It seems to me that Chicago’s historical Scandinavian population hasn’t received the notice and PBS documentaries due them. It’s a fine history, you know? One stretching back to the mid-1800s, when Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes established their presence on the Near North Side (aka: Swede Town), Douglas and Armour Square, North Lawndale, and near the intersection of Randolph and LaSalle (per the Encyclopedia of Chicago), and Clark St. According to one source, the latter was called Snusgatan, or Snuff Street (that’s snuff as in chewing/snorting tobacco), owing to the number of saloons in the area. I’m not sure of the veracity of that factoid, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Eventually, Milwaukee Ave. became the main thoroughfare for a northwestward migration of Scandinavians. Similarities in language and culture encouraged them to stick together, though parts of town show, and still show, more prominent influence by one group or another. The Danes occupied the area surrounding North Ave., from Damen to Pulaski, for example, while Logan Square and Humboldt Park became Swedish and Norwegian enclaves. As evidence, note the 110-year-old statue of Leif Erikson guarding Humboldt Park, and the charmingly old world Minnekirken/Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church—the only Norwegian language church left in Chicago—resting in Logan Square’s western elbow). Look closely in other north and northwest side neighborhoods as well and you’re bound to find evidence of immigrants from the land of ice and snow, and the midnight sun where the hot springs flow.

One little-noticed monument is located at 4146 N. Elston Ave. Built in 1922, the building is currently occupied by the Chicago Latvian Association. A recent bit of remodeling, however, tipped me off that it wasn’t always so. The entryway has long been topped by a sign for the community center, but a few weeks ago it was temporarily removed, in preparation for a new sign, revealing the original inscription.

Ivar Temple? IOV?

It’s interesting how a simple change can cause one to reassess an entire building. I’d suspected a Scandinavian background before, owing to the medallion near the top of the southeast wall. it features a Viking long-ship with a oversized dragon figurehead that looks like it might sink the ship prow-first. A little research revealed that IOV stands for the Independent Order of Vikings. Per Alex Axelrod’s book The International Encyclopedia of Secret Societies and Fraternal Orders, the IOV was founded in Chicago “as an ethnic fraternal insurance benefit association.” Between the 1880s and 1920s there were an awful lot of those—fraternal, quasi-masonic, and service organizations that promised health insurance while you were alive, and a decent burial and survivor care when you died. IOV membership was restricted to the community of Swedes, Swedish-Americans, and those married to either group.

Eleven Swedish immigrant men established the organization on June 2, 1890, at 86 Sedgwick Street (no longer existent), in what was described in the club’s history as a “bachelor room.” Swelling with ethnic pride, and perhaps feeling a bit butch, they dubbed themselves the Vikingarne—Swedish for Vikings. By June of 1891, the organization was doing well, with more than 234 members. It cost $2 to join, with a quarter a month for dues. In return you earned $3 for sickness and $50 for funeral expenses.

On December 12, 1891, the Vikingarne switched to their current name, the Independent Order of Vikings, possibly to compete with other, pricier fraternal orders cropping up at the time. Meetings took place around the city, usually in public halls, Odd Fellow and masonic temples, and the Phoenix Hall at Division and Sedgwick. Eventually they saved enough pennies to erect the North Side Viking Temple at the corner of School and Sheffield. Reportedly the first lodge building constructed by a Swedish organization in Chicago, its architect was (Swedish) gentleman named Andrew E. Norman. Norman was an interesting person, turning up in the Tribune as a craftsman, artist, architect, carpenter, contractor, and generally talented fellow. He also rocked the mustache/rimless spex look.

As for Irving Park’s Ivar Temple, as yet I have no information on who built it, or why the men of Ivar Lodge were flush enough to afford their own lodge hall. Funnily, information is plentiful, but it’s also in Swedish (see the history of the order, Runristningar: Independent Order of Vikings). According to the date on the building it was erected in 1922, and per a helpful e-mail from Mr. Ray Knutson of the Executive Committee for the Grand Lodge IOV, Ivar was “instituted” as Lodge #27 on Sept. 7 1906.  Beyond that, little info exists—at least in English—though Mr. Knutson says he’ll let me know if he finds anything else.

It appears that the Latvian Community Center has been there since at least the 60s. Before and during that time, the temple hosted not only the Swedes of the IOV and the Independent Order of Svithiod (another fraternal order that brings Scandinavians from the US, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden under its aegis.) but also the American Legion and VFW. According to the Tribune’s social pages, it was a quite popular location for celebrating the golden wedding anniversaries of some rather doughy and dour looking old folks. Labor and socialism fans may be interested to hear that socialist Norman Thomas spoke at the temple on a tour through Chicago and Oak Park back in 1932.

And now, for lack of a more solid conclusion… VALKYRIES!

Ghost sign off Addison for the long-departed Toots ice cream, etc. stand that once stood at Central and Montrose (probably best known for its painted sign featuring a lascivious ice cream cone saying “LICK ME.”

Building names always seem a bit gloomy for me—particularly when they’re etched in stone. Undoubtedly intended to display the affluence and influence a wooden sign could never convey, most only cement (no pun intended) their original owners’ anonymity, inspiring the modern passerby to look up and comment, “Who the hell is that?”

In Mayfair, one such mysterious appellation is chiseled into the limestone-faced storefront at 4407 N. Elston Ave. Calmly regal, whoever designed the building back in 1899-1900 knew what he was doing, especially in the creation of the sign on top, which strikingly states “TRYON & DAVIS.”

But who were Tryon and Davis? I wish I could say. Beyond discovering that Tryon is a British name and Davis a Welsh one, information is spotty about the two (assumed) men. A review of historical newspapers and Google Books suggests that T&D was a real estate agency, and probably a developer as well, owing to occasional references on real estate sites to a “Tryon & Davis subdivision” located near Lawrence and Pulaski.

Obviously, T&D were successful enough to construct their own office building, but otherwise they made little impact on Chicago history. All I’ve turned up are two meager references to plumbing work being done for several single-story dwellings near 2345 W. Roosevelt Road (apparently demolished) in 1921, and the management of a property at 118 N. LaSalle St. (also gone, but now occupied by Murphy/Jahn’s 120 N. LaSalle building—the one with the whacky Daedalus and Icarus mosaic).

The firm later listed an address in the 1915 edition of Polk’s Real Estate Register and Directory of the United States and Canada at 4601 N. Crawford (now Pulaski Rd.), which is currently occupied by a Citgo gas station. Did T&D move there from their Elston digs? Did they expand? Without a day’s visit to the history museum or library, I can’t say. I’ve sent an inquiry letter to the building’s current resident, a lawyer, and I’ll provide an update if I find out anything else.

Later note: I was unaware that the Chicago History Museum has a Chaplin in Chicago exhibit taking place right now. Check out this blog post!

The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company building is part of Chicago’s faraway past as a film capital. Established first on Wells Street, in 1908 the company moved to 1333-45 W. Argyle Street in the neighborhood of Uptown. The main building, now a part of St. Augustine College, isn’t particularly striking, save for the entryway, a gaudy little structure in white, topped by two relatively politically correct Native American heads and the company name (which was formed by the last initials of founders George K. Spoor and Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson.

Yippee Ki Yay. Broncho Billy in full regalia.

Essanay produced multiple films of varying quality, many of which are lost, and were noted for producing silent films, early cartoons like the forgotten and weird Dreamy Dud (seen here psychologically scarring the children of 1915 into not smoking), and introducing the first real cowboy star (Mr. Anderson, in case you couldn’t figure that out through his nickname). The studio also gave performers like cross-eyed vaudevillian Ben Turpin and Chicago girl Gloria Swanson their big breaks, though Turpin had to serve as both an actor and the studio’s janitor at the time. See him here in the Essanay short Mr. Flip humorously molesting sundry women with unusual hairstyles.

Ben Turpin will see you in your nightmares tonight.

Essanay was most famous for employing up-and-coming genius Charlie Chaplin as an actor, writer, and director, starting with the comedic short His New Job, filmed with Ben Turpin as second banana.

Chaplin didn’t stay long, owing to financial and creative differences with the management (they failed to pay him a promised $10,000 bonus and frequently chopped up his films to make them more marketable). Nevertheless, it was an opportunity for him to expand on his skills, learning the tricks of this business called show which he’d use to better effect in future films. Eventually, according to this article, he finally left the Windy City. The weather was too changeable to suit Chaplin’s perfectionism. Furthermore, it was, in the Little Tramp’s words, “too damn cold.”

Ben Turpin with two of Mack Sennett’s “bathing beauties.”

Last Friday, I took my kids out to visit the park, a church off Western where my great uncle served as assistant pastor, and two buildings connected with Louis Sullivan’s former chief draftsman, George Grant Elmslie. As a father I am slightly unusual, I know.

Mr. Elmslie stuck with Mr. Sullivan through the Lieber Meister’s exceedingly lean final years. Sadly, Sullivan was unable to afford to keep him on staff and had to let him go. Elmslie landed on his feet by partnering with William Purcell, forming the firm of Purcell & Elmslie in 1909. After turning out several lovely Prairie School style buildings across the Midwest  together, personal problems, including his wife’s tragic death at age 31, took their toll on Elmslie. Despite being a full partner, he chose to move back to Chicago to live with his sisters, while Purcell ran the firm from Minneapolis. Steeped in misery, Elmslie nonetheless pressed on, producing several more works—including his masterpiece, the Woodbury County Courthouse in Sioux City, IA—before financial matters eventually caused the firm to dissolve.

If his work seems “Sullivanesque,” it’s because Elmslie is responsible for much of Sullivan’s fancier ornamentation. He’s probably best known for  his designs on such large scale structures as the Carson Pirie Scott facade and the National Farmer’s Bank of Owatonna, MN. Luckily for the city, Elmslie created smaller structures as well, lending a bit of Sullivanesque charm to our neighborhoods. My favorite would have to be the Peoples Gas Irving Park Neighborhood Store at 4839 W. Irving Park Road. Peoples Gas Stores were actual stores selling only products employing the full benefits of that exciting new energy source, natural gas. Check out the 1920s ads below.

If you ever drive or walk by the building (which appears to be a church or similar religious institution now) be sure to look up, otherwise you’ll miss its delightful decorations and windows. Wish I could have had either a clearer day for taking photographs or direct sunlight. I’ll go back and try again some day.

Looks like one of the ads features the addresses of every store in Chicago. There’s a field trip for you!

Quick research reveals that the Union Special Machine Company was, and still is, a manufacturer of sewing machines. The big industrial kind, I’m guessing. I’ll look into it a bit more in the future. Until then, check out this lovely sign. I was on a stroll and didn’t note the location, but I believe it’s near Orleans Street.

[Later note: Oops. Ran St. James twice. The pictures were small! There are so many buttons! Kudos to my wife for catching it.]

Most small Illinois towns were big at one time. Whether as important stops along the railway lines or the I & M Canal, they had their day, enjoying boomlets of prosperity before quieting down.

Lemont, IL, was one such town, doing quite well as a producer of limestone (along with its neighbor down the canal Joliet, IL), quarrying and selling it under the brand name of “Athens Marble” (Athens being the town’s original name—side note: Joliet was formerly called Juliet). Both towns enjoyed the largess of the last few Ice Ages, when, over 400 million years ago, Illinois still rested underwater. Uncountable plant and animal shells floated to the bottom over the eons, creating large deposits of what came to be called Sugar Run Dolomite. This “limestone” was a popular building material of the time, but transportation costs made it difficult to sell outside the immediate area. Then the I&M Canal was built, and limestone could be easily shipped upstream to Chicago—the city’s own underground stores of limestone being of poor building quality. Historically, Juliet/Joliet had the idea first—selling their own “Joliet Limestone”—but more deposits were discovered in the Lemont area during the digging of the canal in 1846, kicking off the town’s own quarry industry.

Naturally Lemont, Joliet, Lockport, and other surrounding towns used limestone in their own building projects. My original purpose for visiting Lemont was to track down some dead pioneer relatives at St. Patrick’s Church’s Catholic Cemetery outside of town (“Right behind the Hindu temple!” as the nice folks at the church explained to me). Performing research on the Ray and Hennebry side of the family led me to discover the town’s own history, and impressive architectural legacy. Lemont, for example, boasts 38 limestone-faced buildings in their downtown area, including several churches and city hall.

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church

St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

The Old Stone Church
(Former Union Army recruiting station during the Civil War, and current Lemont Historical Society building)

More famously, Joliet Correctional Center (former residence of Leopold and Loeb and other famous felons), created by architect William W. Boyington (who also designed the front gate at Rosehill Cemetery and another famous structure to be mentioned below)  was similarly constructed of the stuff.

As for the Chicago connection, residents and visitors may recognize a few of the following structures, raised and faced with Lemont’s famous limestone.

Chicago Water Tower (Built by William W. Boyington)

Holy Name Cathedral

St. James Cathedral

Courthouse Place (Not so coincidentally the location of Leopold and Loeb’s trial)

More information on Joliet and Lemont Limstone here!

The former Rivoli Theater, now the Muslim Community Center, at 4380 N. Elston Avenue, showed a little bit more  of its original facade recently. Check out the roaring beast-man(?) on top!

Presumably, the original conception drawing of the Mayfair Water Pumping Station.

Every raindrop promises life or death. Somewhere in-between rests inconvenience.

Here, lately, water is a petulant creature, severely perturbed by years of abuse. When it snows, it smothers us, and when it rains, it pelts, torrents, and creeps in, destroying basement furniture and carpeting like a bad houseguest. In the blasting heat of summer, our beaches threaten to become festering petri dishes of bowel-blasting bacteria. A city built on a swamp, despite Ellis S. Chesbrough’s best efforts to raise us from the muck, it feels like the water won’t leave Chicago alone. Constantly seeking its own level, it sometimes chooses to drag us down with it.

If things run smoothly, you won’t hear about it in the news. The bleeding leads, and the few times the Mayfair Pumping Station pops up in the Trib for the next seven decades usually involves violence, semi-biblical snafus, and moments where blood flowed like water and vice versa.

Jumping ahead to the 1960s, on January 5, the fire department arrived to douse a fire at the station. Ignited by welding equipment, a shower of sparks set ablaze a inconvenient pile of paper. While the station and its equipment weren’t damaged too badly, four firefighters were transported to Northwest and Swedish Covenant hospitals and treated for smoke inhalation. Two years later, in an exceedingly brief article, we learn that city worker William Dugan, 57, fell off a ladder July 10, while fixing the station’s roof. His fellow workers, reportedly, “were unable to explain the accident.” Mr. Dugan doesn’t turn up in the obituaries later on that week, so perhaps we can assume the best.

Then we have James and Nina Gardiner.

James, age 28, had, in a matter of speaking, been unfaithful. Not necessarily to his wife, Nina (23), but to water. If that sounds daft, that’s because it is, but allow me a momentary Fortean flight of fancy.

It was January 17, 1930, and Nina and James (two years married), were fighting—presumably again—in their rooms at the Grandeur Apartment Hotel (now Grandeur Apartments at 1055 E. Granville). James worked as an sanitary district engineer at the Mayfair Pumping Station; while Nina, to her great shame, was a secretary to Criminal Court Clerk John H. Passmore (seen here standing beside legendary conman Yellow Kid Weil). “To her shame,” because Nina was forced to take a job rather than keep a house,  James having failed to bring home the bacon. James showed his, let’s call it “hydro-infidelity” by both avoiding work at the pumping station and running into the arms of the local saloons. According to the two available photos of her, Nina was a pretty young thing with devil-may-care eyes and a winning smile. James, perhaps unpossessed of a flapper’s allure, remains faceless to us.

Returning the the apartment—oh, let’s imagine it with a rusty sink, Murphy bed, and grim breakfast nook equipped with a hot plate and dingy side toaster—James had been absent for two days, returning without explanation and with hootch on his breath. Nina asked where the hell he’d been. James replied with his fists before turning in to bed.

Nina wasn’t having it. She opened a drawer, grabbed a revolver, carried it to where James lay, and began pistol-whipping the engineer. Unappreciative of her failure to ventilate his head, James slapped Nina around a little more then entered the bathroom—let’s picture it with a rustier sink and a single bulb dangling from the ceiling—to clean his wound. Washing the gore from his hair and face, dripping a far-too-late blood sacrifice into the sink, he told her more beatings were in the offing.

Nina replied with a butcher knife, stabbing upwards and slicing through his neck. The blade stuck out of his mouth like a metal tongue. Someone called the cops, and while James was taken to the Lake View Hospital, Nina was transported to the Summerdale police station at 1940 W. Foster. The Trib’s back page shows her cheerfully perched on a cop’s desk—Velma Kelly in furs—under photogenic interrogation by “Policeman William Garney.”

The Gardiners were absent from the papers for a few months. Until March 5, when the couple traveled down the Memphis-Bristol Highway on a reconciliation vacation. The facts are hazy about why the two kissed and made up, or even how far the case got in the courts. Maybe it was a different time, when a little light attempted homicide could be waved off by a romantic old fool of a judge. The couple barreled down Tennessee State Route 1 on a dark Wednesday night—then the rest of the tale played out like a Tom Waits song. The steering wheel broke, sending the car soaring over the embankment before planting it grill-first in a ditch. Buried deep in the mud, the water seeped in and reclaimed James and Nina. Shortly after, Mr. William A. Williamson of Mason, TN, saw the car’s taillights gleaming in the night and reported the accident. Nina and James were draped over the car doors, more than likely having tried to escape the car before the crash. And just like that, the engineer and stenographer were gone.

Sunk.

*******

Bonus: Photos from the groundbreaking and opening of the Mayfair Water Pumping Station from the Chicago Daily news photographic archives.

Alderman Ellis Geiger digging at Mayfair Pumping Station while other officials watch.
[DN-0064323, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum]

Mayor Harrison and city officials standing in the Mayfair Water Pumping station
[DN-0064324, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum]

Joseph Kostner, Mayor Harrison and city officials, wearing rain coats and hats, standing on the street at the Mayfair Water Pumping Station
[DN-0064322, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum]

Many thanks to Steven Szegedi, archivist and special collections librarian at Dominican University, who tracked down this photo showing camera-shy Chicago City Architect Charles W. Kallal at the …”blessing of Mother Emily Power Hall, Rosary College, 1 October, 1922.” Archbishop George Mundelein can be seen at the center, while Kallal stands—with impressively good posture—at far right. Click the photo to get a closer look at the man. It wasn’t until I sized it up a tad that I noticed that Kallal wore glasses. Incidentally, Steven asks that if anyone out there can identify the other men in this picture, please let him know (or just post it in the comments).

“Photograph 113402, Buildings and Grounds, Dominican University Archives and Special Collections”

 Added bonus: Kallal’s bathhouse at 4501 N. Clarendon Avenue. It doesn’t look this awesome anymore, by the way.