Deco Arts Building

This is a repeat. I managed to delete this from the web so I decided to send it again so it could be googled. Last year, I took a class at the Newberry Library. Turned out to be a bit different than I thought, but it was a writing class that asked us to talk about a corner in Chicago and what it meant to us. So, here’s one of the things I wrote.

The Corner of 55th Street and Lake Park Avenue

One day in 1975, I was sitting by the window of the Walgreen’s diner at 55th and Lake Park, idly gazing out the window, when I realized I was looking at a mystery across the street. I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I’d come from rural upstate New York, so, in the fog created by  18th Century British poetry and Pre-Shakespearian Drama, I didn’t question the landscape I found myself in. I’d walk the mile from my rooms on Ellis Avenue to the shopping center at 55th and Lake Park, barely registering that 55th Street was oddly empty. I passed the low brick townhouses that turned their backs to the street and circled the two midrise buildings that blocked my path in the middle of the street. It all just captured the bleak dismay of reading Cambises, King of Persia.

That morning, however, I focused for the first time on the building on the corner of Lake Park—and laughed. I suddenly realized that it was covered with car parts—gears, cam shafts, tires, engine blocks, stoplights, and roadsters. Nothing else on 55th Street had anything remotely whimsical.

I didn’t pursue the mystery. Not then. This wasn’t my neighborhood then. I was a graduate student, just passing through—albeit very slowly. I eventually left to chase the elusive tenure-track job. Eight years later, I returned to Hyde Park. I still had friends in the area. Chicago had jobs. I liked it better than the claustrophobic college towns I’d been in. Soon, Hyde Park became my neighborhood. The Walgreen’s diner was gone so I gazed less often at my favorite building, but after retiring, the itch of the central mystery returned. What had happened to 55^th Street?

The cataclysm that swept across 55^th Street was urban renewal. In the 1950s, the car became king and the small stores built for pedestrians suffered. In the buildings thrown up fast for the 1893 World’s Fair, too many storefronts were vacant. Upstairs, crowded apartments had been illegally subdivided. They were firetraps. One fire that killed 11 people revealed that six families shared a single bathroom. Crime was so bad that in May 1952, 25% of all the crime in the entire city of Chicago happened in Hyde Park. People were afraid. They wanted change.

And change was coming. The neighborhood in 1950 was primarily white. After restrictive covenants were declared illegal in 1948, neighborhoods across the South Side were flipping from white to black as real estate interests cashed in by whipping up fears. The University of Chicago decided to use the federal urban renewal process to create a stable middle-class residential “suburbanized” neighborhood where students and new faculty would feel safe. They cut the population in half.

The first steps were to designate buildings to be torn down and to plan out a new design for the neighborhood. Urban renewal meant wiping out the elements that made a landscape urban. Gone were the bakeries and butcher shops, the bookstores and hardware stores. Gone were the taverns and jazz clubs, including the Beehive, the famous jazz showcase, and the Compass, the forerunner of Second City. Eminent domain meant that the owners had no choice, but it also meant they had to be paid a fair price.

Amidst the rubble, the car building accidentally survived. It had been built in 1928 as the Ritz Garage, when Hyde Park was famous for luxury apartment hotels. The wealthy residents could store their cars there, safe from the wave of car thefts that swept the neighborhood. Their chauffeurs had their own lounge with red leather chairs and a shower. Though a lot of Chicago buildings were using terra cotta—lightweight and fireproof—most of it came from catalogs. Instead the Ritz used artisans who had shown their work at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. The Ritz terra cotta was truly Art Deco. No expense was too great before the stock market crash, but by 1931 the debt was also too great and the Ritz sold to a Chevrolet dealership.

In 1953, Hyde Park Chevrolet did an extensive upgrade to the building, which may have helped it survive. It wasn’t classified as dilapidated, but it was identified as a building to be torn down. The plan called for a surface parking lot. It was fireproof and had no residents to be shoved out of the neighborhood, so it wasn’t a priority for demolition. Soon the building stood on the corner of 55th and Lake Park all by itself. I had thought that it had survived because of its delightful terra cotta, but no. From 1961 to 1963, the neighborhood and the university through the South East Chicago Commission railed against the building as an eyesore. Witnesses at the Land Clearance Commission testified that it spoiled the entire redevelopment plan. Owners of the new townhouses on 56th Street called it a monstrosity. Everyone seemed utterly impervious to its charms.

The Land Clearance Commission shrugged. There wasn’t enough money left in their budget to buy the building. The dealership agreed to wash decades of coal dust off the terra cotta, take off the huge Chevrolet sign, and set back the storefronts. In a few years, the dealership sold the building, and converted it back to a garage again. The commission decided that was close enough to a parking lot and so it was allowed to stay.

In just a few years, the mood shifted. In 1970, Architectural Design, a British magazine, published a “Map Guide to Chicago” that praised the building. The Hyde Park Herald noted that maybe the terra cotta was ok, kind of like a Roy Lichtenstein painting. Many people in the neighborhood started to have some regrets over what was lost, especially the loss of the large art colony that thrived from 1894 to 1963. Organizations in the neighborhood began for the first time to talk about preservation—and to treasure the building now named the Deco Arts Building.