Urban Spelunking is brought to you by Nicolet Law.
CHICAGO – Milwaukee has some impressive architecture, including works by big name landmark architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Burnham, Santiago Calatrava, William LeBaron Jenney and others.
But one architectural giant who didn’t work in Milwaukee was Henry Hobson Richardson, who was so influential that when an architectural trade magazine polled the nation’s top architects in the 1880s for their opinions on the most important American buildings, five of the top 10 were Richardson works.
Heck, he even has a whole style named after him – Richardsonian Romanesque – and there are lots of examples of those in Milwaukee, including the federal building on Wisconsin Avenue, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on the lower east side, the Loyalty Building (home to Hilton Garden Inn) on Broadway and more.
The closest we get to a Richardson building, geographically, is Chicago’s Glessner House, 1800 S. Prairie Ave., which he designed in 1885 and which was completed in 1887, a year after his death.
The house’s owner – John J. Glessner – also has a loose Milwaukee connection. Glessner earned his fortune in the farm equipment game, rising to the role of partner in Warder, Bushnell and Glessner, which in 1902, would merge with Milwaukee Harvester and three other companies to create International Harvester.
Glessner was appointed VP of the new conglomerate and he served in that role for many years.
Glessner was living in Springfield, Ohio, where his company was headquartered, when he met and, in 1870, married Frances MacBeth. The couple moved to Chicago, where Glessner was sent to open a branch office of the firm. They arrived just in time for the 1871 Great Chicago Fire, which was a tide-turning moment in terms of architecture and construction in the city.
After living for a time on the west side, the Glessners wanted a place on high-falutin’ Prairie Avenue, where magnates lived in homes designed by big-name architects.
They bought a plot of land on the southwest corner of Prairie Avenue and East 18th Street, across the street from George Pullman, and tore down the existing Hitchcock House on the site.
At the time, the houses directly across Prairie Avenue were not yet constructed and the (pre-landfill) shoreline was closer, so the site had a lake view.
In order to keep up with the likes of the Pullmans, Glessner needed a top-notch name in architecture and in 1885 there was no one above Richardson.
The second American (after Richard Morris Hunt) to attend the prestigious École des Beaux Arts in Paris, Richardson was there when the Civil War broke out and he stayed on. However, when his family’s fortunes suffered due to the war, he was unable to finish his studies there.
Returning home, Richardson began working on a variety of projects, and adapting Romanesque architecture he’d seen in France, especially for the 1870 Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, which he worked on with his good friend Frederick Law Olmsted.
His Trinity Church in Boston (1872-77) really made his name.
Richardson brought in features from a variety of styles from the 11th and 12th centuries to create his often monumental buildings. There were broad almost horizontal arches, stumpy columns, rusticated stonework, lots of French chateau-looking turrets and towers, interesting groupings of windows, including a sort of tic-tac-toe grouping of small windows that can be seen on many Richardsonian Romanesque structures, including the Glessner House.
On larger works, like the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago (now razed), Richardson used bands of different window configurations to create visual interest and sometimes to create a horizontal focus.
No less than Louis Sullivan was especially enamored with the Field Wholesale Store and was influenced by it to create his design for the Auditorium Building, on which he used an extremely similar approach.
Richardson traveled to Chicago to meet his new clients and they reportedly quickly became friends.
Together they visited the site and the next day, while at dinner together, Richardson did an initial sketch and as a display at the house today notes, it drew upon elements of England’s Abingdon Abbey, which was pictured in a photograph the Glessners had, as well as Normandy’s Manoir d’Ango, of which Richardson possessed a photograph.
It’s interesting to see just how much that May 14, 1885 sketch resembled the floor plan of the completed home.
In an interesting twist – especially on Prairie Avenue, where homeowners clearly wanted passersby to see their glorious houses – Richardson turned the house inward, creating an L-shaped footprint that enclosed a courtyard behind the house.
Facing Prairie Avenue was a horizontally oriented greystone-clad house nearly right up to the sidewalk with a beautiful entrance, but not a ton of ornament otherwise.
On the 18th Street side the stone facade does literally touch the sidewalk and with its narrow slit windows, it looks as foreboding as any medieval castle in France.
Neighbors were less than thrilled. One said it resembled a jail. Another said if there were ever an invasion at least they’d know where they could run to safety.
Pullman moaned, "I do not know what I have ever done to have that thing staring me in the face every time I go out of my door." (Interesting to note that his Second Empire mansion has long since been demolished and replaced with townhouses and a tower.)
But it made sense. Before the area was built up, the site could expect to get pummeled with wind off the lake from the north and so the 18th Street facade was a good barrier.
Richardson even carefully protected the servants' entrance on this side by almost hiding it within a broad arch shaped like a G (for Glessner?).
The Prairie Avenue side, which would’ve had a lake view back then, got more windows.
The courtyard is the more traditionally picturesque side, with exposed Chicago Common brick and a facade dotted with features like an apse that enclosed the dining room and a second-floor greenhouse; a rounded bay that formed the back wall of the expansive entrance hall; and a turret that housed a spiral staircase.
Here there were plenty more windows, all ornamented with the Indiana limestone that Glessner had wanted to cover the entire facade of the home. Richardson, explaining that weather would take a toll on this material, talked him out of it, leading to the use of the Braggville granite that faces the street sides.
The Glessners raised two children in the home and held countless parties, especially with members of the Chicago Symphony, of which Frances Glessner was a staunch supporter.
Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky likely played the piano in the parlor, and Enrico Caruso left a self-portrait – now framed – at the end of his visit.
The Glessners lived in the home until John Glessner’s death in 1936 at the age of 92. The family gave the house to the Armour Institute (which merged to create the Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1937 and after about 8 years of use, they leased it to the Lithographic Technical Foundation, which used it as a testing site for printing presses.
Thus was the house filled will a variety of presses for testing and research until the foundation moved to Pittsburgh in the early 1960s, at which point there were fears that the home could be lost.
It was listed for sale for $70,000 and drew no offers. The threat of demolition led to the creation of the Chicago School of Architecture Foundation (later renamed the Chicago Architecture Foundation) with the goal of saving it.
The same year, 1966, Philip Johnson, Harry Weese (who designed Milwaukee’s Marcus Performing Arts Center) and his brother Ben Weese, and group of other architects and preservationists pooled funds and offered $35,000 for the house, and their offer was accepted.
Now, the home, which is a museum you can tour, is beautifully preserved and restored, and about 90 percent of what is inside belonged to the Glessners.
Fortunately, Frances Glessner kept a daily log of the goings on in the house – who visited, what they had for dinner, etc. – and their son George was a devoted photographer, so there are many photographs of how the interior looked during the time the family lived there.
Over the years, the Glessner family has also returned many objects to the house, including hand-crafted furniture and frames; decorative Arts & Crafts tiles and pottery; original and recreated William Morris wallpaper, furniture and fabrics; and examples of some of the varied work that Frances Glessner did in addition to practicing her impressive piano skills.
Frances was also a jewelry maker and a silversmith, among other pursuits.
She also made honey and kept doves in a dovecote that can be seen above the carriage house on the 18th Street side. These recesses near the peak of the gable were nests for doves. The backs of these recesses could be accessed from inside the coach house in order to retrieve eggs.
The house has the Glessners’ large collection of prints and their expansive library of books, which could be called upon during the weekly book club meetings that Frances Glessner led with sometimes as many as 50 women from the neighborhood as a means of helping new arrivals become acquainted with their neighbors.
One entire wing of the home was meant for the servants, of which there were eight – four men and four women (most of whom were required to live onside and be unmarried).
They each had a bedroom and there was an outdoor balcony.
These were above the kitchen, cold storage, butler’s pantry and other related back-of-house facilities, many of which had walls covered in glazed brick, giving them a more utilitarian feel.
The attached coach house, which still has its rings for tying up the horses in the back area – the front was reserved for the carriages – was also mostly covered in the easy-to-clean glazed brick.
There were two guest bedrooms upstairs and two bedrooms for the kids, with a secret door connecting the kids' rooms.
The first floor had the dining room, the library, the master bedroom and, up some stairs from the main entrance, a wide reception area leading to the main staircase.
This area was modeled on a medieval hall and has an exposed beam ceiling with heavy duty hardware connecting the elements.
Above the stairs leading from the entrance to the hall was a small balcony, a perfect reading nook, with cork-covered walls that allowed the Glessners to use it as something of a changing art gallery.
The idea came from Richardson's own home, where he had installed cork on the walls so that when he was ill and stuck in bed, he could have project drawings pinned up where he could see them.
The library, with its fireplace, heavy wooden table in the center and walls lined with books, was reportedly modeled on Richardson's own study.
The dining room has exquisite Syrian tiles around the fireplace and on the opposite wall, the interior of the apse we could see from outside in the courtyard.
The tiles had been removed by the Glessners when they left the house, but were later returned, although some were damaged over the years. Two originals remain and the others seen today were recreated.
The master bedroom is also on the first floor, a rarity in homes from an era when the family bedrooms were all typically together on a single floor.
The his-and-hers dressing rooms are impressive, with hers serving only to hold the four outfits she'd wear each day, brought down from the top floor wardrobe storage daily by one of the servants.
The adjacent bathroom is one of the spaces in the home that is still awaiting restoration. An enlarged photo on an easel shows how it looked in the Glessners' era.
On the lower level was a schoolroom, where the children were educated, with many books and teaching materials.
It is in this space that I learned that the Glessner’s daughter Frances Glessner Lee was a pioneer in the field of criminal forensic science.
In addition to leading annual conferences to help educate law enforcement on the latest techniques in “legal medicine,” Fanny used to create “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” which were finely detailed dioramas of crime scenes used to educate criminal investigators to, in her words, “convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”
Her brother George (who later added "John" to the start of his name) would follow into his father's business before relocating to New Hampshire, where the family kept a second home, called The Rocks.
There, he entered politics serving four terms in the state legislature. In that role, he was among the men who led the initiative to establish the New Hampshire presidential primary as the first in the country.
Do yourself a favor next time you’re in Chicago, take the tour, and when you do, ask for the free brochure that helps you explore the other architectural treasures in the neighborhood.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
