C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Gwen Ihnat Emily H. Nordstrom Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford On the cover: The Chicago History Museum lobby boasts a sparkling, peacock-blue 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo lowrider. For more on the making of the lowrider, see Peter T. Alter’s article on page 30. Photograph by John Alderson.
Copyright 2007 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6038 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.
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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
Summer 2007 VOLUME XXXV, NUMBER 1 AND 2
Contents
4 30 44 64
North Shore Town and Gown Michael H. Ebner
Rolling Low in Chicago Peter T. Alter
Yesterday’s City: Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn Guy Szuberla
Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle
North Shore Town and Gown A complex legacy connects the college and community of Lake Forest. M I C H A E L H. E B N E R
T
Mary Eveline Smith Farwell (above, in a painting by Charles Highwood) inspired the revival of Lake Forest College so that her daughter, Anna, could attend. Lake Forest College has an intrinsic relationship with the town that shares its name. Opposite: The bell tower and cloister of Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel. 4 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
he relationship between town and gown furnishes instructive narratives. During the nineteenth century, Americans envisioned towns and their accompanying colleges—in this case sharing the name Lake Forest—as essential complements. The presence of a college, in their minds, certified a community’s moral and economic prospects. Whether the arena is a small college or large university, the heady mix of characters, traditions, and institutions contributes to the formation of complex, frequently intriguing cultural landscapes. This also corresponded to the growing regard for American undergraduate education, a key byproduct of the rise of industrial capitalism, as the number of degrees awarded doubled between the 1870s (113,131) and 1890s (226,531). By tracing connections between town and gown in Lake Forest to their earliest days, we not only uncover previously unexplored aspects of their shared past, but also learn about how they changed over the course of some 150 years. Invariably, however, dynamics between town and gown encompass a play of human interactions and social forces more complex than this complementary ideal. Consider the human side: learned professors, wise administrators, exuberant students, attentive trustees, proprietors of small businesses as well as their employees, the professional classes, local governing officials, and the laboring classes. Also consider the social forces: a cyclical economy; recurring wars; secular values confronting religious traditions; demographic surges; swings of the political pendulum; significant social redefinitions, including gender, immigration, and race; shifting metropolitan proportions; and revolutionary advances in science as well as technology. These intertwined forces shaped the interactions between one Lake Forest and the other over several decades.
5
Charles Farwell (right) and his wife Mary financed the construction of several new buildings for the college. Above: The Farwells’ Lake Forest residence.
After receiving its charter in 1857, Lake Forest College faltered for more than a decade due to the Civil War. Mary Smith Farwell inspired its revival in 1876. Her husband, Charles B. Farwell, destined to serve as a Congressman and later as a United States Senator, fully subscribed to this philanthropic endeavor. All with an eye toward a successful relaunch, the couple underwrote the construction of College Hall (now Young Hall), North Hall, and the Women’s Gymnasium (today Hotchkiss Hall) as well as donating the land that became Farwell Field. John V. Farwell, elder brother of Charles and former mayor of Lake Forest, was an iconic figure in Chicago and beyond because of his own philanthropic commitments, including serving on the United States Christian Commission during the Civil War; as U.S. commissioner of Indian Affairs, appointed by President Grant; and as benefactor of the Young Men's Christian Association. Each branch of the Farwell family con6 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
Charles and Mary Farwell donated the land for Lake Forest College’s Farwell Field (above) and funds for the building of North Hall (below), which was originally constructed to house Lake Forest Academy. North Hall was converted into a residence hall in the 1890s.
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Each branch of the Farwell family built prominent homes in Lake Forest. Above: The estate of John V. Farwell was across the street from his brother’s home on Deerpath Road. Below: Anna Farwell, eldest daughter of Charles and Mary, graduated as valedictorian at Lake Forest’s first commencement ceremony in 1880.
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structed prominent residences in Lake Forest, becoming closely attached to the community while preserving their respective commercial and civic links to the city. Yearning for the simplicity of his youth that he anticipated recapturing in this suburban setting, John Farwell had grown increasingly skeptical about the surging forces of social change within Chicago unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. As of 1870, the foreign-born inhabitants in the city had accounted for 48 percent of the population, a statistic surpassed only by San Francisco. Troubling him most of all, however, was the accelerated economic tempo that positioned Chicago as the mid-continent’s unparalleled distribution center, earning him handsome profits and furnishing the rationale for his philanthropic pursuits. The momentous transformation sweeping the nation surely figured into Mary Smith Farwell’s determination to provide her eldest daughter, Anna, with a college education close to home. Trained at an academy in her native Massachusetts, Mary Smith had once taught English, history, and Latin. Now she insisted upon Anna’s enrollment at an institution where men and women learned together. While coeducation extended back episodically to the eighteenth century, Oberlin College is credited as the first American college to institute it upon its founding in 1833 and then sustain it. By the time Lake Forest College received its undergraduate class of fourteen students in 1876, several institutions founded as coeducational were in place, among them Knox College (1837), Lawrence University (1847), Antioch College (1853), Carleton College (1866), and Swarthmore College (1870). Anna Farwell would graduate as valedictorian of her class in 1880, writing a senior thesis entitled, “The Position and Opportunities of Women in America.” Imagine Mary Smith Farwell on the memorable occasion of the first commencement at Lake Forest College. In the course of the ceremony, she surely entertained affirming thoughts: the college’s revival, the possibilities associated with coeducation; and motherly pride as Anna crossed the platform resplendent in academic laurels. But understanding the college’s role in the cultural landscape of Lake Forest is only possible in the context of three other local settings: the First Presbyterian Church, the country club known as the Onwentsia, and the shopping district named Market Square. More than any other institution, it was the church, established in 1859, that provided the earliest impetus to the development of Lake Forest College. The Presbyterian founders of the town had earmarked property for a college campus within their original plans. The beneficence of local residents—particularly the Farwells but also the Reids and Durands, all ardently associated with their community’s earliest Presbyterian piety—enabled the
Generations of Farwells: John V. Farwell Sr. with his grandson; his daughter, Mrs. Abby Farwell Ferry; and his mother, Mrs. Henry Farwell. Town and Gown | 9
The prestigious Onwentsia country club drew prosperous families to the Lake Forest area. Right: The Onwentsia club house, 1911. Above: Spectators watching a polo match at Onwentsia, 1907.
college to grow beyond its embryonic phase by the start of the twentieth century. The Onwentsia Club, established in 1895, instantly stood atop the ladder of social status in Chicago as well as along the North Shore. Henry James, sharply attuned to sociological distinctions, characterized country clubs as a “deeply significant American symbol.” Onwentsia attracted to Lake Forest enormously wealthy and socially prominent people from Chicago who constructed palatial residences thought of as country places. Market Square, created by Howard Van Doren Shaw and completed in 1917, added a sublime public center. Designed to complement the community’s sumptuous private dwellings, it supplanted a ramshackle assortment of shops with an elegant fancy of a Tudor village. Foreseeing the automobile age, Shaw created a tree-lined square enabled access for motorists and opened upon the suburban railway station. Capitalized and operated privately through a land trust, it became a lasting civic expression. In 1978 it was listed on the National Register of Historical Sites as the nation’s first planned shopping center. 10 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
Town and Gown | 11
Above: The First Presbyterian Church provided the earliest impetus to Lake Forest College; the town was founded by Presbyterians who had included a college campus in their development plans. The church sits near the college’s North Campus at the corner of Deerpath and Sheridan Roads. Below: When it was completed in 1917, Market Square became the nation’s first planned shopping center. The rectangular square opens to the commuter railway station.
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From its founding by Presbyterians in the mid-1850s, the town of Lake Forest attained high regard among wealthy Chicagoans. This was a storied, almost mythical place. It offered cultivated landscapes and the prospect of social order amid the monumental transformations spurred by the Industrial Revolution. At least since the 1890s, as its early Presbyterian piety ebbed, Lake Forest epitomized an unabashed social whirl more than any other place in the suburban network known as Chicago’s North Shore. Some local residents—Louis F. Swift, second-generation meatpacker, for example—lived like American royalty. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who visited Lake Forest during 1916, brings this renown into focus. Son of a Catholic family from St. Paul, Minnesota, with a depleted fortune, Fitzgerald had made his way to this place in a headstrong bid to woo Ginevra King, daughter of Charles Garfield King and an early member of the Onwentsia; the family’s handsome estate, Kingdom Come Farm, also designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw, sat just south of the club. After a fleeting courtship, meaHenry Van Doren Shaw (left) designed Market Square to feature a tree-lined plaza. Below: This image of Market Square features the town’s original post office and Charlie Paulsen’s barber shop, the first business to move into the shopping center.
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14 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
sured in months, Ginevra gently but deliberately threw the writer over. Fitzgerald, however, immortalized— indeed he capitalized upon—the illusive object of his affection in the guise of The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan and elsewhere in his work, leaving Ginevra privately bemused. Fitzgerald also learned enough from Lake Forest to inspire his endlessly cited observation: “The rich are different from you and me.” Thirty miles to the south, Chicago loomed ominously over the suburbs comprising the North Shore. At the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote H. G. Wells, the city amounted to a “dark smear under the sky.” Quickly overcoming the ravages of its great fire of 1871, it became the fastest growing city in the world during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, in the eyes of the British historian Asa Briggs, it was tagged as a “shock city,” a label previously attached to Manchester, England, and later to Los Angeles. Chicago had become the nation’s second largest city in 1890, displacing Philadelphia, having reached a population of almost 1.1 million. When Sister Carrie appeared in 1900, Theodore Dreiser portrayed Chicago as a giant magnet. By 1910 its population had doubled to 2.1 million, exceeding Berlin (2 million) and making inroads upon Paris (2.9 million). As for Lake Forest, its inhabitants in 1900 amounted to 2,215, smaller than Highland Park (2,806) but larger than Winnetka (1,833). Chicago would surge to 3.4 million in 1930 and attain its population pinnacle of 3.62 million in 1950. Not until 1960 would Lake Forest exceed 10,000. Amid the specter of Chicago’s ascent as well as shifting sensibilities within Lake Forest, the early optimism the college enjoyed was not sustained. Did the conspicuous grandiosity and success of two large-scale private initiatives within the community, Onwentsia and Market Square, magnify any shortcomings associated with the college? A conspicuous clue is the short tenures of its presidents compared with other nineteenth-century coeducational liberal arts institutions. The five individuals elected to presidency of Lake Forest College between 1876 and 1897 (excluding those serving in an acting or interim capacity) had a mean term in office of less than five years. The longest was Daniel S. Gregory’s eight years (1878–86). In contrast, presidents with the lengthiest tenures at Carleton, Oberlin, Knox, and Swarthmore boasted an aggregated mean service of twenty-three years. Many Chicago business magnates built palatial estates in Lake Forest. Left: Meatpacker J. Ogden Armour’s magnificent home viewed across a reflecting pond.
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The original plan of Lake Forest, designed by Almerin Hotchkiss in 1857, capitalized on the town’s strategic lakefront location. The curvilinear street design added to the picturesque nature of the elite suburb. 16 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
Above: The original campus plan of Lake Forest highlighted the campus’s sixty-two self-contained wooded acres. Below: An early graduating class of Lake Forest College in 1888.
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Above: Although he was the son of Presbyterian missionaries, Lake Forest College president John Merle Coulter (1893–96) was the college’s first president to lack a degree in divinity.
Two of these successive presidents of Lake Forest College, William C. Roberts (1886–92) and John Merle Coulter (1893–96), offered particular promise. Each shared recognizably modern sensibilities regarding the secular cast of liberal learning. Roberts also showed himself especially alert, like his counterparts at other institutions of this era, to curbing interference in day-to-day administration from locally based trustees. Cumulatively Roberts and Coulter created a revised course of study at the college, including the addition of electives to the curriculum, akin to some of the latest currents in American higher education at the end of the nineteenth century. They also appointed more scholarly professors trained in newly forming academic disciplines. Indeed, President Coulter, a botanist, was the first president of the college without an advanced degree in divinity. Neither Robert nor Coulter, however, remained in office quite long enough, especially by nineteenth-century standards, to transform the college. The latter’s resignation was tied to the collapse of an ambitious plan that aroused contentious debate in town and on the campus proposing to absorb Lake Forest College as the northerly undergraduate division of the new University of Chicago. When this arrangement failed, the president himself departed to accept a faculty position chairing the department of botany at the university. Soon thereafter the college lost three longstanding benefactors with links to its very origins: Charles Farwell died in 1903, Mary Smith 18 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
The academic procession for the 1908 commencement featured many of Lake Forest College’s most prominent faculty members. Here they prepare for procession on the Middle Campus lawn.
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Farwell in 1905, and John Farwell in 1908. Younger trustees, it seems apparent, took this as a cue to assert considerable influence. Easily detectable was the weight of Cyrus McCormick Jr. and Louis Swift, each an imperious captain of industry accustomed to having his wishes fulfilled instantly. The trustees now took a strategic step designed to reverse the unhappy situation caused by the void at the college. The presidency of Reverend James Glore King McClure (1897–1901) can be read as fostering a purposeful strategy to recapture the bountiful prospects once foreseen for the college by its founders. It seemed to turn the tide. Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Lake Forest since 1881, the charismatic McClure was adoringly regarded within the town as well as in Chicago. In effect, McClure had accepted the college’s call—possibly issued by the Farwells themselves with
assurances of brevity—to its presidency in 1897. When McClure departed in 1901, he had achieved much to advance the institution. Most notable was the construction of Arthur Somerville Reid Memorial Library, donated by a local family with longstanding philanthropic connections to the institution. Dedicated at the commencement ceremony in 1900, it was the college’s first freestanding library. Another advance took form in the celebrated appointment of Richard Davenport Harlan (1901–06). His presidency was scripted as a sequel to the bright era of prosperity initiated by President McClure. Harlan proved unequal to the opportunity bequeathed by his muchadmired predecessor, forfeiting the confidence of faculty as well as trustees. His successor, John Scholte Nollen (1907–17) again offered great promise only to resign under murky circumstances that may have been tied to
Middle Campus in winter, 1913. During the early 1900s, the college ran through a number of short-term presidents. Opposite: An idyllic bridge setting on the Lake Forest College campus. Beyond the bridge stood the estates of Henry Durand, Calvin Durand, and Charles B. Farwell. 20 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
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One of the greatest accomplishments of Reverend James Glore King McClure’s presidency was the construction of the college’s first freestanding library. Above: The 1899 cornerstone ceremony for the Arthur Somerville Reid Memorial Library, which was completed the following year (below).
the patriotic fervor bedeviling campuses during the First World War. He would soon reestablish himself in academic administration, serving Grinnell College over two decades as dean and later as president. As for Lake Forest College, the misfortune caused by this sequence of sudden departures sealed its fate, especially in the eyes of locals, for a longue durée. Lake Forest College was embroiled in visible turmoil during the spring of 1919. Henry Wilkes Wright, acting president since the departure of John Nollen, delivered an address to an assembly in Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel. A member of the faculty since 1907 and chair of the department of philosophy, Wright’s progressive ideology was very much evident in his scholarship, although trustees probably had not consulted his publications. The acting president’s formal remarks now provoked an uproar. With the fighting in Europe finished, Wright pronounced the time opportune to renew a cri22 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
tique of capitalism and trusts: “This does not mean that the majority of college professors are Bolsheviks, but it does mean . . . that criticism of big business which was begun before the war should continue.” Such remarks were little different than the economic reforms espoused by either Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson during their respective terms in the White House. But Wright’s rhetoric sounded radical—especially to trustees at the helm of some of the nation’s largest corporations—amid the hypernationalism of 1919 (widespread strikes, commodity shortages, inflation, domestic bombings attributed to anarchists, race riots, fear of an international Bolshevik revolution, the founding of the American Communist party, and debate over President Wilson’s advocacy of American membership in the League of Nations). Henry Wilkes Wright departed in 1920, taking up a faculty appointment at the University of Manitoba. Lake Forest College was not alone in discovering dissent. Professors and administrators elsewhere suffered the patriotic fervor during and immediately after the World War I. In the wake of Wright’s exit, the leaders of the alumni association of Lake Forest College convened in May 1920 at Chicago’s La Salle Hotel to consider the future of their alma mater. One proposal favored by some trustees and under review for at least a year would have terminated coeducation and transformed the institution into an allwomen’s college. Henry Wilkes Wright, during his acting presidency, steadfastly resisted this and the alumni supported his stance. Following the decision to remain coeducational, a dispatch made its way to the front page of the Chicago Tribune. On this occasion Daniel S. Wentworth ’99, a Chicago attorney, also reported on a plan for alumni to assume a greater role in administering Lake Forest College. Over the next thirty or so years, the alumni exercised a considerable role on the board of trustees as local interest in sustaining the institution dwindled. Samuel P. Capen was retained in 1920 to advise on the future of Lake Forest College. He was one of the highly specialized experts who carved their niche in the modernized economy of the industrialized American nationstate. Capen’s annual surveys as well as statistical compilations of American colleges and universities first gained modest recognition via the United States Bureau of Education. Then he became the founding director of the American Council on Education, established to organize the resources of higher education at the time of the nation’s entry into the World War I. Capen’s report called for a dramatic curricular transformation for the college. He advocated preparation of students for what he termed “the executive and administrative departments of business and commercial enterprises.” This advice significantly altered the identity of the institution and remained unchallenged until the 1950s. The Capen advisory diminished the role of liberal learning in favor
During a 1920 meeting, a group of Lake Forest alumni rejected a proposal to make the college an all-women’s school and kept the institution coeducational, as the Chicago Tribune reported.
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From the top of Lake Forest’s College Hall (now Young Hall), you can see Lake Michigan, as this panoramic view indicates.
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John V. Farwell Jr. (above) snubbed the school and his cousin when he declined to attend a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Anna Farwell DeKoven’s enrollment in Lake Forest College.
of vocational instruction for business managers. This turn reflected the general postwar American retreat from progressive ideology as well as the local contretemps surrounding Henry Wilkes Wright. Aligned with the goals identified by Samuel Capen was the choice of Reverend Herbert McComb Moore ’96 as the college’s ninth president (1921–42). The first and only alumnus to occupy the position, he lacked formal training for his responsibilities. President Moore warmed to the Capen advisory and in so doing earned his measure of gratitude from alumni for saving their college in a vaguely recognizable form. During his first year the Chicago Tribune reported that he “rearranged” the faculty. Seven dismissals and ten new appointments—analogous to a bureaucratic reorganization in a corporate struc26 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
ture—were rather gleefully characterized by the newspaper as “the biggest shakeup in the history of the college.” Moore, however, did not implement Capen’s recommendation that the college forge alliances with corporate enterprises in Chicago to offer undergraduates first-hand experiences in accounting, management, labor relations, marketing, and production. Enrollment expanded during the 1920s from approximately 300 to 425 as students registered for the vocational curriculum, especially the new major in business administration. Increasingly these undergraduates were drawn from nearby communities such as the satellite city of Waukegan, the principal industrial center north of Chicago as well as the historic gateway for immigrants entering Lake County.
The declining social prestige of the college was reflected early in the Moore years when Anna Farwell DeKoven was asked to return from Italy in 1926 to accept an honorary degree on the fiftieth anniversary of her own enrollment in 1876. But long-established local families declined invitations from the college to attend this celebration. Among those not accepting was John V. Farwell Jr., Anna’s first cousin. The snubs have been read, entirely accurately, as sending an unmistakable signal of the college’s depleted stature locally. Likewise a dispatch in the Chicago Tribune lavishly detailed social occasions organized in the city to celebrate the visit of DeKoven but ignored entirely the commemorative ceremony staged by the college. The second half of the twentieth century, in broadly brushed strokes, is best understood as a narrative of liberal learning’s redemption at Lake Forest College. Its rebirth took hold gradually in the post-Moore years during the presidency of Ernest Johnson (1944–59). Benefiting from the G.I. Bill after the World War II, the
veterans entering the now-proliferating American knowledge industry construed their educations as fulfilling long-deferred aspirations for economic security. Nonetheless, by the 1950s the college’s curriculum underwent telling alterations, including abandonment of the majors in business administration and speech. Figuring into this was a growing cohort of freshly appointed, well-educated faculty. Sharing their sensibilities was President William Graham Cole (1960–69). This renewed devotion to liberal learning—now subscribed to by a critical mass of faculty, administrators, and trustees—contributed significantly to the college’s attainment of a long sought-after objective in the form of a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa awarded by the venerable national honor society in 1961. Another measure of change was the stability achieved in college presidency. From the time when Ernest Johnson assumed office (in an acting capacity until 1944) through David Spadafora’s term (1993–2001), the mean tenure was fourteen years. Eugene Hotchkiss (1970–93) served longest in the history of the college,
Lake Forest College board member Francis Farwell (far left) at the groundbreaking ceremony of the Johnson Science Building on October 22, 1960. Farwell reconnected his family name with Lake Forest College when he joined the board in 1958.
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Ruth Winter, the college’s director of cultural affairs from 1953 to 1973, shows Katherine Hepburn (left) around campus with an unidentified young man.
for twenty-three years. In comparison, the aggregated mean presidential terms at Carleton, Lawrence, Oberlin, and Swarthmore, measured from the 1940s thru the 1990s was nearly eleven years. This contrasted sharply from the tenures of the college’s president one hundred years earlier. Reestablishing connections between town and gown amounted to another dimension of the college’s resumption of its historic role. Ernest Johnson launched this when he installed Ruth Winter, a Lake Forest resident with innumerable links to the larger world, in a campus office promoting cultural events as well as the visibility of the college. The election of Francis C. Farwell II—greatgrandson of the first John V. Farwell—to the board of trustees in 1958 reassured longtime residents by virtue of reinforcing the institution’s historic mission. A succession of prominent local residents, beginning with Elliot Donnelley in 1967, assumed catalytic roles chairing the board. To be sure, larger events imposing themselves from beyond the campus complicated ties between town and gown. Student and faculty participation in the upheavals of the 1960s—opposition to American military intervention in Southeast Asia, racial conflicts, the rise of feminism, and the counterculture—caused unmistakable divisions with the town. But unlike the circumstances spurred by World War I, the institutional response to this turmoil largely unfolded with measured, programmatic resolutions. President Hotchkiss purposefully, and ultimately successfully, set himself to the task of refurbishing links between the college and its neigh28 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
bors. This strategy, sustained by David Spadafora as well as President Stephen D. Schutt (since 2001), has yielded dividends that have extended into the new century. They took tangible form in large-scale capital projects that transformed the campus: Dixon Science Center, Donnelley and Lee Library, Mohr Student Center, and Stuart Commons. Each resulted from the beneficence of local residents, affirming pride and confidence in the future of the college. As Lake Forest College celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2007, once again it turned to Francis C. Farwell II, in this instance as honorary chair of its sesquicentennial. Assaying Lake Forest College in its contemporary form returns us to its origins—designed to foster bonds between town and town—inspired by Mary Smith Farwell as the singular champion of coeducational liberal learning. In tandem with Charles B. Farwell and John V. Farwell, the legacy she inspired now stretches over portions of three centuries. From our vantage point at the start of the twenty-first century, this cultural landscape continues to be reshaped by a heritage that connects the college and community sharing the name Lake Forest.
Recent Lake Forest College president David Spadafora (now president of the Newberry Library) attempted to revive the connection between the town and the college. While president, he taught at least one class per year.
Michael H. Ebner is the James D. Vail III Professor of history emeritus at Lake Forest College. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS | Arthur H. Miller, College Archivist and Librarian for Special Collections as well as prolific historian, generously has responded to endless inquiries. I am grateful as well to student researchers in the College Archives—Emily E. Capettini ‘09 and Sara C. Woodbury ‘08—for expert assistance. An astute reading by Christopher Reed enabled the author to immeasurably sharpen the conceptualization of this chapter. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 4, courtesy of Archives, Lake Forest College library; 5, CHM, ICHi-37924; 6 top, CHM, DN002476; 6 bottom, CHM, ICHi-30965; 7, from Lake Forest and Its Environment, CHM Archives; 8, courtesy of Archives, Lake Forest College library; 9, CHM, ICHi-20282; 10, CHM DN53103; 10–11, CHM, DN-053103; 12 top, from Lake Forest and Its Environment, CHM Archives; 12 bottom, CHM, DN067339; 13 top, courtesy of Special Collections, Lake Forest College library; 13 bottom, courtesy of Archives, Lake Forest College library; 14–15, CHM, DN-073251; 16, courtesy of Archives, Lake Forest College library; 17 top, CHM Archives; 17 bottom, courtesy of Archives, Lake Forest College library; 18–20, courtesy of Archives, Lake Forest College library; 21, from Lake Forest and Its Environment, CHM Archives; 22 top, courtesy of Archives, Lake Forest College library; 22 bottom, from Lake Forest and Its Environment, CHM Archives; 23, from Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1920; 24–25, from Lake Forest and Its Environment, CHM Archives; 26, CHM, ICHi-51038; 27–29, courtesy of Archives, Lake Forest College library.
For the college’s 150th anniversary celebration in 2007, Francis C. Farwell II, a life trustee of the college, served as honorary chairman, bringing the connection between Lake Forest College and the Farwell family full circle.
F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The definitive volume on Lake Forest College to date is the college’s own Thirty Miles North: A History of Lake Forest College, Its Town, and Its City of Chicago by Franz Schulze, Rosemary Cowler, and Arthur H. Miller. Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest: Architecture and Landscape Design 1856–1940 by Kim Coventry, Daniel Meyer, and Arthur H. Miller (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003) takes a closer look at the area’s elite. Susan Dart delves into the history of the country’s first planned shopping center in Market Square: Lake Forest, Illinois (Lake Forest–Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1985). Lake Forest: Estates, People and Culture by Arthur H. Miller and Shirley M. Paddock (Arcadia, 2000) offers more images of the picturesque suburb. Michael H. Ebner further explores the region above Chicago in Creating Chicago’s North Shore: A Suburban History (University of Chicago Press, 1989). Town and Gown | 29
Rolling Low in Chicago PETER T. ALTER
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A
treasure on wheels, a sparkling 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, dominates the Chicago History Museum’s new first-floor lobby. Created as an abstract Chicago streetscape, the lobby introduces visitors to the city’s lowrider culture. The car is the result of a partnership between the Museum and the Amistad Car Club of Cicero, Illinois, whose members created this low-rolling work of art. Lowriding has a long and interesting history. It originated in the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American communities of the Southwest in the late 1930s. At that time, some lowriding enthusiasts placed large rocks or sandbags in the trunks of their cars to achieve the low-slung look. Others chopped down their cars’ suspension coils to make their rides low and slow. Originally, hydraulic pumps from old World War II aircraft provided the lowrider’s greatest trick—hopping. By the late 1950s, lowered suspensions and customized hydraulics gave the cars their distinctive low look and moves. The term “lowrider” was coined in California in the 1960s. In the following decades, the culture spread nationwide fueled by immigration, migration, and the media. Chicago’s first lowrider clubs were founded during that time period. Amistad, which means “friendship” in Spanish, is a self-styled “small club with a big heart” that promotes lowriding as a positive force in the Mexican American community. The group formed as a bicycle club in Bishop, Texas, in 1978. Pedro Cisneros III, the local club’s current president and former member of Amistad’s Texas chapter, moved to west suburban Cicero in 1999. In 2001, he organized the local chapter, which now consists of six men and their families. In early 2006, the Chicago History Museum asked Amistad to create a lowrider for the Museum’s new lobby and grand reopening in September. After several conversations and a visit to the lobby, which was then covered in construction dust and debris, club members agreed. Within two months, they located a red 1978 Monte Carlo tricked out as a hot rod; the Museum soon purchased the car, and the club got to work. In addition to creating the lowrider and coordinating work on the car with a muralist, an upholsterer, auto mechanics, and other craftsmen, Amistad’s members opened their homes and garages to the Museum staff. Club members hosted staff at lowrider picnics and car shows, explaining the significance of the events and introducing members of other clubs. Amistad’s members regularly spoke with reporters from local newspapers, radio stations, and television networks about their work on the project and helped to create a documentary film on lowriding and the production of the Museum’s car. For the film, the club organized a twenty-nine-car lowrider caravan on Cermak Avenue in Cicero. The Chicago History Museum–Amistad Car Club collaboration resulted in a low-rolling treasure that graces the lobby with its glistening paint job, murals, chrome, and elaborate interior. Club president Pedro Cisneros summed up the club’s work on the Monte Carlo: “This is basically a garagebuilt car, and that’s what we do. There is a lot more pride and personal and sentimental value to it. If you do it yourself, it is just like a home-cooked meal. You put your love into it, and the end result is good.”
A highlight of the Museum’s new lobby, the lowrider (left) is surrounded by artifacts and images of the city. A mobile made of street signs hangs overhead. Photograph by John Alderson.
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The Amistad Car Club posed with a club member’s Cadillac in 2006. The bright red lowrider has a fifth wheel bearing the club’s name, and the club plaque hangs in the back window. Describing the close-knit nature of the club, president Pedro Cisneros asserted, “Amistad means brothers or family to us.” Often the passion for lowriding is passed down within families. Pictured from left, front row: Pedro Cisneros III, his son Pedro IV, Javier Hernandez, and Pedro Rios. Second row: Mike Garcia and Robert Olvera. Back row: Mario Olvera, David Chaidez, and Pedro Rios Jr. Photograph by Jay Crawford. Rolling Low in Chicago | 33
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While some clubs hire others to work on their lowriders, Amistad members completed nearly all of the work on the Museum’s Monte Carlo. Left: Mike Garcia cleaned part of the car early in the project. Work on the car progressed from the ground up, beginning with cleaning the undercarriage. Other major tasks included cleaning, detailing, and painting the engine; replacing belts, hoses, lights, chrome, trim, and the exhaust system; and constructing and installing the hydraulics. Above: At this stage, the car awaited its primer coat and new peacock-blue paint job. Photographs by and courtesy of Pedro Cisneros III.
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Mikey Villanueva posed by his 1933 Pontiac lowrider with Sanjuanita Avila at Amistad’s fifth-anniversary show in Cicero in 2006. A member of another local club, Villanueva tricked out his lowrider as a “mafia” car, complete with bullet-hole decals and a sign stating “Mafia Parking Only.” Lowriders as old as this are considered antiques and are relatively rare at lowrider car shows. Photograph by and courtesy of Pedro Cisneros III.
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In the summer of 2006, Somosuno Lowrider Car Club sponsored a show at Holy Family Catholic Church in north suburban Waukegan. Sergio “Tank” Arroyo of Solitos Car Club in Round Lake Beach displayed his Monte Carlo with mirrors to highlight the car’s chromed undercarriage, hydraulics, rims, and stylized Chicago skyline. At the show, judges evaluated the quality of each car’s paint job, chrome, interior, and engine compartment. Photograph by P. Kruse and courtesy of Groundswell Educational Films. Lowriders generally are divided into categories according to year and in some cases, manufacturer. Older lowriders, like this 1947 Chevrolet Fleetline (below) that belongs to the president of Somosuno Lowrider Car Club in Waukegan, are called “bombs” for their round, low look, while cars from the 1950s to the 1970s are referred to as “classics.” Foreign cars tricked out as lowriders generally are known as “Euros” and often fall into their own category at lowrider shows. Photograph by P. Kruse and courtesy of Groundswell Educational Films.
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Many lowriding enthusiasts enter the customizing world through bicycles. Amistad started in Bishop, Texas, as a bicycle club and evolved into cars as the members grew older. Right: In the late 1970s, David Serbantez posed with his tricked-out bike, which included a fuzzy seat, lights, horns, a C.B. radio, and an eight-track tape player attached to the rear fender. Today, Serbantez is the president of Amistad’s Texas chapter. Photograph courtesy of David Serbantez. Above: These members of the Chicago-area Aztlan Bike Club rode their bikes through LaBagh Woods, a Cook County Forest Preserve on the city’s North Side, during a lowrider picnic in 2006. Photograph by P. Kruse and courtesy of Groundswell Educational Films.
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Hollywood Kustoms brought this seven-foot ruler to measure the hopping height of the lowriders at the Majestics Car Club Throwback Picnic on the North Side in 2006. The club advertised this particular contest as a “Hop Off for King of the Midwest,” and at the event, drivers put their cars’ hydraulic pumps to good use. At Hollywood Kustoms in suburban Northlake, owner Bob “Hollywood” Wagner is famous for his custom hydraulics. Photograph by P. Kruse and courtesy of Groundswell Educational Films.
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On August 27, 2006, Amistad members organized a caravan of twenty-nine lowriders, including the Museum’s Monte Carlo, down Cermak Avenue in Cicero. Drivers weaved their cars back and forth, hopped, honked horns, and occasionally rode on three wheels. Deputy Superintendent Rolando Hernandez of the Cicero Police Department led the way on his customized motorcycle; the Museum’s car rode close behind with its headlights shining, and several other Amistad lowriders followed. Photograph by John Alderson. Bands, including this conjunto trio, often play at lowrider events. At a 2006 picnic, attendees enjoyed this music, which originated in Texas, as well as rap, hip hop, rhythm and blues, and rock. The diversity of music at these events reflects the diversity of today’s lowriding enthusiasts. Although the sport originated in Mexican American communities, Chicago lowrider clubs now include African Americans, Asian Americans, and whites. Photograph by P. Kruse and courtesy of Groundswell Educational Films.
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Amistad member Mike Garcia rode in the Museum’s lowrider with club president Pedro Cisneros III during the caravan. Heading down Cermak Avenue, the Monte Carlo showed off its silver- and gold-leaf pinstripes and spoke-rimmed thirteen-inch tires. On both sides of the car, the pinstripes form peacocks, a symbol of pride. The tires, which are smaller than those on a typical ’78 Monte Carlo, help give the car its low look. Photograph by John Alderson. Lowriders typically sit only a few inches off the ground in “pancake position,” but drivers can move their cars by flipping switches on an interior control panel. Operated by these switches and powered by heavy-duty batteries, hydraulic pumps in the car’s trunk shoot oil through tubes to cylinders connected to each wheel. As the oil pumps through the cylinders, the car moves up and down or side to side. In the caravan, some cars, like this 1980s Buick Regal (right) owned by Eddie Orta of the South Side Cruisers Car Club, rode elevated by their hydraulics. Other cars rode on three wheels, like this 1966 Chevrolet Impala (opposite) owned by Martin Espinoza also of the South Side Cruisers. Observers have compared these lowrider moves to the ones Mexican charros, or cowboys, would perform with their horses. Photographs by John Alderson. 42 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
During the caravan, Amistad member Pedro Rios drove his 1966 Chevrolet Impala low and slow with his daughter, Denise, in the front seat and his son, Pedro Jr., in the back. Lowrider caravans emphasize the communal nature of lowriding while other motor sports, especially hot-rodding, focus on racing and competition. Lowrider clubs gather together to caravan to support each other, celebrate, and simply to have fun. Amistad regularly organizes summertime caravans on Cermak Road, Harlem Avenue, Roosevelt Road, and other locations in the western suburbs. Photograph by John Alderson.
Peter T. Alter, a curator at the Chicago History Museum, worked closely with the Amistad Car Club on the Museum’s lowrider project.
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On October 9, 1893, the twenty-second anniversary of the Great Fire, more than 750,000 people visited the World’s Columbian Exposition to celebrate Chicago Day. The massive crowd is pictured here in the Grand Plaza near the Administration Building. 44 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
Y E S T E R D AY ’ S C I T Y
Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn GUY SZUBERLA
“Miss Chicago” and “Dad Dearborn” were once familiar to most readers of the city’s newspapers. During the first half of the twentieth century, the two characters appeared regularly in the editorial cartoons of Chicago’s leading papers. At a time when the city boasted a halfdozen or more dailies, both of these figures were as readily recognizable as the characters that now represent sports teams, as easily identified as the caricatures of the latest crop of presidential candidates. Editorial cartoonists, including the Chicago Tribune’s John T. McCutcheon, Joseph Parrish, and Carey Orr, used Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn to symbolize the city and represent civic pride, political reform, and patriotism. Miss Chicago was created around the time of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Given her origins, it is not surprising that she often represented the city’s future and the far-reaching visions of reformers and city boosters. Father Dearborn dates from about 1919, and he was, in many respects, a product of the Tribune’s editorial cartoonists. Dad Dearborn symbolized the city’s imagined history and disappearing past. His chin whiskers, slouch hat, and frock coat were reminders of frontier life and the “good old days.” Neither Miss Chicago nor Dad Dearborn remained fixed in a single appearance or storyline. Over the years, cartoonists altered the characters to match the city’s changing spirit and the requirements of editorial boards. Miss Chicago owed her original existence to a newspaper contest. In the early 1890s, Herman Kohlsaat, the enterprising publisher of the Chicago Inter Ocean, invited entrants to devise a new city symbol. Painter and muralist Charles Holloway won the contest with his line drawing of an idealized woman, who might have stepped straight from the pages of Bulfinch’s Mythology. Hefty, heroic, and sharp-eyed, she was both a Wagnerian Valkyrie and Pallas Athena. The city’s new motto, “I Will,” appeared across her breastplate. At her side, she carried a carpenter’s square, a tribute to the city’s workers. Her oversized golden crown featured a phoenix surrounded by flames that symbolized the city’s rise from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
Designed by painter and muralist Charles Holloway, the original Miss Chicago was hefty, heroic, and sharp-eyed. Yesterday’s City | 45
Advertisers often used Miss Chicago to promote their products. Above: Published on October 10, 1893, the day after Chicago Day, this soap advertisement portrays an exhausted Miss Chicago with a new motto: “I Did.” Below: In the 1920s, the original Miss Chicago returned as a representative of “Chicago’s oldest banking house.”
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In 1893, cartoonists often depicted Miss Chicago standing alongside Uncle Sam, welcoming all to the World’s Columbian Exposition. As a ceremonial figure at the fair’s parades and pageants and a character in the fair’s posters, souvenir magazines, and advertisements, Miss Chicago appeared often enough to take on a semiofficial presence. On Monday, October 9, in celebration of Chicago Day, the city outdid itself with pageantry and enthusiasm. The celebration drew a crowd of more than 750,000. Stores closed, work ceased, and bunting and flags appeared everywhere. The event’s crowning moment came that evening when Miss Chicago helped lead a parade through the fairgrounds. After the fair closed, the neoclassical “I Will” figure gradually disappeared from the front pages and editorial sections of Chicago newspapers. Although some advertisers continued to reproduce Holloway’s “I Will” into the 1920s, Chicago’s editorial cartoonists began to reimagine the city as a contemporary and fashionable young woman. By the turn of the century, Miss Chicago looked more like a debutante than a demigod. She was almost always regal in bearing, innocent of eye, and fashionably up to date. Imagining the city as an innocent, young beauty was something of a stretch. Chicago, then and for many years after, had a reputation for gritty streets, entrenched graft and greed, open vice districts, and the blood and stink of the stockyards. Miss Chicago, as portrayed by cartoonists, represented the triumph of hope, aspiration, and Chicago’s native booster spirit over the city’s hard realities. Caricatures of Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin—fat, unshaven, and shiftyeyed—might have more generally embodied the popular idea of Chicago’s residing spirits. Against such symbols, Miss Chicago’s youthful purity afforded a pleasing and beautiful contrast. Her virtue and innocence represented the reformers’ ideals and the city planners’ vision of the future of Chicago. Harold R. Heaton, a cartoonist for the Tribune and later for the Inter Ocean, cast and recast the earliest versions of Miss Chicago in the 1890s and 1900s. Heaton worked for the Chicago Tribune from 1885 to 1899, holding the post of chief cartoonist from 1892 to 1899. During this time, he drew a cartoon panel, “Pen Pictures of the Leading Events of the Week,” which usually appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition. The feature included comments on the week’s political events, sketches of celebrities in the news, and an occasional inspirational message. In 1893, when the fair dominated the city’s interest, Heaton frequently drew Chicago as a well-dressed young lady observing or participating in the fair’s daily doings in some ceremonial way. In one front-page cartoon, she stands alongside Uncle Sam, welcoming President
Cleveland and the world to the fair. In another, she salutes the decision to open the fair on Sundays. For the fair’s triumphant Chicago Day celebration, and the Tribune’s souvenir program, Heaton drew her holding a palm of victory in her outstretched arm. For this glorious moment, she is formally dressed: her elegant ball gown shows off her fashionable wasp waist; long gloves reach above her elbows; and her upper arms and shoulders disappear into leg-o-mutton sleeves (such a glamorous young lady would never be seen carrying a carpenter’s square). Heaton borrowed only one detail from Holloway’s “I Will” character; mimicking the phoenix crown, he gave his Miss Chicago a tiara topped by a single stylized flame. In the years after the fair, Heaton’s young and beautiful Chicago entered the rough-and-tumble arena of city politics, but retained her graceful innocence and queenly qualities. After Republican George Bell Swift won the 1895 mayoral election, Heaton drew a royal Chicago handing the keys of the city to the new mayor. She gives them to Swift with an overdone ritual gesture, while grandly turning her back on the outgoing mayor, Democrat John Patrick Hopkins. A few days later, Heaton
Chicago cartoonists gave Miss Chicago many responsibilities. Harold Heaton drew her welcoming all to the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 (below) and handing the keys of the city to the mayor elect in 1895 (above).
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Shortly before the 1897 election, Heaton drew Miss Chicago dangling the mayoralty on a string in front of three candidates: Washington Hesing, Carter Henry Harrison II, and John M. Harlan.
presented her in an aggressive stance. Hand on her hip, Chicago disputed the course of the drainage canal with a bewhiskered old man representing the Illinois state legislature. Almost all of Heaton’s 1895 cartoons show Miss Chicago wearing a gown embroidered with a “Y,” the symbol of the branching Chicago River. By late in the decade, the once-polite and restrained Miss Chicago was taking satiric jabs at candidates and causes. On April Fool’s Day 1897, shortly before the mayoral election, she dangled the mayoralty on a string before three candidates. The candidates—Washington Hesing, Carter Henry Harrison II, and John M. Harlan— are dressed in dunce caps and assume boyish looks. Miss Chicago, wearing her tiara with a flame, towers above the dwarfish trio. She grins mischievously, ready to yank away the mayoral prize. Heaton left the Chicago Tribune in 1899 to pursue a career as a playwright and actor. When he returned to cartooning at the Chicago Inter Ocean in 1908, his satiric streak widened. He often cast Miss Chicago as an innocent victim, preyed upon by thieving politicians. Yet, even as a victim, she assumed roles as the protector of 48 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
civic virtue and the guardian of the taxpayers’ money. She looked older and dressed more conservatively but continued to wear a tiara topped by a small phoenix. During the unhappy administration of Mayor Fred A. Busse, Heaton tirelessly illustrated “holdups,” in which “bandits” robbed the city’s treasury. In several of these cartoons, he found an all-too-usable pun in Mayor Busse’s ally, State’s Attorney John E. Wayman. It took little ingenuity to work up a storyline in which Wayman and some of his underlings became “city hall highwaymen.” At least twice, Heaton staged his cartoons like a melodrama or an episode in a silent film. He showed Miss Chicago being mugged in the corridors of city hall by three or four masked men, who are about to take her purse and grab her necklace. As Miss Chicago calls out for help, Wayman looks away coldly, arms folded, puffing on his cigarette, and saying, “I refuse to answer.” In another cartoon from this period, a mature Miss Chicago stands majestically above the city skyline and scolds a smallish, skulking policeman for his failure to defend the city against “Bomb No. 29”; the caption states her rebuke to the city’s police force, “What about this?”
In the spirit of the times, Heaton’s Miss Chicago crusaded against scandal and public immorality. In a circa 1911 cartoon, we see her modestly lifting her skirt as she turns to a sisterly looking “Wisconsin.” With disgust, she tells Wisconsin that she will not take back Frank Lloyd Wright and his lover Mamah Borthwick Cheney. In 1909, Wright and Cheney had abandoned their spouses, run off to Europe for a year, and then settled down in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The breakup of their marriages caused a scandal, which Heaton scrawls in dark smoky letters on the clouds hanging above the Wright-Cheney bungalow. Wisconsin holds her nose against the foul smell of it all.
After Heaton left the Chicago Tribune, the paper bid for the services of John T. McCutcheon, then ace cartoonist and illustrator for Victor Lawson’s Chicago Record. After a few years of negotiations, the Tribune lured McCutcheon away. Starting on June 30, 1903, and continuing for nearly fifty years, McCutcheon drew editorial cartoons and illustrated stories for the Tribune on an almost-daily basis. In some of his early efforts, McCutcheon followed Heaton in making his symbolic Chicago a youthful beauty, but he also borrowed a few pieces from Holloway’s original iconographic scheme. McCutcheon coyly introduced his version of Miss Chicago in a front-page cartoon in 1907. The cartoon
Later in his career, Heaton used Miss Chicago to represent the long-suffering, victimized city, as in this cartoon for the Inter Ocean in 1909. Yesterday’s City | 49
criticized Mayor Edward Dunne and his supposed alliance with William Randolph Hearst. It depicts Miss Chicago in a phoenix crown with a suggestion of a breastplate drawn into the sketchy lines of her dress. Even so, she is clearly presented as a homemaker, not an antique goddess, as she stands in the doorway of her neat little cottage, guarding it against the mud-spattered Dunne and an even muddier Hearst. To make sure his readers recognized her, McCutcheon wrote “Chicago” in bold on the hem of her dress. Three weeks later, McCutcheon reimagined Miss Chicago’s character and form. In the front-page cartoon, “Welcome the Coming, Speed the Parting,” a young, slender Miss Chicago welcomes incoming Mayor Fred A. Busse as she hands the departing Dunne his hat. McCutcheon again banked on his readers’ quick recognition of this character and her familiar attributes, using only a simple crown and the faint outlines of her breastplate to identify her as the symbolic Chicago. Luther D. Bradley, editorial cartoonist and head of the art department at the Chicago Daily News, created other versions of the idealized Chicago. Neither a goddess nor a lady, his character was animated by a simple and rather obvious idea. At the turn of the century, Chicago was a young and fast-growing city, incorporating outlying Starting on June 30, 1903, and continuing for nearly fifty years, John T. McCutcheon (above) drew editorial cartoons and illustrated stories for the Chicago Tribune. McCutcheon sketched “Welcome the Coming, Speed the Parting” (below) for the Tribune in April 1907.
Cartoonist Luther Bradley (above) brilliantly envisioned Miss Chicago as a gawky preteen. Bradley’s 1904 cartoon “Isn’t It Time She Had a New Dress?” (opposite) expressed the need for a new city charter. 50 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
communities and suburbs at a rapid rate. With a bit of poetic genius, Bradley imagined Chicago as a gawky preadolescent girl, who had outgrown her clothes and “taxing body.” For the front page of the Daily News on August 17, 1904, he drew a long-legged, pig-tailed girl, who wore high-buttoned shoes and a patched-up, tooshort dress. Overhead, she holds a comically small
umbrella marked “1837,” the date of the city’s original charter and incorporation. Bradley drew Chicago peering into a dress shop window at a long dress labeled “new charter.” According to the editors of Cartoons by Bradley, this cartoon was “reproduced widely and used as campaign material by the charter amendment advocates in 1904.” Yesterday’s City | 51
During the women’s suffrage movement, Miss Chicago often symbolized the female vote. Above: In this 1914 cartoon, McCutcheon traced the history of the movement using the reaction of the crowd, from “Absurd creatures!” to “Isn’t she noble looking!”
The drive for women’s suffrage upset many of the conventions that had framed and defined the character of Miss Chicago. In 1913, the Illinois Municipal Voting Act gave women throughout the state the right to vote for presidential electors and certain local officials. As political sentiment shifted, cartoonists increasingly looked to a character tagged the “women’s vote” to cleanse and purify Chicago politics. Although Miss Chicago did not disap52 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
pear from the front page between 1910 and 1920, she often merged with the figure of the women’s vote. Bradley drew a would-be woman voter looking on disapprovingly at the mess that men had made in the “Municipal Kitchen.” McCutcheon personified the women’s vote first as a crusader in armor, then as a bespectacled bluestocking, and, for the 1915 mayoral election, an ordinary woman in a voting booth.
McCutcheon used Miss Chicago to represent the need to cleanse and purify Chicago politics. In this cartoon, Chicago sternly instructs the average citizen to weed the “unfit aldermanic candidates” from the “municipal garden.”
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Around this time, McCutcheon and other cartoonists simultaneously began to age the youthful Miss Chicago. In a cartoon commenting on the Carter Henry Harrison II– Charles E. Merriam mayoral contest, McCutcheon drew “Civil Service,” a frightened ten-year-old girl, running into the arms of Chicago, a plump and grandmotherly figure in an apron; the young Civil Service was frightened by a parade of Democratic “Carter for Mayor” supporters. McCutcheon repeated the grandmotherly Chicago in “We Hope He’s Honest,” in which a smiling but sleazy porter, representing the new City Council, offers to take her bags. Chicago looks slightly befuddled and a bit apprehensive, since the porter is taking away bags that represent legislation on telephone rates, an unfinished subway, new railroad terminals, and city taxes. On the eve of election day in April 1916, McCutcheon transformed Miss Chicago yet again in “Chicago Expects Every Good Citizen to Do His Duty Tomorrow.” A strong, gray-haired, steely eyed matron, Chicago wears a coat with the municipal “Y” design. She strides through the swinging doors of a tavern, takes a blustering Chicago citizen by the ear, and hauls him outside to the “municipal garden,” where he is told to weed out the “unfit aldermanic candidates.” A quick survey of newspapers from this period suggests that Miss Chicago had become an extraordinarily fluid character. Unlike older symbols of cities—Athena, Romulus and Remus, and Florence’s David—Miss Chicago
In the early twentieth century, the city’s editorial cartoonists began to age Miss Chicago. McCutcheon drew her as a plump, grandmotherly figure who protected civil service (above) and defended the city plan and the taxpayer (right). 54 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
For the 1915 mayoral election, McCutcheon drew Miss Chicago voting “for good government.”
was not defined by traditional myths or bound to a wellknown story. The city’s editorial cartoonists felt no obligation to keep drawing her in the same way or in the same character day after day.
Around 1919, Tribune cartoonists began to use “Father Dearborn” to symbolize Chicago. Father Dearborn did not replace Miss Chicago but symbolized the city in quite a different way. During prohibition, when Chicago was plagued by gangland violence and political corruption, Miss Chicago became the symbol of a captive city, crying out to be rescued from Capone’s henchmen. Father Dearborn, in contrast, acted as the city’s champion, fighting the gangs and the corruption of Mayor William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson. Carey Orr drew one of the first Father Dearborn cartoons, “Don’t Split the Vote,” in February 1919. Similar to Uncle Sam in the famous military recruitment poster, Father Dearborn has old-fashioned whiskers, stares straight at the reader, and demands true-blue patriotism. He counsels hardheaded politicians to counter the city’s German voting bloc and the “disloyal element.” Orr was one of three cartoonists Tribune publisher Colonel Robert R. McCormick dubbed “the terrible three from Tennessee.” Although born in Ohio, Orr, like Joseph Parrish and Ed Holland, had first worked for newspapers in Nashville. In the study The Political Cartoon, Charles Press groups the trio with McCutcheon, Luther Bradley, Vaughan Shoemaker of the Chicago Daily News, and several other cartoonists in a “bucolic fraternity” of urbanite cartoonists wedded to rural nostalgia.
In many ways, the invention of Dad Dearborn expressed this nostalgia. In the 1920s and 1930s, Carey Orr drew Dad Dearborn as tall and strong, giving him a top hat, black frock coat, stand-up collar, and bow tie, nearly every feature designed to identify him with Abraham Lincoln. McCutcheon drew a Chicago character who, apart from his exaggeratedly rotund shape, looked much the same as Orr’s Dad Dearborn. This character appeared in the 1931 election-day cartoon, “In Which Group Are You Today?” McCutcheon also playfully ridiculed the fanciful naming of Father Dearborn. In a cartoon strip on the “Forgotten Man,” he pointed out that General Henry Dearborn had never been to Chicago and looked nothing like “the cartoonists’ conception of Father Dearborn.” Back in the 1890s, McCutcheon had drawn the title character for his friend George Ade’s novel, Doc’ Horne (1899). With short whiskers, a balding head, spectacles, and a bow tie, Doc’ was a perfect model for the future Father Dearborn. Just as important, Doc’ talked and acted the part of a “rustic sage,” a time-honored character in American humor. He lived in the heart of downtown Chicago at the Alfalfa Hotel, where he dispensed proverbial wisdom, invoked village values, and played upon his audience’s nostalgia. Dad Dearborn expressed many of the same smalltown virtues when he appeared in the Tribune’s editorial cartoons. He lived in the city but was not of it.
Carey Orr of the Chicago Tribune expertly used Father Dearborn in a variety of his cartoons. In February 1919, Orr’s Dad Dearborn called voters to the polls (left). More than a decade later, his character embodied “Chicago’s fight against crime” (right). Yesterday’s City | 55
McCutcheon drew a jovial version of Father Dearborn, who hailed Chicagoans down “the path of good citizenship� to the voting booths in April 1931. 56 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
Orr’s “Woodman, Spare the Tree,” published on April 6, 1925, uniquely casts Father Dearborn as a strong and determined lumberjack.
Among Orr’s early cartoons of Father Dearborn is the curiously expressed mix of urban politics and rural wisdom in 1925’s “Woodman, Spare the Tree!” Three exmayors—Dunne, Thompson, and Harrison—kneel down before a tree marked the “Traction Issue—The Old Political Chestnut Tree.” They block, as they supposedly
had done before, the extension of the “elevated, surface, and subway lines.” The tracks lead straight into the base of the old tree that they seek to protect and preserve. Father Dearborn, his mighty axe firmly in hand, says: “Excuse me, boys, but I’ve got to clear the right of way.” The image of strength and determination as he looks Yesterday’s City | 57
In Orr’s “The Stronghold of Peace,” published on December 4, 1941, both “Chicago” and “Illinois” bear a remarkable resemblance to Abraham Lincoln.
During the war, Chicago “I Will” returned to the front page, larger and more heroic than ever. Joseph Parrish reimagined Miss Chicago as Nike or Victory. In his “Inherited Spirit,” Chicago encourages an eager recruit on his way to the navy. She wears a helmet with Nike’s wings in place of the phoenix crown. Instead of a carpenter’s square, she carries a large sword and buckler. Other attributes, old and perhaps forgotten, make her a recognizable symbol of Chicago. Parrish inscribed the city’s “Y” insignia on her shield, and as in the 1890s, the city’s motto is written across her breastplate. In “What Are the Quotas,” Miss Chicago collaborates with Uncle Sam, as she did in cartoons and illustrations for the world’s fair of 1893. The city’s motto shines above her head like a halo. After the war, Father Dearborn returned to his customary place on the front page. He was no longer the tall, brawny Lincolnesque hero that Orr and others had once imagined. Balding and bespectacled, round of belly and noticeably shorter, he favored frock coats, stand-up collars, and bow ties. It is likely that Orr, Parrish, and Holland—who drew him in the 1940s and 1950s—took one or two cues from Vaughan Shoemaker at the Chicago Daily News. Shoemaker is generally credited with having created John Q. Public around 1931. Small and mustached, John Q. Public was a version of the “Little Man,” a character
down at the pleading mayors, he’s ready to chop down the tree bearing the chestnuts labeled “bunk.” During World War II, Father Dearborn generally receded into the background, as Miss Chicago, with new power and some of her old armor, came to symbolize the city and its war effort. Yet, one remarkable Dad Dearborn cartoon calls for comment. Orr drew “The Stronghold of Peace” for the Tribune of December 4, 1941, just three days before Pearl Harbor. The concept is simple: “The Middle West” stands for peace against the black clouds of “War Propaganda” streaming out of Washington. Chicago, with his familiar chin whiskers, holds a gas mask. He appears in the trenches, shoulder-to-shoulder with Illinois and the other Midwestern states. They stand determined to ward off war and, it would seem, the crazed world outside the Midwest. Within days, the Tribune Company found it necessary to shed its long-standing isolationist stance. At the end of 1942, the company published War Cartoons: Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune, December 7, 1941– September 28, 1942, including drawings by McCutcheon, Orr, Parrish, and Somdal. Not surprisingly, the cartoonists contributed work that patriotically encouraged the war effort, calling for the purchase of war bonds, the support of “total war production,” and the defeat of the axis powers.
The invasion of Pearl Harbor forced the Tribune to shed its isolationist stance. On June 29, 1942, the paper published Parrish’s depiction of Miss Chicago applauding Chicago’s 10,000 new recruits.
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On August 1, 1942, Parrish’s heroic Miss Chicago returned to collaborate with Uncle Sam to improve the city’s war efforts. Chicago’s motto shines above her head like a halo.
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Similar to Miss Chicago, the city’s flag stands for the “I Will” motto. Officially adopted by the City Council in 1917, the original flag had only two stars—representing the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The stars for the Century of Progress world’s fair and the Fort Dearborn massacre were added in 1933 and 1939, respectively. 60 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
City boosters used Miss Chicago—in her original, neoclassical “I Will” form—to entice fairgoers to the Century of Progress world’s fair in 1933. Yesterday’s City | 61
Published on March 22, 1950, Ed Holland’s “At the Head of the Line” depicts Chicago politely purchasing his ticket to the Golden Gloves tournament, while “the rest of the world” waits in line behind him.
type perfected by American humorists including James Thurber and Robert Benchley. The Little Man inhabited the modern world but remained troubled by and uncomfortable in it. He was put-upon by contemporary civilization, unable to master the inventions and complications of modern technology, and almost always, dominated by his wife or bullied by his boss. John Q. Public helplessly suffered indignities and troubles at the hands of Chicago’s politicians, national leaders, and dictators abroad. Dad Dearborn suffered a similar fate, as the fighting and civic-minded figure from the 1920s and 1930s slowly slipped away. Parrish drew him politely trying to face down 62 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
ghost payrollers: city employees who collected paychecks but did not work. Orr depicted Father Dearborn confronting Chicago’s “machine aldermen,” as citizens slept on through his calls for help. In such moments, he seemed powerless to act and unable to influence the course of city politics. From time to time, he nevertheless proved to be an upstanding citizen. In Ed Holland’s cartoon, “At the Head of the Line,” Dad Dearborn buys a ticket to support the world premiere of the Golden Gloves. For the critical mayoral contest between Richard J. Daley and Robert E. Merriam in 1955, Parrish brought back a serious and determined Dad Dearborn, who casts his vote as Uncle Sam
looks on over his shoulder. According to the cartoon, “Chicago’s civic reputation [was] at stake.” Daley won the election despite the fervent denunciations of the Tribune. Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn faded from the pages of Chicago newspapers in the 1950s. Through these characters, a generation of editorial cartoonists had expressed visions of political reform and civic responsibility. Looking at the cartoons and advertisements that featured these two figures, one can read a shorthand history of Chicago, an authentic record of the city’s ambitions, fears, and politics. Perhaps it is no longer possible to represent a city as diverse in social, ethnic, and racial identity as Chicago through a single character, no matter how cleverly drawn. But, for a time, Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn seemed to represent the possibility. Guy Szuberla is a professor emeritus at the University of Toledo. He is on the editorial board of the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature and has written extensively on many prominent Chicago writers, including Saul Bellow and Sara Paretsky. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 44, ICHi-02200; 45, detail, Chicago Tribune, 13 April 1920; 46 top, Chicago Tribune, 10 Oct. 1893; 46 bottom, Chicago Tribune, 13 April 1920; 47 top, Chicago Tribune, 9 April 1895; 47 bottom, Chicago Tribune, 7 May 1893; 48, Chicago Tribune, 1 April 1897; 49 newspaper, Inter Ocean, 16 Nov. 1909; 49 cartoon, reprinted with permission, courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago; 50 top, DN0009949; 50 bottom left, Chicago Tribune, 15 April 1907; 50 bottom right, DN-055821; 51, Chicago Daily News, 17 Aug. 1904; 52, Chicago Tribune, 25 Feb. 1914; 53, Chicago Tribune, 3 April 1916; 54 top, Chicago Tribune, 23 Feb. 1915; 54 bottom left, Chicago Tribune, 24 March 1911; 54 bottom right, Chicago Tribune, 2 April 1913; 55 left, Chicago Tribune, 24 Feb. 1919; 55 right; Chicago Tribune, 25 Feb. 1931 © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission; 56, Chicago Tribune, 7 April 1931 © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission; 57, Chicago Tribune, 6 April 1925 © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission; 58 top, Chicago Tribune, 4 Dec. 1941 © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission; 58 bottom, Chicago Tribune, 29 June 1942 © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission; 59, Chicago Tribune, 1 Aug. 1942 © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission; 60, ICHi-16211; 61, ICHi-39026; 62, Chicago Tribune, 22 March 1950 © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission; 63 top, Chicago Tribune, 24 Feb. 1947 © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission; 63, bottom, Chicago Tribune, 5 April 1955 © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Election-based cartoons comprised Father Dearborn’s final appearances in the Tribune. Above: In February 1947, Orr drew him marrying a resigned Miss Chicago to a shifty “machine alderman” while the “average citizen” slept in a nearby pew. Below: In April 1955, Parrish depicted Father Dearborn as a determined voter and protector of “Chicago’s civic reputation.”
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M A K I N G H I S T O RY
Architects of Culture: Interviews with Ronne Hartfield and Helmut Jahn T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
R
onne Hartfield and Helmut Jahn are mavericks of Chicago culture. Since the 1980s, the structures designed by architect Helmut Jahn have enjoyed a reputation for flair and drama. To date, Jahn and his buildings have received more than one hundred architectural awards. Admirers and critics alike identify him as one of the ten most influential living American architects. Ronne Hartfield—poet, writer, artist, and a leading innovator in cultural management—is an internationally recognized expert in multicultural education. Using her natural energy and dynamic enthusiasm, Hartfield made the arts more accessible to children and teenagers through Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts in Education and the Art Institute of Chicago for the past quarter-century. Due to her creative and innovative leadership, Urban Gateways received the 1995 President’s National Medal of Art. It remains one of the nation’s leading nonprofit arts education organizations. Born on January 4, 1940, in Nuremberg, Germany, Helmut Jahn was the eldest son of Wilhem Anton and Karolina Wirth Jahn. At the onset of World War II, “we moved to Zirndorf, which is a little village outside of Nuremberg,” recounts Jahn. When the war ended, Wilhem Jahn returned to Nuremberg and resumed his career as a teacher. Jahn remembers frequent visits with his relatives in Nuremberg. The city was heavily damaged during the war, “and probably subconsciously,” he admits, “had something to do with why I was interested in buildings.” As a teenager, Jahn studied Nuremberg’s newly reconstructed churches, “and that’s how I got interested in architecture.” He studied engineering and architecture before graduating from Technische Hochschule in Munich, Germany in 1965.
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Below left: Ronne Hartfield, recipient of the Robert Maynard Hutchins History Maker Award for Distinction in Education. Below: Helmut Jahn, recipient of the Daniel H. Burnham History Maker Award for Distinction in Architecture and Design.
Born in Chicago on March 17, 1936, to John Drayton and Thelma Shepherd Rones, Hartfield grew up on the Near South Side. After graduating from Wendell Phillips High School in 1952, she studied history at the University of Chicago. Hartfield describes her undergraduate years as “a great experience. When I hit the University of Chicago, I thought this was the best imaginable place for somebody like me.” The small classes, intellectual rigor, and constant questioning of sources and stereotypes made Hartfield feel right at home. “It was like an extension of my family,” she describes. After completing his undergraduate studies in Germany, Jahn moved to Chicago in 1966 to study with Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. But Mies was rarely on campus by then: “When Mies died in 1969, I had never seen him.” Instead, Jahn’s mentor was Gene Summers of C. F. Murphy Associates; he worked as Summers’s assistant from 1967 to 1973. Shortly after Jahn arrived in Chicago, the first McCormick Place burned down. City officials initially recruited van der Rohe to design a replacement, but “he didn’t want to have anything to do with it, because it was too political,” remembers Jahn. When the same officials came knocking on Summers’s door, he was also reluctant to undertake the project. Jahn convinced him otherwise. Jahn eventually became a principal in the firm; he is currently president and CEO of Murphy/Jahn, a position he has held since 1983.
One of Helmut Jahn’s first major projects, the McCormick Place convention center, helped put the young architect on the map.
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Hartfield’s first job after college was with Science Research Associates. “Lyle Spencer ran this publishing company which had just started a few years before, and it was a racially integrated staff,” she explains. “He was interested in me because I had come out of the University of Chicago, so I got this job.” Hartfield was hired as an editorial assistant, but Spencer soon gave her more serious responsibilities: “Lyle used to give me file cards with all kinds of information on it, and I would write speeches.” For a young college graduate, “it was the greatest experience in the world.”
In 1958, Hartfield left Science Research Associates to raise her family. Once all four of her children were in school, however, she began doing public relations work part-time for the Chicago Children’s Choir. Hartfield’s organizational talents were quickly recognized. Within a year, she became project director of Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts in Education, where she supervised a program for gifted high school students. “It was like heaven to me. . . . I had $80,000 a year to run a program that I could design, so I did.” Founded in 1961, Urban Gateways develops programs to transform and enrich the lives of schoolchildren through exposure to music, drama, and the visual arts. Hartfield designed music, poetry, and dance workshops. “We had poor kids, black and white; middle-class kids, black and white and Latino; and rich kids, black and white. Hyde Park kids, Kenwood kids, Lincoln Park kids, and some private-school kids. It was a wonderful, wonderful project.” 66 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
Hartfield’s first venture back into the workforce after staying home with her family involved public relations duties for the Chicago Children’s Choir (above). Opposite: She soon left the choir to become project director of Urban Gateways.
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Innovative buildings such as the Michigan City Public Library (above) enhanced Jahn’s burgeoning reputation. Below: Jahn’s United Airlines Terminal One at O’Hare International Airport opened to wide acclaim in 1988.
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Upon completing work on the McCormick Place project, Jahn increasingly became interested in glass, natural light, and energy-saving design. The Michigan City Library (1977) offers a telling example. The modest building resembles a warehouse from afar: a square shape with simple lines and subtle detailing, dominated by seven sawtooth exterior bays composed of white translucent fiberglass to allow more light. The roof is cut into a series of skylights facing north to allow for daytime operation without artificial light and thus greater economy. The 32,280-square-foot interior, designed by his wife Deborah Jahn, features blue signage, yellow shelves, green exposed ductwork, and contemporary furniture. The library foreshadowed Jahn’s recurrent, innovative, and original uses of glass and energy-saving design in Chicago-area structures. The Commonwealth Edison District Headquarters (1981) in Bolingbrook, Chicago’s Area 2 Police Headquarters (1981), the Argonne Program Support Facility (1981), the office building at One South Wacker (1982), the United Airlines Terminal One Complex (1987) at O’Hare International Airport, Northwestern Atrium Center (1987, now Citicorp Center), and HA-LO Headquarters (2000, now Shure Building) in Niles all embodied Jahn’s distinctive style and philosophy. “Architecture is not what you learn in school,” he insists. “Architecture is what you teach yourself constantly, every day, because the requirements change.” At first, Jahn’s creative applications of technology did not attract much attention. Critics and observers were quicker to comment on the architect’s rejection of the modernist affinity for neutral colors in favor of bright ones. St. Mary’s Athletic Facility (1977) in South Bend, Indiana, featured red columns visible through the facades of glass. The De la Garza Career Center (1981) in East Chicago, Indiana, blazed day-glo yellow and green in the middle of a depressed urban area. The yellow ductwork contrasted with the white and glass structure in the Rust-Oleum Corporation Headquarters (1978) in Vernon Hills, Illinois. The red steel frame of the Learning Resources Center at the College of Du Page (1984) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and the blue exterior of Area 2 Police Headquarters in Chicago (1981) stood out from their surrounding streetscapes. Jahn even envisioned his first major skyscraper—Chicago’s Xerox Centre (1980)—to be clad in blue.
Well-renowned for his use of color, Jahn envisioned that his first skyscraper, Chicago’s Xerox Centre (below), would be bright blue.
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Hartfield taught teacher writing workshops at Urban Gateways before becoming executive director there in 1981. Below: The Art Institute of Chicago. At the School of the Art Institute, Hartfield was not only a professor and dean, she instituted national and international exchange study programs as well as assessment studies.
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In 1974, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago lured Hartfield away from Urban Gateways, hiring her as a professor of comparative literature and dean of students. She developed national and international exchange study programs and fellowships, supervised student services, and designed and executed assessment studies. She also taught at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago and returned to the University of Chicago to study the history of religions. Hartfield, however, could not resist Urban Gateways. In 1981, she returned to the organization as executive director. This time, Hartfield brought new experiences and began integrating the missions of Urban Gateways and the School of the Art Institute. “I hired four hundred artists under contract every year,” she explains. “To get a national reputation, I did a lot of work for the National Endowment for the Arts.” By the time Hartfield departed Urban Gateways in 1991, the institution was the largest private arts and education organization in the United States, a recipient of the Governor of Illinois Award for the Arts (1988), and identified as a “Top Cultural Institution” in Illinois (1988). The National Endowment for the Arts had designated the organization a national model for artist training and community arts education. Hartfield attributes the success of Urban Gateways to the wide array of artists with whom she collaborated. “We had incredibly creative people working for us: poets, writers, and musicians; it was an incredible time,” she enthuses.
Hartfield left Urban Gateways for the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991. Here she bids farewell to Urban Gateways in her final letter as executive director.
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Urban Gateways develops programs to enrich the lives of schoolchildren through exposure to the arts, creating everything from masks (above) to music (right).
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Jahn’s most unconventional structure to date was the James R. Thompson Center in downtown Chicago (1985). Even today, its blue, pink, and gray color combination remains controversial. Defenders described it as “the first office building of the year 2000.” Others derided it as “vulgar” and “hyperactive.” Most agreed that the structure defied traditional architectural classification. A squat polygon with a cylindrical skylight and a side-sloping inward seventeen-story curve, the building appeared, according to one critic, “as if were about to revolve.” Whatever the reaction, the Thompson Center’s interior plaza successfully attracts office workers, tourists, and passersby. Architecture critic Paul Gapp called the structure “the most aesthetically controversial office building ever constructed in Chicago.” Possibly too controversial. Over the next two decades, “much of our American work dried up,” Jahn recounts. Consequently, the architect’s most significant designs were built abroad, including Messehalle (1989) and Messeturm (1991) in Frankfurt; the Hitachi Tower (1993) and Caltex House (1993) in Singapore; the Airport Center (1999) in Munich; the European Union Headquarters (1999) in Brussels; and the Sony Center (2000) in Berlin. Jahn admits his style evolved as “I got really interested in this integration with engineering,” he explains, “because I saw a dead end when you just dealt with historical allusions, forms, and decoration.” Jahn increasingly grew disenchanted with the aesthetics of architecture. “I reminded myself that the best we achieved was always something that had to do with construction,” he emphasizes. “The early buildings, the St. Mary’s building and Michigan City Library, really dealt with construction.” 74 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
Above left: The James R. Thompson Center (formerly the State of Illinois Building) remains the architect’s most famous and controversial work (and his favorite of his urban buildings). Below: The model for the structure.
After the Thompson Center, Jahn focused on projects overseas. His most recent international work is the Sony Center in Berlin (above), which resembles the Thompson Center but is open to the sky in the center. Making History | 75
Jahn particularly was fascinated with manipulating energy, natural daylight, air flow, and the overall engineering of his designs, an approach he labeled “archi-neering.” “That allowed you to then focus on some real goals,” he explains. For Jahn, the result was, “an architecture which was informed by these different goals, had different aesthetic results, and was not just affected by design or style, but in how a building performed.” Like Jahn, Hartfield did not avoid controversy. In 1991, she returned to the Art Institute as the Woman’s Board Endowed Executive Director for Museum Education (1991–99). Her primary purpose was to organize, provide, and administer appropriate interpretive materials and programs for all visitors to the museum. Hartfield, however, was most interested in breaking down the traditional barriers associated with the “high culture” of the Art Institute. She wanted to link the Art Institute with some of the programs associated with Urban Gateways. Not surprisingly, Hartfield encountered resistance from parts of the Art Institute at first. “They’re not set up for it. Even today, they’re not. Urban Gateways [worked with] the Lyric Opera, Field Museum, Adler Planetarium, Chicago Symphony, but not the Art Institute.” According to Hartfield, “They did not want to do these things. They had never had to do stuff with public school teachers and principals. So I had to hire people who would lead that change and that takes a lot of money. I had twenty-seven on staff when I came and fifty-two when I left.” Under her leadership, exhibitions-based activity doubled. In the end, “we made radical change, I think, in the institution.” Hartfield notes that her experiences at the Art Institute and Urban Gateways reinforced each other. “I learned so much about management, about budgets, about staff development. When I went to the museum, which was my most difficult job, the institution was like a rock.” She recalls that a friend warned her: “It’s a big ship, Ronne, it turns slowly.” In retrospect, “I had to learn to be enormously creative and very stubborn to meet my own goals, but I became like a rock myself. I could tell you [about] the times I worked all night to make sure that something was going to happen, that I wanted to have happen, that was the way of opening the place up.” 76 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
Ronne Hartfield (right) with Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks in 1995.
Hartfield poses with her favorite sculpture at the Art Institute, Henry Moore’s Reclining Woman, c. 1997.
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Jahn admits that the Thompson Center never left his mind. “I remember standing one day in the atrium of the Thompson Center, and I said, ‘I think it would have been better open. Next time, I’m going to do it open.’” The “next time” was the Sony Center (2000) in Berlin, considered by many to be Jahn’s most ambitious urban place-making project to date. Seven buildings define the complex’s urban edges. Passages from various directions allow pedestrians to infiltrate the center, creating both a physical and visual connection with the surrounding space. Throughout the day, Sony’s public area is alive with people, water, and light. At night, the building’s “crown,” constructed of steel cable, fiberglass membrane, and glass, literally glows. The Sony Center is now a Berlin landmark. Hartfield’s own artistic landmark appeared in 2004. Her critically acclaimed memoir Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family examines her childhood in Bronzeville, the center of Chicago’s African American community during the first half of the twentieth century. Hartfield’s account portrays a typical, middle-class upbringing through the character of her mother, Day. Hartfield describes the book as a deliberate corrective to what she calls the “Native Son narrative.” She believes a preponderance of the literature on twentieth-century African Americans indulges in stereotypes, emphasizing urban poverty and dehumanizing violence. “[They describe] the black experience [as] where you get up in the morning and fight rats before you can brush your teeth,” she complains, “where you have so much rage, you rxpe your employer’s daughter, you rxpe your girlfriend and kxll her.” All too often, Hartfield believes, these themes of anger and victimization are treated as “the text of the black experience.” Her purpose was “simply to tell the truth about the way I lived, the way my parents lived, and the way I live.” 78 | Chicago History | Summer 2007
In her memoir, Another Way Home, Hartfield traced the rich history of her family and their lives. Above: Hartfield (left) with her mother.
Jahn shows no signs of slowing his decadeslong career. His most recent Chicago building, a low-income housing project, recently opened on Clybourn Avenue near the former site of Cabrini Green. Helmut Jahn poses with James J. O’Connor at the 2005 Making History Awards.
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Ronne Hartfield receives her plaque from Lois Weisberg at the 2005 Making History Awards.
Jahn still considers Chicago’s Thompson Center to be his best urban structure. Although he admits that the color scheme and exposed steel still attract the most commentary, he believes the building portends a larger philosophical message. “I think it makes a statement about all these issues—urban planning and aesthetics—which come from ancient history: the rotunda, the dome, the urban plaza, and piazza.” Jahn and Hartfield share a penchant for contesting stereotypes and defying the artistic status quo. Throughout their professional careers, they reveled in their iconoclasm. They not only compelled viewers to think differently about outmoded traditions, they constructed innovative bridges connecting the old with the new. Timothy J. Gilfoyle is the author of A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of NineteenthCentury New York (W. W. Norton, 2006) and Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (University of Chicago Press, 2006). He teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 64, CHM; 65, courtesy of Murphy/Jahn; 66, CHM, 1989.915.2; 67, CHM Archives; 68–69, courtesy of Murphy/Jahn; 70–71, CHM Archives; 72–73, photographs courtesy of Urban Gateways: Center for Arts Education; 74, courtesy of Murphy/Jahn; 75, photograph by Engelhardt/Sellin, Aschau i.CH, Germany, courtesy of Murphy/Jahn; 76–78, courtesy of Ronne Hartfield; 79 top, photograph by Jay Crawford, CHM; 79 bottom–80, CHM. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The literature on Helmut Jahn is vast. A good place to start is the Murphy/Jahn website at www.murphyjahn.com. The best overviews of Jahn’s projects are Nory Miller, Helmut Jahn (New York: Rizzoli, 1986); Werner Blaser, Helmut Jahn: Architecture Engineering (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser, 2002); and Robert Sharoff, “Out of Exile,” Chicago Magazine, July 2003. Jahn’s early ideas on architecture are outlined in his essay “New Directions and New Designs at C. F. Murphy Associates,” Architectural Record, July 1979. The best place to begin any study of Ronne Hartfield is with her memoir Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Her ideas about art and the African American experience are discussed in her essays “The Chicago Years: Gathering Light in the Gray City,” in Gullah Images: The Art of Jonathan Green (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); and “The Heart Shall Be Weary and Wonder,” in Encountering Art/Different Facets of the Esthetic Experience, edited by Miho Museum/Kyoto (New York: Overlook Press, 2001). 80 | Chicago History | Summer 2007