In our continuing efforts to keep Chicago’s terra cotta treasures high in the general consciousness, consider these gems:
This storefront at Elston and Irving seems to have survived — not unlike a lot of great architecture — through a combination of benign neglect and a depressed real estate market.
It really doesn’t look like much when you whiz by in a car. But if you take the time to stop and look, it’s pretty wonderful.
People always quote Mies van der Rohe for saying “less is more,” but I have always liked his pronouncement that “God is in the details.” He was actually talking about the smallest fine points of a design [an architect I used to know told me that you could tell everything about a project by how well the hand-rails were executed], and most certainly he wasn’t referring to decoration, but it’s hard to deny the essence of divinity in details like these:
I am surmising that the same modeler who did this building also worked on the place on Broadway near Hollywood that houses Exposition Carpet [which I’m guessing was an auto showroom when it was built in the twenties] — another place benefited by neglect and a poor environment for re-development — because the decorative plaques are strikingly similar
Up in Little Warsaw [near Wellington and Milwaukee], some fine examples survive. The Pasieka bakery [which makes great paczkis year round (not only right before Lent) and where, if you are lucky, one of the shop clerks speaks English; otherwise, you just have to point at what you want] is in a building that has apparently housed a bakery for 80+ years.
While it isn’t flashy in the manner of the places pictured above, the fluted tile facade makes this a great example of the streamlined Moderne that Chicago doesn’t really have enough of.
The Sullivanian decoration on the office/retail building across the street is a lot more typical of the city’s terra cotta treasure trove. [And for a sense of the multi-culturalist character of the neighborhood today, all you have to do is check out the signs by the front door.]
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