Ask Geoffrey: 10/15


Geoffrey Baer visits the site of a famously tiny Loop restaurant, a suburban neighborhood endorsed by an Olympian, and those scary steel fire escapes on downtown buildings.


In the ‘50s I remember what must have been the smallest restaurant in the Loop, on Jackson between State and Wabash. It was only about 30 feet wide.
Patrick J. Colombo, Clarendon Hills

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The tiny building at 22 E. Jackson – it’s actually only 19 by 19 feet! – has been home to a number of establishments in its more than 120 years of existence. The longest occupant was Abson’s Chop House, from 1871 to 1900. It was owned by a British couple named William and Fannie Abson and they lived on the third floor of the building. Like modern chop houses, it was a popular hangout for bankers, politicians, and actors. Their specialty was a 2-inch-thick broiled mutton chop.

Abson’s was followed by the Red Path Inn, Robinson’s, the Pickwick Café, and finally, a restaurant named 22 East in 1942, which is probably what the viewer remembers. 

Official city records date the building to 1892, but according to the Chicago Tribune, a stable was in that location as early as 1857, at the end of the cobblestone alley known as Pickwick Lane. The stable’s owner, Henry Horner, was the grandfather of the Illinois governor also named Henry Horner. The younger Horner played in the stables as a child.

Since then, it’s fair to say that the city grew up around this little lot, leaving it in the shadows of taller buildings and virtually eliminating it from the view of passersby. But a new coffee shop is hoping to change that. Asado Coffee Company is preparing to open in the tiny space to serve occupants of the adjoining buildings. The historic Steger Building and the Gibbons Building flanking the coffee shop are both undergoing renovations into student housing for graduate students of the universities and law schools in that area of the Loop. So when Asado Coffee opens, they’ll have plenty of caffeine-deprived grad students to serve.

By the way, the developer that renovated the Steger and Gibbons Buildings, CA Ventures, was recently honored by Landmarks Illinois for that project.

In the ‘60s, Olympian Jesse Owens did ads for a housing development called Kingston Green. Was it ever developed? If so, where and what do they call it now?
David Springer, Printer’s Row

Kingston Green did in fact get developed in the 1960s in south suburban Markham. Many of the homes that were built during that period are still there, and you’ll still find it referred to as Kingston Green in some real estate listings today.

The Kingston Green community got its start in 1959, when real estate developer Bill Alter created a plan to build about 1,000 homes in the burgeoning suburb of Markham and market them to middle-class African-American families looking to leave the city for quiet suburban life. As part of his strategy to attract these families, Alter brought on Jesse Owens as a special consultant and national spokesman. Jesse Owens, of course, was a four-time Olympic gold medalist most famous for his dominating track and field performance in the 1936 Berlin games

Owens appeared in TV commercials and print ads extolling the virtues of the Kingston Green subdivision. The advertisements featured the many different house styles available with names like “the Primrose” or “the Oak,” a model Jesse Owens himself declared “the most home for the money I have ever seen.” The split-level, ranch and Cape Cod style homes boasted modern features like upper-level patios, rec rooms, and attached carports.

Of course, this was during the Civil Rights Era of 1960s, when integration of schools and neighborhoods was greeted with a great deal of conflict. Like many Chicago suburbs and neighborhoods at the time, Markham was mostly populated by white families. So it’s worth noting that Bill Alter not only sought out black homebuyers, he also hired a mostly black sales staff and employed black contractors to do the homebuilding. His efforts were pretty successful – the year New Horizons began selling Kingston Green homes, they sold 100 homes in just four months. The homes continued to sell steadily throughout the decade, increasing the black population in Markham more than 300 percent between 1960 and 1970.

Unlike in other suburbs and Chicago neighborhoods, white families remained in Markham after the black families moved in, and the suburb remained peacefully integrated for quite some time. Today Markham is 81 percent African American according to the most recent census figures.

But the Kingston Green development did have a different kind of trouble in the 1960s: flooding! Repeated floods led families to abandon about 40 of the homes by 1974, and the neighborhood experienced some decline as a result, but today, the majority of the homes that Jesse Owens helped sell still stand in Markham.

 

 

What is the history of fire escapes on buildings in Chicago? Why don’t we need them on modern buildings? What happens when older buildings are renovated?
Bob Johnson, Buffalo Grove

The first building code in Chicago was published in 1875 with lessons learned in the Great Fire of 1871. It mandated non-combustible fire escapes for all new and existing buildings of four or more stories that did not otherwise have two interior stairways leading outside. So any building constructed after 1875 would have been built with metal fire escapes as part of the design unless it had those two interior stairways.

We spoke with Gunny Harboe, a Chicago architect who has worked extensively on historic buildings with old fire escapes. Harboe pointed us to the 1895 Reliance Building which his firm restored and converted into the Hotel Burnham in 1999. He said it originally had a steel fire escape that was basically a vertical ladder with small landings at each floor. People accessed the ladder from the windows. That fire escape was replaced with the more familiar “zigzag” type of fire escape about 20 years later.

Architect and consultant Christopher Chwedyk told us that modern buildings do have fire escapes, but they are inside the building. These interior fire stairs are enclosed within fire-rated walls and doors. The fire stairs provide an uninterrupted exit path all the way down the building and out to the street. Developers renovating older existing buildings are strongly encouraged by the fire department to remove exterior fire escapes and replace them with these interior escapes. Of course, this means stealing some floor area that would otherwise be used for occupied space. This is what Gunny Harboe’s firm did when it restored the Reliance Building in 1999, and this is currently being done on a this 1927 building on Monroe and Clark, which Christopher Chwedyk’s firm is helping renovate into a hotel to be called the Hyatt Loop.

Buildings constructed before 1950 can maintain their existing fire escapes, but they can be dangerous to use – not to mention terrifying! Per code, buildings constructed after 1949 may use an exterior escape only it if doesn’t extend higher than 30 feet above the ground (or three stories or less).

 

 

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