasbrouck: Well, we've done a number of loft buildings. We worked on this building we're in here on Printers Row. We've done the Honore Lofts, which is a factory building out in Wicker Park, and we've done several other structures of that nature with good results. So, you know, the work we do on the historic buildings gives us a lot of experience that we can use elsewhere. We also do new work from time to time.

Benjamin: For example?

Hasbrouck: Let's see, visible new work—we've done a lot of what we call infill structures. Out on the Northwest Side of Chicago not too long ago we did a project called Victorian Gardens, which was a group of townhouses in an historic district but on an empty piece of property. They were scaled in the size—the dimensions and materials and overall form were designed—to be compatible with the historic district, but they were clearly new buildings. They were townhouses with all of the modern amenities. They had fireplaces, enclosed garages, decks and so forth, but they also had some sawnwood trim on the front porches, and they had, for example, front porches. You had to walk up eight or ten steps to get into the house.

Benjamin: Like the older houses on the block?

135 Hasbrouck: Like the house across the street. We didn't copy another building, but we did do these so they were compatible for the community, and that seemed to be very appropriate.

Benjamin: Is context is a big consideration for you?

Hasbrouck: Oh, context is very important to us, you know. It's just inconceivable to me that you'd build a Miesian private home in Oak Park. Regardless of the fact that it might be great as an individual project, it's in the wrong place and I think that's wrong.

Benjamin: Would you speak about some of the work you've done overseas?

Hasbrouck: In the past two years we've gotten heavily involved in new construction overseas. As I mentioned before, one of the partners, Jay Sirirattumrong, is a native of Thailand. He's been in the United States for twenty years, but Jay still carries a Thailand passport. A couple of years ago at a partners meeting he said, "Look, you guys, I'm going back to Thailand for thirty days, and I think I'm going to see if I can find some work. I'm pretty sure I can, but I'd like to include that as part of my work time." You know, we all keep time cards. So we said, "Fine. We'll give you a budget and you can spend a certain amount of time." We discussed it at some length and decided that maybe he ought to go more than once a year. This was two and a half years ago, and we decided he could go every six months. Jay is a very bright guy, and he became acquainted through his family connections with a lady about his age who actually owned an enormous construction company. She had lost her husband and her father-in-law, and now she owned this big construction company in Thailand whose primary business was building toll roads throughout the world. They built toll roads for Third World countries. A lot of Third World countries have no money to build roads, so they hire investors to come in, build a road and give them the privilege of collecting the tolls for the next twenty years to get their money back. Then after twenty

136 years, they give the road to the country. There are some countries in Europe that do this. France does that sometimes.

Benjamin: France does that? Their roads are privately financed?

Hasbrouck: Some of them are. But anyway, this lady had recently built a toll road in her home country, in Thailand, coming into Bangkok, and in order to build the road they had to acquire pieces of property. They had little bits and pieces of property left over. She had one plot about ten or eleven acres, and she asked Jay if he would design a group of large houses, which she in turn wanted to rent to diplomats and foreign CEOs and so forth.

Benjamin: That's a plum job.

Hasbrouck: Yes, it was a great job. She had a budget of about a half million dollars a house, and she wanted ten of them. Jay came back with this job, and we could hardly believe it. But we had a great time because this was essentially a design project. She had seen the work we did on Dana/Thomas House, and she was enamored by the whole Chicago School movement. The first time she came here, we had just started on Robie house, and we gave her a tour through the house. Anyway, she wanted these buildings to reflect a certain amount of the early modern movement in the United States, but she also wanted them to have a Thai look. Jay is a superb designer, and so in a relatively short time he came up with several variations on a theme. We worked them up through design development and then he took the drawings back to Thailand and the final construction documents were done there on a CAD system by an associate we have there. They are now under construction. In the meantime, Jay also got a land planning project from another firm for several hundred houses near Thailand, and then that firm invited him to go with them to Hanoi. This was before the ban on travel to Hanoi was up, but Jay had a Thailand passport so he could go to Hanoi. So he went to Hanoi, a little bit apprehensive and met with a number of people, mostly government people, and identified a couple of sites. This client asked him and us to prepare the drawings for a couple of hotels, relatively small

137 hotels, about two hundred and fifty rooms, because there are simply no hotels there that are suitable for the kind of people that Vietnam is hoping to attract for investments. I remember Jay telling us that when he went the first time, he had a terrible time finding a place to live or to stay. One hotel had a hundred rooms and one bathroom. Another hotel had six rooms and one bathroom, and that's where he stayed. Anyway, Jay has been going back and forth fairly regularly. He is spending about half his time over there. We now have, I think, a total of six hotels, and we're also working on a shopping center and a recreation facility.

Benjamin: When you have a job like that, how do you put together a construction team and manage it?

Hasbrouck: We've done two or three things. We have a lot of people here in the office, as I said. Jim Peterson is a super structural engineer, Jay is a great designer, Henry is a wonderful production guy, and I get involved here and there. What we have done in Bangkok is establish an office there, and we've done it for several reasons. For one thing, we need somebody there to keep an eye on projects and to do day-to-day things. Jay had a classmate from Michigan who has been practicing in Thailand for the last twenty years, and so he brought him in. We set up what amounts to a corporation in Thailand, and we have a firm over there called Hasbrouck Peterson Zimoch Sirirattumrong, Bangkok. Jay owns a portion of it, the firm owns a portion of it, and the guy in Thailand owns a portion of it. Jay actually has controlling interest in the firm, because if he didn't, there would be all kinds of difficult tax ramifications. But by doing it in this manner, the tax problems sort of disappear. We discovered two things in Thailand and in the whole Far East. One, these people have a very difficult time doing design work. They're great on production and so forth, but they just have difficulty in sitting down and designing the building using modern techniques of design.

Benjamin: Is there no training available?

138 Hasbrouck: Not very much. The ones that have training are the ones who mostly trained either here or in Europe. The other thing is that they have tremendous capability in the production of construction documents, largely on CAD systems. There are a number of firms and individuals over there who literally operate CAD machines around the clock, seven days a week. So we have some of these people doing our construction documents, and with the modern modems and fax machines, we can fax or modem a drawing from Thailand to Chicago in a few minutes, and it's very inexpensive. You can get the whole thing here. Then we just plot it out on our plotter and make the corrections and send it back. Isn't that interesting? You can do all kinds of things like that.

Benjamin: Yes, I think that's quite amazing.

Hasbrouck: It's less expensive to fax a letter, by far, than it is to send it by any kind of overnight mail. The only thing we send overnight are checks, because you can't fax a check. You can wire it in various ways. Nevertheless, it's worked out very well. Jim has been over in Thailand and it's my turn next. I'm going over sometime this fall. But we'll see what happens. You know, there is one other area that we are very interested in and we've just touched on it.

Benjamin: What is that?

Hasbrouck: We want to do some restoration over there because they have thousand-year- old buildings. We have only one project that involves an historic building, and it's actually in Laos. It's a building that was built seventy-five or eighty years ago by the brother of the king who has since been deposed. This project is one where this building is pretty ramshackle. It's a big building, but we're hoping to bring it back with modern amenities and turn it into kind of a vacation health spa.

Benjamin: Is there much restoration and adaptive use that goes on?

139 Hasbrouck: There is and there isn't. We have a relationship with Kevin Sarring, whom you may know. Kevin works for us from time to time and has done some good things for us, but he also does his own things. Kevin is extremely interested in archeological studies, and last year around Christmas time, he went to Cambodia to look at the ruins at Angkor Thom or Angkor Wat. He spent about a month over there, helping to identify the ruins and plan for their restoration. We're hoping that we might get involved in that further. I don't know if you know a fellow in New York named John Stubbs.

Benjamin: No.

Hasbrouck: For a number of years John was with Beyer Blinder Belle. He was Jim Fitch's right-hand man. He was the guy who did the day-to-day work on Ellis Island. He is super architect, super preservationist, and a few years ago—two or three years now—he left Beyer Blinder Belle to go with the World Monuments Association. It is a group of people who sort of track the condition of important historic monuments throughout the world and raise funds to restore them. You know, they look after the pyramids.

Benjamin: Who funds that?

Hasbrouck: Well, there is a company on the East Coast where the principal stockholder is extremely interested in this, and he has set up a foundation to fund the organization and the staff. But then their primary function is to raise funds to execute this work. John and I have talked several times about participating. He is always looking for people like me who are planning to go on a trip somewhere. For example, when I was in New York last time, I met with John for a couple of hours to find out what he had coming up. He is looking for somebody to go to Budapest, Hungary, and that area, because there are a couple of projects there that he wants somebody to spend a few days looking at and come back and report on the condition of these monuments. So I said, "Look, I'll be glad to do that." You don't get paid, but I think you can take a tax deduction. They might pick up some of the expense. I don't know. But I'm not really looking for that. It would be great fun to do it. Who knows, we

140 might actually get to do some of the work as well. I'm very interested in all that stuff, you know. I'm more interested in that kind of thing than I am in doing a very ordinary building that might pay us a great deal of money. I'm not a rich man, but I haven't done badly in the world of architecture. I don't have to scrounge every minute for a dollar anymore, so I don't. I do things like work at the School of the Art Institute for a fee.

Benjamin: What are the essential elements you try to convey to students in the historic preservation program?

Hasbrouck: Well, in my opinion a person going into preservation or restoration, which are similar but not the same, has to have three or four elements that aren't always taught. For one thing, I think the person ought to have the ability to become licensed as an architect. I think unless you have that ability, you're not really in control of your own destiny. You know, there are people who do very well without it, but I think that ought to be an option. They ought to have a certain amount of hands-on experience while they are in school, investigating historic buildings. They ought to know how to do intensive research in documentary research. They ought to know how to write, because historic restoration and historic preservation involve a great deal of report writing to convey what needs to be done to a workman who may or may not have had experience in this kind of work. So to make a long story short, we took all of these thoughts and we said that these people ought to have a good background in architectural history, and they ought to understand the technology of construction. They ought to be able to identify and understand the use of a wide variety of materials, including archaic and obsolete materials. They ought to be able to record buildings, measure and draw and photograph, and they ought to be able to assemble all this into a comprehensive report which describes, essentially, programmatically what is going to be done. Finally, they ought to be able to prepare the construction documents or restoration documents that the workmen will use.

Benjamin: When the students come out of this program, are they prepared to take their licensing exam?

141 Hasbrouck: No. They would still have to do their apprenticeship just like any other person. That was something I didn't succeed on because other people didn't completely agree with me. I'm not saying they're wrong; we just had a difference of opinion. So I would say that less than half of the people in the current Art Institute program have a background in architecture. In order to get a license in architecture, one of the requirements is that you have to have a degree from an accredited institution, and by "accredited" it has to be accredited by the Architectural Accrediting Board. You can get a degree from the University of Chicago and it's not accredited by them.

Benjamin: Are only the University of Illinois and IIT in Illinois accredited?

Hasbrouck: Yes, Illinois and IIT, I believe, are the only accredited institutions in Illinois. There are some junior colleges whose time will apply if you go to those schools. Therefore, the only students at the School of the Art Institute who will really qualify eventually for taking a license are those who have an undergraduate degree from an accredited institution.

Benjamin: Can the programs at the Art Institute apply towards the requirements?

Hasbrouck: To a certain degree, yes. It would be a partial fulfillment of an apprenticeship if you already had an undergraduate degree in architecture from an accredited institution. It's interesting, though, that many of the students at the School of the Art Institute do not have undergraduate education in architecture.

Benjamin: Are you surprised?

Hasbrouck: Well, I suppose I wasn't surprised. I was a little disappointed that there weren't more, but then it occurred to me that when you go to school to study architecture, you usually aren't there because you want to study historic architecture. You're there because you want to do new buildings, so the ones who want to study historic architecture come out of a different background.

142 They've either studied historic architecture, and there are several of those, or some related field like art history or history. It's interesting that one of my best students was a journalism major. The students were very good. The students at the Art Institute program are really very bright, enthusiastic and hardworking, and we worked them very hard.

Benjamin: How many students are in a class?

Hasbrouck: There are twelve. We allowed for up to fifteen, and we had one who came the first day and left.

Benjamin: Is it competitive?

Hasbrouck: Yes. Last year I think they had something like over a hundred inquiries. I don't know how many applicants. They admitted, I think, thirteen and the student who did not continue.

Benjamin: What is the median age?

Hasbrouck: They are not kids. I'd say they are twenty-five, twenty-six. Most of them have worked. In fact, one of the brightest students is a young man who has a degree from the University of Illinois. He has worked for three or four years, and he is working forty hours while he is taking a full load in school. I don't see how he does it.

Benjamin: What work does he do?

Hasbrouck: He is a draftsman in an architect's office. In fact, while we were taking the class last year, he took his architect's exam. I don't know if he passed or not.

Benjamin: You've said that restoration and preservation don't necessarily mean the same thing. How do they differ?

143 Hasbrouck: Well, I talked to the students about this. I think there are two tracks that you can study, two tracks you can be a professional in—restoration and/or preservation. Restoration is the hands-on improvement, if you will, of an existing building that merits restoration. The Rookery, for example, is an excellent example of restoration. The bank that we did in Cedar Rapids and the Dana/Thomas house are restoration projects where a building had deteriorated to a high degree but it still had a lot of merit and someone was willing to return it to its visual appearance at a particular period in its life while incorporating modern amenities to make it a modern building. I don't think that a building that was built in 1750 without a furnace should be built again without a furnace. I think that the aesthetics of an earlier date can be realized within the limits that are put upon a person by having to put in modern amenities. I think it's very, very important that when you do an historic building that it have an economic viability when it's finished, and that can take a number of forms. The most obvious one is that you return it to a condition where a owner or a tenant can move in and use the space appropriately and make enough money to generate the funds needed to pay off the mortgage and return a profit. Now, there are other variations of economic viability. A museum, for example, has a different kind of return. There is nothing wrong with a museum which does not charge being restored and used on a daily basis by a broad segment of the public. It's part of the responsibility of the government, if you will, to do that kind of thing, and that sort of return on the investment is perfectly legitimate. The most difficult—I'm sure this is in the line of what we're talking about—the most difficult client that we ever have is someone who comes to us and says, "I want to restore and preserve this building," and you say, "What is your ultimate use?" and they have no idea. They're interested in the process of the restoration and the idea of restoration, but once it's restored, they don't realize that it has to then be used. That's where the preservation comes in, because preservation involves preserving an existing structure or group of structures, and it can be at any stage in the life of the building. You can preserve it as it is today—maybe it's not in particularly good shape but you preserve it—or you can restore it and then preserve it. Preservation is a

144 different thing. It's keeping the building from further deterioration and maintaining it and finding a reason for its long-term use.

Benjamin: I'm going to paint a scenario: What if somebody comes to you with a building that is deserving of restoration and preservation and they have some design in their head for it that is incompatible with your way of thinking. How do you deal with that?

Hasbrouck: We've had that happen. The most common example of that is somebody who comes and they know the building is important, it's beautiful and so forth, and the only thing they can think of is to make it a museum. Sometimes their understanding of what a museum is or should be is inappropriate. We generally then will try our very best to convince them that they have to find a viable use for the building, maybe some kind of commercial use like a bank or a retail operation or law offices or anything of that nature. It's strange because very often these well-meaning people aren't very innovative. They are unable to understand that a beautiful old Victorian house can be used as a law office without destroying it. Now, there are certain people who are purists, in the purest sense of the word, who are unable to deal with that kind of adaptation or reuse of a building. That used to bother me, but it doesn't anymore because sometimes the only way you can justify preserving a building is to find an alternative use.

Benjamin: Yes, that's certainly sensible thinking in today's world. What if a client really wants to do things that are contradictory to the building, in your eye, and they're strong willed but you don't agree. How do you handle that?

Hasbrouck: Well, there are some things we simply won't do. I would not, for example, add another floor to an historic building. I can't imagine doing it unless it was under circumstances where it was absolutely the only way the building could be saved. I think then we could consider it. I wouldn't make inappropriate additions. I think the most appropriate addition on an historic building is one that looks clearly like it's an addition. I don't believe in

145 copying an existing building and making two wings that are identical when there was only one wing in the first place.

Benjamin: Have you ever walked away from a job?

Hasbrouck: I've refused jobs. I refused a job yesterday, not quite in this same light, but I had a call from a representative of the owner of an important building—well, it's the building where the Arts Club is housed. As you know, the Arts Club was designed by Mies van der Rohe. The present ownership is taking a position that the building in which it's housed is a building that is almost impossible to renovate and have an economic viability. He may be right. I don't know whether that's true or not. They wanted me to testify that the building and the space were not of landmark quality because there is a group in town that wants to turn the Arts Club into a Chicago landmark. Well, the building is a rather ordinary building, you know, but the Arts Club space and Mies's great stairway are just incredible, and they should be retained. I think there are solutions to that problem. I don't know what they are, and I'm not sure you could build around it. I'm sure you could build around the stairway and maybe reconstruct the Arts Club space in a new building or something. It would be expensive, but it might be worthwhile. There has to be a solution found for that. Ideally, it should stay where it is. A kind of unfortunate second choice would be to rebuild the Arts Club in a similar space nearby. I think that could be done as well. I told the person who called, whom I didn't know, that I was sympathetic to their problem but I simply could not and would not take a position to destroy the only interior ever done by Mies, particularly one as beautiful as that one. I've had other cases like that.

Benjamin: I know in the past sometimes you have testified against landmark use.

Hasbrouck: Yes. I think the most difficult one that I've had to deal with is one I'd probably do again, except we have a policy now in the office that we will not take a project to destroy a landmark building, even if we think it should be destroyed. We just won't do it anymore. About fifteen years ago, I suppose, I

146 was asked to work for both sides of a single building—the side that wanted to tear it down and the side that wanted to keep it. It was the old North Western Railroad station.

Benjamin: Oh, yes, I remember that issue.

Hasbrouck: I got calls from both groups on the same day. I don't remember which one called first. The next day I called them both back, and I said, "Look, I got a call from the other guy, too. I'm going to take a week, and I'm going to look at this project with great care. If I decide to take your side, I expect you to pay me for that week." Then I called the other guy, and I said, "If I decide to take your side, I expect you to pay me for that week." I only wanted one of them to pay me, whichever one I decided was the appropriate one, I expected them to pay me. They both agreed to this. So I spent a good solid week on it. I went through the building from top to bottom, I read the literature and so forth, and I concluded that the North Western Railroad station simply could not be retained. There was no possibility of ever having an economic viability for this building. It just was impossible. I won't go into the details right now. I worked very hard to demonstrate this, and I had two situations where I had to give sworn testimony, one before the Commission on Chicago Landmarks and the other before the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council. Actually, the commission had voted eight to one to recommend the building for landmark status, partly in order to get the show on the road. After the testimony that I gave—and I wasn't alone, Jerry Shlaes gave testimony and a couple of other people I don't recall—they voted eight to one against it. Then we went to Springfield before the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council and made a similar presentation. They had not voted before. I don't recall what the vote was, but I think in order to deny status in those days you had to have a two- thirds vote.

Benjamin: I think it's still more than a majority.

Hasbrouck: There was no question about it. In both cases it was clear that the other professionals on those two groups agreed that that building was not a

147 landmark. But to this day I still take grief for that. People who I don't know from Adam will approach me and say, "I remember you're the one who tore down the North Western station." I won't do it again. I'm not going to get into that again.

Benjamin: Is that the only time that has happened?

Hasbrouck: Let's see, I think I've done a—well, I was supposed to—what was the site up on North Lake Shore Drive where there was—I want to say the—it wasn't the Wrigley mansion—there was a Howard Van Doren Shaw building and two other buildings.

Benjamin: Are they still standing?

Hasbrouck: No, they were torn down.

[Tape 5: Side 2]

Hasbrouck: The Landmarks Preservation Council took a very strong position in favor of preservation of these projects, and it was another case where I wasn't sure what I was going to take and after I looked at it concluded that they weren't very good buildings in the first place. So anyway, I took that position. Actually, that was a court case. But in any case, in the past few years we have decided here in the office that we simply won't take a position against any kind of landmark status, and we don't. It's not worth it. We don't need to. There are other things to do.

Benjamin: It seems contradictory, and you can be more effective on the other side. Is there a client you would turn down?

Hasbrouck: Not very many. Well, I won't work on contingency. I won't take a job where they say, "Well, we'll pay you if it works." I won't do that. I'll tell you the kind of client that really annoys me, and that's a client who comes in and wants you to work very hard on a project—"we're-all-in-this-together" type of

148 thing—until he gets his funding and then suddenly you're just a paid worker instead of a partner.

Benjamin: Have you run into that situation?

Hasbrouck: Oh, I run into it all the time.

Benjamin: Can you kind of anticipate it ahead of time?

Hasbrouck: We make it clear to people who want us to work not so much on a contingency but on a money-to-come-later-on basis, that if we're going to do a lot of up-front work for either no pay or modest pay, that then when the project goes forward, we get a piece of the action in addition to our fee. Most legitimate developers are perfectly willing to do that. It seems to work sometimes. A lot of times we don't take a piece of the action. I've taken limited partner positions on some projects personally, but the office does not.

Benjamin: What about houses? Do you work on private houses?

Hasbrouck: Houses? We've done a few. It's interesting that we just finished a huge Arts and Crafts house, over a million dollars, out in Barrington for a very pleasant client. Actually, a man and his wife got in touch with us because a couple of years ago I went down to North Carolina to give a speech at the annual arts and crafts conference they have down there. I gave a talk on the Dana/Thomas house and the wife—I don't remember whether she heard me or one of her friends heard me—called and asked if we'd be interested in designing an Arts and Crafts house. I said, "Well, yes." I was a little reluctant at first, but then as we got into it, it became apparent that she was talking about a pretty substantial house. So we did a little investigating and found that she and her husband could easily afford this house because he had a very responsible position. One thing led to another, and we actually even helped them select property out in Barrington. They bought several acres of land on a lake, and then we designed this house. Jay was very much involved in it. Jim and I helped out and Henry helped out. We all worked on it. The

149 end product is an Arts and Crafts house with some, not much, Frank Lloyd Wright, but a lot of Gustav Stickley perhaps and Greene and Greene and things like that. A lot of wonderful interior woodwork in cherry and oak and stencil work everywhere. It's just been finished. They have now moved in. But we did that house. We also did a wonderful restoration of a little house up in Winnetka, the Lloyd house for Georgia Lloyd. Georgia Lloyd's mother built that house in the twenties.

Benjamin: Isn't that Arts and Crafts, too?

Hasbrouck: Oh, it's a classic Arts and Crafts house, more English Arts and Crafts than anything else. Mrs. Lloyd—Mrs. Beshears at that time—had owned this house. Her mother had owned it and she had grown up there. She was a senior citizen, and she was just delightful. She came to us, and I remember when we interviewed, I really wasn't very excited about doing this little tiny house, you know. Finally I said, "Well, Mrs. Beshears, I'll be glad to do this house, but only if you will let me do a true restoration." She looked at me and she said, "Oh, I'm so grateful," because all the other architects wanted to remodel her house, and she didn't want her house remodeled. She wanted it to look like it did when she was a child.

Benjamin: Do you think that a lot of architects want to leave their imprint?

Hasbrouck: All of them. It's the biggest cross that architects have to bear. An architect in restoration has an incredible privilege of working on buildings that are already great, so you really don't have the additional privilege of putting your own signature on them. I do not have the right to improve upon Mrs. Beshears's house—Mrs. Lloyd's house. The thing was beautiful, and we restored it to the way it was. The only thing we changed in it was the kitchen. The kitchen had archaic and obsolete fixtures, but that didn't matter to her. She wanted it to be comfortable. She wanted to be able to get up in the morning and make her breakfast and enjoy it, but she wanted to be able to sit in the living room and see all the woodwork and the colors and the forms and the sunlight, etc., the way they had been originally.

150 Benjamin: When you finish a project like this, are you dying to have it published?

Hasbrouck: I enjoy having things published. I don't do it as much as I used to. It's a lot of work to get something published.

Benjamin: Do you hire photographers?

Hasbrouck: We get photographers. We had the Beshears's house photographed. Hedrich- Blessing did it. They did a super job. But I'll tell you, photography is very expensive, and frankly—oh, I guess occasionally you get a job from it—but it's more an ego thing than anything else. So to answer your question, yes, we do do houses from time to time.

Benjamin: Now, these are houses where you were given a program. Either you inherited a program or somebody said, "I want an Arts and Crafts house." What if somebody came to you and said, "I want a house"?

Hasbrouck: That's probably the hardest kind of client to get, because the key to success is an appropriate program. We spend a lot of time with clients before we start work. We do a lot of writing and we ask a lot of questions. I'll give you a for- instance. For the Arts and Crafts house in Barrington, which cost a lot of money, one of the programmatic requirements was that there had to be a shower in the house where they could give their dog a bath. Now, this sounds a little strange, but the fact is that they had this very nice dog that they loved, and he would go out and run around in the mud and they didn't want him tracking up the house. So there is a shower where they can give the dog a bath. That seems like a strange requirement, but the fact of the matter is, one of the questions we always ask clients very early is, "Do you have pets?" because pets make a difference in a house.

Benjamin: Sure, they do.

151 Hasbrouck: "Do you have children, and, if so, are they boys or girls and how many and how old? Do you have in-laws that come?" They make a big difference. I'm not going to pick on any of my clients, but we live in a condo nearby here and when we moved in, it was a three-bedroom condo. The first thing we did was to eliminate one of the bedrooms and make the living room bigger. The second thing we did was to convert the second bedroom to a sewing room for my wife.

Benjamin: If somebody comes to you with not too clear of an idea about style and architecture and says, "I want a nice house and I want to be comfortable," you're the designer. What do you do?

Hasbrouck: That's a good question for almost any architect. It's a hard one for a restoration person to answer because people don't come to us very often with a blank slate, so to speak. But the fact of the matter is, in any architect's practice it's extremely important that he or she get to know that client and what their personality is and what their favorite colors are and what their hobbies are and how late they stay up at night and what they have for breakfast and so forth. You need to know all of those things. We have kind of a checklist of questions that we do ask clients when they come in to talk to us about their projects, even though these are restoration projects. Most of ours are restoration. We've only done two or three houses from the ground up.

Benjamin: What did they look like, other than this Arts and Crafts house?

Hasbrouck: We did a rather handsome, very stark stucco building out on the far Southwest Side of Chicago that was built for an Oriental couple, friends of Jay Sirirattumrong.

Benjamin: Is a model in your head, like Mies van der Rohe or Frank Lloyd Wright?

Hasbrouck: No. People think that because I've written about Frank Lloyd Wright and I'm interested in his work that that's what we do. But I don't think so, although you couldn't do much better than either one of those people. I once talked to

152 Mies about his experience when he was in Peter Behrens's office in 1910, I think it was. It was interesting because it was a few months before he died and he was very open about it. He said he worked in Behrens's office while Corbu was there and Gropius. I asked him if he saw Frank Lloyd Wright's exhibit while he was there. He said he wasn't sure he saw an exhibit, but they went to see a number of drawings or illustrations of Wright's work. I think it was actually an exhibit of the drawings and prints. I don't think they were originals, the way he described it. But he said they went back several times, and they didn't look at the perspectives. They looked mostly at the plans. I said, "Well, I read once that you wrote that those plans of Wright's in 1910 saved you twenty years," and he laughed and said he didn't remember saying that but it was true. But he did write that and I found it. You can find that quotation of his. Doing a house is a very personal thing. It's not really my favorite thing to do. Some people love to do houses. I would much prefer to do a commercial building.

Benjamin: Why does a commercial building appeal to you more than a house?

Hasbrouck: I don't know. There is kind of a straightforward purity about designing a building to do a specific task. Architects always hesitate to say what their favorite project was—and I've had lots of favorite projects—but right now I think my current favorite is still the Peoples Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids.

Benjamin: Why?

Hasbrouck: Well, it was a Louis Sullivan building which had been essentially destroyed, but there were enough pieces of it still intact so that we could restore it and we found the original drawings and so forth. I got great satisfaction out of returning it visually to the way Sullivan left it while installing a completely modern computer system and other modern amenities. And it works like a charm.

153 [Tape 6: Side 1]

Benjamin: If you were to name five buildings in Chicago that are the most significant ones to save, that you'd like to work on or that need work, which ones would you pick?

Hasbrouck: Well, narrowing it down to five is hard. It goes without saying that everybody understands that the Reliance building should be saved, and frankly, it's a great disappointment to me that I'm not working on the Reliance building. I did a lot of preliminary work on it for a long time but it went to someone other than my client. In any case, I enjoyed working on it. The Reliance building has to be saved, and, of course, the Rookery is one of the great buildings. There are some other buildings, and I'm prejudiced because I worked on some of these. The Delaware at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn, which I worked on about ten years ago, is the oldest surviving commercial office building in Chicago. It was started in late 1871, just a few months after the Chicago fire. It's been remodeled a couple of times but today is a viable structure, and since the McCarthy is now gone it's Chicago's oldest surviving building. The Monadnock is so important that it's just inconceivable that anyone would even suggest that it might go. The Manhattan is an important building. We worked on that, too. It's the first big building we did.

Benjamin: Now, what about buildings that haven't had work done on them that really need it? Would you name some of them?

Hasbrouck: Well, there are some buildings in town that certainly should be protected and restored. The most glaring example of a building that is not properly addressed is the Chicago building. The Chicago building is not even a Chicago landmark and it should be. It's an extremely important building. Someone is working on it now and they're doing kind of a reconfiguration of the base of the building with what amounts to modern aluminum-and-glass storefront, which I think is terribly unfortunate. It's unfortunate that that

154 building is not being restored properly. There are other buildings around town, like the Hotel St. Benedict Flats.

Benjamin: That's a real problem now.

Hasbrouck: St. Benedict Flats until recently was kind of an anonymous building, but it's a superb example of a late nineteenth century building [1882]. It's in reasonably good condition and it's representative of a particular building type that simply is gone now.

Benjamin: I understand that Loyola wants to tear it down for parking.

Hasbrouck: Yes, they do. And, you know, I heard a disturbing thing just a few days ago that one of the senior people at Loyola, a priest, told another client of mine that he'd heard that I was going to try to be on the side to tear St. Benedict Flats down, and that's simply not true. I wouldn't even consider such a thing. In fact, as I told you, I have a personal policy, and the office has a policy, that we no longer will take a position opposing a landmark building. Even if I don't agree that it's a landmark, I won't oppose it. I had an interesting offer just a few days ago to serve as a consultant to the developer who wants to take down the building where the Arts Club is—Mies's wonderful interior—and I just couldn't believe they were even asking me to do this.

Benjamin: How do you feel about the other buildings on the block on Michigan Avenue?

Hasbrouck: You mean on North Michigan Avenue?

Benjamin: Yes. The Arts Club faces Ontario.

Hasbrouck: You know, I haven't looked at North Michigan Avenue very much, but I'm a great lover of South Michigan Avenue from Randolph Street to Roosevelt Road, although at the south end, some of those buildings are a little bit shaky. But I think that part of Michigan Avenue is one of the great facades in

155 the world. In fact, I've always claimed this and said so from time to time in speeches that is one of the great architectural spaces in the world. Think about it. Its west wall is Michigan Avenue facade, the north wall is the Illinois Central area, the south wall used to be Central Station but it's gone now, but the east wall is really the lake, you know. The lake comes up and joins the sky. That's an incredible space, and we are very fortunate that Mr. Montgomery Ward fixed it up so that nobody could build out there and it will remain forever open, free and clear. We're happy about that.

Benjamin: I hope they're going to landmark it. That would be definitely a right thing to do.

Hasbrouck: Yes, I think they are, and I think they'll succeed.

Benjamin: How do you rate the city in terms of doing some right things lately?

Hasbrouck: I think Chicago's landmarks law has succeeded more than any of us had a right to expect.

Benjamin: Is the Commission on Chicago Landmarks doing its job?

Hasbrouck: Pretty well. I think the heyday of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks was about five to ten years ago.

Benjamin: Why do you think that?

Hasbrouck: Well, they had a group of people who took a great deal of personal responsibility. They had Marian Despres and John Baird. I don't mean to pick out specific individuals because there were quite a number of people who seemed to do a good job. Harold Scramsted was there. He used to be with the Chicago Historical Society. That was about a decade ago, I suppose. There was kind of a tone set there for a while, when these people really looked at buildings carefully and declared various buildings landmarks. I don't think they do as good a job today as they did then, but fortunately most of the

156 great buildings have been dealt with. But the commission has also done some other things. For example, they arranged to have the entire city of Chicago surveyed for landmarks. They had this group of bright young people who literally went up and down every single street in the city, and they filled out forms documenting these buildings. There was a certain amount of personal choice in that, but these were not amateurs. These were bright people who understood architecture and styles. They literally covered every building in the city. I believe they have finished. So we probably have the best survey, from the point of view of high quality architecture.

Benjamin: And I think it's being put on a computer so that it will be easier to access. I know that the commission has now been absorbed into the Planning Department. What do you think about that?

Hasbrouck: That was a disappointment to me because I thought that the commission should have been separate from the Planning Department. They had adequate control because the commissioner of planning was automatically a commissioner. But my worst fears have not been realized yet.

Benjamin: Yet?

Hasbrouck: You know, Chuck Thurow, the deputy commissioner, is dealing with this, and he seems to be pretty even-handed. He seems to do a pretty good job. The commission did get rid of the majority of its staff. I always argued that the Commission on Chicago Landmarks staff were zealots but they were not political. I don't recall any instance where the staff made a decision based on politics. I think from time to time some of the commissioners have, but that's the way the world works. But the staff was very even-handed, and they were good. But many of them are gone now.

Benjamin: Some are still with the commission.

Hasbrouck: They have Tim Samuelson over there, who has got to be the world's greatest walking encyclopedia of architecture. Tim Barton is there, Tim Wittman is

157 there, Meredith Taussig is there, and a few others, but those four are the core of the old group, all of whom are very bright and a tremendous asset. There is, unfortunately, no longer an advisory committee to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks.

Benjamin: You were on the first advisory committee.

Hasbrouck: I was on an advisory committee for the Commission on Chicago Landmarks for about five or six years, and we used to work pretty hard. We met at least monthly and reviewed buildings that we wanted to suggest to the commission. It was a way to sort out buildings and pass them on.

Benjamin: LPCI is acting in that role now.

Hasbrouck: Probably, probably. I haven't been as involved with the LPCI recently as I used to be. But the LPCI does kind of serve the purpose that the old committee used to. LPCI has turned out to be a good group. We talked about this early on, but the LPCI and the Chicago Architecture Foundation and the new group that's now going to manage Glessner house and Clarke house are all really outgrowths of the old Chicago Heritage Committee. There has always been this kind of core group of anywhere from ten to fifty people, depending on how you count, who have forced other people to pay attention to preservation, and they still do.

Benjamin: Do you think it's the same people then as now?

Hasbrouck: Some. I'm still there. Ben Weese is still around.

Benjamin: Do you feel that Glessner house has gone off in a good direction with their plans?

Hasbrouck: Oddly enough, the activities downtown were originally initiated in order to raise money for Glessner house. Now, the foundation, which has changed its name to the Chicago Architectural Foundation, has suggested, and I believe

158 they are implementing, separating Glessner from the foundation. I was asked to serve on sort of an organizing group—I was there last night—and they are talking about calling the new group something like "The Prairie Avenue Historic Museum Association," which seems like an awfully long title. I think maybe the committee is going to have to address that problem, but I don't know. At first I was just appalled that the foundation was going to spin off Glessner house and the Clarke house, but now I'm beginning to think, okay, a lot of people want to do this. Why fight city hall, so to speak? Why not turn this into an opportunity to make Glessner house what those of us who started it intended in the first place? That's going to be my attitude, so we'll do our best to try to keep it and make it more active.

Benjamin: Is this driven by economics?

Hasbrouck: I don't know about that. No, I don't think it was driven by economics, because actually the Chicago Architecture Foundation has agreed to continue to support Glessner house into five or six figures of money every year, so it's going to continue to take money out of the other projects. I think it was driven by interest. I think that the people who started the Chicago Architecture Foundation or the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation were primarily interested in the roots of architecture as exemplified by Chicago buildings.

Benjamin: Hence the name Chicago School of Architecture Foundation.

Hasbrouck: Exactly. That was the primary interest, and as time went by and the original board members and others got tired and sort of relaxed and moved on, their replacements were people whose primary interest was more contemporary architecture and what's going on today and what might go on tomorrow. You know, when I look over the board of trustees today, there is nobody there who was involved in the early days, so they have a different thrust and a different interest. There is nothing wrong with that, I suppose. What bothers me is that they are kind of leaving behind the foundation's reason for being. So let's just accept it and revitalize the original. That's my attitude.

159 Benjamin: I hope Glessner house doesn't get lost in the shuffle.

Hasbrouck: Well, on the new organization, it should be at the forefront again instead of at the end. You know, that part of the city is just booming. The mayor only lives a couple of blocks away, and there are other things happening down there. The McCormick Place expansion is moving across Lake Shore Drive. In my judgment, that part of the city is going to have an incredible revitalization in the next decade. If you want to make some money, buy some property in that neighborhood.

Benjamin: It's interesting to me to see the change from twenty-five years ago.

Hasbrouck: Yes.

Benjamin: If you think that really economics didn't drive this decision, what part do you think it takes in other decisions?

Hasbrouck: Well, architectural decisions are almost always driven by economics in one form or another. I think we touched on this before, but, as we speak, they are tearing down 101 South Wacker, the U.S. Gypsum building.

Benjamin: Oh, where the AIA had its offices...

Hasbrouck: Yes, we had our office on the seventh floor. It was a wonderful building. It was beautiful. And yet it is being torn down, and it's being torn down because that building is much smaller than its zoning envelope would permit. They simply weren't able to generate enough money to maintain the building and return a profit to its owners as much as they will be able to do if they build a larger building sometime in the future. I don't know all the terms of the economics, but I can assure you that it is economics that's tearing that building down. Most of the tenants loved it. The views are spectacular. I loved the building myself.

160 Benjamin: What do you think about some of the more recently designed buildings? Are they endangered now, too?

Hasbrouck: I suppose that's true, yes. Generally speaking, in my forty-year tenure in Chicago, Chicago has lived up to its reputation. Let's face it, in 1954 when I came to Chicago, they were building the Prudential building. It was the first post-war building built in Chicago's Loop or on the edge of the Loop since the was finished in 1931. So it was the first of a new generation. I haven't counted lately, but it's a fact that there are more major office structures in downtown Chicago, probably three times as many, built since I came to Chicago than survived from the first Chicago School. There are a lot of our early buildings, important buildings, that are gone. The Woman's Temple is gone and many others. But the architects of Chicago and the world have delivered in Chicago. Just look at all of the wonderful new things we have—the Sears Tower, the tallest building in the world. Whether one likes it or not and whether we like the sociological problems caused by Sears moving out of town is really beside the point. It's still a magnificent structure and beautifully designed, as is the Hancock building. The ultimate Miesian type building, of course, is the Chicago Civic Center. I think it would be difficult, ever, to design a better building of that kind than the Civic Center. Jacques Brownson did that with a consortium of architects, but Jacques was the designing architect. But there are other buildings in downtown. Harry Weese did a number of things that are superb.

Benjamin: What do you like?

Hasbrouck: The Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist on the corner of Wacker and Wabash. It was a very awkward site. He had to go around a corner. It's the best design of a building going around a corner since Carson Pirie Scott at State and Madison. The inside lives up to the exterior. It's not a big building, but it's a wonderful building. And, of course, Harry did the famous triangular jail [Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center] on the south side of the Loop at the corner of Clark and Congress. I think it is a fine building.

161 Benjamin: A handsome solution for an oddly shaped site.

Hasbrouck: One building of Harry's that doesn't get as much attention as I think it should is the Time-Life building. I think the Time-Life building is a wonderful building. There are other architects. Some out-of-towners like Kohn Pedersen Fox have done several good buildings in town.

Benjamin: It is interesting that in the last ten years there have been so many out-of-town architects working here, whereas before it was all Chicago architects. Why? What do you think happened?

Hasbrouck: When I worked for the AIA from 1968 until 1976 I used to have a line that I used from time to time, and I still think about it. I used to say that half of the great architects in the world are in Chicago and the other half wish they were. You know, that's still kind of true. I've talked to various people. I remember one time when Bill Pedersen was in Chicago serving on a jury for a competition that Marilyn had at the bookshop. He and Ben Weese and Kevin Harrington and I sat in this room and worked on this jury all day. We had a wonderful time and had lunch here, and in the course of the conversation, we all wanted to know what he was doing in town. Well, he was here to work on a couple of buildings. He had not built here yet. But the result was the 333 West Wacker building, which is a superb building. I think it's the best building that that firm has done in Chicago.

Benjamin: I once heard him say that he thinks so, too.

Hasbrouck: Really? Well, he should. There are two or three other buildings that they have done which aren't as aesthetically appealing as 333, but they're still handsome things—, for example.

Benjamin: Why is it that before the early 1980s, New Yorkers and other architects generally didn't make a dent in Chicago?

162 Hasbrouck: I think that Chicago developers had kind of a disdain for New Yorkers. Maybe some of the money eventually came from the East or something. I don't know. It's interesting that the early developers of the first Chicago School were, generally speaking, East Coast people. The Brooks brothers were from Boston. In fact, some of the people who built the early Chicago School buildings were really as much responsible for the bare bones Chicago style as the architects, because they instructed their architects to build a building with no frills. The Monadnock is an example. The Monadnock has no frills, and yet its very elegance stems from the fact that it is so clean. So maybe some of the East Coast money came back and said, "We need an East Coast architect." It's funny, though, that there are some great Chicago School buildings in New York. There's the building of Sullivan's. A newer one is Lever House, which I think really should have been built in Chicago. Gordon Bunshaft did that. And the other one, of course, is the Seagram building, which Mies designed, and built with Philip Johnson. Another person who had a huge amount to do with that was Phyllis Lambert who was a member of the Bronfman family. She came to Chicago and stayed here for a number of years. She is now back in Canada.

Benjamin: I remember when she lived at 860 Lake Shore Drive and was working for Mies van der Rohe.

Hasbrouck: She took a master's at IIT and she often worked out of his office. I don't know if she worked for him. She had an office of her own over on North Pier Terminal when it was still a loft building. She was an interesting person. She was heavily involved in the organization of the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation. She was one of the original contributors to the fund that bought the house. She was okay. I always liked her. But, you know, there are other buildings around the country. Whenever I go to a big city like Cleveland or Cincinnati or someplace I always look for Chicago School buildings.

Benjamin: Do you often see Chicago's imprint?

163 Hasbrouck: There are a couple of bank buildings in downtown Cleveland that you'd swear came right out of Chicago's Loop. There is a Burnham and Root building there, for example. The lobby looks exactly like, I think, the Reliance building lobby looked originally, and it was built at the same time. I wonder if anybody else knows that.

Benjamin: So, in your opinion, are there people, architects and owners, today who are acting responsibly and designing good buildings?

Hasbrouck: Yes, there are. Chicago is a whole thing. I mean, in the Loop it would be like pulling a tooth out of the front of your mouth if you took out some of these great buildings. I think the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But, you know, it takes more than an architect to design, develop, and get a great building built. It takes somebody with vision and money. Like the developer. We have a new crew of those today. There's Richie Stein who did the AT&T complex over here, and John Buck who did the 190 South LaSalle building across from the Rookery.

Benjamin: Oh, the Philip Johnson building?

Hasbrouck: Actually, it's John Burgee's building more than Philip's. There is quite a crowd right now. Tom Baldwin is trying to move into that sort of thing, you know. He did the Rookery and is supposedly doing the Reliance building now. I don't think he's really the same kind of a developer that these other men are. These other men started with practically nothing and have gradually moved up into the big leagues. Somebody told me once that Richie Stein started by buying three-flats and reselling them. He probably did. He's a good guy, by the way.

Benjamin: Have you worked with him?

Hasbrouck: Well, he was the first developer who was going to do the Rookery building when it was owned by Continental Bank. He took a personal interest in the building and used to show up regularly at the planning sessions. He was

164 very knowledgeable, knew what was going on, asked the right questions, demanded immediate service. I liked him. I haven't seen him for a long time. Did you know there is a new book on Chicago developers?

Benjamin: Oh, yes. Miles Berger's book, They Built Chicago.

Hasbrouck: I've met him, but I don't know him. I was very impressed by that book. Berger has a lot of assets, so I think he had a lot of help on the book. He brought in some historians and photographers and researchers, but it is his book. It was his idea and he did the basic text. That's the first book I know of about the history of development and developers. It's very important, and he recognized this. When the book came out I went through it very quickly. I sat down and I read it because there are a lot of interesting stories in it. He covers people all the way from the mid-nineteenth century up till the present. I would guess there must be twenty or twenty-five developers discussed in the book. But that's an important thing in architecture. You know, a developer is today's patron. Harriet Monroe said, "In order to have great poetry you had to have great audiences." Well, in architecture in order to have great architecture you have to have great developers, I think.

Benjamin: How do you see the future for development in light of our economy?

Hasbrouck: The economy is getting better, I think. Well, you know, one of the things about our particular area of architecture—preservation and restoration—is our projects take a long time. It's not unusual for us to spend four or five years on a project because it takes a long time to get the plan together. It takes time to find potential tenants. You've got to do more than average work on demonstrating to a lender that the project is going to be financially successful, and then it just takes a long time to restore a building. It usually takes longer to restore it than it did to build it in the first place. Consequently, we started out the recession three or four years ago with a lot of buildings on our boards, and some of them are just being finished now. About six or eight months ago we started getting calls again. We never did really go without work. We never laid anybody off in this recession. We've had a couple of

165 people leave to go on to bigger and better things in the last couple of months, but we'll just replace them. The recession was not a big problem for us.

Benjamin: Do you think that it has been less of a problem for preservation or restoration architects than for architects of new buildings?

Hasbrouck: Yes, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, preservation and restoration, generally speaking, is on a smaller scale. Number two, when you preserve a building and restore a building, particularly when there are investment tax credits and things like that available, you're starting with a good building. It's easier and perhaps more financially viable to find a relatively good building that's underutilized than it is to assemble the whole package to build a new building because there are certain tax credits available. Sometimes you can work on it while there are people in the building, so you don't have to worry about things like the infrastructure. Even if the building is in deplorable condition, the sewer lines, the water lines, the electric and all those sorts of things are there, and the basic structure is there. The framework is there, the walls are there. Even if the windows have to be replaced, a lot of the building is already there. While it may take a long time, and often does, it is really in many ways more realistic to do a project like that during a recessionary period than it is to do a new building like Sears Tower. So I think that the recession did not affect the preservation movement as much as it did construction of the new building structures.

Benjamin: Sometimes in a recessionary economy there isn't pressure to develop land; there isn't money available to develop land. Whole communities like Charleston [South Carolina], I think, have survived because of poor economic conditions.

Hasbrouck: Yes, that's true. It's also interesting that in Illinois the largest economic force is tourism. It used to be agriculture. Agriculture generated more dollars than anything else. Now it's tourism. Tourism has pluses and minuses, but tourism almost always involves some kind of a structure or building. People go to look at a church; they go to look at an historic building. Even if they go

166 out in the woods and go on a picnic, very often there will be some kind of structure involved. So the trend towards restoring historic buildings is in the same spirit as the generation of tourism dollars. I think this is a very important point, and one of the reasons why we continue to work even during a recession.

Benjamin: How does tourism link up with preserving historic structures?

Hasbrouck: Because of some people. And the state of Illinois is one of the few states that has a cabinet-level department for historic buildings. It's the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, headed by a director with a substantial staff and a good budget, and they work very hard to see to it that the state of Illinois stays in the forefront. They also have another interesting policy in Springfield. They support the idea of spending money for restoration. I'll give you an example. Now, Illinois is not a flush state. We're not as bad off as New York, but there is not a lot of extra money around. The state does not like to put money into long-term, year-after-year operating costs, but they will make up-front, one- time grants. They recently made a grant, I think, of something like a million or a million-and-a-half dollars to the town of Pullman to restore some of the buildings in Pullman. It's a one-time thing, and these buildings will be restored. I don't know which ones the money applies to, but this project will continue to generate tourist dollars and the state expects to be paid back. I think I told you before that the Dana/Thomas house, which we worked on, we calculated that in the first year the Dana/Thomas house returned a net profit to the state of something well over a half million dollars.

Benjamin: So the state understands. Does the city get it?

Hasbrouck: The city gets some of it, but we were calculating that based on state tax and hotel tax and gasoline tax.

Benjamin: Do you think that the city of Chicago understands?

167 Hasbrouck: Oh, yes. The city of Chicago gets a certain portion of the sales tax and the hotel and gasoline tax and things like that.

Benjamin: Do you think they see the city's historic buildings as an important tourist draw?

Hasbrouck: Well, the classic example of what we're talking about in the city of Chicago was the work we did on Soldier Field. We spent essentially a year on the planning and restoration of Soldier Field in preparation for the World Cup soccer meet, and there were only five days when the field was used. Yet the city of Chicago was prepared to spend $15 million or $20 million to get Soldier Field restored and ready. From what I see in the press, everyone seems to think it was worth it because there were lots of visitors to Chicago. I think Soldier Field holds probably a hundred thousand people, but even at that, the amount of money involved in repairing it and the number of people using it really wouldn't justify spending fifteen or twenty million dollars. But what happened was the foreign journalists and foreign visitors commented on how great the field looked and how great the city looked. There was a lot of positive publicity because of it, so I think everyone thinks it was worthwhile.

Benjamin: Do you have any projects in your head you're dying to do?

Hasbrouck: Oh, I don't know. We finished the historic structure report on Robie house, and if I don't do anything before I retire from this veil of tears, I'd love to restore Robie house the way it should be. But then I would like very much to do some more of the big buildings downtown. I don't really care which ones so long as they are good buildings to start with.

Benjamin: Do you feel you've dreamed your dream, whatever that may have been?

Hasbrouck: I think about that sometimes. When I look at the whole picture of the last twenty or twenty-five years I have to say yes, because there were a lot of rewarding things. I can look at disappointments, but you can't dwell on the

168 disappointments. There were several buildings that I would love to have been involved with which somebody else did or maybe they didn't get done at all. But there were some things that I look at and say to myself, "My God, I did that!"

Benjamin: About what do you say, "My God, I did that," and feel good about?

Hasbrouck: In Chicago?

Benjamin: Yes, and the surrounding area.

Hasbrouck: Well, the Manhattan building always has to be important to me because it was the first big building we did, and we did it well and it's been a success, and now, of course, it's over a hundred years old. The Delaware building is important to me. The Rookery. We were involved in the Rookery from day one till the end of the project, and while there were lots of other people on the team, I'm always pleased because the plan that was executed was our plan. There were other things that we did. In Evanston we did the Fountain Square building. And throughout the Midwest we've done a lot of house museums, relatively small projects. We did one in Palatine, we did one in Schaumburg and we did one down in Monmouth. We've done a pair of house museums in Barrington; side by side, actually, two nineteenth-century houses. We're doing a city museum in Wilmette right now, and we did one in Skokie. We did the fire station in Skokie, which was an 1871 building. In Wilmette, we are doing the Grosse Point Village Hall. We've been working on that for a long time. So we've done a lot of these. When you put all those in one pot, so to speak, they've made a substantial impact on preserving our architectural heritage, and I'm proud of that.

Benjamin: As well as you should be.

Hasbrouck: Some of these other buildings like the Sunderlage house, you have probably never heard of. It's a farmhouse in Hoffman Estates. Here is this farmhouse right in the middle of all of these apartments. A few people in the village

169 decided that they wanted to save it, and so we did. In the process of doing so, by the way, we discovered that on the site, fifty feet from the house, was a smokehouse. Careful investigation revealed that it was built in 1845, one of the oldest buildings surviving in Cook County. The farmhouse itself was actually adapted and partially restored so they could use it for a community center, but the little smokehouse we restored immaculately and it went on the National Register on its own.

Benjamin: I'm smiling because I'm thinking of H.H. Richardson's comment that he would build anything from a cathedral to a chicken coop.

Hasbrouck: Right. He did both, and so did we. We did the Ben Fuller house in Hinsdale, which is still underway. We do a little bit every year as they raise a few more dollars. The Ben Fuller house is, in my opinion—and I think this is correct—the oldest surviving balloon frame building in the world.

Benjamin: When does it date from?

Hasbrouck: It dates from about 1842, 1843, 1844. We don't know the exact date, but I know it's prior to 1845 from various records that we had. The balloon frame was only like ten years old at the time, and it's still there.

[Tape 6: Side 2]

Benjamin: In the greater world out there, whose work do you respect? I guess we should start with your competitors, other preservation architects.

Hasbrouck: Well, when I began in this strange world of architectural preservation, there was only one person that was really doing it and that was John Vinci. John has been a great competitor and a good friend all that time. I think we're probably better friends now than we were twenty years ago, although we were never enemies. John has a little different approach to his clients and even to his buildings than I do.

170 Benjamin: How do you and John differ?

Hasbrouck: Well, John is not the most diplomatic person in the world, but maybe I'm not either. But he does do a good job. He does other things, too. For example, he does museum installation designs. I remember a few weeks ago my wife and I were at the Art Institute for some kind of an affair, and there was another affair going on in another part of the museum and we stopped there for a few minutes. They were opening an exhibit that John had designed, and it was just as elegant as it could be. I called him and told him that. He was shocked that somebody would do this, but nevertheless I was glad I did. Also Ben Weese I think is one of the great designers in Chicago. He is very low profile. He is so good that he doesn't really need to do any public relations. But he's done a lot of very good small buildings. He did a wonderful church down in Peoria not long ago, which was published several places. It is just as elegant as it can be. He's done a lot of work on college buildings. He did a lot of work out in Iowa. Ben's a good architect, as was brother Harry, who is now ill. But there are other people in town. I think Helmut Jahn is a credit to Chicago. A lot of people criticize Helmut, but they criticize him probably because they wish they could walk in his shoes.

Benjamin: What do you respect about him?

Hasbrouck: You know, a few months ago I had occasion to do some work for Helmut—examining a number of his drawings and writing a little essay about them for a totally different purpose—and in the process of doing this, I had an opportunity to look through his scrapbooks in depth. There were about seventy-five scrapbooks of drawings. Until you sit down and look thoughtfully at the drawings that Helmut prepares using his big fat fountain pens and all the notes he puts on them, you don't realize the incredible amount of work that this man does. He's got a staff of sixty or seventy people whose only purpose in life is to produce working drawings for Helmut's designs. The fact of the matter is that Helmut is the architect for his firm.

Benjamin: Who else designs in his firm?

171 Hasbrouck: Nobody else. I mean, the others are architects in the sense of having licenses and so forth, and they do help develop portions of the buildings—he doesn't work out the kitchens and bathrooms—but the basic designs are his. It's interesting to see his work in the earliest sketch forms because very often the final building looks very much like the original. There are other people like that.

Benjamin: Are there others whose work you respect?

Hasbrouck: Ralph Johnson at Perkins and Will does great work. Larry Booth and his ex- partner Jim Nagle still do fine things, and Stanley Tigerman is a force to be reckoned with in Chicago. Stanley is extremely innovative. He is not afraid to do things that are outrageous, and sometimes his work is quite good. However, there are some times I'm disappointed in it.

Benjamin: What do you like that he's done?

Hasbrouck: I think the Bar Association is a great building. I think Margaret [McCurry], his wife, had a big part in the initial conception of that building. I've seen sketches of the early stages of the building when it was more elaborate, and Stanley had to simplify it. I think it's a better building simplified, and I think that's a mark of a fine designer. He can simplify a project and make it better. But Stanley did that. He's a good architect. An interesting man, too.

Benjamin: I understand that he's starting a school out near Glessner house. What do you think about that?

Hasbrouck: I don't know enough about it to comment. I hope he succeeds. There are other people around town, a few young people who are beginning to do things. It's interesting how many women have moved into architecture.

Benjamin: I understand that over half of the graduates of architecture schools are women.

172 Hasbrouck: I think it might be true. In preservation there are lots more women than there are men. At one time here two-thirds of our staff were women. We've lost a couple lately, one who went away to have a family and another who announced with tears in her eyes a couple of weeks ago that she had been here seven years and she was moving on because she wanted a different kind of experience. I understand that. She'll be a partner someplace, someday. There are lots of women involved. Deborah Doyle is a force to be reckoned with.

Benjamin: So you think women are making their mark in architecture and in preservation.

Hasbrouck: Yes, they are. I've wondered about why preservation would attract women more. I think it attracts women maybe for the same reason that interiors attract women.

Benjamin: Which is?

Hasbrouck: You're dealing with an existing structure and you can see the space before you start. In architecture when you're conceiving a new building, it requires a mind that understand three dimensions without the space being present. You have to be able to think in three dimensions. I'm not sure of this, but I just think that sometimes men are able to do that more easily than women. I don't know why. It's not always true. I don't know, maybe I'm just making that up.

Benjamin: Who is your photographer of choice?

Hasbrouck: Oh, Hedrich-Blessing is the best architectural photography firm in the world. I had a lot of fun a few years ago when Jack Hedrich decided to put the firm's negatives and photographs in a safe repository. He asked me to do an appraisal of the firm's work starting in, I think, about 1930. I forget what the cutoff date was. It was either 1950 or 1960, but I know there were thousands of things. I spent a good deal of time going through these and doing what

173 they call an intensive sampling. You know, you see the famous photographs that Hedrich-Blessing has done of the Century of Progress in the early 1930s, and, of course, the famous photograph that Bill Hedrich did of . I remember the day I was going through the Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater photographs that Bill Hedrich did in the 1930s. There were about a hundred of these that he took in a two-or three-day period. He took a lot of photos, and some have never been published. There are about a dozen, I suppose, that are regularly published. I remember for that particular photo that you see so often, they had a list of every place it had been published. It was like a hundred and fifty times, oh, it must have been more than that. We calculated the amount of money that they had made from this photograph and it was a huge amount—thousands of dollars.

Benjamin: When you appraise them for donation or sale purposes, how do you put a value on photographs?

Hasbrouck: You know, if you generate a hundred dollars a year from a photograph, which is very modest, and you do it for thirty years, it's like having a bond that pays you a hundred dollars a year.

Benjamin: Is that how you determine its value?

Hasbrouck: Well, that's one way. You capitalize the return or the amount of money that it takes to generate that amount of income. There are many ways to do it. Nevertheless, I remember that day when I was looking at that particular photograph because this man came in, an older guy, and asked what I thought of that stuff. I started telling him how great they were, and it turned out it was Bill Hedrich, whom I had never met before. So that was fun. But there are other good photographers. Ron Gordon does a good job. We have a young woman right now named Leslie Schwartz who is taking photographs for us. I looked at her and she is ten years younger than my children, but she just does wonderful things. She's married to a young architect named John Holbert who actually worked for my wife in her bookshop while he was in college. Leslie did some photographs of our work out at the Washington Park

174 Refectory building which are just wonderful things. I'm very pleased with what she did. So there are lots of people like that with skills out there. There are furniture makers and there are painters and others with skills we need for restoration.

Benjamin: Did Hedrich-Blessing donate their photographs or their negatives to the Chicago Historical Society?

Hasbrouck: I think it was a combination of a sale and donation. I don't know the circumstances and I don't care. It's wonderful that these things are there. Many of those buildings are gone. For example, Hedrich-Blessing took a photograph of everything Keck and Keck ever did. Ken Hedrich and Bill were of the same generation as George Fred and Bill Keck, and their archive of the Keck brothers' work is literally complete. The same way with Mies. They did almost all of Mies's photography for a long time, and the number of photographs that they took for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, must be in the thousands, although SOM had other people do work for them, too. The Hedrich-Blessing archive is incredible.

Benjamin: Archives are so important. You must have accumulated a substantial one yourself.

Hasbrouck: Well, a couple of years ago Marilyn and I were very concerned about what we were going to do with all the stuff we had relating to The Prairie School Review, correspondence and manuscripts and photographs and drawings and so forth. It filled fourteen file cabinets, not counting the printed issues, which we also had a lot of. One day I was at the Cliff Dwellers on a Saturday morning, and Jack Brown, who is the director of the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, came in and we had lunch together. I don't even know how the subject came up, but I said something to Jack like, "I've got to find a home for this stuff. What will I do with it?" He said, "Give it to me." I said, "Really?" He said, "Oh, yes. Our business is to collect these things." We talked about it for maybe an hour. He said, "That sounds great." So I went home and for the next few weeks Marilyn and I spent a lot of time sorting and making sure

175 that it was all there. We didn't really keep anything back. It all went in the pot. I think probably the most valuable thing in there were the photographs, both those we used and the ones we didn't use, because people would send in manuscripts and they'd send a hundred photographs and we could only use ten. But we kept them. It was part of our deal with our writers, that they didn't get anything back. Once in a while somebody would say, "Well, I've got to have such-and-such back," and then we'd return it, but most of the time we didn't send anything back. We also had a lot of manuscripts that were never used.

Benjamin: Are those indexed somewhere?

Hasbrouck: Well, after we gave all this material to Jack and he had it a couple of weeks, he called up and said, "You know, this is wonderful stuff, but we can't really use it because we can't find anything. What I want you to do is to make a little contribution so that we can hire somebody to index it." Well, I heaved this big sigh, and I said, "Well, for how long do you need this person?" "Well, I need them about six weeks." So we went to lunch again and this time he paid! He told me they would get a Ph.D. candidate in librarianship to do this. So this young man came. He was a very nice guy, and he was interested in the project. He started sorting the stuff, and I'd go over about once a week and answer questions. The six weeks were up and Jack called up and he said, "Well, the guy is doing a great job, but he's not finished," so we had to put up enough for another couple of weeks. Anyway, he was there about two months and finally he was finished and Jack said, "Come on over," and I went over and looked and it was remarkable. He had an index on his computer. He had a list of everything, and I remember telling Jack if it had been in that good a shape before I gave it away I would never have given it away. But it was theirs. I remember in the collection they found a bunch of family photographs of our children playing on the farm when they were visiting their grandparents and things like that. I said, "Well, you know, those really shouldn't have been in there. Why don't you give them back?" They wouldn't give them back. They said, "This is ours now." So anyway, if you go over there and find a picture of a little boy riding a pony, it has nothing to

176 with The Prairie School Review. It was useful because after I gave this stuff to them, Jack told me one day, "You ought to have this stuff appraised because you can probably get a tax deduction," and we did. We had it appraised. It wasn't a huge amount, but it was enough so that it made it worthwhile. I'll never be sorry I did that. I'm really very happy I did it.

Benjamin: You've really done some significant things in terms of gathering history. What about your documents?

Hasbrouck: Some of the stuff we've done, some of the historic structure reports like the Dana/Thomas house and the Rookery, we deposited copies of the HSRs at the Art Institute. I worry about this.

Benjamin: Why?

Hasbrouck: Well, do you see that bottom shelf over there where there are about, I suppose, fifteen three-ring notebooks? That's all the records and photographs and slides of the construction of the Dana/Thomas house from day one. There are over two hundred sheets of drawings on the Dana/Thomas House, for example. So I think, where should that go? Should it go to the Dana/Thomas house or should it go to the Art Institute? I don't know for sure.

Benjamin: Well, it must go someplace where they can deal with it archivally and make it available. That's really important.

Hasbrouck: Yes. We have lots of slides and things like that also that we probably should find a home for. But every architect should do that. You really don't have much use for these things as the years go by. There are several big firms around Chicago who are considering giving their drawings to some archive.

Benjamin: For institutions, space is limited. So I'm happy to hear the Art Institute is receptive to taking this.

177 Hasbrouck: Well, they are receptive, but they won't take entire collections. The Architecture Department usually selects the cream of the crop. They'll take a half dozen of the most important buildings that some firm did simply because they don't have room. The Chicago Historical Society, on the other hand, takes a different point of view. They want the entire collection because they take the position that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But the problem is that they've run out of storage. In fact, I got a letter very recently from Amy Hecker, who is the chairman of the Architecture Alliance at the Historical Society, stating that they are looking for those of us who belong to this group to help them buy more storage material. I think that maybe we should, because they won't accept any more drawings now, not at the moment.

Benjamin: What do you mean to buy more storage material? Do they need additional space also?

Hasbrouck: They need additional storage cabinets and things like that. I think they probably have the physical space. But I don't know that for sure.

Benjamin: Collecting this material is really important. And as long as it can be accessed. Think about the Holabird and Roche archive and...

Hasbrouck: Well, Holabird and Roche is there. Barry Byrne is there, and Coder Taylor's stuff is there. Harry Weese's stuff is there, but not all of it. I think the Historical Society will probably continue to collect. It's like going to the National Archives in Washington, which I have seen. They have these huge buildings that are just filled with file cabinets and shelves.

Benjamin: What has been the most rewarding aspect of your lifetime in architecture?

Hasbrouck: I've said several times in the past few days that one of the greatest privileges of being in this strange part of the architectural world is you get to work on great buildings, and we've had our share. It seems to me that part of what we

178 have to do when we finish working on them is to tell whoever comes after us what we did. So I intend to do that and I think my partners will agree.

Benjamin: This about rounds out the whole story. This has certainly been a valuable and wonderful experience, and for the many people who will benefit from all that you've shared with me, thank you.

179 SELECTED REFERENCES

Bach, Ira. "Forward." In Chicago's Famous Buildings, ed. Arthur Siegel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Despres, Marian A. Chicago Architecture Foundation: The First Twenty Years, 1966-1986. Privately Printed. Marian A. Despres, 1990. Hasbrouck Scrapbook, 1977-1982. Courtesy of Wilbert R. Hasbrouck. Hasbrouck, W.R., ed. The Prairie School Review, 1964-1978. Kahn, Eve M. "Wilbert Hasbrouck: Learning from the Chicago School." Traditional Building (March/April 1991). Kamin, Blair. "A New Legacy: Prairie School Archive Given to Art Institute." Chicago Tribune 10 September 1992. Kranz, Les, ed. American Architects. New York: Facts on File, 1989. Newman, M.W. "Drier Days for Soggy Soldier Field." Chicago Sun-Times 17 May 1993.

180 WILBERT R. HASBROUCK

Born: 17 December 1933, Mapleton, Iowa

Education: Iowa State College, Ames Iowa, B.S. Architectural Engineering, 1954 University of Chicago, 1968-1969

Work Experience: Illinois Central Railroad, 1954-1968 Executive Director, Chicago Chapter and Illinois Council of the American Institute of Architects, 1968-1975 Wilbert R. Hasbrouck, 1970-1975 Office of Wilbert R. Hasbrouck, Architect, Historic Resources, 1975-1984 Hasbrouck Hunderman Architects, 1984-1986 Hasbrouck Peterson Associates, 1986-1981 Hasbrouck Peterson Zimoch Sirirattumrong, 1991-present

Military Service: United States Army, 1955-1957

Selected Honors and Awards: Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1973 Citation for Efforts in Restoration and Preservation, National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1974 Distinguished Service Award, American institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter, 1975 Preservationist of the Year, Chicago Coordinating Council for Landmarks Preservation, 1986

Civic Service: Board of Directors, Society of architectural Historians Charter Member, Association of Preservation Technology Member, Committee on Historic Buildings, American Institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter Member, Committee on Historic Resources, American Institute of Architects Preservation Coordinator, State of Illinois Member, Governor's Advisory Committee on Historic Sites and Structures Advisory Board, Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks Chairman, Adaptive Use Committee, Chicago Central Area Committee Board of Directors, Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois Member, Alumni Advisory Committee, College of Design, Iowa State University

181 INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS

333 West Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois Brown Jack 175 162 Brown, Peter 94, 95 900 North Michigan, Chicago, Illinois 162 Browning, Mark 88 1900 Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 35- Brownson, Jacques C. 161 37, 38, 48, 49, 53, 63, 68 Buck, John 164 Bunshaft, Gordon 163 Abraham Lincoln Interpretive Center, Burgee, John 164 Springfield, Illinois 133 Burnham and Root 90, 113, 164 Alinsky, Jeanne 10 Burnham, Daniel H. 26, 48, 51 Alofsín, Anthony 44 Butler, Jerome (Jerry) 61, 63 Alschuler, Alfred 66 Byrne, Barry 178 Alschuler, John (son of Alfred) 66 American Institute of Architects 23,24, 26- Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, Cape Hatteras, 27, 30, 31, 32-33, 34, 35, 37, 60, 93, 162 North Carolina 103 Archicenter 28-29 Central Station, Chicago, Illinois 29, 156 Architectural League of America 52 C.F. Murphy Associates 23 Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson Chambers, Henry 107 Burnham Libraries, Chicago, Illinois 54, Chicago (School of) Architecture 175 Foundation 21, 28, 158, 159, 163 Arts Club, Chicago, Illinois 146, 155 Chicago Architectural Club 51, 52, 54 Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 51 Chicago Building, Chicago, Illinois 154 Chicago Heritage Committee 8, 9, 13, 15, Baird, John 156 19, 21, 39, 57, 158 Baldwin, Thomas 116-117, 120, 164 Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Banham, Reyner 48 Illinois 20, 76, 156, 175, 178 Barber, Ted 10, 11, 14 Chicago Stock Exchange, Chicago, Illinois Barrington Area Historical Museum, 18, 22, 23, 24 Barrington, Illinois 67, 169 Civic Center, Chicago, Illinois 161 Barton, Tim 157 Clarke, Henry B. (house), Chicago, Illinois Battles, Tom 31 35, 59-61, 158, 159 Beeby, Thomas Hall (Tom) 27 Cliff Dwellers Club 48, 95, 175 Benjamin, Wayne 19 Coffey, Daniel 133 Berger, Miles 165 Coleman, Joseph G./Ames, Miner T. Berman, Irving 21 (house), Chicago, Illinois 36, 37 Bernheim, Kahn and Lazano 75 Commission on Chicago Landmarks 9, Beyer Blinder Belle 140 60, 64, 147, 156-157, 158 Blackwell, Ruth 9-10 Condit, Carl 10 Blossom, George (house), Chicago, Illinois Cuscaden Rob 39 6 Bock, Richard 44 Daley, Richard J. 9, 17-18, 29, 60 Booth, Larry 116, 172 Dana/Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois Booth/Hansen 116 1, 34, 104, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117- Brenner, Daniel, 27-28 118, 121, 122, 124-125, 137, 144, 149, 167, Brewster Apartments, Chicago, Illinois 177 86-87 Dearborn Street Station (now Dearborn Brooks, H. Allen 39, 42, 44-45 Station Galleria) 64, 69, 80, 96, 97

182 Delaware Building (formerly Bryant Great Lakes Naval Training Center, Great Block), Chicago, Illinois 70, 73-78, 154, Lakes, Illinois 102, 133 169 Greene and Greene 50 Despres, Leon 9, 20 Greengard, B.C. 43-44 Despres, Marian 20, 61, 66, 156 Griffin, Walter Burley 50 Donnelley Corporation 36-37 Griggs, Joseph 44 Donohue Building, Chicago, Illinois 68, Gropius, Walter 153 69 Grosse Point Lighthouse, Evanston, Doyle, Deborah 129, 175 Illinois 67, 100 Drummond, William 115 Grosse Point Village Hall, Wilmette, Dubin, David 67 Illinois 169 Dubin, Dubin and Moutoussamy 133 Gsell, Richard (Rich) 80-84 Dunlap, William 25, 31 Haffner, Charles (Charlie) 36-37, 38 Ellis, Harvey 49 Hallmark, Donald 44 English, Maurice 10 Hammond, James Wright 27, 66 Epstein, A., and Sons 133 Hancock Building, Chicago, Illinois 161 Hanks, David 107 Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania 174 Hanson, Donald (Don) 20 Farrar, Bill 33, 105, 106 Harrington, Kevin 162 Ferguson Fund 12 Hartmann, William 25 Field Building, Chicago, Illinois 161 Hasbrouck, Charles (son of Wilbert) 7, 67, Fischer, Carl 107 71-72, 73, 88 Fitch, James Marston (Jim) 92, 140 Hasbrouck, John (son of Wilbert) 73 Fort Sheridan, Fort Sheridan, Illinois 133 Hasbrouck, Marilyn (wife of Wilbert) 1, 7, Fountain Square Building, Evanston, 12, 15, 16, 38, 39, 40, 41-42, 45, 50, 55, 57, Illinois 169 58, 68, 73, 162, 175-176 Friedman, Bill 24 Hedrich, William (Bill) 174 Fuller, Ben (house), Hinsdale, Illinois 170 Hedrich, John (Jack) 173 Hedrich-Blessing Photographers 151, 173- Gamble, David B. (house), Pasadena, 174, 175 California 50 Heller, Isidore (house), Chicago, Illinois 6 Gapp, Paul 30-31 Highland Park Historical Society, Garden, Hugh 43-44 Highland Park, Illinois 67 Garner, John 94 Hill, Lewis (Lew) 59 Garrick Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 8, 9, 12, Hoerner, Joseph (Joe) 111 16, 17-18 Hoffman, Donald 48 Geyer, Georgie Anne (Gigi) 11 Holabird and Roche 76, 178 Giegold, Carl 89 Hollis, Jim 88 Gilmore, Leslie 111, 121 Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Glessner, John (house), Chicago, Illinois Chicago, Illinois 51 18-19, 21, 26-30, 33, 36, 37, 38, 61, 63, 65- Honolulu House, Marshall, Michigan 90, 66, 90, 158-160, 172 96, 100 Globetrotters Engineers 129 Hotel St. Benedict Flats, Chicago, Illinois Goss, Peter 44 155 Graham Foundation for Advanced Hunderman, Harry 88, 98-99, 111 Studies in the Fine Arts 20 Huxtable, Ada Louise 13 Grand Traverse County Courthouse, Traverse City, Michigan 98 Iannelli, Alfonso 9, 14, 44 Graphic Arts Technical Foundation, 19, 21

183 Illinois Historic Preservation Agency 32, Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald 94 33, 34, 77, 96, 104, 105, 111, 167 Maher, George 39 Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council Majewski, Daniel 61, 63 33, 34, 104, 147 Makinson, Randell 50 Illinois Historic Structures Survey 23, 33, Malkovich, Dan 33 34, 38 Manhattan Building, Chicago, Illinois 1, Illinois Society of Architects (formerly 51, 70, 80, 83-86, 87, 88, 90, 96, 154, 169 Chicago Architect's and Businessmen's Martin, Darwin (house), Buffalo, New Association) 53-54 York 121, 122, 123-124, 125 McCarthy Building, Chicago, Illinois 64, Jackson, Michael (Mike) 96, 111 74, 154 Jahn, Helmut 64, 171-172 McClier Corporation 116-117 Jenney and Mundie 80, 84, 90 McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois 209- Johnson, Philip 19, 20, 21, 163, 164 30, 61, 160 Johnson, Ralph 172 McCoy, Robert (Bob) 50 Johnson, Walker 88, 95 McCurry, Margaret 172 Jones, Anthony (Tony) 94 Macdonald, Frances 94 McLaughlin, Herbert 97 Kalec, Donald G., 95 Meers, Robert 116 Keck and Keck 175 Metropolitan Correction Center, Chicago, Kennedy, Roger 49 Illinois 161 Kenney, David 104 Michael, Vincent (Vince) 96 Kimball, William W. (house), Chicago, Mies, van der Rohe, Ludwig 19, 20, 56, Illinois 36, 37 136, 146, 152, 153, 155, 163, 175 Klein, Kate 111, 121 Miller, Richard 22, 23 Knight, Lester B., and Associates 129, 131, , Chicago, Illinois 132, 133 154, 163 Knutson, Steven 88 Monastra, Richard 88 Kohn Pedersen Fox 162 Monroe, Harriet 39, 48, 165 Krause Music Store, Chicago, Illinois 44 Moore, Ruth, (see Garbe) 11, 12, 13, 61 Murchie, Jack 99 Lambert, Phyllis Bronfman 20, 163 Landmarks Preservation Council (now Nagle, James 116, 182 LPC of Illinois) 23, 148, 158 National Register of Historic Places 33, Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret 34, 65, 77-78, 81, 100, 102, 128, 170 153 National Trust for Historic Preservation Lever House, New York City, New York 16, 93 163 Netsch, Walter 25, 26 Lewis, Lloyd (house), Libertyville, Illinois Neumann, Hans 23-24 14 Nickel, Richard 8, 9, 10, 12, 22 Lichtmann, Samuel 59-61 North Pier Terminal, Chicago, Illinois 163 Llewellyn, Joseph C., III 52-53 North Western Railroad Station, Chicago, Llewellyn, Joseph C. 52-53 Illinois 96, 147, 148 Lloyd, Georgia (house), Winnetka, Illinois 150 Ogilvie, Richard 32, 33 Lownie, Theodore, 123 Oliver Building, Chicago, Illinois 76-77 Lurie, Paul 19, 21 Ovresat, Ray 31

Mabry, Bud 31 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie 94

184 Palatine Historical House Museum, Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, (formerly George Clayson house), Chicago, Illinois 161 Palatine, Illinois 67, 100, 169 Severns, Ken 43 Palmer, H.L. 54-55 Shlaes, Jerrod (Jerry) 147 Pedersen, William 162 Sirirattumrong, Jay 99-100, 136, 152 Pelli, Cesar 72 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill [SOM] 20, Peoples Savings Bank, Cedar Rapids, 25, 27, 72-73, 175 Iowa 123, 125, 144, 153 Slayton, Deborah 88, 111 Perkins and Will 20, 172 Soldier Field, Chicago, Illinois 100, 129- Perkins, Dwight 133 130, 132, 168 Perkins, Lawrence (Larry) 24, 72 Spencer, Robert 46 Peterson, Charles (Charlie) 92 Sprague, Paul 33, 38, 44 Peterson, James (Jim) 97, 99, 138 Stauffer, Thomas 8-9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 21- Phillips, David (Dave) 76 22 Prairie Avenue Bookshop, Chicago, Stein and Company 116 Illinois 1, 38, 39, 53, 58-59, 69 Stein, Richard (Richie) 165 Prairie Avenue Historic District, Chicago, Stout, William 58 Illinois 1, 30, 61, 63 Strobeck, Charles 83, 84 Pratt, Steven (Steve) 68 Stubbs, John 140 Prudential Building, Chicago, Illinois 161 Sullivan, Albert (brother of Louis) 6 Prus-Nelson House, Chicago, Illinois 66, Sullivan, Ann 88, 95 70-71, 72 Sullivan, Louis 6, 8, 26, 39, 40, 44, 47, 50, 52, 123, 124, 125, 153, 163 Raeburn, Ben 40 Sunderlage House, Hoffman Estates, Reeves, Blair 93 Illinois 100, 169-170 Reliance Building, Chicago, Illinois 73, 120-121, 127, 154, 164 Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin 40, 106, Republic Building, Chicago, Illinois 17 115 Richardson, Henry Hobson 19, 47, 48, 170 Taussig, Meredith 158 Robie, Frederick C. (house), Chicago, Taylor, D. Coder 178 Illinois 6, 7-8, 14-15, 25, 39, 125-127, 137, Thompson, James 34, 104 168 Thurber Art Gallery, Chicago, Illinois 15 Robinson, Bob, Bandstand, Highland Thurow, Charles 157 Park, Illinois 67-68, 100 Tigerman, Stanley 172 Roches, Barbara 88 Time-Life Building, Chicago, Illinois 162 Rookery, Chicago, Illinois 48, 113, 114, Turak, Theodore 50-51 115-121, 135, 144, 154, 161, 169, 177 Root, John Wellborn 48, 119 Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois 14 Rudd, J. William (Bill) 39, 42 U.S. Gypsum Building, Chicago, Illinois 26, 160 Samuelson, Tim 157 Sarring, Kevin 95, 140 Van Trump, James 48 Sawyer, Calvin 9, 11, 17 Vickrey, Victor 88 Schiller Building, Chicago, Illinois 8 Vinci, John 8, 66, 79, 170 Schultz, Jim 19 Schwartz, Leslie 174 Walker, Bill 14 Scramsted, Harold, 156 Walker, Daniel 33 Seagram Building, New York, New York Ward, Montgomery 156 20, 163 Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois 161

185 Washington Park, Refectory (now Pool and Locker building), Chicago, Illinois 133, 174-175 Watson, Claire B. 3 Weese, Benjamin (Ben) 8, 10, 11-12, 19-20, 21, 24, 36-37, 158, 162, 171 Weese, Harry 8, 10-11, 12, 19, 20-21, 24, 31, 32, 34-35, 59, 68-69, 161, 178 Wheelock and Thomas 74, 90 Wille, Lois 11 Winslow, William H. (house), Oak Park, Illinois 14 Winslow, William H. 41 Wintergreen, Richard 19, 22 Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates 88, 99, 103 Wittman, Tim 157 Woman's Temple, Chicago, Illinois 161 Wooley, Taylor 44 World Monuments Association 140 Wright, Frank Lloyd 6-7, 9, 13-16, 26, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 51, 90, 104, 105, 110, 113, 114, 115, 118-119, 121, 122, 126-127, 150, 152-153, 174 Wright, Frank Lloyd, Home and Studio, Oak Park, Illinois 14, 15-16

Yost, L. Morgan 47

Zimoch, Henry 99-100

186