The city’s architectural heritage is disappearing—with help from the people who are supposed to protect it.

By Lynn Becker

February 21, 2008

In 2005 a proposal for a new condo tower in the landmarked Jewelers Row District on Wabash came before the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. The plan for the Legacy allowed the developers to demolish everything but the facades of three 19th-century buildings, one of which had once housed the flagship store of booksellers Kroch’s & Brentano’s. I wrote in the Reader in favor of the project, rejecting preservationists’ “slippery slope” arguments that it would set a dangerous precedent.

I was wrong. Three years later, even as the commission is celebrating the 40th anniversary of Chicago’s landmark ordinance, the true legacy of the Legacy has become clear: not only does the commission continue to leave many of Chicago’s most famous buildings in danger, it’s also eviscerating the very concept of what a landmark is.

If you’re looking for someone to blame, you could start with Brian Goeken. A deputy commissioner of the city planning department, he heads its landmarks division, which coordinates landmarks protection with city planners and provides staff and research for the landmarks commission. By city ordinance, the planning department commissioner is a voting member of the landmarks commission along with eight mayoral appointees; Goeken is not, though he attends its meetings, weighs in on its agenda, and wields great influence over its decisions. Last year it held a hearing on whether a developer could demolish the landmark Farwell Building on Michigan Avenue and paste its facades onto a completely new structure, much of which would be a parking garage. When objections were raised about allowing a garage on Michigan Avenue, Goeken was Johnny-on-the-spot: “The commission has previously approved parking on street frontages as part of 6 N. Michigan and the Monroe Building . . . and also as part of 21-29 S. Wabash”—that is, the Legacy project. It didn’t matter that this and the other examples were south of the river, almost a mile away in completely different landmark districts. Goeken was persuasive—the Legacy had become an argument for making parking on the Magnificent Mile A-OK. It’s just one example of how Goeken is a master at expanding precedents; he can take a tiny rivulet and expand it into a superhighway.

Germania Club, built in 1888; Platt Luggage Building facade, 1907, and power plant; Chicago Printed String Building facade, 1920s

Robert Murphy (photos)

His heavy hand can be seen in how, in an accelerating succession of decisions, the commission has become a willing partner in the subversion of the most basic tenet of landmark preservation: keeping important buildings intact. Even before Goeken’s time, in 1997, the city was so anxious to have John Buck move forward with his $500 million North Bridge development that the McGraw-Hill Building on North Michigan Avenue wasn’t landmarked so much as it was sacrificed; Buck won approval to destroy the building and remount its facade on a new hotel structure. Since the Legacy decision, though, the pace has increased dramatically. In 2006 we witnessed the strange saga of the Chicago Printed String Building, across from the Target at Elston and Logan Boulevard: Demolition started because a permit had been issued in error, then landmark negotiations allowed the near total destruction of the actual building and the installation of a new structure behind the original facade. After that, the proposal to landmark it was dropped. And recently, preservationists learned that the commission was ready to sign off on a proposal to demolish all but the front 60 feet of the landmarked Chicago Athletic Association building, on Michigan Avenue just south of Madison, with a new structure to be inserted behind it. A special meeting called in January to approve the proposal was canceled. If the project is on hold it might mean that there’s hope for some threatened landmarks, not due to any action by the commission but thanks to economic recession slowing down development.

Developers are clearly paying attention to the new landmarks policy. A spokesman for the Alter Group says a facadectomy is one of several options, including demolition, under consideration for another potential landmark, the Romanesque 1912 American Book Company building at 320-334 E. Cermak, which is in the path of a $450 million hotel development project next to McCormick Place. Just across the street there’s a nightmare preview of American Book’s possible future. In 1993 the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which runs McCormick Place, entered into an agreement with state officials and preservationists to maintain a historic property it owned: the Platt Luggage Building, a 1907 beaux arts building designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw at 2301 S. Prairie. No landmarking required, right? Well, seven years and $2.4 million in rehabilitation costs later, the authority tore up the agreement so it could use the property for a McCormick Place expansion. After the nonprofit group that became Landmarks Illinois failed to stop it in court, the building was destroyed. Shaw’s elegant facade is now pasted onto a power plant a block to the north.

“All exterior building elevations, including rooflines, visible from public rights-of-way”—that’s the standard wording used in each ordinance designating a landmark or landmark district. For decades that merely meant that unless architecturally significant interiors were also referred to in the ordinance, the owner was free to change the inside of the building so long as the protected exterior wasn’t altered.

Now, however, the commission is turning that interpretation on its head, removing the protection of the structures themselves. And ordinances created to protect landmarks have been transformed into vehicles for codifying their destruction.

Perhaps worse, even as it’s negotiating away lesser buildings that would be nice to keep around, the commission is also neglecting the buildings that form the bedrock of Chicago’s architectural heritage. The number of neighborhood landmark districts created by the commission con­tinues to explode, and while the commission and its permit review committee spend increasing amounts of time reviewing changes to the thousands of buildings in those districts, irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind structures like the Wrigley Building, Marina City, and the Newberry Library have no landmark protection whatsoever.

If you want to see how seriously out of whack the commission’s priorities are, take a look at the corner of Clark Street and North Avenue. There you’ll see a minor modernist gem, the 1961 North Federal Savings and Loan building, now home to Diamond Bank. It’s one of 16 bank buildings throughout the city that the commission is seeking to landmark. I think it’s a good idea, although some would disagree.

What’s clearly not a good idea is what’s happening less than a block to the south on Clark at Germania Place: an example of how the commission often piddles with second-string (if worthy) landmarks while leaving far more seminal and historic buildings vulnerable. A shopping center developer has purchased the 1888 Germania Club, one of the great icons of Chicago’s once-thriving German culture and one of its last surviving traces.

As The Encyclopedia of Chicago tells it, at the turn of the century German immigrants and their children made up about a quarter of Chicago’s population. The German community was a driving force in building the city and its culture, and the Germania was its epicenter. The club was founded by German-American Civil War veterans in 1865, after onlookers were moved by the requiems they sang at the public viewing of President Lincoln’s body in Chicago. Originally known as the Germania Maennerchor, the group initially had an intensive focus on music, but it evolved to meet the community’s wider needs. According to a 1965 book celebrating the club’s centennial, its purpose was “to bring together American citizens of German extraction, to foster and perpetuate German cultural ideals, and Gemütlichkeit, roughly translated as ‘sociability.’”

Imposing yet inviting, the Germania building is dominated by a continuous arcade of paired high windows, each bisected by an ornamented column that blossoms into a double arch under a classical pediment. Tall red brick piers rest atop a two-story stone base. A broad loggia centers the second story of the Clark Street elevation, and a majestic, Doric-columned entrance faces Germania Place.

It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, but—shocking but all too common—it has never been designated an official Chicago landmark. It’s rated orange in the city’s Historic Resources Survey, which means it possesses “some architectural feature or historical association” making it “potentially significant in the context of the surrounding community.”

Last month, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that shopping center goliath Kimco Realty had acquired the Germania for $9.3 million. And while the company declined to return their calls—or mine—about the fate of the structure, the prospects are not exactly cheery.

There could, of course, be a fairy tale ending to this story, but sensitive restoration and adaptive reuse aren’t Kimco’s special­ties. It’s known for creating, owning, and operating strip malls anchored by big boxes and afloat in a sea of parking—like its Kmart complex at Kimball and Addison, for instance. Precedent suggests that Kimco’s idea of a different approach to development might be something like its Kmart on Market Street in downtown Philadelphia, a retail bunker complete with 524 parking spaces, just blocks from Philly’s soaring 1901 city hall.

In 1985, about a year before the Germania Club voted itself out of existence, a developer proposed turning the building into the entrance for a 45-story condo tower to be built just to the north. Could something similar be on the table this time around? The low-rise buildings that would have been razed for the tower are still there, including Mitchell’s restaurant on North Avenue. In between, the 1916 Village Theater, originally called the Germania, also orange-rated, went vacant last March.

Kimco could be ripping out the Germania’s ballrooms and interiors even now—there’s nothing to stop them. The orange rating provides only minimal protection if the company wants to raze the whole building: it puts a hold on demolition for 90 days after the request for a permit, giving preservationists scant time to persuade the commission and City Council to save the Germania.

The bottom line is that the landmarks commission has become increasingly subservient to the will of its parent, the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. If you’re a home owner in a landmark district and you want to make changes to your property, the commission will likely hold you to strict standards. If you’re a big developer in the planning department’s good graces, too often anything goes.

In this climate, every new proposal threatens to become an exercise in how much of a building’s integrity the commis­sion can negotiate away in the process of designating it a landmark.

Take the case of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s classic 1974 IBM Building at Wabash and the river. It’s one of Chicago’s finest structures, and it finally received landmark designation this month—but only because the developer transforming the middle floors into a hotel needed the attendant tax breaks to make his project financially viable. When he proposed erecting a large, redundant canopy to protrude beyond the ample shelter provided by Mies’s elegant original, commission staff recommended cutting it to just a few feet, enough to provide some additional weather protection and heat lamps. Fat chance. The commissioners overruled their own staff to approve every inch of the developer’s desired 14-foot projection.

Need another example? In 2006 the commission also negotiated away the grand, block-long concourse linking State and Wabash at the Palmer House and approved a “modernization” of the retail facades until activist groups, including Preservation Chicago, pressured them to reverse them­selves and mandate a restoration of the original designs.

The next big battle could be over the 1929 art deco Daily News Building, at Madison and Canal. In 1993 owner Sam Zell, the real estate titan who just bought the Tribune Company, had John Warner Norton’s spectacular mural Gathering the News, Printing the News, and Transporting the News (subject of a 1997 Reader feature story) peeled off the high ceiling of the 180-foot concourse. It’s been languishing in a warehouse ever since. Now Zell is floating a proposal to chop off the concourse and replace the gracious riverfront plaza—among Chicago’s greatest civic amenities—with a new office tower. How can he get away with this? Because even though the Daily News Building and Plaza is nearly eight decades old and one of Chicago’s best and most recognizable structures, the commission has never gotten around to designating it a landmark. But it did make one out of the Engine Company 42 firehouse on West Illinois, so I guess that’s OK.

Brian Goeken is giving a talk this month on the 40th anniversary of the Chicago Landmarks Ordinance at the Chicago Cultural Center; the history of the ordinance is also the subject of a new exhibition, “Do We Dare Squander Chicago’s Great Architectural Heritage?,” at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. It’ll be interesting to see if Goeken has anything to say about that.   

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