Wright in Racine

Addition to the Unitarian Meeting House

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:41:58 GMT

Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg unless otherwise noted

    In 1947-1951, the 100 members of the First Unitarian Society of Madison worked furiously to help build the new church that Frank Lloyd Wright had designed for them.

    Membership had grown enough by 1963 that Jack Howe was commissioned to build a classroom addition. Another addition, the “Lower Meeting House,” was built in the early 1990s. The congregation now numbers about 1500, and has again outgrown the landmark Wright building as well as the additions. It is the largest Unitarian Universalist congregation in the United States and, perhaps, in the world, according to Tom Garver, a member of the church’s Building and Preservation Committees.

    The congregation realized the need for not only a larger auditorium, but also more classroom and office space, in 1998. Architects were interviewed in 2004. Controversy swirled not only through the congregation, but also through the world of Wright, as solutions, including a new building at another site, were debated. The solution, an addition that gracefully circles out of the south end of the original building, opened this fall. The new $9 million building was designed by The Kubala Washatko Architects of Cedarburg, Wisconsin. The building is “green,” and has earned LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, certification.

    The two buildings meet where the Lower Meeting House once stood. The new auditorium or sanctuary is opposite the famous hall that Wright placed under a dramatic soaring copper roof 60 years before. A glass connecting hallway leads from the new auditorium to Wright’s limestone building. “There is no change in profile to make the connection,” Garver points out.

    The project included needed repairs to the original building, such as rewiring lights, painting, and plastering. The original building had seven tiny -they were only 10 feet wide- classrooms in the loggia, when it opened in 1951. They were remodeled into offices, a library, religious education office, and a minister’s office when the 1963 religious education center addition was built. They have now been remodeled again, into one large office, four smaller offices, and a small conference rooms. The loggia now looks much as it did in 1951.

This slide show has photos of the addition, the remodeled loggia, and a unique use of the original auditorium - a blood drive the day I visited the church. A blue sky would have made for better photos, alas. The crane visible in some photos is from an unrelated construction project at the nearby University Hospitals campus.
    Garver is pleased with the new addition, “It is a very constrained site, but that worked to our advantage because it had a gentle slope to the south. The new auditorium...is set well below grade, well below the entrance level. The curve allows for a parking lot and decent distance between the buildings.

    “It will take a few years, after the roof is planted and seeded, which will soften the edges of the roof. A berm by the parking lot is planted. Eventually plants and shrubs will soften the horizon line. It will make this building become ever more discreet.”

Links:

Craig Wilson photography (they hyperlink may not work, you may have to type the URL in yourself):

www.fromakite.com

First Unitarian Society of Madison new building website:

http://www.fusmadison.com/green/intro.shtm

Burnham Street Update - Porch Roof Removed

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:02:46 GMT

Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg

A major step in the restoration of the Frank Lloyd Wright - designed Richards Small House at 2714 W. Burnham St. in Milwaukee took place Saturday and Monday October 18 and 20 when the porch roof and its framework were removed. The house was designed in 1915, and completed in 1916, with an open porch. The porch was enclosed by a later owner, in 1939. The restoration, which is funded in part by a Save America's Treasures grant, includes bringing the porch back to its original design.

The restoration is a project of the home's owner, Wright in Wisconsin. The group, whose board I serve on, also owns two of the four duplexes on the block. There are no immediate plans for restoration of those two buildings. There are six Wright American System-Built homes on the block, making it a unique collection of Wright's work.

Links:

wrightinwisconsin.org

Burnham Street restoration

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:34:32 GMT

The long-awaited restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Richards Small House is underway. The small stucco house is one of six Wright homes in the 2700 block of W. Burnham Street in Milwaukee. The house, at 2714, and two of the four duplexes on the block, are owned by the Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin Tourism Heritage Group ("Wright in Wisconsin"). I am a member of the board of the group. We have been planning the restoration for several years.

2714 is an American System Built house, and is designated Model B1. It was designed in 1915. The extensive restoration project includes a return to the original open-porch design.

Asbestos abatement began recently, and continues inside a tented area on the west side of the house. The ceiling of the porch has been partially removed already. Extensive exterior work is tentatively scheduled to begin the week of September 21.

The following slide show was shot this week. Additional photos will be posted as the project progresses. The anticipated completion date is late fall.

Links:

2005 story and photos about Richard Small House Restoration:

http://http//www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=2599

Wright in Wisconsin:

http://http//www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=2599

Wright in Wisconsin Burnham Street project:

http://http//www.wrightinwisconsin.org/WisconsinSites/asbh/Default.asp

Louis Sullivan's Merchants National Bank

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:45:37 GMT

Text (c) Mark Hertzberg

Bank photos (c) David Kennedy

Portrait of David Kennedy (c) Keith Kennedy

Banks were once among the most important buildings in a community, as important as the city hall, the post office, and the court house. Though Louis Sullivan is well known to many people because he designed great, big buildings in big cities, he also designed a number of great small banks in small towns across the Midwest.

Bill Menner has published a well-illustrated survey of the eight Sullivan banks, focusing on the Merchants National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa, Menner’s hometown (Louis Sullivan’s Merchants National Bank, San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2007).

   I became interested in the book when I learned that Menner had hired David Kennedy to illustrate it. I was not disappointed, and neither was Menner, “There’s a number of wonderful books other there that feature the building that use black and white, but Sullivan needs to be shared in color, and he (Kennedy) took that challenge and ran with it. David was the star.

   “The more I saw of the stuff he was doing on his own, the non S&B (student newspaper) work, I thought David really had a strength when it came to capturing buildings, capturing places, and capturing accessories and ornament. That is exactly what this book called for.”

   Kennedy has a fine feeling for making existing light work to highlight the features of his subjects. He used sunlight and the bank’s lighting effectively to emphasize the terra cotta, stained glass, and other features of the bank.

   I met Kennedy in May, 2002, when he was a high school senior. Our newspaper photo department welcomes area students to job shadow us. He was a student at The Prairie School when he accompanied me on an assignment at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wingspread. He enrolled at Grinnell College the next year. He self-published a striking collection of photos of the campus (A Portrait of Grinnell: The Architecture and Landscape of Grinnell College, 2006). Those campus photos prompted Menner to invite Kennedy to photograph the Grinnell bank.

   “I got an e-mail out of the blue from him, basically asking, would you be interested in meeting me for coffee? I have a book proposal,” Kennedy recalls. “I remember getting the e-mail, and thinking, ‘Boy that would be cool.’”

   They chatted over coffee. “I was a cheap date,” says Kennedy. Menner proposed that Kennedy work on the project the next year, his senior year (2005-2006). He says Menner “had a great sales pitch. ‘We know the people who work at the bank.’ He was saying we'll get really great access. ‘We can go in when no one is there. I’m think of renting a lift.’ Sure enough he did it. It was really a fantastic opportunity. Of course I said yes!”

David Kennedy at Lower Antelope Canyon in Page, Arizona

      Kennedy worked from Menner’s shooting script and added some of his own photos. He used the project as an excuse to buy himself a 24 mm tilt shift lens, a lens used in architectural photography to help eliminate the distorted lines that can be caused when a photographer shoots a building at an upward or downward angle.

   The pictures were all taken with existing light. “For the interior, my biggest concern was going in at times when the sun was behind the glass, so that all the stained glass would really pop.” Kennedy was limited in when he could shoot good pictures. “It's never really gloomy in there, but certain times of day, particularly mornings are better, because other times, it has kind of a pink pastel look to it, which is also pretty. When the sun is out, it really glows. It is really magnificent. You only really get that fairly early in the morning, not too early in the
morning, kind of 9-10.”

   He did not always get to pick when he could shoot, however. “It’s too bad for the cover image when they put me in a cherry picker, we couldn’t pick the time of day to do it. The city lent us the picker, and they picked the time of day when it was convenient. For them, it was 11 a.m., when it was kind of flat (lighting). It’s kind of hard to tell the city we need it at 8 o’clock.”

   Kennedy thought he had better frames for the cover than the one that was published. “I was surprised they picked that one (particular photo). I had nicer ones from the street, but you can’t win them all.” But he was happy with the rest of the book, particularly the back cover.

   Menner is delighted with the variety of lift pictures that Kennedy shot. “(He) took a picture of the Sullivan stained glass from that eye level perspective you’re never going to see otherwise. We put him in a city bucket truck out front...the parapet at the top, the finials which duplicate some of the terra cotta on the interior. It took David getting up in the bucket truck and getting at that eye level the terra cotta ornament that really defines the bank.

Kennedy began his graduate studies in photojournalism at the University of Missouri in August. He is pleased with the book. "I had already seen the PDF files of most of the book, but it was rewarding to see the final project. It's one thing to see images on a computer screen--it's quite another to have a tactile experience with a physical book."

LINKS:

David Kennedy's website:
http://www.david-kennedy.com/

Pomegranate:
http://pomegranate.stores.yahoo.net/

Wright's service station

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:30:46 GMT

Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg

    If you tell people who do not know Frank Lloyd Wright’s work inside out that you recently detoured to Cloquet, Minnesota to see a Wright-designed service station, they will invariably ask you to repeat yourself. They are sure that either they misheard you or that you are pulling their leg.

    Wright thought that gas station designs should be no less appealing than the homes he designed, writes Suzette Lucas in the Summer 2008 Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly. But, she continues, no oil company was interested in his standardized designs which he pitched as a way to save money, and help build up the brand with distinctive buildings.

    The gas station Wright designed in the late 1920s and early 1930s for his Utopian Broadacre City project was finally built in Cloquet in 1956-1958, for R.W. Lindholm. He had built a house in for Lindholm in Cloquet in 1952.

    The service station features a dramatic thirty-foot cantilevered, copper-covered canopy that projects north past the second floor lounge, or waiting room, and the bathrooms that are over the office. The lounge is glass-enclosed on three sides. There are skylights in the garage. Building codes precluded Wright from adding the overhead gas lines featured in his original concept. Wright had wanted motorists to be able to drive without having to navigate around conventional fuel pumps.

    Wright’s design was built around an existing filling station and garage. Lindholm sold Phillips 66 gasoline. The 60’ pylon atop the roof originally said “Phillips” where Wright’s name is now painted. And “66” was at the base of the tower, where we now see his “F” and “L” initials.

Today the station is a Spur dealership. It is a full-service gas station. Gas is cheaper across the street, but it would be shoddy to buy gas at a self-service station, and then drive over to walk around and take pictures. There is a dry cleaner on the south side of the building.

These pictures were regrettably shot at midday. The lighting and architecture would be more dramatic at dusk, mixing ambient light with the lights of the building. The car in the service bay is a 1955 Studebaker Champion (which evolved from one of Raymond Loewy's wonderful designs for Studebaker).

Wright’s 1927 design for a service station is being built in Buffalo. It will be a full-scale building, but it will not be a working gas station.

Links:

History:
http://www.cloquet.com/index.cfm?PID=118

A rich collection of historic photos:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/08/06/gasstationslideshow/

Paul Ringstrom’s photos of the 50th anniversary celebration on August 7:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/45747476@N00/sets/72157606674836927/

The Buffalo project:

htto://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/06/arts/design/06wrig.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&oref=slogin

The Ennis House

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:00:56 GMT

Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg

Robert Leary cooked himself a batch of popcorn (with real butter, if you please), and settled down to watch a movie in the book-lined library of his 1909 California craftsman-style house. He was not just a movie buff that Saturday night. He was an architectural archaeologist, researching Frank Lloyd Wright’s majestic and sprawling Ennis House (1924). There are two buildings at the Ennis House: the main house, and the garage and chauffeur’s quarters, west of the house. The “motor court,” which would be called a driveway today, separates the two.

My friend Robert Leary, at the Ennis House

Leary had heard that the 1933 film “Female,” starring Ruth Chatterton shows what the original doors and windows in the garage and chauffeur’s quarters looked like. He found what he was looking for, about eight minutes into the hour-long film, “I let out a yelp last night at 12:30!”

Ruth Chatterton in the movie

    The 75-year-old black and white comedy romance movie confirmed that the original building had garage doors and French windows. “Thank God we had not done those windows (during the restoration)! It is a whole other project that involved money, but at least we have it! It’s clear as day!”

    Leary wanted to call his friends, but it was too late at night. “I was jumping at the chance of sharing the good news. You can look at the Ennis House, and see all the terrible things that have happened. A lot of bad luck.”

    The house has had a succession of private owners, including Charles and Mabel Ennis, who commissioned it. It has likely had few stewards like Leary, past president and current member of the Ennis House Foundation board of directors. He is passionate about the house and about the Foundation. Their efforts saved the house from sliding off the southern face of the hills of Los Feliz, defying the expectations of many people who thought the house would be lost forever.

    The house is one of four that Wright designed for Los Angeles clients using his patented concrete textile block construction method. The numbers are staggering: there are some 27,000 blocks inside and outside the Ennis House, in 27 different varieties. Some are patterned on both sides; others on only one side; some are half blocks; and some are quarter blocks. Each block is 16 x 16 inches. The house is 4,000 square feet; the footprint of the property, including the retaining walls, the motor court, and the garage and chauffeur’s quarters, is about 6500 square feet.

    Add to those statistics one more that is almost unimaginable: 400 million pounds of concrete have been poured in the last two years to stabilize the house. Just two years earlier, in 2004, the Ennis House had been named one of the Eleven Most Endangered Properties in America by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, after being nominated for that dubious distinction by The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

    The signature retaining wall is now a facade, rather than part of the structure of the house. It hides what Leary calls an “invisible superstructure under the house and the property.” The modern engineering included drilling pylons 57 feet into solid bedrock, behind the wall.

    Leary first met the Ennis House when he was a docent for Wright’s Hollyhock House, across from Ennis. “We were taken there on a tour as part of our ongoing education. We were taken to a number of Wright properties around California. I had heard of it, and had clearly seen it from Hollyhock House.

    “To actually see it is one thing, to go inside is a whole other experience. It was so large and it was so different from so many of the other lovely small Frank Lloyd Wright houses I’d seen in California and the East Coast area. Most of the houses I’d seen from outside were modest in scale and the Ennis House and Hollyhock House were so bombastic in their presentation. They were so audacious and grand and beautiful and just thereby being so unique. I could learn that this was Frank Lloyd Wright working on a grander scale.”

    He was not disappointed. “My first impression was just overwhelming. I wanted to own it. I wanted to buy it on the spot.” The house was owned at the time by Augustus Brown, who was there during Leary’s visit.

    The Northridge earthquake of January 20,1994 had recently struck the city. “The Ennis House at that time was in grave shape. It was deteriorating. You could see the effect of the earthquake, how they had to put up temporary shoring.

    “He (Brown) was in process of trying to raise as much money as he could.” The money would be used to restore, rather than save the property. “It was hugely different, the realization was that it had to be saved, not restored yet. It was in immediate danger of structural collapse. I never dreamed that I would be in his position 11 or 12 years later!”

    The house clung precariously to the side of the hill for the next 11 years, during which time Mr. Brown died. “A very dedicated group of volunteers led by Franklin DeGroot was doing everything they could to raise money, to raise awareness. The probability was that the house was facing imminent structural collapse.”

    Diane Keaton, the actress, took up the cause of the Ennis House after the National Trust listing of it as one of the most endangered properties in the nation. She wrote press releases and gave interviews about the house. Her message was that the house “is” collapsing, according to Leary. Then, as if the house was not already in bad enough shape, 2005 brought rain, “catastrophic rain, like we had not had in one hundred years.”

    It was a turning point for the house, Leary says. “Between Diane Keaton’s clarion call, the National Trust listing, and the rain of 2005, a new group was brought in to see what we could do immediately to save the house.” There was no time to waste, he says.

    The Ennis House Foundation was formed, though the efforts of film producer Joel Silver (then owner of Wright’s Storer House, also in Los Angeles, and Auldbrass, in South Carolina); Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy; the National Trust; and the Los Angeles Conservancy. Leary was invited to join the board. “I was really stunned that they wanted me, possibly because I had been so involved with Hollyhock House, and was a member of all three (organizations).” He was elected chairman.

    They had to act decisively, “We did not have the luxury of ‘let’s really think this through.’” The board did not meddle in areas in which it had no expertise. “The board religiously stuck to the behind the scenes stuff, to let the architectural people and engineers do what they do best, and not get involved in the rigimarole.” They told the experts, ‘Go do what you can, and do it quickly.’

    Leary singles out another group for praise. “It truly is the accountants and the lawyers that were the genius for this miracle that has taken place in three years. Yes, the architects and engineers were helpful, and historians and others, but it really was the lawyers and the accountants who were able to free up the money, some from FEMA, some from banks, some from loans. It really was a community effort, all volunteer.”

    A diverse group of people, with varied talents committed to the rescue effort. “Everyone came together and has continued to come together pro bono because of the reality of the grave future of the Ennis House. We all came to the conclusion indeed, that if this house was lost, Los Angeles would never live down the shame. We would never live it down if something so extraordinarily important in the cultural history of the U.S. were lost.”

    In spite of the problems the house had almost from the beginning, there have been bright spots, Leary says. Lloyd Wright, the architect’s son, was supervising construction, when he wrote to his father that the retaining wall was failing. Decades later, the house was badly damaged by the earthquake and rains, to be sure, but Leary says, “Conversely, at the same time, even ironically, there was so much good luck, the fact that the interior was never really mucked up at all.”

    There were also some lucky finds. “When the Ennis House Foundation first started taking things over and cleaning out the house and ground in 2005, we were in the chauffeur’s quarters, just after disastrous rains. The ceilings were caving in. It was just abominable and abysmal, beyond gross. We were looking for anything we could salvage, anything that might be important. In the back of the room were these five file cabinets. Three of the five were completely drenched with water and had been there for a year after being drenched. All had to be chucked. In the bottom drawer of the last file cabinet, we found about 300 construction photographs.

    “They showed every stage of the Ennis House through the years except a few we needed. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of historic construction photos of the Ennis House, the Freeman House, and Julius Schulman photos. Thank God. If they had been only 12-14 inches over to the right, they would have been lost forever. This was the first ball in our court. We don’t have money, the house is collapsing. This got me so jazzed.”

    That was only the beginning. They found iron work, some of the latches from the gate (in an antique store). “We found gobs of stuff.” It has now all been photographed, scanned, and filed on discs.

    Leary is especially proud of an artifact he found in the dirt under the house in late 2005. “I found one original mold (for the textile blocks) in the mud, when there basically was no southern retaining wall. I was under the house, literally in the cavernous underside of the house, crawling in the mud and the dirt, knowing this is a rare opportunity. I wanted to see how the house was supported.

    “Wright called a lot of his supports ‘dead men,’ joists, support beams, load bearing walls under the properties. I wanted to see just how the Ennis House had originally been supported. I was crawling in the guts of the house in the mud and the dirt, and there was this rusted piece of metal that was just sicking out of the dirt. I was wondering what it was. I dug and dug more. I saw it was a square with metal supports on both sides, holding two pieces of wood. I realized it was a mold for the negative space or the inside of a block. Obviously, when the workers were finished, they just left it there, so we have this wonderful cultural artifact of the craftsmanship of these four wonderful (textile block) houses, but especially of the Ennis House, of the 27,000 blocks, produced one at a time. They were not cookie cutter, not mass produced. Here was material that they used; that they used to build the Ennis House!

    “That sort of thing...is priceless. It is like finding the Raiders of the Lost Ark Holy Grail. Historians and researchers and craftspeople in the future can see that this was in effect just one on one, a worker producing his art.”

    Leary is not ready to stop searching. “There’s more out there. There was a time last year where Steve (McAvoy, a fellow board member) and I were literally finding a piece of the puzzle once a week.” They traded phone calls. “Steve, you’re never going to believe this. Robert, you’re never going to believe this.” These kinds of finds helped them restore the Ennis bathrooms to their original colors. “Now the biggest example of this energy or luck is ‘Female’ (the movie) with the garage door and the French windows.”

    Leary believes that the chauffeur’s quarters are overlooked in their importance. “I try to emphasize that the Ennis House property has two buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright. In actuality the chauffeur’s quarters was built first. It was built before the Ennis House. The geometrics of the chauffeur’s quarters are revelatory of where Wright is going with pre-Usonian ideas, like Residence A at Barnsdall Park. These are two buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright that get very little notice.

    Wright completely redesigned the interior of the Ennis House in the 1940s for John Nesbitt, the second owner of the home. Not only did Wright suggest furniture and a fireplace designed in styles seen in his Usonian homes, but he also suggested renaming the house “Sijistan,” the Persian name of the Safavid Caliph’s palace, according to Prof. Neil Levine.1 “He completely reworks the scale and the proportions and the living spaces and dining. None of that came to be through Nesbitt’s tenure. They did add a billiard room downstairs in what had been storage space. In the upper part, in what had once been a garden, they added a lap pool and a few other minor alterations. Those were the only ones carried out in the 1940s. Plans for furniture, light fixtures, dimensions are in the Taliesin archives. Most of it was never carried out.”

    The house has many leaded glass windows. Leary thinks only five were designed by Wright. They are not the most prominent windows in the house (one opaque one is between Mrs. Ennis’ bathroom and the signature hallway of the house). The more prominent windows, including those in the dining room and living room, may be the work of Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, who supervised construction of the house. The extant dining room table dates to the 1930s. Wright designed one for the house in the 1940s, but it was never built.

    Leary is asked about whether Wright might have had “a fit” about the furniture and light fixtures which he did not design. “I would imagine. They are Mediterranean, neo-Spanish of that period, which does work with the California southwest houses of that period, just not with the Ennis House.”

    He has advice for people who want to experience Wright’s work. “Let the house speak to you. In my experience in visiting homes and buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the experience of other people I’ve talked to, it’s one thing to go into a Frank Lloyd Wright space on a tour or experience it for an hour or so. It’s completely different to spend large amounts of time in these spaces, quietly and let the house or building speak to you.

    “There is nothing like the extraordinarily unique opportunity to spend time in one of the spaces with friends, good food, a good bottle of wine; a fireplace is working, the light changes. See how the character of these spaces are completely different from the day time into the evening. Encourage people to go to these buildings where you could spend time. Spend as much time as you can in these places. That’s when the real genius of Wright surfaces, 50 years or so after he died.”

    Leary is an unshakable optimist. “As many stumbles, and as many heartbreaks, and God-awful stuff that you just want to tear your hair out, then there’s just been something that’s been incredible. It’s just going to go on. What could be more exciting? The house will be better studied, better researched, better catalogued than ever.”

    The Ennis House restoration won a 2007 Preservation Award from the Los Angeles Conservancy. Leary was moved by the award, but knows the work is far from over. “I look at the work that has to be done. I think it’s a little early, but it’s nice, it gets out the perception that the Ennis House is not dead.” Leary is Roman Catholic, but turns to a Yiddish expression, when he talks about the effort to save the house, “It’s a mitzvah” (good deed). Indeed!

Links:
Ennis House Foundation:
http://www.ennishouse.org

Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy:
www.savewright.org

Los Angeles Conservancy:
http://www.laconservancy.org/

Movies and television shows that have been filmed on location at the Ennis House include:

Female (1933)
The House on Haunted Hill (1959) *
The Terminal Man (1974)
Day of the Locust (1975)
Blade Runner (1982) *
Black Rain (1989)
The Karate Kid, Part III (1989) *
Moon 44 (1990)
Predator 2 (1990)
Twin Peaks (1990)
Blood Ties (1991)
Grand Canyon (1991)
The Rocketeer (1991)
Fallen Angels (1993)
The Glimmer Man (1996)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997)
The Replacement Killers (1998)
Rush Hour (1998)
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

* Indicates the three most famous uses of the house as a movie location
(Source: The Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/
which lists the house as the Ennis-Brown House. It is now known only by its original name, the Ennis House).

Wright tourism: Students from New Mexico stopped to see the house.

Many thanks to my colleague Scott Anderson, for his technical help producing the slide shows of my photos.

Mason City update

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 19:30:17 GMT

Text and photos (c) Mark Hertzberg

Ann MacGregor and Bob McCoy hold a model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Park Inn Hotel and City National Bank building in Mason City, Iowa, in the lobby of the hotel building. The model was made by a local student.

MacGregor is executive director of Wright on the Park. The organization is negotiating to secure a $9 million Vision Iowa grant to help restore the building, in time for the 2010 centennial of Wright's last surviving hotel building. The group also proposes to build a vistor's center next to Wright's Stockman House, adjacent to Mason City's Rock Glen neighborhood. Rock Glen has a wide variety of homes designed by architects including Walter Burley Griffin and Barry Byrne.

$4.3 million in private funds would have to be raised, as a condition of the Vision Iowa grant. $7,500,000 of the grant would be for the hotel/bank building, $1 million for the Mason City Public Library, $250,000 for a performing arts pavilion in East Park, and $250,000 for the architectural interpretive center. This visitor's center would be near Wright's Stockman House, adjacent to the Rock Glen neighborhood.

I had the opportunity to speak in Mason City again, in May. The Mason City Globe-Gazette has supported the quest to secure the Vision Iowa grant, and quoted my remarks supporting the project, in advance of my talk. I had the pleasure of staying with Bob and Bonnie McCoy again, -in their Walter Burley Griffin-designed home. Dr. McCoy gave me an extensive tour of the hotel and bank buildings. A variety of slide shows of the buildings, as well as of the Stockman House, follow.

The hotel lobby:

The hotel was doomed when the Hotel Hanford, with 250 rooms, all with private bathrooms, opened in 1922. That building is now a residential apartment building. Dr. McCoy notes "In one fell blow it made the Park Inn with its 100 square foot rooms and shared baths belong to a bygone generation."

There is much work to be done upstairs in the next two years, but project organizers are not daunted. After all, they have made great progress in recent years. The basement will also be redone.

A model of one of the rooms proposed for the remodeled Park Inn is displayed in one of the bank building windows.

The law offices of James Blythe, who commissioned the building, were above the bank.

Wright on the Park acquired the City National Bank building when the clothing store occupying the ground floor moved across the street. The second floor will be removed during renovation, and the lobby will be open again.

Bob McCoy is keen to photograph the hotel and bank building at any opportunity. Here, he takes advantage of early morning light.

The Vision Iowa grant would also fund a visitors center next to Wright's Stockman House (1908). Photos of the Stockman House follow:

Links:

Park Inn Hotel and City National Bank:

http://www.wrightonthepark.org/

Stockman House:

http://www.stockmanhouse.org/