This will be a great big DUH for many of you, particularly armchair architecture historians, professional historians and anyone who ever took an architecture boat tour and now has strong opinions about bricks — but I didn’t really know why the Wrigley gave off such odd vibes until I read “The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon,” a fascinating and pretty entertaining new $95 coffee table book devoted to this terra cotta mainstay. Something about it always looked so … off. That’s because, as I learned, there’s really no traditional front. The place curls and squirms between the river and its neighbors. You could say it has several fronts. And compared with other buildings so associated with the city, it’s relatively hollow — the jewel is the facade, the interior is eh.
That was intentional. It was never meant to be more than an office building promoting a chewing gum company. Like traditional billboards, it’s all about a head-turning surface.
The point is, read this and you’ll never take the Wrigley Building for granted again.
That’s why I visited the architects of the book, who all live in the same apartment building on South Shore Drive, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s first high-rise in Chicago. In their building, where they will host an occasional town hall to educate the residents on its architectural legacy, they have become known “the Mies Conscience,” said Tim Samuelson, the former city cultural historian. He lives directly above his two co-authors, Robert Sharoff, the ringleader, and Sharoff’s husband, photographer William Zbaren.
“Actually, we’re the Mies Police,” Zbaren said, leaving the impression that, as well-meaning as they are, other building residents have far less charitable names for them.
To be fair to those residents, they know more than you do about Chicago buildings. They might seem pleasantly intimidating if you don’t know as much. They are like other architecture people who tell you why you’re wrong about what’s in front of you. We all know those people. Some of these people are my best friends. An architecture critic who knows more than I do once patiently explained that I was wrong about the new developments around Wrigley Field, that it was smarter than my glib assessment and not “as soulful as a dentist’s office.” I stand by my assessment, while simultaneously admitting, I don’t know what I’m talking about.
For instance, my assessment that the Wrigley Building has no front door. It’s more nuanced than that, the Mies Police explained.
Sharoff: “It’s two buildings, built at separate times, and while they work together, they are also individual spaces, which is unusual. The centers of the buildings match, but the bases and the tops — those do not match. You can’t stand there and see it as a whole.”
Zbaren: “The footprints are completely irregular.”
Samuelson: “Askew. They are askew. What’s so strange is how the Wrigley Building follows old paths of the Chicago River, not the city grid we’re so familiar with today.”
Zbaren: “Yes, but as for the door on the south tour — OK, that is in the center. But remember, also, as you look upward, (architect Charles Beerman) is folding it all like paper. You just can’t look at Wrigley by standing in front of it! Across the street? Maybe? It’s meant to be in motion.”
The Wrigley, they said, is there to make you smile. It’s a one-off. There’s nothing else like it in Chicago.
I decided not to ask about the front door on the north tour.
Because they would know, and like their book, they contain so much interesting information on the origin and legacy of the Wrigley Building that we could be here all day. We sat in Sharoff and Zbaren’s remarkably decorated apartment overlooking the lake, surrounded by Zbaren’s vast collection of salad forks from all over the world (plus two that resemble the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote). There’s Sharoff’s childhood train set. Also, posters salvaged from Wrigley’s basement. Wooden cherubs recovered from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis. Tintype photos of couples whom Zbaren suspects were gay. Bowls by architect Stanley Tigerman. Portraits by celebrity photographer Marc Hauser. The chairs came from Mies van der Rohe himself; they once sat in the downstairs lobby. Above on a shelf, a vintage Electrolux vacuum, a gift from Samuelson, who once owned their apartment; he used it partly to store his own warehouse-worth of artifacts.
Zbaren jumps up and grabs a bit of ornamentation from the Wrigley. A cornice? A doorknob? All I know is that it’s terra cotta and when Zbaren turns it over, it’s hollow. He points out the long, thin graves inside the chunk, where physical fingers pushed at the material.
His point is, the Wrigley, despite being surrounded by steel skyscrapers, is very much handmade art. Like most everything in their apartment. Everything in here is something. Even their coffee table is aqua, lime and covered with Ben Day dots. I bet yours isn’t.
Similarly, their book lays plain, on page after page, how eccentric and unexpected the Wrigley was for 1920s Chicago, if not today. It was elegant but playful, and avoided the head-spinning hard sell William Wrigley Jr. was known for. Before it was completed in 1924, throughout its four-year construction, its corner of Michigan Avenue wasn’t much of a city showcase yet. It was surrounded by far less austere structures, railroad tracks, warehouses. “Kraft was there then,” Samuelson said. “Kraft Mac & Cheese was invented next door.” In fact, journalists across the street at the Tribune building (finished in 1925) were anticipating something more Times Square out of Wrigley’s imagination. They expected, at least, a big, brash WRIGLEY plastered across the facade. The irony being, a century later, a big, brash TRUMP now stretches across the facade beside it.
Except, as Sharoff, Zbaren and Samuelson amend, the Wrigley was still regarded as aggressively theatrical. Particularly considering how filthy the block was then. So bad was neighborhood soot, Sharoff said the Wrigley facade — which incorporates six different shades of white — had to be scrubbed several times a year. The clock tower, that clever way of getting everyday Chicago to glance constantly over at your building, was so inaccurate, the Tribune made it a running joke. And though the ornamentation was made by hand, modernist critics hated its classicism. The architecture firm was Graham, Anderson, Probst and White — which eventually became known for much of landmark Chicago, including the Civic Opera House, Field Museum, Merchandise Mart and Union Station — but Beerman, who was behind the Wrigley, was an out-of-towner and a rookie.
Sharoff and Zbaren expected a relatively quick history. It turned into a two-year job. Samuelson alone dug up enough detail on its tenants to decide the Wrigley, in its own way, had been an unofficial “arts incubator.” Besides becoming a hub for advertising firms, it was home to WBBM-AM for more than 25 years. It also held recording studios that cut tracks by most of Chicago’s major blues musicians, as well as country legends Roy Acuff and the Carter Family. “If you go into Walgreens in the building now, right around the adult diapers — Peggy Lee made her first records there,” Samuelson said.
There was so much back and forth, and up and down, between authors and apartments, they describe “a whole Ralph Kramden/Ed Norton dynamic.” Other than Samuelson — who never did give up his downtown office, despite “alleged retirement” — Sharoff, a former real estate writer for the New York Times, and Zbaren, an architecture photographer, were already authors of a half dozen Midwest architecture books. This time, from alchemy came a rarity: a genuinely fun book on architecture. They even decided, since they return so often to the joy in great architecture, it should end with images of tourist trinkets of the Wrigley, none of which were even made by Wrigley.
So now their summer plans involve creating an archive in the Wrigley Building, about the Wrigley Building. While researching, they came upon a treasure of artifacts in the Wrigley basement. It all needs maintaining. Scrapbooks, original blueprints, ad posters. Crates upon crates. “Like a submerged world,” Sharoff said, “in the heart of downtown.”
Then it’s back to South Shore Drive, and their heavy, blocky, grimly beige Mies.
But what do I know?
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com