In the architectural preservation arena, you’ve got to celebrate the small as well as the big. If they save Prentice Hospital, it will be a major accomplishment. The remodeled storefront at the corner of Lincoln and Melrose may represent a more minor victory, but it is still triumphant in its way.
I had watched the place for years, because it has one of the greatest terra cotta facades in the city, and one of the few really art decoesque: a deliriously dream-like pattern of swirls punctuated by a couple of figurative inserts. It had worn away in spots, but basically kept its integrity.
I took these pictures sometime in 2010.
The last occupant had left the space probably two years ago, and the longer it sat vacant, the more I figured something bad was going to happen to it. But construction barricades went up in the spring and the place emerged refreshed and renewed, if not restored in a historically exact manner. Most importantly, it works as a contemporary retail environment.
You have to credit Talisman Realty Group, the owners of the building, for doing the right thing — realizing that storefronts matter, and unusual, decorative ones matter even more — rather than the easy thing, which might have been covering the terra cotta with something else [as most of the Lincoln Avenue side of the building had been] or [this is painful] painting it. A nod, too, to the architects, Hartshorne Plunkard. While architectural intercession here was minimally invasive, the changes they made in the original configuration of the building [or certainly in its most recent condition] definitely improve it: the window openings and entry sequence may not be historically accurate, but they completely make sense in a 2011 design.
What makes the place special, of course, is the restored tile work. The facade looks brand spanking new, which is sort of a problem for me. I kind of liked the dull, matte finish on the “before” pictures. But Marion Restoration’s Martin Bazula, the terra cotta restorer who supervised the job, says this is how the tiles would have looked when they were installed in the 1920s. [I will admit to not having done my research, so I don’t know the history of the building and can’t identify who made the terra cotta, although you’ve got to figure it was the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company, whose factory was half a mile away from here.]
The actual restoration work was fairly labor intensive; the tiles were cleaned and re-glazed; then the facade was re-pointed with a more historically accurate dark gray mortar. Luckily, all of the tiles on the facade were sufficiently intact that none had to be replaced, although several needed patching and all were re-glazed. All worth it, according to Bazula, who is about as fervent an advocate for restoring terra cotta as you are likely to find, with a zero-tolerance policy for terra cotta building owners who don’t go the extra mile to preserve and conserve. He’d much rather turn down a job completely than cut corners. “You’ve either got to downsize the scope of the work, or don’t do it. People don’t say ‘no’ enough,” he says.
Fortunately, he said ‘yes’ here.
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