A TOAST TO BEER BUILDINGS
Even if this isn’t exactly happy hour for some of them, the time is right to give Chicago’s often-forgotten taverns, beer halls and brewers’ mansions a fresh look
Raise a glass to Chicago’s architecturally alluring beer buildings. Their ornate brickwork, fanciful turrets and other decorative flourishes make them a savory alternative to less-is-more design sobriety.
From the mansions of brewing magnates to former taverns built by marquee brands like Schlitz, beer buildings brighten nearly every corner of the city. They provide a visible link to the immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe who poured into the city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And whether they still sell beer or have switched to coffee, some still function as the proverbial “third place,” the gathering spot apart from work or home.
Now the time is right to give these often-overlooked buildings a fresh set of eyes.
The upcoming Open House Chicago architecture festival, which runs Oct. 16-25, will feature an outdoor-only walking tour of Wicker Park’s “Beer Baron Row,” an impressive lineup of ornate late 19th Century mansions.
On Tuesday, a City Council committee is expected to approve
official landmark status for a former Schlitz-built tavern on the Far Southeast Side.
Yet for many beer building owners, the shadow cast by COVID-19 makes these times anything but happy hour. The coronavirus crisis has had a chilling impact on their businesses, leading to city-imposed restrictions that contributed to last Sunday’s shutdown of another former Schlitz tavern, Southport Lanes in Lakeview, which served as a bar, bowling alley and billiards hall for almost 100 years.
Even though Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Monday announced an easing of some of the coronavirus restrictions, which include allowing indoor bar service, the outlook for some owners of the beer buildings remains as bleak as a Chicago winter sky.
The beer back story
Once home to such beer behemoths as Miller, Pabst and Schlitz, Milwaukee is more strongly associated with beer than Chicago. But Milwaukee’s “Beer City” status is partly attributed to its historic proximity to Chicago’s vast population of working-class immigrants.
In Chicago’s early years, local brewers served up English-style ales and Germanstyle lagers. Local brewers
faced increased outside competition after the Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed five of the city’s 12 breweries and much of its drinking water infrastructure. In response, Milwaukee-based Schlitz shipped trainloads of beer and drinking water to the singed city.
“Schlitz’s good-will gesture earned the company a large number of loyal customers in Chicago, and it served as a basis for the brewery’s advertising slogan, ‘The beer that made Milwaukee famous,’ ” stated a 2011 city report on beer buildings.
Under the leadership of Edward Uihlein, who ran Schlitz’s ever-growing Chicago operations, Schlitz became the most prolific builder of so-called “tied houses,” which only sold beer made by the breweries that owned them.
The tied houses guaranteed brewers a retail outlet for their product, protecting them from wholesale price wars that ate into profits. And the buildings’ designs — picturesque, well-crafted and above all, respectable — sought to protect the brewing companies from “dry” advocates who inveighed against the evils of public drinking and eventually got Prohibition passed in 1920.
The tied houses
Schubas Tavern, at 3159 N. Southport Ave., is one of the most beautiful of the tied houses. The German Renaissance Revival gem features multicolored tracery brickwork, a bonnet roof atop its corner bay, and Schlitz’s distinctive Schlitz logo, a belted globe, beneath its steeply-pitched front gable.
The architects of the 1903 building, the Chicago firm of Frommann & Jebsen, reportedly designed more than 25 buildings for Schlitz.
A 2018 addition to Schubas, designed by the Chicago office of Gensler and appropriately called “Tied House,” placed an outdoor seating area and a contemporary brick building to the south of the original building. The addition’s screen-like facade, which picks up on the brick patterns of the original structure, is a model of complementary contrast, successfully marrying the old with the new.
The outdoor seating and a sliding-glass door that brings the outside into the addition’s indoor dining area have helped during the pandemic.
But while the just-eased city restrictions will let Schubas squeeze in more dining customers, they won’t let Schubas reprise its identity as a renowned small music venue. Schubas’ German Gothic Revival music hall, which delivers visual pleasure you don’t expect from a tavern’s meeting hall, can’t be packed with standees due to the need for social distancing.
“Live music for us is still a riddle to be solved,” said Schubas’ manager and previous co-owner, Mike Schuba.
Open House Chicago has put together a driving tour of the tied houses, which will include Schubas and a former Schlitz tied house at 9401 S. Ewing Ave. that the City Council’s landmarks committee is expected to consider Tuesday.
If the full council approves it, the two-story Queen Anne and Tudor Revival structure will become Chicago’s 10th tied house landmark, according to the city’s Department of Planning and Development. Among that group is a Queen Anne-style Starbucks at 2159 W. Belmont Ave., still a neighborhood focal point even though it serves coffee instead of beer.
But beer’s architectural legacy extends beyond the tied houses, as Wicker Park’s Beer Baron Row makes clear.
The mansions
Tucked behind the chic shops and bike lanes of Milwaukee Avenue, the row belongs to what has been called Chicago’s ethnic Gold Coast. Here, on shady, treelined streets, the visitor finds humble workers’ cottages that popped up on the same blocks as mansions in the building frenzy that followed the Great Fire.
“The neighborhood developed as a real eclectic blend of incomes and ethnicities. It wasn’t meant to be the next Gold Coast by any stretch,” said Ian Spula, a Chicago Architecture Center specialist.
Spula is putting together the Open House Chicago audio tour of the multiblock Row, which is concentrated on North Hoyne and West Pierce avenues. Among the tour’s highlights: a Second Empire mansion at 1407 N. Hoyne, with a spectacular domed turret, a multicolored porch and a vast yard surrounded by a wrought-iron fence.
According to the American Institute of Architects “Guide to Chicago,” the mansion was built in 1879. The original owner was
German immigrant John Raap, a wholesale liquor retailer and wine merchant who was murdered in 1897 by a former employee at his wholesale liquor store on Milwaukee Avenue. The identity of the home’s architect is not known.
A nearby 1884 mansion, the Hans (also known as John) Runge House at 2138 W. Pierce, sports an intricately detailed, two-story wood porch that reflects the wood-milling fortune made by its namesake. Its indirect tie to beer comes through its architects, Frommann & Jebsen, the designers of Schubas and other tied houses.
Why did the German beer barons cluster in Wicker Park? “The foreignborn beer barons weren’t necessarily a good fit for assimilating into the wealthy neighborhoods of the Gold Coast or South Side, and many actually chose to live in neighborhoods where their language and customs were shared,” explained Tim Samuelson, Chicago’s official cultural historian.
One notable exception: Madlener House at 4 W. Burton Place in the Gold Coast. Originally the home of German-American brewery owner Albert F. Madlener, its deft combination of German neoclassicism and Chicago’s Prairie style was designed by Chicago architect Richard Schmidt and his employee Hugh Garden. Since the early 1960s, it has served as the headquarters of the Graham Foundation, the architectural grant-making organization.
The saga of ‘Schlitz Row’
The city’s recent attention to the architectural merits of its beer buildings marks a welcome shift from what happened in 2002 in the former “Schlitz Row” in the Roseland neighborhood on the city’s Far South Side.
Schlitz Row was a minicity of saloons, beer gardens, houses and stables that the Milwaukee brewery erected in the early 1900s to quench the thirst of workmen in the “dry” company town of
Pullman, a few blocks to the east.
Historic preservationists had hoped Schlitz Row would someday become an extension of the Pullman historic district. But with the blessing of the local alderman, the Metra commuter rail agency razed a Frommann & Jebsen-designed tavern at 11444 S. Front Ave. to expand the parking lot at its heavily used Kensington/115th Street station.
As if to atone for this fiasco, the city in 2011 granted landmark status to two surviving Schlitz Row buildings, both in the 11000 block of South Front Avenue — a former brewery stable, adorned with terracotta horse heads, and a former tavern.
In 2009, the old stable became the home of the Argus Brewery, backed by Bob Jensen, who had made millions as the president of a transportation company he had taken public. But Jensen closed it March 28 after its draft beer businesses dried up when bars and restaurants closed in mid-March, then put it up for sale in June on Craigslist for $2.5 million.
Jensen did not return a phone call inquiring about the current status of the building, but its windows are boarded up while a blue Argus banner remains on display, along with a sculpture of a white horse adorned with the brewery’s name and a picture of the Chicago skyline.
I hope this building has a better outcome, like the one Chicago artist and developer Theaster Gates achieved when he converted an old South Side beer warehouse into a pottery studio.
Yet even in its sorry state, the old stables, like its beer building brethren, convey a certain dignity. Socially and aesthetically, the beer buildings form part of the glue that holds together a fractious city.