If you like this article, read more about Milwaukee-area history and architecture in the hundreds of other similar articles in the Urban Spelunking series here.
Partisanship is real.
I got another lesson in it recently when I visited the beautiful, ground-breaking and ahead-of-its-time Charnley-Perksy House in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood.
Designed by the landmark architecture firm of Adler & Sullivan and constructed in 1891-2, the home looks modern even now, more than 130 years later, with its open plan interior, its exterior horizontality, its clean lines lightly dotted with ornate details.
It’s pure Louis Sullivan.
Or it’s pure Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked on the house in his role as a draughtsman at Adler & Sullivan.
“It's very complicated,” says Olivia Archer, who is communications manager for the Society of Architectural Historians, which owns the house now via a foundation and uses some of its rooms as its national headquarters.
“People who are more familiar with Wright’s later work ... step into this space and say, ‘oh, I see it.’ Does that mean that’s Wright's influence showing up here or is it maybe the opposite and it's actually Sullivan's influence showing up in Wright's work later?
“Even our docents are split on this. We've got people on both sides. We've always said that we should just have a running little score tally in the basement of when people come back to the tour center before they leave of like, ‘okay, now that you've had the tour, please vote’.”
A look at Winslow House, Wright’s first major commission after leaving Adler & Sullivan, designed in 1893, is no help. It’s very, very similar to Charnley House, but, again, who influenced who?
“It’s a bit of a mystery,” Archer says. “But we can't see into that relationship between Sullivan and Wright at that time.”
No documentation is known to survive that would clarify the situation.
“The house has been advertised historically as Frank Lloyd Wright’s because that's a name that everybody's knows," says Archer, “and we lean into that a little bit, too, as we know that people who come for our tours are here because this house is listed by the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy as one of his works.”
Me, I’m taking a middle of the road view that it was – officially and consciously, or not – a collaboration of two great architectural minds. After all, it seems pretty clear and accepted that Wright learned a lot from Sullivan – whom Wright would later call his “master” – but that the young artist also brought some ideas of his own, as he did to the Auditorium Theater (albeit, perhaps, in a much more limited way there).
Interestingly, Robert Twombley, who wrote one of the best known and most in-depth biographies of Sullivan, seems to have been of a similar mind.
“Most authorities accept (Wright's) claim to have been the actual architect of the $25,000 Charnley house, designed in June 1891, a brilliant building, remarkably clean and straightforward for its day, with smooth, skinlike, taut brick walls, an early landmark of the modern movement,” he wrote in “Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work.”
“It is not like earlier Sullivan houses, although certain details like the front-door window (pictured above) and the porch’s balusters and frieze reveal either Wright’s mastery of his employer’s ornament or the employer’s hand itself.”
The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust takes a similar stance, noting on its website that the, “house brings together the work of two of Chicago’s most progressive architects, Frank Lloyd Wright and his mentor, Louis Sullivan. The building stands as one of the few major residential commissions realized by Sullivan. Wright served as lead draftsman on the project, contributing significantly to the design.”
Regardless of who gets the credit, the house is clearly a work of art.
On the exterior, the house has its main entrance on the wide side facing Astor Street, which is an interesting change for the neighborhood which is mostly populated by row houses with their main entrances on the narrower fronts.
However, in this case, because Astor doglegs at the house, had the entrance been on the Schiller Street side, it would’ve looked directly up Astor (and would’ve been the main view for everyone walking or riding down Astor toward Schiller) for better or for worse.
It has a long, limestone base upon which walls of tan Roman brick are stacked. The limestone of the base rises up to frame the main doorway and its adjacent windows, too. This definitely has a Wright feel.
On the second floor above the main entrance is a wooden balcony that projects out from the facade with its balusters and distinctly Sullivanesque motifs.
Inside, there is gorgeous woodwork, metalwork, tile around the fireplace that greets visitors upon entering, leaded and art glass, much of it in pure Sullivan style.
Still, the open plan and lack of doors, the skylit atrium that provides Wright’s classic release from the compression created by the entrance foyer, the vertical wooden screen only subtly, but not completely masking the main staircase ... this feels very Wrightian (though one need only visit the aforementioned Auditorium to see that Sullivan was no stranger to compression and release).
On the lower level – a raised basement level – were the servants’ areas, such as the kitchen and larder. On the first floor a butler’s pantry was tucked next to a narrow servants’ staircase, both of which led to the dining room with its stunning Sullivan fireplace surround.
Passing through that atrium there was a parlor with built-in bookcases.
Upstairs were bedrooms and on the top floor, which appears nearly windowless from the exterior on Astor Street were the living quarters for the Charnley family’s butler and maid.
So, who were the Charnleys?
Well, first off, it bears saying that in 1890, by the time they commissioned Adler & Sullivan to design this house, they were not only friends of Sullivan’s but also his neighbors and previous clients, having had him design a home in Ocean Springs, Mississippi on land they owned next to the architect’s.
Add to this that Dankmar Adler had designed for Charnley’s father-in-law the Erie Street house in which the Charnleys resided for a time.
These connections would suggest that Sullivan couldn’t or wouldn’t hand off the entire Charnley project to his draftsman ... another vote for collaboration!
James Charnley was born in Philadelphia in 1944, lived in an octagon house designed by renowned New England architect Henry Austin and studied at Yale.
In 1866 he moved to Chicago where he started Bradner, Charnley & Co., a timber business, with his brother and brother-in-law. That morphed into Charnley Bros. & Co. in 1872. Five years later, he would launch James Charnley & Co with his father-in-law.
During his career, Charnley would have significant lumber interests in Sturgeon Bay in Door County.
Of course, the 1871 fire that had devastated Chicago created a building boom that surely was good for the lumber business and for Charnley.
Thus when Charnley wanted a substantial new house at Division Street and Lake Shore Drive for himself and his wife Helen Douglas – whose father, like Sullivan’s brother, was an executive in the Illinois Central Railroad – he had the means to tap no less than Burnham & Root to design it.
Why they left this 1882 house is unclear – though some have suggested its siting wasn't suited to Chicago's blustery cold winters – but when the new Astor Street house was completed in 1892, the Charnleys moved in with their teenaged son Douglas.
Two daughters, aged about 7 and 5, had died during an 1883 diptheria epidemic.
The Charnleys moved out of the house – and Chicago – permanently in 1901, but they did not sell it right away, renting it first to the Winterbotham family from 1902 to 1904, then to Ogden and Marion McClurg (he of the Lake Shore Building Company, which helped kick off the development of apartment buildings on Lake Shore Drive in Streeterville) for two years; and finally, in 1906, to Redmond and Mation Stephens, who ended up buying the house for $24,000 five years later.
The Stephens family sold the house in 1918 to Chicago real estate man James Breckenridge Waller, Jr., and the Waller family would remain for nearly half a century.
A widower at the time, Waller settled into the house with his son James B. Waller III, who inherited the place when the elder Waller died in 1920.
Waller III married in 1925 and soon there were two children in the house. After divorcing, Waller remarried in 1935 to a woman with two sons.
Now, room was needed and so in 1927 Waller put a three-story addition onto the south end of the house, knocking the symmetrical design off-balance.
Fortunately, however, Waller decided against his idea two years later of tearing the whole thing down and building taller.
Waller died in 1949 but his widow, Nettie, remained in the house for another 20 years, reportedly swinging open the door to pretty much anyone who rang the bell and asked to see inside.
In 1969, she sold it to Hawley Smith Jr. and his wife, who had said they intended to live there but stayed only briefly before renting it out.
Sensing a whiff of trouble, perhaps, the city began to discuss landmarking it, which, no surprise, was fought by Smith, who had also bought some adjacent lots and buildings and made no secret of his desire to raze it all and build a high-rise.
Again, thankfully that never happened and Smith went elsewhere while he tried to sell it. In the meantime he allowed the Frances W. Parker School use it as a showhouse setting to raise money and in spring 1975 the rooms were all redecorated by local designers.
The following year, Smith had another bright idea: create condos in the house by dividing it up and adding units onto the back. The Commission on Chicago Landmarks thankfully shot down this scheme and Smith sold the house to Lowell Wohlfeil and Inland Steel heir Larry Duvall who began work to restore the house, including fixing and restoring the balcony, cornices, chimneys and more.
Putting the house up for sale, the owners rejected a number of offers that would’ve threatened preservation of the interior before the SOM Foundation – world-famous architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s foundation – bought it to house its headquarters and the soon-to-be created Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism (CIAU).
As any responsible firm would do, SOM – reponsible for the renovation work – researched the house and planned a complete restoration that would adapt it for everyday use as the SOM Foundation, including offices, meetings, lectures, etc.
That work, which included removing the 1927 addition, was finished in 1988, but six years later, the SOM Foundation closed the CIAU.
This is when Seymour Persky enters the picture.
A Chicago philanthropist with a passion for architecture, Persky bought the Charnley House and offered it to the Society of Architectural Historians, if the group would agree to move to the Windy City from its home in Philadelphia (much as Charnley himself had done more than a century earlier).
When the the officers and directors of SAH agreed, Persky sold it the society with money he donated and ever since, the SAH’s offices have, appropriately, occupied a real architectural landmark.
"This was always a goal of the Society's, to support an architecturally significant building as a physical manifestation of its mission of education and preservation," says Archer.
According to a written history of the Society published in 1998, it occupied two offices in Philadelphia before moving to Chicago. First, a rented room at 1700 Walnut Street near Rittenhouse Square and later in an 1830s Greek revival townhouse at 1232 Pine Street.
"That latter property excited them as, I quote, 'a more gracious setting for daily work and the welcoming of members and other visitors.'" Archer says. "But when the call came for Chicago, a revered architecture town, the opportunity must have been too good to pass up."
Best of all for you and me, SAH offers regular tours of the house, led by knowledgeable docents.
And when you’re walking through, you just may see Archer and her colleagues at their desks in the former bedrooms.
“We actually got moved here in ‘95 and in ‘96 we had the house open for public tours,” she says. “So we didn't waste a whole lot of time in getting people in to see the space. That's part of our educational mission. Yes, we work in this building, but we also want to maintain it as a resource for the public.”
It’s a pretty inspiring place for someone who works for SAH to spend their work days.
“I know, it’s gorgeous,” Archer confirms, nodding out the door to the sleek wooden screen in the atrium. “I get to look at that screen all day long. It’s just beautiful.”
To book a tour or rent space for an event, visit sah.org/about-sah/charnley-persky-house.
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.
