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Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago
Architecture, Institutions, and the Making of a Modern Metropolis
By EDWARD W. WOLNER The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2011 The University of Chicago
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-90561-7
Chapter One
The Union Club, Self-Made Men, and Chicago's First Period of Growth
In September 1881, Henry Ives Cobb, in his first year as an architect at the prestigious Boston firm of Peabody & Stearns, entered a competition sponsored by the Union Club of Chicago to design a clubhouse on Washington Square in the middle of the well-to-do North Side. Cobb almost certainly learned of the competition through his older brother and club treasurer Albert Wheelwright Cobb, a fellow Harvard alumnus and Boston Brahmin who had moved to Chicago to enter the importing business to which his father had introduced him in Boston. Soon after he arrived he helped found the Union Club in 1878. With such prominent members as real estate developers Potter Palmer and Charles Henrotin, the club, which consisted mostly of affluent younger men like Albert Cobb, enjoyed a prestige out of proportion to its short history.
The competition and the club's membership underlined four features of Chicago's increasing social complexity in this period. First, after the cataclysmic fire of 1871, Chicago businessmen, who before the fire had made the city the economically dominant metropolis in the Midwest, not only rebuilt and extended the technological and organizational infrastructure of the prefire period, but also launched multiple campaigns to make the city just as notable for its metropolitan culture. The campaigns included Chicago's intensified club rivalries, which led to initiatives like the Union Club's architectural competition, then a rarely used means in Chicago to secure the best possible design for a building, and to the city's first architecturally sophisticated clubhouses.
Second, the club's North Side membership highlighted that neighborhood's pivotal role in the pre- and postfire phases of Chicago's development, and helps explain why Henry Ives Cobb, like his brother Albert, moved there to establish his first firm. Third, although self-made men by definition did not inherit the wealth, family name, educational opportunities, and social status that members of the most selective men's clubs typically did, the Union Club, with its mix of patricians like Albert Cobb and self-makers like Potter Palmer, showed how permeable the barriers between self-made and clubbable men in Chicago could be, and how open the city's arenas of ambition actually were. Fourth, the competition and its outcomes underlined aspects of the recent professionalization of architecture, ones that slowly displaced the local apprenticeships and the strictly local practices that in the prefire period were nearly the only means to attain recognition from peers and the public.
Social Clubs and the 1881 Competition
The Union Club's competition measured how quickly the rivalries among elite men's clubs in Chicago and other cities had intensified. Only a year before, the membership had not contemplated a new facility at all. Instead, like many Chicago clubs, it occupied quarters not originally designed as a clubhouse. Even so, the property it leased on the north side of Washington Square revealed the membership's social ambitions and set the stage for the later clubhouse campaign, a stage for which the square's history provided an indispensable backdrop.
A three-acre parcel that a land speculation company gave the municipality in 1842, just five years after Chicago's incorporation as a city, Washington Square was an amenity that attracted people and groups who built fine homes and churches in the neighborhood bordered by State, Division, Chicago, and LaSalle Streets (fig. 1.1). In 1869, the city formally landscaped the park with trees, lawns, and diagonal walks, making it Chicago's single example of the urbane residential squares of cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Savannah, and New York, whose own Washington Square perhaps suggested the name of Chicago's.
The club's leased property had its own historical associations. The grounds and its Second Empire house constituted about one half of the Mahlon Ogden estate, which covered the entire block bordered by Washington Square, Dearborn Avenue, and Oak and Clark Streets (fig. 1.1, B). Ogden had been one of Chicago's early settlers, a lawyer, and a prominent figure in real estate and public affairs. Chicagoans into the 1890s mythicized his home as the only North Side property to survive the 1871 fire. But Ogden, reeling from the millions of dollars he lost in the conflagration, had placed this and his other properties in trust for creditors in the same year the Union Club was founded. The club's payments on the lease therefore serviced the mortgage held on Ogden's property by the trustees of another well-known estate, that of Walter L. Newberry, a yet more lionized early settler who, like Ogden, had made a fortune buying and selling land before the fire.
The square, Ogden's estate, and club activities like summer concerts led the Chicago Tribune to claim that "a more eligible location for a club-house ... would indeed be difficult to find throughout the length and breadth of the city." With an "elegant" building and "fine grounds" used for "games and ... several delightful lawn parties in the summer season," the property, in the middle of "the best" residential neighborhood on the North Side, fronted on "one of the prettiest parks in the city," and "under the present real-estate boom" was bound to increase greatly in value. Six months later, however, the club dropped its option to buy the property and instead purchased a less expensive, smaller lot fronting the park on the opposite side of the square, at the southwest corner of Dearborn Avenue and Washington Place (fig. 1.1, A).
A new clubhouse illustrated the social competition then heating up among elite men's clubs in Chicago and New York. After first pledging forty thousand dollars for the project, the Union Club, with more than three hundred members, increased that amount by 50 percent "to outdo" the Calumet Club, whose own plans for a new clubhouse had, in the Tribune's view of the matter, "inspired [a] generous rivalry [with] that enterprising institution on the South Side." For the Calumet Club, the firm of Burnham & Root had designed a four-story building of arcaded windows, red-brick walls, terra cotta trim, and a picturesque skyline of dormers, turrets, chimneys, and roof ornaments—features appropriate to what many regarded as the city's most "aristocratic" club (fig. 1.2).
Although it was no older or larger than the Union Club, the Calumet enjoyed this reputation because its clubhouse at Michigan Avenue and Twenty-First Street was only a short block away from the mansions lining fashionable Prairie Avenue, and many of the avenue's residents were club members, along with some of Chicago's most prominent businessmen, including meatpacker George Armour, industrialist George Pullman, and dry-goods merchants Marshall Field and Levi Leiter. A few Union Club members like Potter Palmer were just as well known, but its other members were not, and their North Side mansions and townhouses were not concentrated along a single, highly recognizable avenue. These facts made the club's site on elegant Washington Square and its architectural competition that much more important in the status rivalry.
In seeking to do for club life on the North Side what its rival had just done for the South Side, the building committee of the Union Club solicited "plans and specifications" from a small number of firms. Each had to submit a design "without the architects' names attached," so that the committee might judge the designs on "their merits," with "no room for ... favoritism." A follow-up article in the Tribune stated that the club had increased the building budget another 25 percent (to seventy-five thousand dollars), and that of the four different designs under review, the ones that "seem to meet the most favor are believed to be the work of Burnham and Root." The irony that members favored the rival club's architects, or that Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root both belonged to the Calumet Club, apparently did not matter. Since their firm was just hitting its stride in commissions for homes, churches, and office buildings—its ten-story Montauk Block was set to become Chicago's tallest structure—the committee instead used Burnham & Root's growing reputation and the competition itself to enhance its own social standing in the pages of the city's leading newspaper.
Such jockeying for status created the nation's first examples of the imposing club buildings that already lined Pall Mall and St. James's Street in London, the Anglophile's capital of cosmopolitan club culture. And in a booming urban America, 1881 was the threshold year: at the same time as the rivalry between Chicago's principal North and South Side clubs heated up, Manhattan's Union League Club, a group of prominent Republicans, moved into their clubhouse on Fifth Avenue, its bristling monumentality the result of a competition held in 1879 and won by Peabody & Stearns just before Cobb went to work for the firm (fig. 1.3).
Preceded by six clubs founded shortly before and after the fire, and motivated by urban anonymity, individual ambition, and group desires to reinforce and advance their class, wealth, family, social, and business standing, Chicago's clubhouse fever in the 1880s confirmed an early Chicago historian's view that men's clubs were rapidly becoming "indispensable to modern city life."
But if the building committee favored Burnham & Root early in the competition, it was Cobb's design that in mid-December emerged as the membership's unanimous choice. His selection was remarkable in part because of his youth. When the Tribune called Cobb "a young man" it failed to note that he was just twenty-two, in his first year of practice, unacquainted with Chicago, and without the varied experience that Burnham & Root had already accumulated between 1873 and 1881, years when they designed and built more than forty buildings.
Nor did the newspaper mention that Cobb brought unusual social and professional assets to the club, for not long after he had won the competition he announced his intention to move from Boston to Chicago. The assets included everything in his Brahmin pedigree: scion of one of Boston's First Families, a graduate of Harvard and MIT, and a respected architect at Peabody & Stearns. Cobb and his brother Albert were also acquainted with club life through their uncle John Candler. During one of his three terms as president of Boston's Commercial Club (1868), the prestige of that organization caused several Chicago businessmen to pay for Candler's visit to the city in 1877, an event that catalyzed the formation of Chicago's own Commercial Club.
But that Cobb was an ideal catch for the Union Club hardly explains why he quickly abandoned Boston, "the Athens of America," to launch a career in what was still an upstart city. He forsook New York City's opportunities as well, since his fiancée was Emma Martin Smith, a direct descendant on her mother's side of a dissident Quaker in New Amsterdam and of Walter Bowne, an early nineteenth-century New York State senator and New York City mayor. Since her father was Augustus F. Smith, a well-known Manhattan attorney with an international clientele in America and Europe, his prominence and her maternal lineage would likely have yielded the social contacts necessary to launch a promising architectural career in Manhattan. Why did this educated, ambitious, talented, and patrician architect choose Chicago and its North Side instead? Meeting the merchants who formed Chicago's Commercial Club may have led his uncle to talk up the city's business and professional prospects with his nephews. Having lived there for more than three years, Albert Cobb might also have urged his younger brother to move, or Cobb may have seen enough of Chicago on short visits to the city to convince him to do so. Be that as it may, the neighborhood's history and privileged position in the Chicago of the 1880s had much to offer in the way of seeding the career of an architect as young as Cobb.
Self-Made Men and Chicago's First Period of Growth, 1835–1871
In many ways, the North Side's development and that of much of the rest of Chicago was catalyzed by Mahlon Ogden's brother, William Butler Ogden, whose own estate before its destruction in the 1871 fire was a short walk away from the Union Club site. William Ogden established so many of Chicago's most important institutions and business enterprises that by the time he died in 1877, four years before Cobb entered the Union Club competition, Ogden's multiple legacies constituted much of what people identified with Chicago's distinct character.
An upstate New Yorker who settled in the frontier village of Chicago in 1836 to manage his brother-in-law's extensive holdings in land, Ogden made a fortune in real estate, became Chicago's first mayor, promoted the Illinois and Michigan Canal that linked Chicago to burgeoning international trade on the Mississippi River, and developed the city's first railroads, without which Chicago's extraordinarily rapid development was unthinkable. After launching the Galena and Chicago Union Railroad in 1848 with lawyer J. Young Scammon and fellow real estate speculator Walter Newberry, Ogden founded and aggregated lines in Wisconsin and northern Illinois to form the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad, of which he was president from 1859 to 1868. When Congress authorized a transcontinental railroad in 1862 he became the first president of the Union Pacific.
Exploiting the railroad's capacity to make Chicago a transshipment and manufacturing center, Ogden also developed lumber mills at Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and ironworks at Brady's Bend, Pennsylvania. In 1847, when Cyrus Hall McCormick, who had recently perfected the reaper, moved from Virginia to Chicago, Ogden was his partner in the reaper factory he constructed less than a mile south of Washington Square. Like Ogden with his ironworks, lumber mills, and railroads, McCormick pioneered some of the first modern economies of scale when he deployed a novel kind of organization: a national sales force whose success radically transformed agriculture on the vast, level farmlands of the Midwest and the Great Plains that were ideally suited to his new machine.
Ogden's railroads and McCormick's reapers were two of the enterprises behind Chicago's exponential, recognizably modern rates of economic growth. In facilitating McCormick's move to Chicago, Ogden became an entrepreneur of entrepreneurs, one among the reasons why people like Henry Strong, who worked with Ogden at Peshtigo, thought he had no peer "in the planning and management of large enterprises," for his "constitution of iron ... executive power of a high order, ability to master the details of anything he had on hand ... faith in his own judgment and plans, and an unbending will [allowed him] to carry through to completion, and against all opposition, anything he undertook." Men like Ogden, Strong declared, made Chicago "one of the powers of the earth."
Ogden's public and cultural initiatives were just as various and remarkable. Ogden was an abolitionist, a donor of land to expand the North Shore's Lincoln Park, and a founder, an officer, or a board member of the Chicago Historical Society, Rush Medical College, the first University of Chicago, and the Astronomical Society. Ogden corresponded with artists, commissioned work for his private gallery, persuaded the expatriate portrait painter George P. A. Healy to relocate from Paris to Chicago, and recruited John Van Osdel, an apprentice architect in New York City, to move to Chicago to design Ogden's North Side estate and Chicago's first City Hall and County Courthouse (1853).
In these and other activities Ogden exemplified the civic humanism then common even in small midwestern and northeastern cities. His recruitment of Chicago's first major architect was instructive. Unlike Cobb some thirty years later, the uncertified Van Osdel attended no school of architecture organized around extralocal standards. Like almost all architects of his generation, his success depended on a local building culture, local apprenticeships, and sponsorship by a local elite.
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Excerpted from Henry Ives Cobb's Chicago by EDWARD W. WOLNER Copyright © 2011 by The University of Chicago . Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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