By J.R. Jones
An ardent lover of architecture, Grannen was collecting stained glass from wrecking sites at an age when most boys were chasing baseball cards. No subject excites him more than Louis Sullivan and the Chicago School, or disgusts him more than the loss of the city’s historic buildings. “We don’t want them to come down, and we have nothing to do with that. But if they’re gonna come down I wanna be the one to save them. That’s happened with a lot of buildings in Chicago–where they’ve said, ‘OK, this one’s gotta go,’ and I’ve invested a lot of money and a lot of man power into saving it. I do this as a business, but I also do it because I love it. And a lot of those buildings, you’d never make any profit on it, but at least you saved some of it.”
The salvaging of architectural ornament in Chicago developed more or less in tandem with the rise of the preservation movement. Richard Nickel, the Chicago-born photographer who campaigned to save Adler and Sullivan’s Garrick Theater and other important structures, had begun rescuing terra-cotta from Sullivan buildings in the late 50s. Having lost the fight to save the Garrick in 1960, he orchestrated the sale of its ornament to museums around the country, contracting to remove it himself. Part of his legend derives from his willingness to flout the law to save fragments from ignorant wrecking crews: in 1963, for example, he was arrested for removing some Frank Lloyd Wright windows from the Oscar Steffens house, on Sheridan Road (the charges were dropped). By the early 70s he was salvaging artifacts from Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building, at the southwest corner of LaSalle and Washington, routing the fragments to the Art Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sneaking out as much as he could for his own collection. In 1972 he was killed while scavenging for artifacts in the half-demolished building.
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By the time Grannen entered the University of Tennessee–where he focused on archaeology, museology, and black studies–he’d amassed a huge collection; he rented barns in the Nashville area for $50 a month and managed to fill several of them with stained glass and other relics. When he was 24 he met Mike Wilkerson, an antiques dealer who owned the Bank, a large shop located in an old New Orleans bank building. Amazed by Grannen’s collection, Wilkerson bought him out and offered him a job. Grannen, who hadn’t finished his degree, took the job and worked for Wilkerson for three years, traveling around the country as a buyer.
In 1987 Grannen opened Architectural Artifacts in a 3,000-square-foot space near Grace on Ravenswood; eventually he expanded it to 25,000 square feet as he carved out a niche for himself selling elaborate architectural pieces. “He came into town and very quickly had an impressive collection of fragments,” says Vince Michael. Grannen targeted higher-end clientele than Salvage One, including other dealers. He treated fragments as objets d’architecture, pieces that “were worthy of just being decorations on their own.” The real estate boom of the 80s and the consequent demolition of so many older buildings had created an avalanche of architectural fragments, and in 1991 alone, the Milwaukee Journal reported, Grannen’s sales increased nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
Among Grannen’s proudest acquisitions, displayed in the main showroom near the front door, are copper-over-cast-iron ornaments from Sullivan’s Stock Exchange: a ten-foot stair stringer ($7,200) similar to the item Richard Nickel was looking for the day he died, a four-foot frieze from a stair landing ($3,200), and a six-by-two-foot elevator frieze ($9,500). On the other side of the room rests a stack of terra-cotta stones from the same building, ranging in price from $275 to $600. Grannen’s collection of Sullivan artifacts is so large that he can display only a fraction of it on the floor; the rest is stored in warehouses or squirreled away elsewhere in the building. His collection, he claims, is “probably the largest in the world. Not the best, but definitely the largest.”
The glass dome and Sullivan artifacts are some of the more prestigious pieces in Grannen’s showroom, but they’re paid for by bread-and-butter items–the French furniture, the mantelpieces, the bars. Near the glass dome, doing double duty as a display shelf, stands a 16-foot solid mahogany bar Grannen brought back from France. Bars are reliable sellers, and Len Cullum, Grannen’s other assistant, says that removing one from a local tavern typically takes about two hours. “It kind of depends on what it is, how ensconced it is in the building,” he says. “We’ve had to tear out walls to get bars out.” The money has changed hands before the crew arrives, and if an item is damaged it’s Grannen’s loss. “I’ve taken out a lot of bars,” says Cullum, “and they have these really nice mahogany cornice pieces and pillars and giant mirrors and stuff. Every time it’s sort of edge-of-your-seat work. Shifting something around the wrong way or picking it up the wrong way can mean destroying it.”
