Lost Buildings: Adler & Sullivan's Victoria Hotel (original) (raw)
Historic RPPC photo postcard of the Victoria Hotel and its surroundings in Chicago Heights, IL. (Richard Nickel Committee and Archive/Building 51 Archive)
So many buildings designed by Adler & Sullivan were lost during the age of urban renewal. One of them was the Victoria Hotel (1892-93) located on an entire block bounded by Halsted Street, Illinois Street and Vincennes Avenue in suburban Chicago Heights. It was commissioned by Victor Falkenau, a previous Adler & Sullivan client, who built three Bedford limestone row houses at 3420-3424 S. Wabash Avenue in 1888 (they were demolished in 1958 and today the site is a parking lot). Falkenau was a building contractor who owned V. Falkenau & Bro. Earlier he had constructed the architectural firm’s Loeb Apartment Building (1891-92), the Auditorium Hotel Annex (1892-93), and the Chicago Stock Exchange (1892-94) where Falkenau kept an office. It was a fruitful partnership for both the architects and the general contractor.
Historic images of building contractor Victor Falkenau. (vamonde.com)
The Victor A. Falkenau Row Houses (1888) at 3420-24 S. Wabash Avenue in Chicago. Victor supposedly lived in one of them for a short time. (Photo by Richard Nickel/Ryerson & Burnham Archives)
Born in New Jersey in 1859, Victor Falkenau moved to Chicago in 1882. Victor and his older brother Louis had apprenticed as a bricklayer and plasterer with a New York City contractor before establishing their own business in Chicago in 1883, which would be incorporated as Falkenau Construction Company in 1897. For a time Falkenau was the Chairman of the Building Contractors council before he was dramatically forced out in 1900 as described in an Inter Ocean article. In the new planned industrial suburb of Chicago Heights, his company had land holdings, which would include not just the construction of the hotel but also fifty worker cottages for immigrants employed at the nearby Inland Steel Company.
Costing around 50,000(orabout50,000 (or about 50,000(orabout1.5 million today), the hotel was a wood frame covered in a veneer of brick and Sullivan’s trademark ornamental plaster. In 1892 the Chicago Tribune described the project as a square with a four-story clock tower with the main entrance at the base. There will be eight stores, including a bank office at the northwest corner. The hotel will have 105 sleeping rooms, half of which will be first class with private bathrooms attached.
Historic images of the Victoria Hotel, including a postcard. (Chicago Heights Historical Society)
With millions of visitors expected to attend the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition, the hotel was created to bear the load of travelers to the area. But it ended up becoming the center of Chicago Heights for four generations. Not only did the hotel serve as a venue for special occasions and community events, but it housed the wares of immigrant jeweler Angelo Del Giudice, a local travel bureau, various clothing stores, and even a Walgreens.
Historic photos taken inside the Victoria Hotel: the bar area in 1910 and the store of Italian jeweler Angelo Del Giudice, who maintained his business here from 1920-1960. (Chicago Heights Historical Society)
Later in life Frank Lloyd Wright declared a number of Adler & Sullivan commissions as his own, which is still up for dispute today. But Adler & Sullivan draftsman, George Elmslie, who shared an office with Wright at the time, remembered his colleague “worked on it (Victoria Hotel) a lot” with Louis Claude, another draftsman in the firm. The hotel certainly resembles Wright’s early work with its horizontal brick facade and hipped roof with overhanging eaves. Wright left the firm, where he was employed between February of 1888 and June of 1893, as the Victoria Hotel was nearing completion. The next year Wright “copied” Sullivan (or possibly himself?) with the use of projecting horizontal friezes of plaster ornamentation at the Winslow House (1894), one of his first independent commissions.
While working for Adler & Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright had a hand in the designs of the Loeb Apartments (1891-92) and Victoria Hotel (1892-93), both now demolished. (Richard Nickel Archive)
The Victoria Hotel and its storefronts were modified over the years with the stucco and ornament of the clock tower covered with wood shingles. The roof was replaced. What was once a former center of the community, especially through the 1920s, had become a shell of its former self. The building, destroyed by a fire in March of 1961, was demolished but not before preservationist Richard Nickel saved the exterior columns and frieze panels with friend Charlie Gregerson. Nickel photographed the building the morning after the fire before coming back to take some of the ornament.
Victor Falkenau’s 1933 obituary. (vamonde.com)
And just as his building met a tragic end less than a century after it was built, Victor Falkenau would also suffer the same fate. While retired in California, Falkenau was fatally struck by a hit-and-run in Pasadena in 1933. The same would happen to the man who helped save pieces of Falkenau’s hotel. Richard Nickel spent his life documenting and salvaging Adler & Sullivan-designed buildings around Chicagoland. As he saw more and more buildings destroyed, Nickel felt it was important to record as much as he could before it was all gone. Unfortunately Nickel would lose his life doing just that, dying inside the half-demolished Chicago Stock Exchange in 1972.
Before and After: Richard Nickel’s photo of Adler & Sullivan’s Victoria Hotel before it was destroyed by fire and his friend Charlie Gregerson salvaging ornament before its demolition in 1961. (Richard Nickel Archive)
Richard Nickel’s photos of Adler & Sullivan’s Victoria Hotel taken after the fire and before its demolition in 1961. (Richard Nickel Archive)
Sources:
The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan by Richard Nickel, Aaron Siskind, John Vinci & Ward Miller
Images of America: Chicago Heights by Dominic Candeloro and Barbara Paul
They All Fall Down: Richard Nickel’s Struggle to Save America’s Architecture by Richard Cahan
https://www.vamonde.com/posts/115-row-houses-for-victor-falkenau/4638