Great Houses of Chicago

Urban Domestic Architecture

Great Houses of Chicago,

1871-1921

By Susan Benjamin and Stuart Cohen

Foreword by Franz Schulze and Arthur H. Miller

9 x 12 inches, 334 pages

Nearly 350 duotone photographs, drawings, and floor plans

Cloth, dust jacket

ISBN: 978-0-926464-39-8 • $75.00

March 2008

Dark, raw power built Chicago into an authentic American city. Beginning in the 1870s, farmers, hog swains, and gamblers—Europeans, New Englanders, southerners, and nearby midwesterners—migrated to the shores of Lake Michigan. From a world of shanty towns and smoke-stacked factories, ambitious men built vast commercial and industrial enterprises that changed the way Americans shop, eat, and think. Adventurous, civic-minded, and newly rich, Chicago’s grandees boldly hired the most progressive architects and savviest art and antiques dealers to design and furnish private houses that ultimately defined the city as a center of American capitalism, culture, and architecture.

Along Prairie Avenue, majestic Lake Shore Drive, and Astor Street, the Armours, McCormicks, Pullmans, and Ryersons immortalized their place among Chicago’s elite with lavish palaces designed by David Adler, Daniel Burnham, Howard Van Doren Shaw, and Frank Lloyd Wright, in styles that ranged from detailed Beaux-Arts eclectic to International Modern.

Great Houses of Chicago, 1871-1921 is the first authoritative study of Chicago’s grand city houses. Thirty four in-depth profiles, illustrated with restored archival photographs and floor plans, portray a private world of Midwestern splendor. This masterful volume includes biographical sketches of leading Chicago architects, a comprehensive bibliography, and a portfolio of 40 additional, rarely-seen residences.

FROM THE AUTHORS:

One of the special moments…was receiving permission from Cardinal George to include the residence of the Archbishop of Chicago, a grand brick Queen Anne style house built in 1885 facing Lincoln Park. No images of the house’s interiors existed and after a number of conversations with the Jack Treanor, Vice Chancellor of the Cardinal Bernardin Archives of the Archdiocese of Chicago, the Archdiocese offered to photograph the interior for inclusion in our book. What we all realized was that, for most of the world, including Chicago Catholics, this would be the public’s first viewing of the Cardinal’s residence.

We arrived at the Cardinals’ Residence, to discover that the nuns had prepared a high tea for us. At tea, Jack kept impressing on us how few people were ever invited to the Cardinals house and urged each of us to pocket the paper napkins imprinted in gold with the Cardinal’s crest: “Rare souvenirs,” then pausing to perhaps reflect on the fact that his guests were both Jewish, “they will make wonderful Christmas gifts for your Catholic friends.”

— Susan Benjamin and Stuart Cohen