Peaceful refuge for artists
For decades, Tree Studios on State Street was an oasis in the midst of a noisy city
The Tree Studios building doesn’t appear to be 130 years old because it was commissioned by a Chicago couple that could well afford to have it built to last. Lambert and Anna Tree considered the money well spent on what they viewed as a civic cause, providing an enclave for artists. The building deserved an elegant look.
Fronting on the east side of State Street between Ohio and Ontario streets, it had block-long wings running east on those streets to Medinah Temple. Collectively, they enclosed a courtyard that provided a verdant refuge from the hustle and bustle of the city’s commercial center.
On a September evening in 1948, word made the rounds of the Studios’ cerebral residents that an angel’s-trumpet plant was blooming under the courtyard’s Chinese lanterns, a Tribune contributor wrote. “Slowly they drifted back into the garden dusk — dreaming, thinking, talking, talking.”
The Tribune’s “A Line O’Type or Two” columnist in 1941 described Tree Studios as “a veritable pueblo of the arts and crafts.”
“Professional affiliation with the arts has always been required of the tenants,” the column noted.
Providing working and living spaces for creative spirits, the building’s oversized secondfloor windows reflect a painter’s preference for judging colors by natural light. The studios were piggybacked over retail shops that subsidized the rents paid by the resident painters, etchers, dramatists and composers, who often had precarious incomes.
Construction of Tree Studios began on the morrow of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which had drawn artists from faraway places, in hopes of getting some of those artists to return to Chicago by offering accommodations in the price range of Parisian garrets, but much more commodious.
Lambert and Anna Tree were of a blue-blood generation that still believed America required periodic transfusions of European culture. They saw no reason to deny themselves the satisfaction of that need. Their steamer trunks got a lot of use.
In 1895, they were abroad for nearly six months. “Mr. Tree declined to discuss either home or foreign politics for the reason that he had not kept posted,” the Tribune reported upon their return.
“‘We kept away from the large cities. Consequently I scarcely saw a newspaper and received very few letters or telegrams.’ ” Lambert Tree told the newspaper.
In Chicago, Lambert Tree was a political powerhouse. He was a leader of the “silk suit Democrats,” the party’s well-heeled Illinois faction, and a kingmaker nationally. He would become ambassador to Belgium and Russia. But when recharging his aesthetic batteries, he wanted no mundane distractions.
His wife, Anna, was a daughter of Haines Magie, an early Chicago settler. Haines Magie bought 80 acres for $1.25 an acre, some of which he gifted to his son-in-law.
Lambert and Anna built a spacious mansion on a piece of Magie’s land along Wabash Avenue in 1883. Their home was directly behind the site of the future Tree Studios.
“The general treatment of the exterior will be the Romanesque detail of the south of France, and no expense will be spared in making it very substantial in appearance as well as construction,” the Tribune wrote.
“In the northwest corner and entirely separated from other apartments are three servants rooms, a trunk-room, a servants stairway running from the basement, and a lift four-and one-half feet square for the elevation of baggage, also running from the basement.”
In 1948, the Tribune’s “Line O’ Type Or Two” columnist suggested the studios were inspired by Judge Tree’s desire for peace and quiet no less than his love of art:
“There came a time when he was disturbed by the streetcar service on State Street. He decided to build along his frontage there to isolate his home from the noises of traffic. But he didn’t want to put up apartments because their back porches would not provide a pleasing view from his veranda.”
The studios were primarily occupied by homegrown professional artists. The Trees’ endowment required applicants to have a portfolio of their work approved by a residents’ committee.
Among those who made the cut were J. Allen St. John, illustrator for the novels of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs; actors Peter Falk and Burgess Meredith; sculptor John Storrs, whose rendering of Ceres, the goddess of grain, sits atop the Chicago Board of Trade; and umpteen painters such as Richard Florsheim, whose works hang in major museums.
Besides prohibiting artistic wannabes, the Studios had other rules.
“No one is allowed to cook cabbage — disagreeable cooking smells might disturb the aesthetic air! And the playing of musical instruments is verboten between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Scale practicing during daylight painting hours is sure to interrupt the muses!” the Tribune reported in 1956.
“Discarded canvases were salvaged recently by the neighborhood
coal man. He used them to decorate his office. Who knows — in years to come there might be a connoisseurs market for an original by J. Allen St John, Diane Duvigneaud, Helen Steiner, Eoina Nudelman.”
The Studios’ residents were outliers in a city where the dominant personality type was laconic and rarely given to pondering the inevitable.
The Studios’ future was never fully secure, as a 1967 article noted, “Chicago has shown little sympathy for 70-year-old buildings, regardless of history, charm
or usefulness.”
In the same story, Florsheim noted that he and his Tree Studios neighbors were living and creating in the last of Chicago’s working art centers.
“The others have all been torn down or filled with society ladies who feel like living la vie boheme!” Florsheim told the Tribune. “You know, it is hard for artists to find adequate working space in the heart of the city, yet it’s essential that they do. You can’t disperse them all over the countryside.”
“This is Paris,” said artist Barton Faist during in 1998 as the Medinah Shriners sought offers for the building. “Where do we move? I know that we could have some exposed brick thing in Pilsen, but this is a rich piece of irreplaceable history.”
At the end of the day, land values prevailed over aesthetics, though the Studios’ redeveloper claimed to be preserving both. “We think of it as a unique, adaptive reuse of a historic block in the city of Chicago at a time when we’re rapidly losing that historical perspective” Albert Friedman, whose firm also renovated the Medinah Temple, told the Tribune in 2005.
That year, the renovated Studios’ building reopened as daytime work and office spaces. Sleepovers aren’t allowed.
“Where artists once struggled to find their muse, a bank and furniture store now do business,” the Tribune observed.
The buildings’ namesakes had died a century earlier. Anna Tree died on a steamboat returning from Europe in 1903. Lambert Tree had a fatal heart attack in a New York hotel in 1910.