To let visitors into his home, a 35-room remnant of Chicago’s Gilded Age, Ed Magnus has to undo two deadbolts, two padlocks, and a barrage of other safety measures. Before he bought the former Marshall Field Jr. mansion at 1919 S. Prairie, the house had been all but abandoned to vandals and pillagers. A carpenter and rehabber by trade, Magnus doubted he could restore the 1884 building to its former glory, but he was the first person in 20 years willing to give it a shot.
Over the last year he’s intensified work on the exterior of the big house, and he’d hoped to tackle the interior soon. Now all that has changed. This south-side neighborhood is beginning to bloom after being declared a tax increment financing district five years ago. Developers are anxious to take the house off his hands and they may have the power to force him to sell. Not happy to see it torn down, Magnus has hired a lawyer and chosen a real estate agent.
Magnus nods.
In the years following the Chicago Fire, an era of open space and no income tax, the wealthy had few obstacles to owning their dream house. In the 1947 book The Marshall Fields: A Study in Wealth, author John Tebbel writes that department store titan Marshall Field hired Richard Morris Hunt–architect to the Astors–“and instructed him to spare no expense in the building of a three-story, red brick palace at 1905 South Prairie Avenue.”
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Opulent homes lined Prairie Avenue from 16th to 22nd, making it the social center of the city’s well-to-do, including the Pullmans, Kimballs, Armours, and Glessners. By 1890 Field’s son, Marshall Field Jr., had moved into the luxurious spread next door with his new wife, Albertine Huck, the daughter of a Chicago brewer. This place, which Magnus now calls home, was designed in part by Daniel Burnham’s architecture firm. The Field mansions were on either side of the yard where Magnus has planted black-eyed Susans, butterfly bushes, and honeysuckle. Ivy climbs up the side of a warehouse that now occupies the site of the elder Field’s home, which was demolished after World War II. In 1886 a lavish soiree was held there. The Mikado Ball, according to Tebbel’s book, was thrown in honor of Marshall Field Jr., then 17, and his 14-year-old sister, Ethel. Guests came costumed as characters from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and mingled in a Japanese garden as a mandolin orchestra played. “For years afterward people talked about the party,” Tebbel writes. “It was all the splendor that $75,000 could buy.”
Tebbel concludes that the shock of Marshall Jr.’s death “undoubtedly hastened” his father’s demise seven weeks later. Albertine Field sold her home and took her children to London, where in 1908 she married a British army captain.
In August 1994 the City Council passed the ordinance establishing the Near South TIF Redevelopment Project and Plan, which includes the Field mansion within its boundaries. “Although the downtown north and west sides of the central area have experienced dynamic growth in office, entertainment and residential development,” the ordinance reads, “the Near South area generally south of Roosevelt Road and east of Michigan Avenue continues to decline….The area is in significant need of revitalization and redevelopment.”
