Month: October 2018

This past weekend I went on a walking tour of Riverside, Illinois. The tour was given by the Frederick Law Olmsted Society. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were the architects who designed and built the village of Riverside in 1869. Riverside is one of the earliest planned communities in the United States and the Riverside Landscape Architecture District was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970.

Riverside has been called a village in a park because of its curved roads that follow the bend of the Des Plaines River. Riverside also has a central village square that is located at the Metra BNSF Riverside train station. The train station was built in 1901. It also has a lot of greenspace because it has several large parks and 41 smaller parks and plazas at various intersections throughout the village. Many homes and estates were designed by famous architects of the time such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Le Baron Jenney, Frederick Clarke Withers, Calvert Vaux and Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Another major period of development happened in the 1920s and 1930s when smaller houses were constructed on smaller plots of land. The village has an eclectic mix of different types of buildings including smaller bungalows, larger Victorians and huge early twentieth century mansions. The photos below are from the South Side tour. I plan on taking the North Side tour next Spring. I hope you enjoy viewing these photos as much as I enjoyed taking them!

Last Sunday I visited The Growing Place in Aurora. It was my first visit to the very large and beautiful garden center and nursery. The Growing Place is located at 2000 Montgomery Road in Aurora. While it offers many varieties of plants, trees and shrubs, it’s also a fun place to visit because of the way it is arranged. There are picturesque displays of items throughout the space, as well as small houses in which to explore specialized merchandise. The larger white farmhouse on the property is beautifully maintained inside and out and offers eclectic antique like home decorations available for purchase. I hope you enjoy these photos as much as I enjoyed my trip there. I found my new nursery!

Our first stop during Open House Chicago this weekend was the Wintrust Bank Building located at 231 South Lasalle Street in the downtown financial district. The site is more commonly known as the Central Standard Building (formerly the Continental Illinois Bank of Chicago). It’s located directly across the street from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. It was designed by architects Graham, Anderson, Probst and White in 1924.

It is a combination of neoclassical, Gothic Revival and Art Deco architectural styles. The second floor of the building boasts the grand banking hall. It consists of 88,000 square feet of space. It’s a huge space that has been recently restored to grandure.

The building is located on the former site of the Grand Pacific Hotel, where the U.S. was divided into four standard time zones during a commemorative event in 1883. This is commemorated by a plaque on Jackson Street.

The Bank of America was the primary tenant starting in the mid 1980s after Continental Bank folded. They remained there until 2014 when Wintrust leased the building and it became its permanent headquarters.

 

The Jane Addams Homes were built in 1938 by architect John Holabird and were one of the first projects the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) built to provide housing to the city’s poor in The Little Italy neighborhood on the Near West side. It was the first ABLA housing project. Four housing developments made up ABLA: Jane Addams Homes, Robert Brooks Homes, Loomis Courts, and Grace Abbott Homes.

The Jane Addams Homes consisted of 32 buildings containing approximately 1,000 units. They were built as a result of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration (PWA) Program. They housed hundreds of families over several decades until they were vacated in 2002 and largely demolished by 2007. Below are photos of the only building that remains and plans are to have it house the National Public Housing Museum which is scheduled to open in 2019. The building is located at 1322-24 West Taylor Street.

 

The other day I took a walk on Downer Place in Aurora’s Westside Historic District. The City of Aurora has five historic districts. The historic homes and churches in this area were built in the mid to late 1800s or early 1900s. I hope you enjoy viewing the photos below, as much as I enjoyed taking them.