What Comes Down Must Go Up
Chicago has long been defined by its willingness to tear down the old to make way for the new, earning the city a reputation for both creating and destroying masterpieces of architecture. The idea that aesthetic considerations alone could prevent a building’s demolition didn’t even enter the public consciousness until 1960. That’s when photographer Richard Nickel began his crusade to save Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan’s Garrick Theater Building, on Randolph just west of Dearborn. Though Nickel failed to save the building, his campaign resulted in a new awareness of the value of commercial architecture, giving birth to the modern preservation movement both here and throughout the nation.
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In the late 1880s A.C. Hesing, owner of the German-language newspaper Illinois Staatszeitung, proposed that a downtown theater be built for German plays and opera. The Garrick, then known as the Schiller Building, was completed in 1892. The office tower was added to offset the expenses of staging shows and to return a profit on the investment, a strategy that had worked before, most notably with Adler and Sullivan’s mammoth Auditorium Building, built just a few years earlier (the Auditorium included a hotel as well as offices). Adler was recognized as one of the best theater designers in the nation, yet it was Sullivan who extolled the virtues of the new skyscraper, bluntly describing its chief characteristic–and challenge–when he wrote, “It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.”
Sullivan is credited with fulfilling the aesthetic promise of the tall building. Though not considered as definitive a statement as his Wainwright Building in Saint Louis, the Garrick nonetheless embodied Sullivan’s idea of what a tall building should be–by emphasizing the vertical rise of the structure, its various elements coalesced in an organic composition. Its base included richly detailed ornament to draw the eye, engaging the attention of passersby. The top of the building consisted of an arcade with an overhanging cornice, above which sat a cupola; these features were also festooned with intricate ornament, a Sullivan hallmark. But the central tower was his soaring statement: a series of recessed vertical lines framed the windows and joined in arches at the sixteenth floor. The panels between the windows were suppressed in favor of the vertical piers, so not a single line dissented from the tower’s upward sweep. The building was one of the first skyscrapers to have a setback design, allowing light to enter the offices (in anticipation of future tall buildings nearby) and to fall on the street below. This idea would be written into building codes several decades later in New York and then Chicago. Sullivan biographer Willard Connely declared that “with the Schiller Building the era of the American skyscraper firmly caught the public fancy, and the East began to talk of the ‘multiple-storied architecture of Chicago.’” In typical Chicago fashion, the theater joined in its own praise. An advertisement in the Tribune on October 16, 1892, not only promoted its first English-language production, the farce Gloriana, but billed the Schiller as the “Highest and Finest Theater Building in the World.”
Balaban and Katz’s reaction was predictable: it sued to force the city to issue the wrecking permit. During the trial, Judge Donald S. McKinlay visited the Garrick and later ruled that the city could properly deny a wrecking permit based on aesthetic considerations. But he was soon overruled by the Illinois Appellate Court, which held that the city could not withhold the permit without a concrete plan for purchasing and restoring the building. The battle was over; Daley issued the permit. By the summer of 1961 the Garrick was no more. (Nickel later became a martyr to the preservation movement; he was killed in 1972 by falling I-beams as he attempted to salvage portions of the partially demolished Stock Exchange Building, also designed by Sullivan.) In an article published in 1964, Condit called the Garrick’s demolition “an irreparable loss to American architecture.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Richard Nickel, June 8, 1960; Garrick Theater Building; Garrick Garage photo courtesy Commission on Chicago Landmarks; New Goodman Theater; extra photo by Jon Randolph.
