Altered by a succession of tenants of the decades, a local paper, the Newark Advocate reports on new hopes for restoration. A new owner bought the building last August, has already made a few small changes.

Plans filed with the Newark Building Code Department in November indicate that Jones has removed the false ceiling and an upper floor that was added to support a furnace.

Jones said “a decent bit” of the original marble is still there, although the elaborate stencils that lined the ceiling and upper portion of the walls are in varied condition.

“That’s an area where there was neglect,” he said.

Jones, who lives in a historic residence he renovated, has called upon contacts in New York as well as consultants from other parts of the Midwest to help him assess how to progress with improvements.

Newark City Councilman David Rhodes said Jones led him on a tour of the building last fall.

“There are a lot of beautiful buildings in downtown Newark, and it takes the right owner and right niche. In my view, the right person has purchased the building,” Rhodes said.

Jones, who has joined the Downtown Newark Association, said he had no timeline planned for completion of the restoration. He intends to lease it to an appropriate tenant — possibly food service, retail or professional offices — when the work is complete.

“It’s not a short-term investment for me,” Jones said. “I’m more interested in doing it in a quality way.”

The Governor made an election-year promise that state funds would be given to help rebuild a destroyed church building adjacent to the landmark, a building that held offices and classroom space, but never hosted religious services. Money instead went to a provate school that leased space from the church, but had no other connections. The school has since moved, taking the state money with it.

Almost immediately after Blagojevich had promised $1 million to assist Pilgrim Baptist, concerns arose from the American Civil Liberties Union and others about funneling public dollars to a religious group.

Church officials said they were told state money couldn’t be used to repair the church but learned from the administration it could be used to reconstruct the adjoining building with office space and classrooms.

That was the last Pilgrim Baptist heard from the administration.

Ottenhoff did not say how exactly the administration intends to live up to the governor’s promise of state help to rebuild Pilgrim Baptist, a deal overseen by two senior Blagojevich staffers no longer with the administration. Ottenhoff refused to name them publicly.

”We need to figure out what happened and what the options are. It’s hard for me to say at this point what can happen until we’ve had a chance to revisit this,” she said.

The $1 million state grant to Loop Lab School was earmarked for ”all costs associated with space/land acquisition,” state contracting documents show.

The school intended to use the money to purchase a commercial condominium at 318 W. Adams St. and convert that into a school, records show. Efforts to reach Elmira Mayes, the school’s director, were unsuccessful.

Cynthia Jones, a Pilgrim Baptist trustee, said she is unclear how diverting money to Loop Lab School benefitted the church or met Blagojevich’s promise to help the church.

The computer-generated model of the fairgrounds will be projected on a movie screen in a 220-seat museum auditorium. The program allows Snyder to move the screen’s point of view at will, giving viewers a real-time, human-scale tour similar to a video game.

“Since I was a kid,” said Samuelson, “I have been collecting books, photos and maps on the fair, and I always thought I knew the fair pretty well, but now realize that I never had a sense of what the fair was really like until I saw Lisa’s presentation.”

The temporary exhibit is part of the 75th anniversary of the museum, which is housed in the building that served as the expo’s Palace of Fine Arts 115 years ago.

The visual record of the fair, while voluminous and striking, consists almost entirely of black and white photographs that fail to convey the scale of the event and the buildings, Samuelson said. The fair covered 633 acres along the lake shore in Hyde Park.

“It’s one thing to see the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building in a photograph, but it gives you no idea how big it is,” he said. “It was the biggest building in the world at the time, and in Lisa’s presentation, you can stand next to it and gape upward and really begin to understand its size.

The tour is lead by Chicago historian Tim Samuelson and the simulation of the fair is the work of the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA.

Times are: 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m., 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Monday, and 11:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m.

Examples of the simulation, stills and video, and can be seen on the website of the Urban Simulation Team (note the link in the article is defective, use mine), and it is pretty amazing. There are also simulations of the Forum of Trajan in Rome and Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

David Bradley, a competitive skier at Dartmouth College, graduated with honors in English. He was the the US champion in the Nordic Combined (ski jumping and cross-country skiing), chosen for the 1940 US Olympic team, went to Finland was a war correspondent in 1939 after the Russian invasion. He then attended Harvard Medical School and subsequently entered the army and served as a medical officer.

His 1948 book, No Place to Hide was an early warning of the potential horrors of atomic warfare, and was praised by E. B. White in a New York Times review (White said Bradley had “eyes and ears of a poet”).

He served in the New Hampshire state legislature, taught, worked with the US Nordic ski team for the 1960 Olympics, and wrote more books (on Finland, on skiing and the work of Robert Frost).

An opening reception this Friday at 6PM will feature Tim Samuelson of the City of Chicago.

The exhibit opens January 25 and runs through December, 2008.

Of course, because the Universe is perverse, my wife will be in St. Louis in April (the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys annual conference), and, being either still unemployed or newly employed, I have to skip the trip — I’m keeping a list, and one day, Fate, or Destiny, or Karma or The-Guy-Pulling-The-Strings will have a lot of ’splaning to do (not one but two missed chances to go inside the Heurtley House, Wright Plus, FLWBC Convention …)

The architecture firm Gensler will occupy 55,000 square feet on the third floor, and hefty increase from the 40,000 sq. ft. they currently lease in the Inland Steel building.

The owner of the Sullivan Center, Joseph Freed & Associates LLC, says about 70% of the office space in the Sullivan Center has been leased (it’s a multi-building site, the former Carson’s building has about 600,000 sq. ft.). Freed is spending about $100 million on interior renovations to the building.

Construction of the Auditorium Building, which quickly became a Chicago landmark, would have gone much smoother if Sullivan had separated the tower from the rest of the building, though it would have been less aesthetically pleasing. “But that would not have pleased him much,” Kaufman wrote. “He envisioned his auditorium building as a fully integrated structure.”

To stay true to his vision, he had to come up with a way to support the tower, which was being constructed on marshy land.

Once he solved the problem through interior braces, construction moved quickly.

Actually, I believe that Dankmar Adler deserves credit for the structural system supporting the Auditorium Building, but even so, it is nice to see Sullivan receiving recognition.

Sadly, the State of Mississippi is wearing down the best hopes and efforts of the owners:

In fact, the repairs have barely begun. “The state of Mississippi seems to be struggling on how to administer the funds,” says Cooper Norman, the architect overseeing both restorations. He reckons that each house will cost at least $500,000 to stabilize, then another $1.5 million or so to fully restore. Recently a contractor backed out of the stabilization phase, perhaps intimidated by the scale of the job. Unfortunately, with the state dithering and contractors bailing, Sweeney is again seeking a demolition permit. Although she signed an agreement to save the house in July, she isn’t bound to the commitment until the state begins repairs. “I think at this point we would have it demolished,” she says.

the cottages were designed in the early 1890s, a collaboration between Sullivan and Wright (at the time, Wright was still employed by Adler & Sullivan) and both are considered important examples of the transition from 19th to 20th Century architecture.

The article includes a link to photos of the current state of the buildings, artists renderings of the completed restoration and drawings and a historic photo.

James Charnley was a friend of Louis Sullivan, and the house was designed by Adler & Sullivan in 1891-1892. There isn’t a consensus on Frank Lloyd Wright’s role in the design, though the divergent opinions seem to be rarely acknowledged — it’s presented as either conclusively an early Wright, or conclusively a rare Sullivan residential masterpiece done with a bit of help from a young, talented draftsman named Wright. Some of the arguments on both sides are summarized in this 1995 article, written just after the house was given to the Society for Architectural Historians (the current owners of the house) .

Like the Winslow House, hints of the Prairie style peek out: prominent water table, horizontal feel (though the vertical aspect is not as well masked as it is on the Winslow House) and a nearly fortress-like presentation.

The interior is disciplined elegance in service to Sullivan’s dictum, “form follows function” (Peter Beers has more and better interior photos on his site).

Interior photos ( and floor plans) can also been seen on this site.

The Library of Congress has photos and drawings on-line from the Historic American Buildings Survey, though the drawings and most of the photos are from 1964 and show a later addition that destroyed the symmetry of the design (the addition was removed in the SOM restoration done in the 1980s).

The house is open for tours on Wednesdays and Saturdays (Wed. tours are free, but Sat. tours include an optional tour of the Madlener House).

The Society of Architectural Historians has a website with more information, and there is an excellent book available on the house: The Charnley House: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Making of Chicago’s Gold Coast