Dankmar Adler: a Biography Rochelle B. Elstein Chapter 2
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DANKMAR ADLER: A BIOGRAPHY Rochelle B. Elstein Arthur S. Elstein, Editor © 2017 by Arthur S. Elstein TABLE OF CONTENTS Pages Editor’s Introduction i-iii Author’s Introduction iv-xvi 1. Early Life 1-17 2. From Burling & Adler to D. Adler & Co. 18-33 3. Adler & Sullivan: The Early Years 34-62 4. The Auditorium and its Context 63-86 5. The Rise of Adler & Sullivan 87-116 6. At the Summit 117-140 7. Leader and Mentor; Architect or Engineer? 141-163 8. Adler without Sullivan 164-210 9. End of a Life 211-234 10. Adler’s Writings 235-267 11. Evaluation 268-291 Appendices A. Corpus of Adler Buildings 292-303 B. Adler’s Autobiography 304-309 C. End of the Partnership 310-327 Bibliography 328-376 Editor’s Introduction Rochelle Berger Elstein worked on Dankmar Adler over her entire professional life. Her M.A. thesis at the University of Chicago, in General Studies in the Humanities, The Architectural Style of Dankmar Adler, is dated September, 1963. Of course, her work on Adler had begun before that date, perhaps as early as 1961. In Chapter 9, footnote 23 of this book, she relates that she interviewed Adler’s surviving daughter, Sara Adler Weil, on June 27, 1962. She had been introduced to Mrs. Weil by one of her teachers, Prof. Edward Weil Rosenheim, himself a member of the family. She began her studies of Adler acknowledging that he had long been regarded as the lesser of the partners in the famous architectural firm, Adler & Sullivan. She recognized, as have others, that Louis Sullivan was a genius and that Adler, whatever his gifts may have been, lacked that spark. He was, she thought, a competent architect, an excellent engineer, a much better businessman than Sullivan, and importantly, a good family man of exceptional character. She also believed that Adler’s contributions, both to the firm and to late nineteenth-century American architecture, were insufficiently appreciated. Her master’s thesis was the first step in correcting that assessment; this book is her last contribution to the topic. When we left Chicago in 1965 and moved to Boston, her work on Adler was suspended, partly because we were starting a family and partly because Adler had never built anything in Boston and there were no records to be searched. Adler re-appears in her thinking and writing when she began her study of synagogue architecture in the Midwest. He was well connected with the Jewish community of Chicago (as this book will show), and his connections led to several important synagogue commissions for the firm of Adler & Sullivan and, later, for D. Adler & Co. These buildings, and many others by other architects, are discussed and analyzed in her 3- volume PhD dissertation, Synagogue Architecture in Michigan and the Midwest: Material Culture and the Dynamics of Jewish Accommodation (Michigan State University, 1986). Adler was a crucial link between two of her abiding interests, architectural history and Jewish material culture. We returned to Chicago in 1984 and Shelli soon found a position as Art Bibliographer in the Northwestern University Library. After completing her PhD dissertation, she resumed work on Adler, in addition to her full-time job at Northwestern and her family responsibilities. Her searches of various libraries and archives for primary literature on Adler and writing sections and chapters continued on a part-time basis until her retirement from Northwestern in 2006. She hoped then to devote herself full time to revising and completing this book, which can fairly be said to be the product of at least 20 years of investigation and reflection. (For example, the first draft of Chapter 9 is dated August 23, 2000; her last revision is dated Oct. 31, 2007. A Christmas letter dated December 1991 expresses the hope that the manuscript will be completed in 1992.) Sadly, health problems began to loom large in her life a few years after retirement. The chapters now presented were all written and re-written many times, as she was a research perfectionist, but as her health further declined, she could not assemble a completed, final manuscript suitable for publication. The dates on the computer files of the various drafts show that her last efforts on this project were in October 2007. The first date of the Bibliography is July 1998 (although clearly begun before that date). Last revised by her in early 2010, the Bibliography runs nearly i 50 pages, approximately 1000 entries, 12000 words. The earliest surviving version of Chapter 1, dated June 2000, proposed to begin the story with the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, New York, the last building designed by the partnership of Adler & Sullivan. Later versions employ a more conventional format, beginning with Adler’s birth and youth. I adopted that version of chapter 1, but the opening paragraphs of the earliest chapter 1 are preserved in the Author’s Introduction. By the time she retired, if not earlier, it was clear that finding an academic publisher for this monograph was unlikely for several reasons: The entire enterprise of publishing scholarly books was under severe financial pressure which continues to this day. A publisher might be willing to take a risk on yet another book about Sullivan, but Adler—not so much. Finally, a publisher might be willing to take a risk on a book by a well-known scholar, but she was not that well known. This difficulty led Shelli to consider publishing her findings as journal articles. Only one was completed, “Adler & Sullivan: The End of the Partnership and its Aftermath.” It appeared in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 2005, 98:51-8, included as Appendix C. It is a more detailed analysis than the monograph provides of an issue that has been the subject of much discussion among architectural historians: why the firm dissolved in 1895, after so much success, and why it was never reconstituted. As a measure of her talent as an architectural historian, the paper won the Harry E. Pratt Memorial Award, presented by the ISHS each year to one scholar, to acknowledge “the general excellence, style, and accuracy of the original manuscript.” In short, it was the best paper published that year in that journal. As Shelli’s health problems worsened, I was forced to conclude that she would never resume work on this project and complete it. So I undertook to edit the manuscript and to publish it in the format of the 21st century, as an e-book. Obvious typos have been corrected; redundancies that accrued over years of writing sections at varying intervals have been eliminated; the entire text, including the bibliography, has been edited to improve clarity. Some footnotes are obviously incomplete; there is a number in the text without an entry. These stand as the author left them. I have not checked the other footnotes for accuracy, relying instead on her commitment to thoroughness and her eye for detail. The multitude of primary and secondary sources cited in the extensive footnotes and the bibliography testify to the thoroughness of her research. Correcting her errors, if there are any, is beyond my scholarly competence. Further, the text frequently points to figures and pictures of buildings, but what image from her extensive collection of architectural photographs she wanted at each point cannot be determined. This is less of a deficiency than might be the case, for The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan, by Richard Nickel and Aaron Siskind, with John Vinci and Ward Miller, was published in 2010. Her text was essentially complete before their definitive work was published. It contains hundreds of images, including a few provided to these scholars by Shelli herself. No one can possibly do better than their book to bring Adler’s buildings to the public’s attention. The interested, committed reader can find in The Complete Architecture at least one picture of every building she mentions. The author’s goal was to tell Adler’s story and to gain for him the recognition she believed he deserves. The editor’s aim has been to present her research to three constituencies: readers of architectural history, scholars interested in the social history of late 19th century American Jewry, and the people who loved her. In these pages, those who knew her can hear her voice, now ii stilled. For the editor, it has been a labor of love, a tribute to my lifelong partner, an opportunity to stay in contact, albeit intermittently, with her lively intellect. A special thanks to our son David for his patient assistance in readying the final product for uploading to the internet. Arthur Elstein Chicago, May, 2017 iii Author’s Introduction From 1880-1895, the architectural partnership of Adler & Sullivan was enormously successful. After joining forces in 1879, Sullivan matured from student/apprentice to architect, while Adler went from novice to expert architect and engineer. Their schism in 1895 was an American architectural tragedy because Adler & Sullivan had built some outstanding buildings between 1883 and 1895. As a team they built over 150 structures, some of them the best produced in the nineteenth century. Separately they were much less innovative, creative, productive or prosperous, although each remained influential in increasingly separate spheres. Adler died in 1900 while Sullivan lived until 1924, but with few commissions. The firm also trained a generation of successful architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Alfred S. Alschuler, Irving Gill, Simeon Eisendrath, Hugh Garden and Henry Ottenheimer. Adler was instrumental in providing a solid foundation for the professional practice of architecture, and he was active in securing passage of the first state architectural licensure law in the United States and the first certifying examination.