“Their owners had not saved them,” wrote Lowe, lamenting so many lost buildings. pictorial essays on the city ever produced,” and he quoted an eloquent passage from the book’s introduction. Gapp called Lost Chicago “one of the best. Paul Gapp, the newly appointed architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune (and only a few years away from winning the Pulitzer Prize), wrote a glowing review of Lowe’s book-titled Lost Chicago-that appeared on the front page of the newspaper’s Sunday book section. No one expected the book to generate much interest-even among the residents of Chicago. The publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had agreed to a small run of about 1,000 copies.
A boyish-looking magazine editor named David Lowe had proposed to a New York publisher a collection of essays and photographs cataloging the Windy City’s many destroyed architectural treasures.
Perfect, that is, if, on a December night in 1975, you were searching for the ideal setting to celebrate the appearance of a book dedicated to the city’s glorious but rapidly disappearing past. In a few more years, the place would vanish entirely. Abandoned by the Bourniques, the remodeled building became a trucking company’s garage that then gave way to a cavernous brauhaus called Sauer’s. Their client was Augustus Bournique, a dapper dance teacher who, with his wife, Elizabeth, instructed several generations of Chicago’s elite, among them the Pullmans and the Fields.īut with the advent of a new century, all that glitter had gravitated to the city’s North Side. Situated just east of ultrafashionable Prairie Avenue, the building-a jumble of Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival styles-had been completed in 1883 from a design by John Root and Daniel Burnham, though clearly before those great architects had hit their revolutionary stride. Pictures from Lost Chicago and David Lowe's own private collectionĭecades earlier, before it began its sad, slow slide toward oblivion, the big brick barn on 23rd Street reeked of glamour, culture, and an envy-inducing exclusivity.
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