Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism Author(s): Joseph M. Siry Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 128-159 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991376 . Accessed: 28/09/2013 13:23 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of California Press and Society of Architectural Historians are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 147.91.1.45 on Sat, 28 Sep 2013 13:23:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Transcript
Chicago's Auditorium Building: Opera or AnarchismAuthor(s): Joseph M. SirySource: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp.128-159Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991376 .
Accessed: 28/09/2013 13:23
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
University of California Press and Society of Architectural Historians are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
http://www.jstor.org
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Few buildings in the modern period have been as closely identified with a city's architectural culture as Adler and
Sullivan's Auditorium Building in Chicago, designed and built from 1886 to 1890 (Figure 1). Regarded as a definitive monu- ment for its place and period, it is a work that did much to launch Chicago's reputation as a major center for modern architecture. The Auditorium Building has always figured centrally in accounts of Adler and Sullivan's oeuvre because of its technical and aesthetic virtuosity, both as a construction and as a theater.1 This study attempts to situate the Auditorium
Building within the social history of Chicago in the 1880s, when the city's theatrical and musical culture was part of a
larger ongoing struggle between Chicago's leading capitalists and property owners and a local working-class political move- ment for socialistic anarchism.
As an ideologically calculated response to its historic mo-
ment, Chicago's Auditorium adapted traditions of theater architecture and urban monumentality as these had devel-
oped in both Europe and the United States in the late nine- teenth century. The building's planning and design answered to its social purpose. Such analysis of this pivotal work provides a different perspective on the phenomenon of the Chicago School of architecture with which the Auditorium is linked in the modern movement's historiography. The case of the Audi- torium points up the need to examine not only the protomod- ern construction and expression of Chicago's commercial
buildings from 1880 to 1900 but also their patronage.2
NEW YORK CITY'S METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE
As its patron and architects later commented, Chicago's Audi- torium Theater was designed partly in opposition to New York's original Metropolitan Opera House of 1881-1883. Un- like the Auditorium, the Metropolitan was paid for by indi- vidual stockholders who purchased boxes in the projected theater for their private use. As the Met's architect, Josiah Cady, explained: "In this country, where the government is not 'paternal,' aid has been found in another quarter: the
wealthy, fashionable classes, who, even if not caring especially
for, nor appreciating deeply the music, find [the opera house] a peculiar and valuable social feature. Its boxes afford a rare
opportunity for the display of beauty and toilet[te]s. They also
give opportunity for the informal exchange of social courte- sies, being opened to select callers through the evening; the
long waits between the acts especially favoring such inter-
change."' This method of financing "in no small degree
determines the size and character of the house," where provi- sion had to be made "for accommodating liberally and el-
egantly the boxholders who have built this house, guarantee it
against loss, and receive their special accommodations as a return for the same."4
Appointed after a competition in 1880, Cady designed the
original Metropolitan Opera House for a site 200 feet wide from Thirty-ninth to Fortieth Streets and 260 feet long from its front on Broadway back to Seventh Avenue (Figure 2). For this site, as Edith Wharton recalled, New Yorkers wanted "a new
Opera House which should compete in costliness and splen- dor with those of the great European capitals."'5 The chairman of the Metropolitan's building committee wrote that "there is not a Theater or Opera House in the country that can be taken as a model for what we intend to have.'"6 Before he
became the Metropolitan's architect, Cady, although an accom-
plished organist and musician, had never designed a theater nor seen an opera and had never traveled to Europe. His
appointment prompted him to tour European opera houses in 1881 prior to executing his final plans.7
In Cady's built plan for the Met, the auditorium housed a
ring of equally sized boxes in the tradition of La Scala in Milan
(1776-1778) and Edward M. Barry's Covent Garden in Lon- don (1856-1858). However, the Met's larger auditorium was a
slightly modified version of their horseshoe-shaped plans. To ensure good sight lines from boxes near the stage, Cady shaped the boxes as a lyre in a plan that flared outward where it met the stage. Indeed he named his original competition project "Lyre," alluding to the musical instrument of Apollo, the god of music, whose image appeared in the mural over the
proscenium. The auditorium's large overall area and its dis- tended curvature enabled Cady to include a total of 122 boxes in three full tiers around the horseshoe and an additional half
128 JSAH / 57:2, JUNE 1998
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FIGURE I: Adler and Sullivan, Auditorium Building, Michigan Avenue and Congress Street, Chicago, 1886- 890, from southwest, showing houses on Congress Street (lower right)
tier of boxes beneath the lowest full tier. This half tier of
baignoire (meaning bathtub-like) boxes was near the stage, where the lowering of the parquet permitted its insertion
(Figure 3). As in La Scala, each box at the Met had an
anteroom or salon for receiving visitors. The box itself seated
at most six persons, yielding a total capacity of 732 persons in
boxes. Stockholders purchased outright only the boxes on the
two lower full tiers. Those on the lowest half tier and the upper full tier were rented, at first for $12,000 a season. When the
Metropolitan opened, newspapers printed diagrams showing who owned each of the boxes. To ensure adequate ticket
revenues, the entire auditorium was to seat 3,045, making it
larger than major European theaters such as the Paris Opera, which had 2,156 permanent seats.8
To avoid competition among patrons, the Met omitted
visually prominent boxes close to the stage in the side walls of
the proscenium, which were characteristic of earlier opera houses. To make all the boxes equally desirable, "sight lines
were drawn from every part of the house in each tier [of
boxes] to the sides and the rear of the stage, to ascertain how
much of the view of the stage would be lost from that point, and the contour of the auditorium and the pitch of each tier
[of boxes] were modified in conformity with the results of
these studies to the arrangement actually adopted."9 In opti-
mizing sight lines from boxes, the Metropolitan converted its
wealthiest patrons "into a republic of oligarchs with no prece- dence among themselves, nodding on equal terms all around
Olympus."10 In 1966, before its closing and demolition, accounts of the
old Metropolitan praised its acoustics, especially for the voice.
Yet in its first season (1883-1884), the theater was deemed too
large to be an acoustically optimal space because its huge volume made it difficult to hear performers (especially those
with less strong voices) in the uppermost galleries." In addi-
tion, although Cady's office prepared 700 drawings to adjust
sight lines, such studies did not perfect the quality of views
from seats in the balcony and top gallery above the three tiers
of boxes. In the topmost gallery, only a fourth of the seats had
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 129
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original stage and proscenium, showing frieze with
central mural of Apollo flanked by individual
figural portraits of the muses and paintings of
"The Ballet" and "The Chorus" by Francis May-
nard to either side of the frieze above topmost
gallery. From Century Moagazine 28 (July 1884)
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a portico of three bays as the main frontal entrance on
Broadway (Figure 5). To the sides were corner blocks that rose
to seven stories. Only the first two stories were internally part of the opera house, articulated as such by larger windows. The
corner blocks' ground floors contained shops, with ballrooms
and restaurants above on the second floor. Their rents were to
supplement income from the theater, whose operations alone
were not expected to be profitable. Additional income was also
expected from the corner blocks' upper stories, which were
initially identified as apartments for bachelors.16 The residential
corner blocks were crowned by a bracketed cornice and balus-
trade, so that the round-arched exterior style was distinctly italianate, considered appropriate for a theater initially intended
for Italian opera. Since funds were insufficient to allow employ- ment of costly stone and marble, Cady's walls were of a pale
yellow brick with ornamental terra-cotta trim of the same color.'7
Cady's fronts for the Metropolitan signified the idea of
opera as a legitimate entertainment. In New York, opera was
popular, with audiences acclaiming leading musical artists
imported from Europe to perform Italian works since the
1850s.18 Yet some regarded these operas as so emotional in
tone as to border on the disreputable as a form of public amusement. This view became dominant with changing reper- toires of the 1860s, when plots of new operas gave greater
emphasis to personal mores.19 To certify the Met's social
acceptability, its sober fronts were meant to contrast with those
of the Casino Theater of 1882 (Figure 6), standing opposite on
the southeast corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway.
Designed by Francis H. Kimball and Thomas Wisedell, the
Casino was Manhattan's main center for light opera and
burlesque. This theater's exterior was highly eclectic and
picturesque. Its round corner tower and bowed loggia curving out above the arched entrance on Thirty-ninth Street com-
bined with Islamic motifs to evoke exotic fantasy that bespoke the productions within. The loggia signaled the presence of a roof garden-the first space of its kind in Manhattan- intended for informal musical performances.20 By contrast, the Metropolitan was deliberately restrained to convey its
purpose of housing grand opera. Communicating an appropri- ate urban character was a central issue for the Chicago Audito- rium's design, yet its founders had a different theater in mind, one shaped by their city's social and cultural situation.
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FIGURE 5: Metropolitan Opera House, on west side of Broadway between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets, 1881 - 1883; demolished 1966; from the southeast, showing New York
Times Building (1904) at right. Photograph (c. 1905) by Detroit Publishing Co.
CHICAGO'S GRAND OPERA FESTIVAL AND ANARCHIST
DEMONSTRATIONS
The old Met's completion quickly stirred Chicagoans to act.
Dankmar Adler recalled: "The wish of Chicago to possess an
Opera House larger and finer than the Metropolitan, a hall for
great choral and orchestral concerts, a mammoth ball-room, a
convention hall, an auditorium for mass meetings, etc., etc., all
under the same roof and within the same walls, gave birth to
the Auditorium proper."21 As Adler implied, Chicago's build-
ing was to be broader in its program and range of purposes than the Metropolitan's. It was also intended to be a theater
and a monument responding to local urban conditions as
these were interpreted by the project's chief patron, Ferdi-
nand W. Peck (1848-1924). His vision was a frame of refer-
ence within which Adler and Sullivan created the Auditori-
um's interiors and monumental exterior.
Peck was the youngest son of Mary Kent Peck and Philip F.
W. Peck, who came to Chicago from Rhode Island in the 1830s
and gradually acquired a series of centrally located properties whose values rose with the city's growth. When their father
died, Ferdinand and his brothers, who were also instrumental
in building the Auditorium, took over management of the
Peck properties. By 1890 these holdings constituted most of
the fourth largest private fortune in Chicago, with the Peck
wealth estimated at $10 million.22 Devoted to a series of civic
causes, Ferdinand Peck was a major supporter and president of the first Chicago Athenaeum, an urban college and cultural
center for working people, which in 1890 moved into a build-
ing close to the Auditorium.23 By all accounts, Peck showed an
unusual degree of concern for workers' lives. His fortune was
based on the rental values of family-owned urban real estate, so
he was not a socialist. However, unlike many wealthier Chicago- ans, he was neither an industrialist nor a merchant who dealt
directly with workers or their associations. This relative dis-
tance from confrontations between capital and labor may have
fostered his more charitable outlook. He had "always been
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 133
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FIGURE 6: Kimball and Wisedell, Casino Theater, southeast comer, Broadway and
Thirty-ninth Street, New York City, 1882; demolished
outspoken in his defense of the rights of workingmen, and he
heartily despises all forms of snobbish aristocracy."24 Another
observer wrote that Peck was "very sympathetic towards the
man who could not afford to indulge his propensities in the
direction of culture without pecuniary aid."25 This concern
shaped his vision of the Auditorium, which drew on a broadly informed knowledge of theaters.
As the Auditorium was being completed inJune 1888, Peck
noted that "the thing had been in my mind a long time."26
How long is unknown, although Peck was said to have traveled
repeatedly to Europe, where he cultivated his lifelong enthusi- asm for Italian grand opera.27 He was not the only wealthy
Chicagoan to acquire culture from European travel. For ex-
ample, Philo T. Otis, one of the key supporters of the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra and author of its history, noted the
operas he had attended in an account of his Europeanjourney of 1873-1874. For Otis, as for many of his American contempo- raries, the productions of the Royal Italian Opera Company at
London's Covent Garden were a prime link to European
operatic culture. By the 1870s this was the home of the
premier vocalist of the period, Adelina Patti, who also sang in
NewYork and at the Auditorium's opening.28 Peck's emphasis on democratic access to high culture in
music and theater, especially opera, may have been based in
part on familiarity with comparable European efforts that
predated Chicago's Auditorium. In France the revolution of
1789 had initiated a prolific development of popular theater
in Paris, where numerous new buildings for public commer-
cial theater were built before the Restoration. By 1847 the
growth of Parisian popular theater had led to the creation of
the Opiera National, whose repertoire, staging, seating, and
pricing were intended to attract workers. A democratic ideal
also informed Charles Garnier's building for the Paris Opera of 1861-1875, wherein the architect carefully orchestrated the
spatial system of arrival and circulation to accommodate a
range of ticketholders.29 A comparable goal informed the
design of Parisian municipal theaters built under the Second
Empire for popular audiences, where auditoriums were en-
cased by rented shops and apartments. These included Gab- riel Davioud's Theitre du Chitelet and the Theitre Lyrique (the latter built for a reincarnated Opera National) sited on
the Place du Chitelet, commissioned in 1859 and inaugurated in 1862. Early in the Third Republic, Davioud designed the
large Trocad6ro Theater (1876-1878) as a popular concert
hall where opera could also be staged.30 Built for the Paris
International Exposition of 1878, the Trocadero recalled the
program and scale of the Royal Albert Hall (1867-1871) in
South Kensington, London. This hall had a vast metal dome
that recalled the scale of the Crystal Palace built for the Great
Exhibition of 1851. When rebuilt at Sydenham in 1854, the
Crystal Palace had also housed large-scale popular concerts.31
As Roula Geraniotis has shown, perhaps the most direct
architectural and ideological precedent for Chicago's Audito-
rium was one of the most innovative new European opera houses, Richard Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. Its archi-
tects, Otto Bruckwald and Carl Runkwitz, worked with the
theater's technical director, Carl Brandt, to design a setting
specifically for Wagner's musical dramas. The project grew from the composer's earlier collaboration with architect
Gottfried Semper to design a comparable theater in Munich, which was never built.32 At Bayreuth, Wagner selected the site
and specified the Festspielhaus's plan. Built from 1872 to
1876, this famed hall featured an amphitheater-like sweep of
seating designed to give spectators a broad view of the stage
(Figure 7). The theater seated about 1,500, including the rear
boxes and a rear gallery above. Bayreuth had neither a main
foyer nor aisles running to the stage between seating groups. Instead, the audience entered through five doors on the right and five on the left. Each of these led to a certain number of
seating rows entered from the sides, leaving an unbroken
curvature of seating in front of the stage. As with Semper's
projects for Munich, the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth explicitly recalled the amphitheater-like shape of ancient Greek the- aters. On one level, the architecture's Classical allusion was
consistent with Wagner's ideal of musical drama rooted not in
Italian court opera but in ancient Greek theater. On another
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level, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus's deemphasis of boxes in
loges or tiers fulfilled Wagner's aim to provide a more demo-
cratic and unified experience for the audience. In this goal, he
was carrying forward Semper's earlier intentions for his Court
Opera House at Dresden (1837-1841). Similar democratic
impulses had underlain the amphitheater-like main floor of
Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Royal Theater, or Schauspielhaus at
Berlin (1818-1824), although both there and at Dresden, loges of boxes still predominated around the theater interior.33
The opening of Wagner's Festspielhaus in August 1876 was
an international event described in detail in New York newspa-
pers. At least one project for the Metropolitan Opera House
incorporated ideas from Bayreuth's design, and, after its first
season in 1883-1884, the Met adopted a program of German
opera modeled closely on Bayreuth's, hiring Wagner's protege to conduct performances in New York.34 However, the Met's
directors did not choose to build a theater whose form imi-
tated Wagner's at Bayreuth. Instead, by modeling the Met on
Covent Garden and La Scala, Manhattan patrons chose the
earlier tradition of court opera houses to which Bayreuth's
Festspielhaus had been opposed. Peck was familiar with the major opera houses of Europe,
many of which he visited with Adler during the late summer of
1888. Their itinerary included Bayreuth, among other Ger-
man theaters. Louis Sullivan greatly admired Wagner, and
many Americans traveled to see performances at Bayreuth. Yet
Sullivan also presumably knew the Paris Opera from his period of study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1874-1875. Its exterior
had been visible from 1867, near the rue de la Paix, where he
recalled his pleasure in strolling and window shopping. The
Paris Opera's opening as a theater on 5 January 1875 was a
major national event, occurring before Sullivan sailed back to
the United States in May. He later acquired Charles Garnier's folio monograph on the building and similar publications on
the opera houses of Vienna and Frankfurt.35 As Peck stated in
1888, "We've had the plans of all the leading opera houses and theaters of Europe in our architects' offices from the begin- ning of the [Auditorium] enterprise."36 He was ideologically opposed to the concept of an opera house primarily for the
privileged classes, with its space dominated by private boxes. On 7 December 1889, two days before its theater opened, he wrote to the Auditorium's 180 stockholders, who constituted the city's capitalist elite, stating that the great opera houses of
Europe, those of Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, Dresden, Berlin, and Milan, "are all smaller in capacity, exclusive boxes occupy- ing much of the space. They are built rather for the few than for the masses-the titled and the wealthy rather than for the
people--lacking the broad democratic policy of providing for all which prevails in the arrangement of your Auditorium,
thereby lessening the gulf between the classes."37 This last phrase was rooted in Chicago's deeply troubled
social history of the years 1883-1886. A recession starting in 1883, with its sudden layoffs and wage reductions in many trades, had been the stimulus for a series of local labor actions, beginning with a city-wide bricklayers' strike in the summer of that year. The focus of the strike was Chicago's new Board of Trade Building then under construction at La Salle and Jack- son Streets, the cornerstone of which had been laid in Decem- ber 1882. Designed by William Boyington, the Board of Trade
Building was then Chicago's most massive commercial monu-
ment, with the city's tallest tower (Figure 8). The building housed a legendary trading floor for grain and other commodi- ties, while the leaders of its board controlled Chicago's railway systems and manufacturing plants. This structure "was by all odds the most important project then under way, and the strike was looked upon as a challenge to the industrial and financial might of the city."38
Although the bricklayers' strike was unsuccessful, it did
help to initiate a rapidly growing labor movement in the city. The most politically radical and visible arm of this movement was the International Working People's Association (IWPA), whose leaders included Albert Parsons, publisher of Chicago's main English-language socialist newspaper, The Alarm. Parsons
and his allies advanced a utopian ideal of anarchism as an alternative postcapitalist society based on freedom, brother- hood, and equality. As a part of the international anarchist movement, the IWPA opposed not only oppression of working people by propertied classes but also ideas of authority, privi- lege, and hierarchy in culture as in politics. An important part of the 1WPA's program in Chicago was the nurturing of a working-class counterculture that would provide a prerevolu- tionary model of the future utopia they envisioned. Toward this end, the IWPA organized orchestras, choral groups, the- ater clubs, concerts, dances, lectures, and plays as politically motivated alternatives to their bourgeois counterparts. For
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FIGURE 7: Otto Bruckwald and Carl Runkwitz, with Carl Brandt, Festspielhaus,
Bayreuth, 1872-1876, showing scene from Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold, at
theater's opening night, 13 August 1876. Drawing by L. Bechstein
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 135
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indoor events, workers rented local auditoriums, especially Turner Hall on the North Side and Vorwiirts Turner Hall on
the West Side, both located outside the central city, where
middle-class theater buildings and music halls predominated. In workers' halls, an ongoing series of musical and theatrical
fetes focused on revolutionary rhetoric and anarchistic
speeches. The events were consciously intended as socialistic
rituals, offering politicized working people a collective identity not found in bourgeois theater and music.39
The IWPA's cultural program was not only an alternative to
capitalistic entertainment but also to the nonpolitical and
much decried amusements and leisure activities prevalent
among workers throughout Chicago. These were detailed in
the writings of religiously inspired middle- and upper-class social reformers, such as George Wharton James's Chicago's Dark Places (1891). There were politically conservative trade
unions with their own programs of socially conventional enter-
tainment. Yet James and others described a widespread pov-
erty and demoralization represented by saloons, brothels, and
general public immorality throughout the city's peripheral districts where most workers lived. These areas housed many smaller theaters and music halls that were closely tied to
alcohol and prostitution. James painted a bleak picture of the
lewd entertainments staged at these theaters as evidence of an
FIGURE 8: William Boyington, Chicago Board of Trade Building, 1882-1885, with
jenney's Home Insurance Building (I 883- I 884), left foreground; Burnham and Root's
Rookery (1885-1887), left background, opposite Burnham and Root's Insurance
Exchange Building (1884-1885), right background
Capitalists like Peck and anarchists like Parsons both sought to provide alternatives to cheap, nonpoliticized, and depraved amusements for Chicago's workers. Both also valued the sym- bolic dimension of control over highly visible public space in
the city. Their alternative visions were apparent in two events
that took place in late April 1885. The first, organized by Peck, was the Chicago Grand Opera Festival, inspired partly by the
new Metropolitan Opera Company's performances in Chi-
cago in January 1884. The Met's manager, Henry Abbey, had
brought a large orchestra and chorus. To support his touring
productions, he had charged what were widely regarded as
"unreasonable and extortionate" prices "which in Europe no
one would have the temerity to demand," for "in older
countries the lover of music, however poor in this world's
goods, may hear great singers at a trifling expense."41 One
editor asked why Chicago should not "have constantly within
the easy reach of all classes of its citizens these ennobling divertis [s]ements? Music halls and art galleries, accessible to
the poorest, promote peace and good order, elevate the gen- eral social tone and abound in all exalting influences."42
In this context, Peck was a leader in incorporating the
Chicago Grand Opera Festival Association in April 1884. A key
ally was a local composer, Silas G. Pratt, editor of a booklet that
described the association's aims. Presumably alluding to the
Metropolitan's opening in October 1883, Pratt wrote: "Those
who have observed operatic events for the last decade in
America, have noted the gradual withdrawal of Grand Italian
Opera from the enjoyment and patronage of the masses, and
its limitation as a luxury to the favored few of wealth and
fashion."43 Peck's association was organized "primarily to
remedy this evil, and provide Grand Opera for the people at
popular prices, within the reach of all, and, at the same time, to raise the performances to a higher standard of excel-
lence."44
The only building in Chicago able to provide seating for an
audience large enough to allow the festival to cover its costs
was the Inter-state Industrial Exposition Building in Lake Park, on Michigan Avenue at Adams Street. Constructed in 1873, this building had repeatedly been identified with the city's
capitalistic elite as a site for commercial expositions, music
festivals, and national political conventions.45 However, the
hall's enormous interior dissipated the sound of vocal artists.
Such poor acoustics inhibited its ability to fulfill the social
goals of music festivals, whose large choruses were intended to
provide a spiritually uplifting experience for audiences.46
For the Opera Festival of 1885, Peck hired Adler and
Sullivan to refit the Exposition Building's north end. Adler
built new interior walls to lessen the room's volume, so that
"the entire opera hall will be inclosed, and also the stage."'47 He also built a massive sounding board extending upward from the stage's arched proscenium and outward 80 feet into
136 JSAH / 57:2, JUNE 1998
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the auditorium (Figure 9). Fan-shaped seating focused on the
stage. Adler's sounding board ensured that the least strong voices of singers would carry to the rear of the house, so that, as Peck asserted, "the seats most remote from the stage are in
as good hearing as those near the stage."48 Sullivan designed ornamental art for the sounding board in papier-mdach as
extensions of the elaborate theatrical scenes on the stage, thus
making "the auditorium itself an attractivefeature of thefestival."49 In this setting, two weeks of grand opera were staged,
including Italian, French, and German works. More than
8,000 people attended each performance, including Chica-
go's wealthy citizens as well as those with modest incomes.
Peck and the festival's guarantors were "prominent citizens
who are willing to assume any loss which may occur in order
that the people may have opera at reasonable prices." The
lowest-priced ticket for a reserved seat in the main balcony cost
one dollar for a single performance. During the Met's opera tours before 1885, Chicagoans had "constantly complained that they have been kept away by the high prices, and that they could not afford to pay all the way from $3 to $6 for a seat." For
the Grand Opera Festival, "the action of the association and
the public spirit of the guarantors have now made it possible for them to attend fourteen performances for $12 by buying season seats, and to obtain the best seats in the house for the
season for a little over $2 a performance. If they fail to avail
themselves of this extraordinary privilege they will have no
right to complain in the future."50 With such low-priced tickets
for general admission, the festival attracted a total of 115,000
people, yielding receipts in excess of $170,000, which enabled
the association to cover costs of the productions and to refit
the hall.5' Local taste was educated, and the audience for
grand opera broadened. At the end of the last performance, Peck, in response to repeated calls to the stage, came forward
and declared that the festival "had shown what Chicago would
and could do, and he hoped that people would look upon this as a stepping stone to a great permanent hall where similar enterprises would have a home. The continuation of
this annual festival, with magnificent music, at prices within
the reach of all, would have a tendency to diminish crime
and Socialism in our city by educating the masses to higher
things."52 Peck spoke those words on 18 April, just ten days before
Parsons and others led the most dramatic socialistic demonstra-
tion Chicago had yet seen. Since 1883, the IWPA had staged massive urban workers' parades that wound their way through the streets. Lines of 3,000 to 4,000 workers marched to music,
carrying and waving flags of socialistic groups. These events
reached a climax in response to the Board of Trade Building's dedication on 28 April 1885, three days before the annual
workers' May Day parade. On the evening of 28 April, Parsons
led a protest march to the Board of Trade to disrupt the
inaugural banquet. Singing an anarchistic adaptation of the
"Marseillaise," the workers approached what they termed the
"Board of Thieves" who had erected a "Temple of Usury." When police lines blocked their approach at every street, the workers marched around the building, then rallied elsewhere, where leaders decried poverty amidst wealth.53
Such demonstrations continued through the spring of
1886, when Parsons led a May Day parade down Michigan Avenue, past the future site of the Auditorium. The year be-
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 137
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fore, he and others had led Sunday-afternoon labor meetings on the lakefront at the foot of Van Buren Street, almost
directly east across Michigan Avenue from where the Audito-
rium was later built. In the spring of 1886 the workers' cause
focused on the eight-hour day, an idea supported by the
American Federation of Labor, which declared that it should
go into effect nationally on 1 May 1886. Strikes and other
demonstrations followed in an effort to force employers to
yield. It was in this context that the labor rally at the Haymar- ket, an urban square on Chicago's near West Side, took place on the evening of Tuesday, 4 May 1886. As leaders addressed a
crowd, police arrived and ordered the group to disperse. A few
moments later, someone (never identified) hurled a bomb of
dynamite toward the police. After the explosion and ensuing
gunfire, seven officers and at least four civilians were fatally wounded, with scores more seriously injured.54
The shock of the violence at Haymarket devastated civic
morale throughout Chicago, whose labor movement retreated
in the face of a wave of reactionary rhetoric and legal action.
Part of what made the anarchist movement so threatening to
propertied Chicagoans was its foreign element. For example, the city's oldest extant socialist newspaper was the German-
language Chicagoer Arbeiter-zeitung, launched in 1876 and ed-
ited by two leading anarchists, August Spies and Michael
Schwab, who were tried for the Haymarket bombing. As many of Chicago's workers were of German origin, their native
language was often used in the radical speeches and banners
prominent at anarchist gatherings.55 Thus Haymarket repre- sented an urban society divided not only along class lines but
also between foreign and native-born. Newspapers other than
those with socialist leanings, and most clergy, condemned the violence. More broadly they decried the depth of social divi- sion within the city. The Reverend David Swing, whose liberal
ministry Peck supported, earlier saw the need for a symbolic
counterweight to structures like the Board of Trade Building,
noting, "There is perhaps only one city in the world having a
population of half a million along whose streets no traveller or citizen can find a single structure built by local benevolence.
Chicago has the honor of being that city."56
THE ORIGINS AND PLANNING OF THE AUDITORIUM
Less than four weeks after Haymarket, Peck outlined his vision of a permanent Auditorium Building at the Commercial Club's first meeting after the tragedy, which addressed the topic "The
Late Civil Disorder: Its Causes and Lessons."'57 As a leading organization of businessmen, the Commercial Club had been
founded in the fall of 1877, shortly after the railroad strikes of
that summer.58 Peck detailed his proposal for the program, siting, and financing of a new civic structure, "a large public auditorium where conventions of all kinds, political and other-
wise, mass-meetings, reunions of army organizations, and, of
course, great musical occasions in the nature of festivals,
operatic and otherwise, as well as other large gatherings, could
be held."59 No such facility then existed in the city, and public funds would not be available. There was sufficient local private
capital to pay for construction, but to cover operating costs, the building had to have "sufficient area to produce adequate rentals out of improvements attached to and surrounding the
auditorium."60 The Auditorium Theater would be encased by a hotel, rentable shops, and offices.
Peck offered his vision not only within the context of
Chicago's response to Haymarket but also as part of an ongo-
ing effort to improve the city's cultural life. In the spring of 1880 the Commercial Club had devoted a meeting to "the
fostering of art, literature and science" in Chicago. Another session was devoted to "the cultivation of art, literature, sci-
ence, and comprehensive charities, and the establishment of art museums, public libraries, industrial schools and free
hospitals" attendant to the commercial prosperity in great cities.61 In the early 1880s one of the club members, Nathaniel
K. Fairbank, the primary supporter of the construction of the Central Music Hall in 1879, had initiated the idea of an opera house and public hall. Adler, who had designed the Central Music Hall as his first independent theater building, worked with Sullivan on studies for Fairbank's opera-house project. As
Sullivan later recalled, it did not progress to effective fund-
raising because of its perceived elitist appeal.62 In proposing the Auditorium to the Commercial Club within weeks of
Haymarket, Peck was offering a version of his friend Fairbank's
earlier idea, but broadening its civic purposes in response to the sense of urgency brought on by the recent violence. The
political situation in the city lent support to Peck's aim of
recasting the opera house, a type of building long associated with urban elites, into a novel kind of structure aimed at the cultural inclusion of workers.
By May 1886 one of Peck's allies had acquired an option on a set of contiguous properties that would become the core of the Auditorium Building's site at the northwest corner of
Michigan Avenue and Congress Street, then the southern
limit of Chicago's commercially developed center. In Peck's
view, this was "the only place available" for an auditorium
"which will fulfill all the requirements," meaning sufficient area for revenue-producing appendages and a central location
providing access by streetcar from all parts of the city.63 To have sufficient funds for land rental and building construction, Peck
organized the Chicago Grand Auditorium Association in July 1886 to provide a corporate framework for the issuing of stock in the enterprise. He led the effort by pledging $100,000, with
$30,000 more from the Peck family. The next largest stock- holder was Marshall Field ($30,000). Adler and Sullivan, who had been making studies for a permanent auditorium since 1882, also purchased shares in the amount of $25,000.64
138 JSAH / 57:2, JUNE 1998
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-_iiiiii iiiii: i!iiiiiii i !iiiiiiiiiHiiiiiiiiiiii ili - ii:iii:i?ii:! i'i-i?Iii : :*iii iilll!ii~ili •iii ii? -ii---:_- !i-i: - --
...........
:-..._::-..... ......- m ill_.-i---i -
FIGURE 10: Auditorium, interior looking north-
west from stage, showing rising floor of parquet
with vomitorio-like tunnels from west foyer, north
boxes, main balcony, lower and upper galleries.
Albert Fleury's mural of autumn on north wall is
faintly visible in bright daylight from skylight over
main balcony behind ceiling arches. Photograph
by J. W. Taylor
By January 1887, when construction began, the Audito-
rium Association had increased its capital stock to $1.5 million.
Peck sought to broaden the base of stockholders to include all
classes.65 Citizens subscribed to the project without "any finan-
cial inducement being held oUt."66 Peck wrote that the aim
was "the benefit and elevation of the public, and to add to the
glory of our city--the public spirit and liberality of citizens
being necessary here to produce what governments build and
support in other countries." His purpose was "not to create a
commercial enterprise."67 For Peck, the paradigm of a state effort
was the Paris Opera, which he disliked. He did not refer to
Parisian municipal theaters built, like the Auditorium, for
popular audiences and encased by rented shops and apart- ments.68 Instead, he compared the Auditorium to European state opera houses. Even if the Auditorium were to be privately and locally funded, Peck believed that it would attain the status
of a national monument like major European opera houses.69
Unlike the Metropolitan's stockholders, purchasers of shares
in the Auditorium did not acquire a box because, as Peck
originally envisioned the theater, it would contain no boxes.
The Met's boxholders were the guarantors against the annual
losses of the theater, which was never expected to be profit- able. In the Auditorium, sizable hotel and office revenues were
to be the theater's guarantors against loss. Peck elected not to
follow the Met's operating plan for both financial and ideologi- cal reasons. In its first season of 1883-1884, the Met's boxhold-
ers had agreed to guaranty the theater's manager against a
possible loss of $60,000. After the season of sixty-one perform- ances, the Met amassed a loss of at least $250,000, due in part to initial high costs of scenery and costumes. Also, seats other
than boxes were priced too high to fill the house. As Adler
recalled, the Auditorium, with its larger theater and encasing
spaces, was to be "self-sustaining, and not like the Metropoli- tan Opera House, a perpetual financial burden to its owners."70
Peck had also consistently opposed boxes as a symbol of
those differences in social class that had been so sharply drawn
in Chicago, which the Auditorium was intended to lessen. Its
lack of boxes "was [Peck's] idea, for he has no belief in
privileged classes, and regards the Metropolitan Opera House
of New York, where the whole structure is sacrificed to the
boxes, with infinite scorn and patriotic dislike. This was a
repetition of effete European ideas, and if there was one thing he impressed upon the architects, it was that he wanted the
Auditorium to represent the present and the future and not
the corrupted past."7' Although Peck initially preferred no
boxes, their conventional place in Chicago theaters presum-
ably led to the inclusion of forty boxes in the Auditorium
Theater as finally built. However, these were set to the sides of
the theater in two tiers above the parquet, and even the most
frontal boxes were set well back from the proscenium. The
boxes were also open to one another, unlike the Met's, which
were separated by partitions. The Auditorium's lower boxes
formed an arcade, while upper boxes had only posts between
them (Figure 10).72 In all, the Auditorium's boxes, which
individual Chicagoans bid to possess for a season, accommo-
dated about 200 people, or less than five percent of the
theater's total seating.73 As Sullivan said: "We are democratic in
America and the masses demand the best seats. The boxes, you see, are on the sides and do not furnish the best possible view.
In the imperial theaters the boxes are closed and take up all
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 139
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FIGURE 1: Auditorium, main entry-level plan. From Engineering Magazine 7 (August 1894)
the best part of the house. Those occupying boxes in America
desire to be seen, probably, more than they desire to see."74 Sullivan's position corresponded closely to that of Adler,
whose views appeared in an essay on the theater probably written shortly before his death in 1900. Adler argued for a
progressive view of architecture, meaning that older building
types like theaters should adapt to modern social changes by
avoiding nonfunctional historical conventions. He wrote that
in 1800 just one kind of theater had been "common to the
civilized world. The typical characteristics of its auditorium
were: level or nearly level pit; high surrounding walls masked
by many balconies and galleries; a ceiling raised high above
these high walls by the interposition of an entablature or cove, or of both; within the ceiling a dome rising high enough to
allow the main central chandelier to be hung above the line of
vision of the greater part of the audience; and a proscenium fashioned and decorated according to the rules convention-
ally accepted for the proportions of a doorway in a palace of
the period of the Renaissance. Almost the entire nineteenth
century has lapsed, and theater design is still dominated by reverence for this historically transmitted type."75 Adler advo-
cated "non-historical theater design," for "neither historical nor conventionally aesthetic considerations justify the use of
forms and types which do not adapt to practical requirements.""76 In Chicago's Auditorium, Adler sought to provide views
and acoustics of similar quality for all patrons in a room whose
4,237 seats would make it among the world's largest spaces of
this type. Such a capacity, with a large number of inexpensive seats, was meant to ensure financial viability and democratic access. The theater was a rectangle, measuring 118 feet wide by 178 feet deep from the stage's front to the foyer's rear. The site
permitted a main entrance only on the south side (Figure 11). The Auditorium's different concept of audience shaped its
interior appearance. The Metropolitan's interior read from
the stage as an encompassing wall of box tiers. The Auditori-
um's multiple aisles and tunnel-like passageways leading into
them from the rear foyers recalled vomitoria-a term Adler
used-like vaulted entrances to Roman amphitheaters (Figure
10).77 In theater planning, he advocated a maximum number
of narrow aisles (rather than fewer wide aisles) for facilitating
egress in case of fire. A maximum number of aisles also
resulted in a larger number of aisle seats, which were the most
desirable. On the main floor and balcony, no seat was more than seven seats away from an aisle.78
Horizontally, the Auditorium's deep rectangular plan en-
abled inclusion of a large number of seats in two sections of
seating on the main floor: the parquet near the stage and the
parquet circle farther back from the stage. The seating in both
directions was set in "generous sweeping curves."7" Adler did not specify these curvatures, but Figure 12 shows that they are
segments of circles. He did not center seating rows at the
stage's front, and as a result, the rows did not reflect sound back to its source on the stage front, thus avoiding echoes
there.80 In the theater, the central point of the circle from
140 JSAH / 57:2, JUNE 1998
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FIGURE 1 2: Auditorium, second-story plan showing (a) central point of circle defining curvature of seating rows in lower parquet, (b) central point of circle defining curvature of
seating rows in upper parquet, and (c) seating rows at sides of upper parquet with rows of convex curvature toward stage. From Engineering Magazine 7 (August 1 894); graphic
additions by author
which the arcs of the parquet rows are swung is at the stage's rear center (Figure 12, a), while the central point of the circle from which the arcs of the parquet circle rows are swung is behind the first parquet row (Figure 12, b). At the parquet circle's frontal sides, the curvature of the seating rows reverses, becoming convex rather than concave relative to the stage to ensure optimal views of the stage from these lateral seats
(Figure 12, c). As Adler wrote, the main balcony (Figure 13) was elliptical in plan. Rows have a broad, shallow curve yielding superb views of the stage from the 1,429 seats on this high level.
Vertically, as Charles Gregersen showed, Adler adapted the ideas ofJohn Scott Russell in order to calculate the steep rise in seating rows of the main floor (17 feet from front to rear). Adler had first used this method in the Central Music Hall of
1879, which was the auditorium where Ferdinand Peck regu- larly worshiped as a supporter of the hall's main tenant, the Reverend David Swing's Central Church.81 Ascending rows enabled observers to see and hear above the heads of others
directly in front, as shown in the section (Figure 14).82 The
resulting banked tiers of seating rise impressively from the
stage up through the main floor, continuing into the balcony and galleries, the topmost of which has an extreme slope of
forty-one degrees. From the uppermost row of this topmost gallery, one clearly hears an unamplified singing voice from the stage. As Adler said, "[T]he acoustic properties of the house are such as to permit the easy and distinct transmission
AUDITORIUM THEATRE
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FIGURE 13: Auditorium, main balcony plan showing elliptical curvature of seating
rows. From Diagram of the Seats and Boxes of the Auditorium Theatre, Chicago (after
1910)
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 141
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FIGURE 14: Auditorium, longitudinal section looking south, showing (a) hinged ceiling panels for closing off lower and upper galleries, and (b) trusses spanning Auditorium's width
above stepped ceiling. Historic American Buildings Survey, IL- 1007, Drawing No. 40; graphic additions by author
of articulated sound to its remotest parts."83 Tickets for this
uppermost gallery were initially priced at one dollar, the same
as the least expensive tickets for the Chicago Grand Opera Festival, whose theater was also to enable acoustical access for
the least wealthy.84 The Auditorium's design contains a number of features
that indicate Adler's interest in ancient Roman and Greek
theaters as functionally viable models for modern theaters. In
referring to the Auditorium's tunnel-like passageways as vomi-
toria, Adler implicitly recalled the prototype of the Roman
Colosseum, the only ancient theater to which he referred in
his writings.85 Known for its efficiency of circulation, the
Colosseum was also elliptical in shape. Adler and Sullivan's use of the ellipse in designing the balcony floor and ceiling arches of the Auditorium recalled a preference for this form for
theaters by European architectural writers since the late eigh- teenth century. For example, Gottfried Semper, whose studies of theater design with Richard Wagner provided one basis for
the latter's Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, had also believed in the
advantage of the ellipse for the projection of sound.86
Adler's essays on theater design echoed ideas propounded
by the Roman architect Vitruvius. His analysis of the acousti-
cally optimal design of theaters remained a standard reference before the matter received sustained scientific inquiry begin- ning in the late eighteenth century. 87 Vitruvius endorsed the idea of raising tiers of seating to optimize acoustics. To avoid the problem of spectators blocking sound from those behind them, he advised that "it should be so contrived that a line drawn from the lowest to the highest seat will touch the top edges and angles of all the seats. Thus the voice will meet with no obstruction."88 Citing Vitruvius's writings on acoustics in his discussions of the topic, Adler described it as a phenom- enon of concentric waves of sound that emanate from a
source,just as the Roman architect had described the transmis- sion of sound in ancient theaters, where seating rows were set in concentric rings around a stage. Like Vitruvius, Adler maintained that sound waves travel outward from a source until they are obstructed by an object. To enable sound to flow unobstructed, "ancient architects, following in the footsteps of nature, perfected the ascending rows of seats in theatres from their investigations of the ascending voice," endeavoring "to make every voice uttered on the stage come with greater clearness and sweetness to the ears of the audience."89 Thus, in adapting Scott Russell's isacoustic curve, Adler reworked a
142 JSAH / 57:2, JUNE 1998
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Ok A 4 -a 'lrAan of Greek Theatre, from Stnart P R evett.
Mloldern ADtation of thle Greek Form -Pitln nd Section.
FIGURE 15: Plan of an ancient Greek theater, from James Stuart and Nicholas Revett,
The Antiquities ofAthens (London, 1762- 1 830), and modem adaptation of the Greek
form, with longitudinal section at right, from John A. Fox, "American Dramatic
Theatres. III," American Architect and Building News 6 (2 August 1879): 36
principle of design that he knew from Vitruvius's description of Classical theaters.
Adler's contemporary, architect John A. Fox of Boston, had articulated the rationale for modern American adapta- tion of ancient Classical theater design. In a lecture of 1879
Fox noted that the term "theatre" was derived from the Greek
word signifying "to see." He cited James Fergusson, then
perhaps the most widely read English architectural historian, who wrote that the Greeks "hit on the very best form in plan for the transmission of the greatest quantity of sound, with the
greatest clearness, to the greatest possible number."90 Fox
proposed a modern adaptation of a Greek theater plan (Fig- ure 15) that anticipates Adler's Auditorium plan. In a modern
theater, the need to see into the stage's depth to a distance
beyond the proscenium called for abandoning the extreme
side seats in a Greek semicircular plan. The result was "the
fan-shape; or more accurately, a portion of the sector of a
circle, the centre for the radius of which shall be behind the
proscenium, instead of in front of it as in the Greek form."Just as Adler did, Fox argued for multiplying the points of egress to
subdivide the audience for rapid exit in case of fire. During
performances, the Greek idea of rising tiers of seats gave the
opportunity "for every one in the hall to see almost everybody else.... There is no more valuable adjunct to noble architec-
ture than this sea of interested and sympathetic faces, supple- mented by the bloom of color in varied costumes."91 This
social effect anticipated descriptions of the Auditorium's open-
ing, when the full house became a metaphor for civic unity.92 Such an American adaptation of Greek theaters both re-
sembles and differs in key ways from the adaptation of the
ancient model at Bayreuth's Festspielhaus, which was an exten-
sion of Semper's ideas. Both buildings abandoned the primacy of the loges or tiers of boxes in favor of seating that was more
equal, democratic, and unified. The dramatic upward rise of
the seating at Bayreuth was also modeled on Scott Russell's
idea of ensuring acoustical and visual access to the stage.93 But, unlike Adler's theaters, Bayreuth's Festspielhaus had no main
public foyer and no aisles running to the stage between seating
groups, leaving an unbroken curvature of seating as a more
direct evocation of an ancient Greek theater. Also, vertically, the Festspielhaus gallery was relatively small, whereas in Adler
and Sullivan's Auditorium Theater the main balcony and two
galleries above accounted for well over half the seating.
Bayreuth's Festspielhaus featured a triple proscenium, pro-
viding multiple rectangular frames for the stage.94 The Chi-
cago Auditorium's arched proscenium expanded out into a
multi-arched ceiling that had no precedent in European or
American opera houses. The Met's acoustical difficulties were
caused by its high proscenium and ceiling needed to accommo-
date tiered boxes. Adler believed that a proscenium higher than necessary for sight lines hampered an auditorium's acous-
tics since the amount of unwanted reverberation is directly
proportional to a room's volume. He lowered the proscenium to reduce the room's volume, thus conserving sound pro- duced on stage and directing it outward to the audience,
analogous to retaining density of sound projected through a
trumpet or a speaking tube. This principle implied fan-shaped
seating on raised levels, "but the effort to conserve the sound
waves influences to a still greater extent the vertical dimen-
sions of the auditorium. The proscenium must be low, not a
foot higher than is necessary to permit full view of any possible
grouping at the back of the stage from the last and highest seat in the house."95
Adler complemented the low proscenium with "a gradual increase in height of ceiling from the proscenium outward."
He modulated the rising ceiling planes "into a profile which deflects the sound waves downward toward the rear of the
lower portion of the house."96 The Auditorium's ceiling was
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 143
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FIGURE 16: Auditorium, interior showing elliptical ceiling arches, main organ screen to left of stage (with portraits of Wagner and Haydn in arch spandrels), and iron-and-plaster
reducing curtain framing stage. Photograph by J. W. Taylor
thus designed as four elliptically arched segments with a
common center. These repeat the proscenium arch at progres-
sively larger scales overhead (Figure 16). The four arches
contain the sound emanating from the stage and reflect it
back down into the theater quickly enough to prevent a
discernible echo of direct sound from the stage.97 To further control the size of the opening around the stage,
the Auditorium had an iron reducing curtain, covered with
ornamental plaster, which could be raised or lowered. This
reducing curtain framed the central heavy silk curtain. When
lowered, the reducing curtain framed an opening 47 feet wide
and 35 feet high for opera, drama, lectures, and concerts with
no chorus (Figures 16, 17). Alternatively, to accommodate
large choral performances, the reducing curtain was raised
and the stage's entire width of 75 feet was made spatially continuous with the rest of the auditorium. Adler wrote: "The
success of the room is greatest when used as a hall for mass
concerts. The chorus seems thus to blend with the audience, and the house is so open that one can see at a glance almost
the entire audience and the whole chorus.""98 This effect was
apparent on the Auditorium's opening night, when the reduc-
ing curtain was raised to bring the whole stage into view from
the house, including a chorus in banked seating on the stage
(Figure 18). Combined lectures and choral performances were a part of
Peck's social vision of the Auditorium. He proposed a series of
Sunday-night lectures by eminent orators of the English-
speaking world. These were "not to be the star performances of mere oratory, but real speeches upon important questions of the day-philanthropic, economic, educational, artistic, social."99 The lectures were to be accompanied by great choral
performances of 500 voices drawn from the Chicago public, with choral responses from the audience filling the house.
Wealthy guarantors such as Peck would underwrite the cost of
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the Auditorium Building to be their rival to Paris's Opera, even though on the Auditorium's exterior "the decorative
element, painting, and sculpture, so abundant, too abundant
even in our [Opera], is here totally lacking."108 Peck con-
trasted the Auditorium with European opera houses, most of
which had "grand approaches and splendid vestibules, embel-
lished with costly frescoes and statuary which governments have paid for."109 He reminded his stockholders that the Paris
Opera cost more than twice the amount for the Auditorium
and took thirteen years to build, yet it contained a hall whose
capacity was only half that of the Auditorium Theater.
The Auditorium Theater eschewed the elaborate Classical
and political iconography of the Paris Opera as a key monu-
ment of the French Second Empire. Rather, Sullivan, with
Peck's approval, created a distinct symbolic program for the
room that was to embody Sullivan's ideal of architecture as
nature. This program appears in Sullivan's many ornamental
motifs. One of these was the plasterwork relief framing the
light bulbs on the ceiling arches. One observer likened these
to sunflowers, signifying the theater's locale as a prairie me-
tropolis.110 On the main balcony, Sullivan also repeated inter-
pretations of the milkweed pod, a plant native to the Chicago
region, thereby creating a botanically specific reference to
place rather than a variation on a historical style of orna-
ment.111 As one contemporary wrote, "It is indubitable that
there is within these walls an architecture and a decorative art
that are truly American, and that owe nothing to any other
country or any other time.""112
Allusions to nature recur throughout the Auditorium The-
ater. As initially completed, the room had stained glass sky-
lights over the balcony for daytime illumination, unlike the
Metropolitan and its main European models. One observer
wrote that the light along the arches was "so even, so white and
free from shadows, that it resembles a mild sunlight.""113
Evocation of nature became more literal in Sullivan's scheme
of ornament for the reducing curtain. These reliefs appear to
have been inspired by representations of nature found in
operatic stage sets of the period, as shown in a scene from
Wagner's Lohengrin on the Auditorium's stage (Figure 17).114
In this view, dating from 1890, the canopy of trees forms a
naturalistic arched frame that reiterates the proscenium's
elliptical arch above. At the rear is a distant expanse of
landscape receding in perspective toward a painted backdrop
showing horizon and sky. The foliage on stage continues the
foliate plaster ornament in the reducing curtain framing the
stage, linking representation of nature in operatic scenery to
the theater's permanent architecture."5 This theme continues in the mural paintings that frame the
Auditorium's interior, all of whose imagery was modeled from
life by the artists. Having selected the themes for these murals
to create a unified program, Sullivan wrote that they expressed
,j-AL
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ii!
ti-
" a ca i AM*
i
? z(%~ ke?s~~~4~f fllttl '
j~ ?rL
FIGURE 19: Charles Holloway, drawing of mural over proscenium, Auditorium, 1889.
From Chicago Daily Inter Ocean (I I December 1 889)
growth and decadence as the two great rhythms of nature.116 Above the proscenium arch is a continuous processional mu-
ral of life-size figures on a gold background (Figure 19). They are not muses, symbolic of the inspiration for creating musical
art, to be found over the prosceniums of the Met and other
opera houses. Rather, they are groups of monks, young women, and others who express "the manifold influence of music on
the human mind-the dance, the serenade, the dirge."117 For Sullivan, these effects took their inspiration from the
deeper rhythms of life and death that are cyclical in nature.
This theme appeared in his prose poem "Inspiration," which
he first read to the Western Association of Architects in Chi-
cago in November 1886, just before Adler and Sullivan were
confirmed as the Auditorium's architects.11s The idea is repre- sented by the winged figure before a bright fire, at the mural's south end (to the right as one faces the stage). This image,
typifying youth and inspiration, signified the dawn of life or
springtime, like an allegro tempo in music. The winged figure at the north end (at left), representing twilight and memory, reaches down to a low fire flickering to its end, like autumn,
analogous to an adagio effect."19 At the proscenium mural's central crown are three figures
representing the past (south) and future (north). The central
figure is not an ancient deity like the Apollo who presided over
the Met's proscenium but rather a personification of the
present, enthroned below a phrase based on Sullivan's poem
"Inspiration": "The utterance of life is a song, the symphony of nature." As he declared in the poem, Sullivan's ideal for the
present was a spontaneous and vital art coming fresh from
nature rather than from inherited styles. In this spirit, all
forty-five figures were painted by a young American artist, Charles Holloway (1859-1941), "who made the sketches from
living models posing for each separate figure" so that "every-
thing is true to nature."120 As one observer wrote, "Thousands
of the spectators who enter the Auditorium will look admir-
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ingly on that work of art, but few will stop to reason out the
subject treated there."'121 The two murals toward the rear sides of the house contin-
ued the theme used over the proscenium. They were painted by the French-trained artist Albert Fleury (1848-1924). Origi- nally educated as an architect, Fleury entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts after the Franco-Prussian War to study painting. His time there overlapped with that of Sullivan, and also of
George L. Healy and Louis J. Millet, under whose guidance Fleury worked at the Auditorium. Fleury had come to the United States in 1888 to assist his former teacher, Emile
Renouf, in making a large commissioned painting of the
Brooklyn Bridge. At this time, both Renouf and Fleury re- ceived offers to assist in the Chicago Auditorium's decoration, and Fleury accepted. Like Holloway's mural, Fleury's were
subject to the approval of the Chicago Auditorium Associa-
tion's Executive Committee, headed by Peck.122 As an archi-
tect, Fleury not only specialized in murals but also enhanced the relation of such paintings to built interiors. His side murals for the Auditorium are large in scale and have the perspectival depth of landscape, giving the illusion of extending the inte- rior space of the adjacent balconies. They recall the illusionis- tic natural expanse created by scenic backdrops for opera on the frontal stage. Fleury's images of nature were originally illuminated by natural daylight from the art-glass skylights over the balcony. As in the proscenium's mural, the south mural
depicts spring (Figure 20), while the north shows an autumnal scene (Figure 21). From his youth, Fleury "was always a lover and a close student of nature, and besides he always followed the practice of painting his figures in the open air."123 He sketched the north mural's scene "from a Wisconsin dell," like the wooded Wisconsin landscapes where Peck spent much time. The south mural depicts "a scene near Highland Park," a suburb on Chicago's North Shore, further emphasizing the Auditorium's regional character.124
Each side mural shows a single creative figure or poet who is communing with the season as a source of inspiration. As Sullivan wrote, "[B]y their symbolism do these mural poems suggest the compensating phases of nature and of human life in all their varied manifestations. Naturally are suggested the
light and the grave in music, the joyous and the tragic in
drama."125 Through these murals and their inscriptions, Sulli- van linked his personal belief in nature's emotive effects on the artist with the Auditorium as a theater wherein musical
drama moved audiences. In "Inspiration," Sullivan referred
repeatedly to the sun's daily course across the sky and its
repetition through the seasons as a measure of nature's cycli- cal rhythm of growth and decay. In his travels by railroad around the United States, he recalled having "visualized [the
country's] main rhythms as south to north, and north to
south."'26 Fleury's murals suggested such a meaning for the
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FIGURE 20: Albert Fleury, south mural (Spring Song), Auditorium, I889
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FIGURE 21: Fleury, north mural (Autumn Reverie), Auditorium, 1889. From Garczyn-
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arches spanning the Auditorium's ceiling between south
(spring) and north (autumn), as if these elliptical forms
represented the solar cycle of seasons and years in expanded repetition. Thus out of the ceiling's arched functional form as a solution to optimal acoustics for a mass audience, Sullivan
developed a program of ornament and images that gave the
ceiling a cosmic symbolism different from the conven- tional shallow dome at the Metropolitan or many European theaters.
THE AUDITORIUM BUILDING'S EXTERIOR
Adler and Sullivan developed the exterior from their earliest- known design of September 1886 to after their working draw-
ings of April 1887.127 From their first studies, they treated the
building as a major civic monument in keeping with Peck's
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 147
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aims. If the Auditorium Theater's interior space conveyed its social ideals, then the exterior communicated symbolic inten- tions through its architectural style. Adler and Sullivan's con-
temporaries still thought in terms of a building's style and historical associations as principal carriers of meaning. The Auditorium's exterior style evolved in the course of its design and construction partly in response to social conditions and to Peck's aims.
Viewed from a distance, with its cubic mass and tower
(Figure 1), the Auditorium announced Chicago to travelers from the eastern United States coming to the city along the railroad lines running north into town at the lakefront.128 Early designs had featured walls of pressed brick and ornate terra-cotta above a granite base. In May 1887, in the course of a
bricklayers' strike, the Auditorium's directors resolved that the
upper walls above the three-story granite base be clad in an Indiana limestone.129 As the architect of four buildings under construction and of nine more for which plans were ready, Adler had much at stake in this strike. At that time, and in later
essays, he described his professional role as the representative of his clients, the building owners. Like Peck, Adler politically was not a socialist, though he did sympathize with the plight of
workingmen, writing that "there is much that is great and noble even in the trades unionism of our day."'30 But, during the protracted strike of 1887, Adler saw the bricklayers' actions as causing workers to lose income. He noted that his clients
waiting to build were "all agreed not to have a stroke of work done until this strike is ended by the giving in of the workmen.
The [bricklayers'] union is what stands in the way of the
erection of these buildings."131 Because of its size, the Audito-
rium offered steady work for many over a long period, and
progress on its construction continued, partly with workers
who had left their union to return to work, and who were
sometimes subjected to intimidation. Adler stated that some
had returned to work because they had "become so destitute
during the strike that they have sold their tools, and we have
had to supply them."'32 The strike of 1887 brought the issues of Haymarket into the
building trades and into the history of the Auditorium, a
structure that was intended to alleviate social tensions. Adler
later did not recall that the change in the Auditorium's design from brick to stone had been the result of the strike. Rather, he
attributed the decision to "the deep impression made by Richardson's 'Marshall Field Building' upon the Directory of
the Auditorium Association," combined with a "reaction from
a course of indulgence in the creation of highly decorative
effects on the part of its architects."133 Why did Peck and his
colleagues look to Henry Hobson Richardson's monument as
a model?
One answer is that it was then one of only two recently built
local structures covering a comparable half-block site. Field's
store (Figure 22) and the Auditorium block showed the same
ratio of frontal width to height of about 2.5 to 1.134 In symbolic terms, Sullivan and others saw Richardson's building as largely a monument to its patron, Marshall Field. His conservative
views were well known, and the completion of his building was
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ception of the building's allusions to Rome aligned with Peck's
choice of the name "Auditorium" rather than the term "Grand
Opera House." In its ancient Latin usage, auditorium (as distinct from a ruler's private palace, or palatium) referred to
the space of the audience in a theater as a public hall for
cultural and political gatherings, just as Chicago's Auditorium
would hold both opera and conventions.140 Within its walls, music and drama would be interpreted "not, as in the capitals of modern empires, to a favored few, but, as in the ancient
republics, to the people of the city and Nation."141 The
Auditorium's exterior form thus conjoined Roman monumen-
tality with modern democratic ideology. So did the buildings of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, for which Peck
chaired the local finance committee, and whose classical archi-
tecture he subsequently praised.,42 As an architectural response to Chicago's urban class strife
in the era of Haymarket, the Auditorium's exterior may be
compared to other buildings that represented different institu-
tional responses to labor unrest. One of the most prominent of these was a new armory for the First Regiment of the Illinois
National Guard, a project first proposed in 1885. Organized in
1874, the First Regiment came to enroll about 600 local men
who represented Chicago's middle and upper classes. Among its members was one of Adler and Sullivan's draftsmen. Having twice dispersed crowds without firing during the railroad
strikes of 1877, the unit also confronted labor protests at
several points around the city in November 1886. To radical
leaders of Chicago's workers, the First Regiment epitomized armed force in the service of capital.143 When the First Regi- ment sought to build anew, Marshall Field offered to lease it a
site he owned on the northwest corner of Michigan Avenue
and Sixteenth Street, not far from his own home. Field, who
was closely identified with this regiment, agreed to lease the
site to the unit for $4,000 per year (then only half its value) with no annual rent increase. Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root designed the First Regiment Armory in March
1889, and it opened in September 1891 (Figure 24).144 Burnham and Root's First Regiment Armory was described
as "perhaps the most massive structure in Chicago," with its
heavy stonework rising unbroken to a height of 35 feet on all
four sides.145 The front had a wide sally port for troops
marching abreast. Above the rusticated granite base were
brick walls with arched openings and round corner bartizans.
Atop all four walls ran a projecting machicolated cornice
crowned with gun slits. The exterior left no doubt as to its
purpose in the charged atmosphere of the time. Within there
was a large drill hall that Adler and Sullivan redesigned in 1893
as a temporary theater known as the Trocadero Music Hall, named after the Parisian theater designed by Gabriel Davioud
in 1876. Adler and Sullivan's client was Dr. Florence Ziegfeld,
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 149
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FIGURE 24: Burnham and Root, First Regiment Armory, northwest comer, South
Michigan Avenue and Sixteenth Street, Chicago, 1889- 189 1 (largely rebuilt after fire,
1894; demolished 1929). From Gilbert and Bryson, Chicago and Its Makers
_. ,1
JL r -
FIGURE 25: William Le Baron Jenney and William A. Otis, Ferdinand Peck House,
1826 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, 1887. From Gilbert and Bryson, Chicago and
Its Makers
founding president of the Chicago Musical College, which had
its quarters in Adler's Central Music Hall. The armory the-
ater's performances were to raise funds for the regiment, which received little state aid. In April 1893 fire destroyed this
last theater designed by Adler and Sullivan five days before it
was to open.146 Peck was not a benefactor of this regiment. Its treasurer was
Charles Hutchinson, who was also treasurer of the Chicago Auditorium Association. In 1885 the committee in charge of
the regiment's new armory had proposed to Peck that the
armory and the Auditorium project be combined in the same
structure.147 Auditorium directors were leaders of Chicago's
Citizens' Assocation, founded in 1874 to fight corruption in
municipal government, yet which supported the militia against labor agitation in 1877 and 1885. They also led the Chicago Citizens' Law and Order League founded in 1877just after the
city's railroad strikes in order to prevent the sale of alcohol to
minors, as it was believed the strikers included a large number
of half-drunken boys. In this context, both the First Regiment
Armory and the Auditorium were facets of a broad range of
elite responses to threats of social unrest.148
The Auditorium was neither an armory nor a fortress, but it
did have as its social aim the pacification of urban workers, not
by means of armed control but rather by cultural suasion. As a
capitalist monument, the Auditorium did present an image of
indestructibility, as exemplified by its granite base near the
citizen's eye. Moreover, the tower, in addition to the slotlike
windows within its stylized machicolated cornice, had windows
within its arches below that Garczynski described as "square and deeply recessed, like embrasures in a fortification."149 In its style, the Auditorium provided a model for Ferdinand
Peck's own house, which he commissioned William Le Baron
Jenney and William A. Otis to design in 1887 (Figure 25). Educated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Otis translated chapters from Edouard Corroyer's L'Architecture Romane (Romanesque Architecture) immediately after its publication in 1888. This
book traced the continuous development of medieval Ro-
manesque from ancient Roman architecture, a link consistent
with contemporaneous perception of the Auditorium.l50 Lo-
cated at 1826 South Michigan Avenue, within three blocks of
the First Regiment Armory, the Peck house exhibited a rough- hewn stonework similar to that forming the Auditorium's
base. Its tower above a heavy lintel spanning the porch in-
cluded a shadowed loggia below a foursquare crown, so that
the house read in part as a miniature version of the Audito-
rium. When President Benjamin Harrison was entertained by Peck at this residence on the day of the Auditorium Theater's
opening, he remarked that the house was "the Auditorium,
Jr." Peck responded that "the same spirit prevailed in both
buildings."'151 The house reminded all that the Auditorium
was Peck's project. Two buildings, by different architects,
imaged one patron.
Interpretation of the Auditorium as a heavy lithic mass
contrasts with its place in the conventional historiography of
the Chicago School of architecture, which stressed local efforts
to lighten or open up walls of the city's commercial buildings
from about 1880 to 1900. From this viewpoint, the Auditori-
um's exterior was valued not for its solid piers of walling but
rather its arched voids of windows. In this light, the Audito-
rium compares not with Burnham and Root's Armory but with
the building closest to Peck's own attitude toward urban
workers: the new quarters for Chicago's Athenaeum (Figure
26), opened in May 1891. It stood on the same block as the
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FIGURE 26: Thomas Wing, Chicago Athenaeum, south side of Van Buren Street west
of Michigan Avenue, as expanded and remodeled into a seven-story building,
1890- 189 I1; demolished. From Chicago Tribune (10 May 189 1): I
Auditorium on the south side of Van Buren Street, adjacent to
the original Art Institute of Chicago, built on the southwest
corner of Van Buren and Michigan Avenue in 1887. Peck and
other Auditorium patrons had also been founding supporters of the Art Institute.152
Styling itself as "The People's College," the Athenaeum
was open to men and women regardless of "nationality or
religious belief."'53 Its instructional program was partly in-
tended to provide skills that would qualify students for employ- ment with local businessmen whose philanthropy supported the college by heavily subsidizing costs of instruction. Thus both the Athenaeum and the Auditorium were cultural re-
sources that provided workers with capitalist-structured alterna- tives to leftist political culture. It was to be a unifying, upbuild-
ing urban institution, including the Reverend David Swing on
its faculty. In December 1889 the Athenaeum's head, the
Reverend Edward I. Galvin, a Unitarian minister, congratu-
lated Peck on creating in the new Auditorium "such a building for the public good in culture and wholesome recreation [as]
must find universal endorsement." He wrote: "[T]he next
crowning glory of your life will be the completion and opening of the Athenaeum Building."154
As the Athenaeum's president during the same years he was
directing the Auditorium project's realization, Peck had bought the Van Buren Street site for the Athenaeum and had overseen
the expansion of its building from four to seven stories. As
designed by Thomas Wing, the new structure had classrooms,
a large lecture hall, recreational rooms, a library, and a gymna-
sium, all accessible to members for a nominal annual fee.
Facing north, the Athenaeum's street front had an abundance
of windows with minimal piers and columns between, creating the image of a typical Chicago loft building of the period. The
Athenaeum's appearance was determined almost wholly not
by stylistic considerations but by utilitarian needs to light interior spaces and limit costs of construction. The Roman
associations of the nearby Auditorium's exterior were lacking in this building also meant for the cultural uplift of workers,
but one that did not have the Auditorium's monumental scale,
lakefront site, and representational purpose.
CONCLUSION
The Chicago Auditorium, whose design Adler and others
ascribed to the wishes of its patrons, conveyed many messages
simultaneously. On one level, it was a civic and cultural monu-
ment; on another, it projected the city's power and enterprise; on yet a third, it stood for an elite's will to direct Chicago's social, economic, and political future. The outer architecture
figuratively stood against socialism and anarchism, while the
theater inside offered alternatives to politicized and nonpoliti- cized workers' amusements. As Adler concluded more than
two years after the building had opened, without doubt "Chi-
cago has an Auditorium far better as an opera house or a
concert hall or a ballroom than either the Metropolitan Opera House or the Music Hall [the Academy of Music] in New
York."'155 Adler, like Peck and Sullivan, knew these theaters
from eastern trips. Adler's claim rested on his building's innovative plan for audiences in terms of circulation, seating,
sight lines, and lighting, as well as acoustics. Sullivan's ornamen-
tal and symbolic program for the theater's interior was compa-
rably original, meant to contrast with the Met and European state opera houses, which he, Adler, and Peck had studied. They all rejected the predominance of boxes in these theaters. From
the Auditorium's stage, "the performers can neither sing to the
boxes nor play to them, but must address themselves to the
public" as "an immense mass of spectators without a break."'156
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Study of the Auditorium's origins, planning, interiors, and
exterior suggests how to continue to move beyond earlier
modernist views of the Chicago School of architecture. The
influential historians Sigfried Giedion and Carl Condit used
the term to refer to the city's commercial buildings of the
1880s and 1890s. They valued these structures for their techni-
cal innovations and their external expression of new metal-
frame construction. The Auditorium's story underscores the
value of a historiographic approach that considers the ideol-
ogy of patrons in the context of Chicago's dynamic and
difficult social history of the period.'57 Such an analysis of the
Auditorium's development also shows that patrons were aware of competing works in Europe and in New York City, adapting some models, like the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, and rejecting others, like the Paris Opera and the Metropolitan. As did
architects elsewhere through the nineteenth century, Adler
and Sullivan thought in terms of building types and their
possible variations, in addition to pursuing a general ideal of
appropriately functional modern form. This latter side of their
thinking had attracted Giedion and Condit. Yet, as we have
seen, Adler and Sullivan were not fully removed from histori-
cism and the symbolic associations of older styles, for the Auditorium was not only part of the continuing development of an American Romanesque style but also a monument that
conveyed allusions to ancient Rome.
Giedion and Condit were correct, however, in stressing the
regionally distinct identity of Chicago's architecture in the
1880s, as Sullivan's interior for the theater showed. For Peck,
however, this regional identity had not so much a stylistic
impetus as an ideological origin, rooted in his and others'
concepts of democracy. Critics Montgomery Schuyler of New
York and Paul Bourget of Paris both explored this ideal as
peculiarly characteristic of Chicago architecture, which Bour-
get described as "a new kind of art, an art of democracy, made
by the crowd and for the crowd."'58 At the Auditorium, Peck
developed this ideal in terms of working people's access to cultural events usually limited to those with higher incomes. Adler and Sullivan's technical and ornamental inventiveness,
both in interior space and exterior form, served to embody Peck's aims. Together patron and architects forged a link
between ideology and style arising from conditions of the
Auditorium's historical moment, which their building, in turn, did much to define.
Notes I am most grateful for advice and assistance from Charles Laurier, Roosevelt
University Library; Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago; and Miles Berger, Chicago. I Adler's published writings related to the Auditorium include "The Para- mount Requirements of a Large Opera House," Inland Architect and News Record 10 (October 1887): 45-46, also published as "Theatres," American Architect and
BuildingNews 22 (29 October 1887): 206-208; "Foundations of the Auditorium
Building, Chicago," InlandArchitect andNews Record 11 (March 1888): 31-32 and
plates; "Stage Mechanisms," ibid. 13 (March 1889): 42-43, also published in
Building Budget 15 (February 1889): 21-22; "The Auditorium Tower," American Architect and Building News 32 (4 April 1891): 15-16; "The Chicago Audito-
rium," Architectural Record 1 (April-June 1892): 415-434; "Theater-Building for American Cities; First Paper," Engineering Magazine 7 (August 1894): 717-730; "Second Paper," ibid. (September 1894): 815-829; "Convention Halls," Inland Architect and News Record 26 (September 1895): 13-14; ibid. (October 1895): 22-23; and "The Theater (c. 1900)," ed. Rachel Baron, Prairie School Review 2 (Second Quarter 1965): 21-27.
Sullivan's writings related to the Auditorium include: "Plastic and Color Decoration of the Auditorium," originally published as "Harmony in Decora- tion," Chicago Tribune (16 November 1889): 12, reprinted in Industrial Chicago (Chicago, 1891), 2: The Building Interests, 490-491; in Sherman Paul, Louis Sullivan: An Architect in American Thought (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), 143-146, and in Robert Twombly, ed., Louis Sullivan: The Public Papers (Chicago, 1988), 74-76; "Development of Construction, I," Economist 55 (24June 1916): 1252,
reprinted in Twombly, ed., Sullivan: Public Papers, 214-222; and The Autobiogra- phy of an Idea (1924; New York, 1971), 292-294, 303, 309. See also Sullivan's remarks quoted in "Church Spires Must Go," Chicago Tribune (30 November
1890): 36, partly reprinted in Twombly, ed., Sullivan: Public Papers, 72-73. Other accounts of the original building include Edward R. Garczynski, The
Montgomery Schuyler, "Glimpses of Western Architecture: Chicago," Harper's Magazine 83 (August 1891): 395-406, and A Critique of the Works of Adler and
Sullivan, D. H. Burnham & Co., Henry Ives Cobb, Great American Architects
Series, no. 2: Architecture in Chicago (New York, 1896), 2-27; Paul F. P.
Mueller, Testimony, in Chicago Auditorium Association vs. Mark Skinner
Willing and the Northern Trust Co. as Trustees, etc., et al., in the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, October Term, A.D. 1925, no. 3733, 440-470, reprinted in Edgar J. Kaufmann, Jr., "Frank Lloyd Wright's 'Lieber Meister,' " in Nine Commentaries on Frank Lloyd Wright (New York and
Cambridge, Mass., 1989): 42-62; Paul Sabine, "The Acoustics of the Chicago Civic Opera House," Architectural Forum 52 (April 1930): 599-604; Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (New York, 1932), 105-106; Hugh Morrison, Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (New York, 1935), 80-110; Wright, quoted in "Chicago's Auditorium Is Fifty Years Old," Architectural Forum 73
(September 1940): 11-12; Frank A. Randall, History of theDevelopment ofBuilding Construction in Chicago (Urbana, Ill., 1949), 117; Wright, Genius and the Mobocracy (New York, 1949), 42-53; Carl W. Condit, "Sullivan's Skyscrapers as the
Expression of Nineteenth Century Technology," Technology and Culture 1 (win- ter 1959): 78-93; Historic American Buildings Survey, IL-1007: Auditorium
Building (1960; Addendum, 1980); Albert Bush-Brown, Louis Sullivan (New York, 1960), 15-16; Willard Connely, Louis Sullivan As He Lived (New York, 1960), 101-122; Condit, The Chicago School ofArchitecture: A History of Commercial and Public Building in the Chicago Area 1875-1925 (Chicago, 1964), 69-79; Paul E. Sprague, "The Architectural Ornament of Louis Sullivan and His Chief
Draftsmen," Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1968, 396-398; William H.Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects, vol. 4: Progressive and Academic Ideals at the
Turn of the Twentieth Century (1972; repr., New York, 1986), 101-104, 118-119, 161-162; Wilbur T Denson, "A History of the Chicago Auditorium," Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1974; Daniel H. Perlman, The Audito-
rium Building: Its History and Architectural Significance (Chicago, 1976); George C. Izenour, Theater Design (New York, 1977), 82-86; Sprague, The Drawings of Louis Henry Sullivan (Princeton, 1979), 6-7, 334-337; Charles E. Gregersen, "The Chicago Auditorium: A History and Description," Addendum, HABS
Survey, IL-1007 (1980); Narciso Menocal, Architecture as Nature: The Transcenden- talist Idea of Louis Sullivan (Madison, Wis., 1981), 18, 45-46; John A. Burns, "Structure and Mechanics Viewed as Sculpture," AIAJournal 72 (April 1983): 44-49; Charles E. Grimsley, "A Study of the Contributions of Dankmar Adler to the Theatre Building Practice of the Late Nineteenth Century," Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1984, 215-304; David S. Andrew, Louis Sullivan and the Polemics of Modern Architecture (Urbana, Ill., 1985), 82-92; Michael Forsyth, Buildings for Music: The Architect, the Musician, and the Listener from the Seventeenth
Century to the Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 236-243; Lauren S. Weingar- den, "The Colors of Nature: Louis Sullivan's Architectural Polychromy and Nineteenth Century Color Theory," Winterthur Portfolio 20 (1985): 250-252; David Van Zanten, "Sullivan to 1890," in Wim de Wit, ed., Louis Sullivan: The
152 JSAH / 57:2, JUNE 1998
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Function of Ornament (New York, 1986), 36-51; Jordy, "The Tall Buildings," ibid., 65-71; Twombly, Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work (New York, 1986), 161-195; Joseph Rykwert, "Louis Sullivan and the Gospel of Height," Art in America 75 (November 1987): 162-165; David G. Lowe, "Monument of an
Age," American Craft 48 (June/July 1988): 40-47, 104; Weingarden, "Natural- ized Nationalism: A Ruskinian Discourse on the Search for an American Style of Architecture," Winterthur Portfolio 24 (spring 1989): 63-67; Gregersen, Dankmar Adler: His Theaters and Auditoriums (Athens, Ohio, 1990), 4-6, 9-23, 65-70; Ross Miller, American Apocalypse: Chicago and the Myth of the Great Fire
(Chicago 1990), 111-121; Roula M. Geraniotis, "German Design Influences in the Auditorium Theater," in John S. Garner, ed., The Midwest in American Architecture (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 42-75; Miles L. Berger, They Built Chicago: Entrepreneurs Who Shaped a Great City's Architecture (Chicago, 1992), 93-103; Hans Frei, Louis Henry Sullivan (Zurich, 1992), 68-75; Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York, 1996), 354-366; and Mario Manieri Elia, Louis Henry Sullivan (New York, 1996), 38-59.
2 Influential characterizations of the Chicago School include Sigfried Giedion,
Space, Time and Architecture, 5th ed., revised and enlarged (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 368-393; Condit, "The Chicago School and the Modern Movement in
Architecture," Art in America 36 (January 1948): 19-36; The Rise of the Skyscraper (Chicago, 1952); and The Chicago School of Architecture. See H. Allen Brooks, "The Chicago School: Metamorphosis of a Term," JSAH 25 (May 1966): 115-118, and Robert Bruegmann, "The Marquette Building and the Myth of the Chicago School," Threshold (fall 1991): 6-23. Important revisions of Giedion's and Condit's ideas appear in The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago and New York: Architectural Interactions (Chicago, 1984); John Zukowsky, ed., Chicago Architecture, 1872-1922: Birth of a Metropolis (Munich, 1987); Daniel M. Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven, 1991); Berger, They Built Chicago;, and Robert Bruegmann, The Architects and the City: Holabird and Roche of Chicago, 1880-1918 (Chicago, 1997).
3Josiah Cleaveland Cady, "The Essential Features of a Large Opera House," Inland Architect and News Record 5 (October 1887): 46-47, reprinted in American Architect and Building News 22 (29 October 1887): 208. Before 1883, the prime venue for opera in Manhattan had been the New York Academy of Music
(1853-1854) on the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Irving Place.
Although it seated over 3,000, the Academy had only eighteen proscenium boxes owned by the city's oldest wealthy families. It was New York's recently monied elite, led by the Vanderbilts, who financed the Metropolitan with its
many boxes. See "The Metropolitan Opera House," The Nation 37 (25 October 1883): 348-349; [Montgomery Schuyler], "The Metropolitan Opera-House," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 67 (November 1883): 877-889; Marianna G. Van Rensselaer, "The Metropolitan Opera-House, New York," American Archi- tect and Building News 15 (16 and 23 January 1884): 76-77, 86-89; Henry E. Krehbiel, Chapters of Opera (New York, 1911), 86-88; Frank Merkling et al., The Golden Horseshoe: The Life and Times of the Metropolitan Opera House (New York, 1965), 13-21; Quaintance Eaton, The Miracle of the Met: An Informal History of the
Metropolitan Opera 1883-1967 (New York, 1968), 43-53; Irving Kolodin, The
Metropolitan Opera 1883-1966 (New York, 1968), 3-6; John Briggs, Requiemfor a Yellow Brick Brewery (Boston, 1969), 6-17; Martin Mayer, The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera (New York, 1983), 15-23; Paul E. Eisler, The Metropolitan Opera: The First Twenty-Five Years, 1883-1908 (New York, 1984), 9-19; John Dizikes, Opera in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, 1993), 214-221; and Kathleen A. Curran, A Forgotten Architect of the Gilded Age:Josiah Cleaveland Cady 's Legacy (Hartford, 1993), 16-20.
4 Cady, "Essential Features of a Large Opera House," 47. 5Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920), in R. W. B. Lewis, ed., Edith
Wharton: Novels (NewYork, 1985), 1017. 6 Egisto P. Fabbri, Chairman, Committee on Building, Metropolitan Opera
House Company, quoted in Mayer, Met, 15.
7 Mayer, Met, 19, noted Cady's tour of Europe following the Metropolitan Board's decision to build on 4 March 1881.
8 Schuyler, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 884, noted that boxes in the lower two full tiers were sold to stockholders, while the manager rented those in the half tier below and the topmost full tier above. Briggs, Yellow Brick Brewery, 22-23, recalled newspaper diagrams of the Metropolitan's boxes. On the shape of Cady's plan, see van Rensselaer, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 86-87. On its name, see Mayer, Met, 16. On La Scala, see Simon Tidworth, Theatres; An
Architectural and Cultural History (New York, 1973), 43-44; and Nikolaus Pevs- ner, A History of Building Types (Princeton, 1976), 74. On Barry's Covent Garden, see Richard Leacroft, The Development of the English Playhouse (New York, 1973), 221-230.
One description of Cady's building concluded: "In the arrangement of the stairways and passages, the Metropolitan Opera-house bears considerable resemblance to Covent Garden" ("In the New Opera-House," New York Times [22 July 1883]: 9). Briggs, Yellow Brick Brewery, 9, noted that Covent Garden's impresario, Ernest Gye, hoping to be named the Met's manager, made plans of Covent Garden available to Cady. Cady also relied on a German-trained associate, Louis de Coppet Bergh (1856-1913), whose sister had studied music in Italy and provided pictures and details of European opera houses such as La Scala. See Milton Stansbury, "Romance in the Opera House," Opera News 5 (10 March 1941): 4-9.
9 Schuyler, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 883. On the form of the Metropoli- tan's proscenium, see also van Rensselaer, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 76, who noted that the Met was "a building in which each and every stockholder should have an equal chance of seeing-and being seen. No variations of plan were to be allowed the architect in favor of architectural effect which would be
at the expense of this perfect equality. All the boxes were to be of the same character and the same size, and, in so far as it was possible to human skill, all were to be equally advantageous as regards seeing the stage, and being seen by the rest of the audience."
10 Schuyler, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 883. 11 At the Metropolitan's opening, "much disappointment was caused by the
comparative failure of the acoustic properties of the auditorium.... In the upper rows of the boxes and in the balcony only the high voices were distinctly heard. Nor were the facilities for seeing much better in some portions of the auditorium than the facilities for hearing" ("The New Opera House," New York Times [23 October 1883]: 1). See also "Metropolitan Opera-House," The Nation 37 (25 October 1883): 848-849. After a first season, it was noted: "The Metropolitan Opera-house season has been financially a disastrous failure." Only consistently sold-out performances would have enabled a profit, but "the house is never full, and never can be, because there is such a large part of it in which no one can see or hear" ("Patti Will Go To London," New York Times [16 February 1884]: 5). Later praise for the Met's acoustics was noted in Briggs, Yellow Brick Brewery, 15, and Eisler, Metropolitan Opera, x.
2 Editorial, "Mr. Abbey's Retirement," New York Times (14 February 1884): 4. Cady's care for sight lines was noted in "A Grand Temple of Music," New York Times (14 October 1883): 5. Briggs, Yellow Brick Brewery, 15-16, and Mayer, Met, 40-41, reported unresolved difficulties with sight lines up to the time of the old Metropolitan's demolition in 1966.
13 Letter, "Its Boast and Its Snare," New York Times (4 May 1884): 4. '4 Cady, "Essential Features of a Large Opera House," 47. 15 Ibid.
16James Roosevelt, first president of the Metropolitan Opera House Com- pany, acknowledged: "We never expected that it would pay. None of us went into it with the idea that we would ever get our money back, but simply for the enjoyment to be derived from having a first-class opera-house. No opera-house in the world has ever paid as an investment, and none will ever pay" ("The Opera House Scheme," New York Times [14 March 1882]: 1). Van Rensselaer, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 76, noted that the corner masses on Broadway, being built inJanuary 1884 after the theater opened in October 1883, were "to contain shops below, above large ball-rooms and restaurants, and above these again bachelors' apartments." A special committee of the Metropolitan's Board of Directors reported that "the advantage in finishing would be that the plans of the corners included the building of reception and supper rooms, which would enable the Directors to rent the house for balls" ("The Opera's New Home," New York Times [24 May 1883]: 1).
17 Van Rensselaer, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 76. 18 On operatic culture in New York City before the Met's construction, see
Richard Grant White, "Opera in New York," Century Magazine 23 (March 1882): 686-703; (April 1882): 865-882; 24 (May 1882): 31-43; (June 1882): 193-210; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage 1815-1925, 15 vols. (New York, 1927-1949); and Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 85-104.
19 On moral concerns in New York City about operas of Verdi and Offen- bach in the 1850s and 1860s, see Dizikes, Opera in America, 171-173, 193-194.
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Schuyler, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 880, wrote that earlier local buildings made for opera, such as the New York Academy of Music (1852-1854),
designed by Alexander Saeltzer on the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, one block east of Union Square, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music's first building of 1859-1861, designed by Leopold Eidlitz, on Mon-
tague Street, were similarly conservative in style: "It is quite certain that when these edifices were built, it would have been as difficult to obtain the money for an undissembled opera-house as twenty-five years later it has proved easy to obtain ten times as much." On New York's Academy of Music, see James V.
Kavenaugh, "Three American Opera Houses: The Boston Theatre, The New York Academy of Music, The Philadelphia American Academy of Music," Ph.D.
diss., University of Delaware, 1967, 28-51, and Dizikes, Opera in America, 166-167.
20 On the Casino Theater, see American Architect and Building News 18 (27
August 1885): 102; James Taylor, "The History of Terra Cotta in New York
City," Architectural Record 2 (October-December 1892): 136-148; Montgomery Schuyler, "The Works of Francis H. Kimball and Kimball and Thompson," Architectural Record 7 (April-June 1898): 494, 496, 497; Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last Hundred Years (New York, 1951 ), 189, 267; Young, Famous American Playhouses, 223-225; Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, andJohn M. Massengale, New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and
Urbanism 1890-1915 (New York, 1983), 206-207, 220-221. On the Casino's roof garden, see Robert H. Montgomery, "The Roof Gardens of New York," Indoors and Out 2 (August 1906): 214-219.
21 Adler, "Chicago Auditorium," 415.
22 "The Men of Millions," Chicago Tribune (6 April 1890): 25. Chicago's larger private fortunes were there listed as Marshall Field ($25 million), Philip D. Armour ($25 million), and George M. Pullman ($15 million). Potter Palmer and Mrs. Cyrus McCormick were also then reported to have fortunes of $10 million. Many Chicago properties of the Peck estate and their assessed values were listed in the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, Ninth Biennial Report; Subject: Franchises and Taxation 1896 (Springfield, 1897). Biographical sources on Peck include C. Dean, The World's Fair City and HerEnterprising Sons (Chicago, 1892), 36-74; The Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Representative Men of Chicago... (Chicago and NewYork, 1892), 106-109;JohnJ. Flinn, Hand-book of Chicago Biography (Chicago, 1893), 283-284; Arba N. Waterman, Historical Review of Chicago and Cook County and Selected Biography, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1908),
3, 926-930; "Ferdinand Peck, Widely Known Chicagoan, Dies," Chicago Tribune (5 November 1924): 19; Paul T. Gilbert and Charles L. Bryson, Chicago and Its
Makers (Chicago, 1929), 625; and Berger, They Built Chicago, 93-104. In 1857
Philip Peck moved with his family to a new home at Michigan Terrace, the most elite rowhouse block in the city. It stood on Michigan Avenue's west side, from Van Buren to Congress Streets, where the Auditorium and its neighboring structures to the north rose in the 1880s. On Michigan Terrace, see Bluestone,
Constructing Chicago, 75-78.
23 On Chicago's Athenaeum, see Alfred T. Andreas, History of Chicago, 3 vols.
(Chicago, 1884-1886), 3, 416-417; and Kathleen D. McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849-1929 (Chicago, 1982), 82-84. Peck supported the Athenaeum from its origins after 1871 and served as its
president for four years (1887-1891). He also secured the Athenaeum's
building at 56 East Van Buren Street in 1890, on the Auditorium's block. See
Nineteenth Annual Report of the Chicago Athenaeum 1889-'90 (Chicago Historical
Society), and Rand, McNally & Co., Bird's-Eye Views and Guide to Chicago (Chicago, 1898), 31, in Randall, Building Construction in Chicago, 160. Peck served for five years (1886-1890) on Chicago's Board of Education and as its vice president. See Proceedings of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago, 1886-1890. He was also a trustee of the old and the new University of Chicago. In 1870 he had helped to found the Illinois Humane Society, and in 1880 he was a founder of Chicago's Union League Club, which sought reform of city government. He also supported the Art Institute of Chicago and the Reverend David Swing's Central Church of Chicago, which was the main tenant of Dankmar Adler's Central Music Hall (1879). See Bluestone, Constructing Chi- cago, 99-101.
24 Waterman, Chicago and Cook County, 3, 930. 25 Gilbert and Bryson, Chicago and Its Makers, 625. See Dean, World's Fair City,
71; and Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea, 292, 293. 26 "The Great Auditorium," Chicago Tribune (18June 1888): 7.
27 Bruce Grant, Fightfor a City: The Story of the Union League Club of Chicago and
Its Times 1880-1955 (Chicago, 1955), 119, and Berger, They Built Chicago, 94. The operas for the Auditorium Theater's first season in 1888-1889 were
predominantly in the Italian tradition. See "The Auditorium and the Italian
Opera Revival," Chicago Tribune (17 November 1889): 5, and "The Dedication of the Auditorium," ibid. (8 December 1889): 12. In the Auditorium Theater's later years, Peck "attended every opening night. He loved Faust, [II] Trovatore and Bohemian Girt' ("Ferdinand Peck, Widely Known Chicagoan, Dies," 19).
28Philo T. Otis, Impressions of Europe 1873-1874: Music, Art and History (Boston, 1922). See also Otis, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Its Organization, Growth and Development 1891-1924 (1924; reprint, New York, 1972). On Patti, see H. Sutherland Edwards, The Prima Donna: Her History and Surroundings from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (London, 1888), 2, 64-124; Herman Klein, The Reign ofPatti (London, 1920); and Dizikes, Opera in America, 223-230. Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 22, noted traveled Chicagoans' aware- ness of cultural amenities in European cities as inspiration for Chicago's improvement.
29 On the development of commercial theaters in Paris after the revolution of 1789, see G. Radicchio and M. Sajous D'Oris, Les thiatres de Paris pendant la
Rivolution (Bari, 1990), and Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History (New Haven, 1993), 67-68. On the Op6ra National, see Jane Fulcher, The
Nation's Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Princeton, 1987), 113-121, 171. On Garnier's design for the arrival and circulation of different classes of operagoers, see most recently Christopher C. Mead, Charles Gamrnier's Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism (New York and Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 113-127.
30 C6sar Daly and Gabriel Davioud, Les Thudtres de la Place du Chdtelet (Paris, 1874), and Mead, Garnier's Paris Opera, 128-129. See also T. J. Walsh, Second
Empire Opera: The Theatre Lyrique, Paris 1851-1870 (London, 1981). On these
theaters, the Trocad6ro, and Davioud's unbuilt project for a new Orph6on Municipal (1864-1867), see also Daniel Rabreau et al., Gabriel Davioud: Archi-
tecte, 1824-1881 (Paris, 1981), 54-75, 76-83, 89-102. On Davioud's and Bourdais's related project of 1875 for a "People's Opera House" in Paris, see
Izenour, TheaterDesign, 93. 31 Michael Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (Cambridge, 1995).
On the Royal Albert Hall, see Hitchcock, Architecture Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries, 4th ed. (New York, 1977), 236; and Izenour, Theater Design, 168-169, 252-254.
32 Geraniotis, "German Design Influence in the Auditorium Theater," 47-54. Descriptions of Bayreuth's Festspielhaus include Edwin O. Sachs and Ernest A. Woodrow, Modern Opera Houses and Theatres, 3 vols. (London, 1897-1898), 1, 19-31; Albert Lavignac, The Music Dramas of Richard Wagner and His Festival Theatres in Bayreuth, trans. Esther Singleton (New York, 1904), 54-67; Pevsner, History of Building Types, 86-87; Izenour, Theater Design, 75-82;
Forsyth, Buildings for Music, 179-182; Heinrich Habel, Festspielhaus und Wahn-
friied Geplante und ausgefiihrte Bauten Richard Wagners (Munich, 1985); and Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven, 1994), 38-54. Peck included the Bayreuth Festspielhaus among those theaters that Adler was to examine during his trip of 1888 (see n. 36 below). Adler
presumably knew of the building earlier. In his paper "Stage Mechanisms," 42, he referred to Carl Brandt's work as a theatrical engineer in connection with
stage equipment for the Opera House in Frankfurt-am-Main, built 1873-1880.
33 On Semper's first Hoftheater at Dresden, see Mallgrave, Gottfiied Semper, 117-129. On the seating arrangement in Schinkel's Schauspielhaus at Berlin, see Barry Bergdoll, Karl Friedrich Schinkel: An Architecture for Prussia (New York, 1994), 60. On these buildings, and on August Sturmhoefel's unbuilt project of 1888 for a Volkstheater, or People's Theater, see Geraniotis, "German Design Influence on the Auditorium Theater," 54-55, 58-62.
On Semper's unbuilt designs for Munich's Festspielhaus and their relation to Wagner's dramatic theory, see Harry F. Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1996), 251-267. On Wagner's interest in ancient Greek drama as a model for his art, see Brian Magee, Aspects of Wagner (New York, 1988), 5-9, and Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. Stuart Spencer (1982; Oxford, 1991), esp. 59-86.
34 On American reports of Bayreuth's opening, see Dizikes, Opera in America, 238-239. Among these reports were those by Leopold Damrosch, the Metropoli- tan Opera's future conductor of German opera, who wrote: "To Day's Musical Wonder," New York Sun (13 August 1876): 2, and "The Twilight of the Gods," ibid. (23 August 1876:2). See also the editorial "Wagner, the Art Revolutionist,"
154 JSAH / 57:2, JUNE 1998
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ibid. (19 August 1876): 2. Architects Potter and Robertson's nonwinning design for the Metropolitan Opera House included a lowered orchestra pit, adapted from the one at Bayreuth ("Competitive Designs Prepared for the
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, N.Y. Messrs. Potter and Robertson, Architects, New York, N.Y.," American Architect and Building News 8 [13 Novem- ber 1880]: 234-235). In 1890 McKim, Mead and White's theater at New York's Madison Square Garden was "to be built upon the plan of that at Bayreuth which Wagner caused to be built according to the most approved plans" ("New York's Auditorium," Chicago Tribune [25 January 1889]: 2). On the Metropoli- tan's German seasons, see Krehbiel, Chapters of Opera, 109-138, 155-212; Kolodin, Metropolitan Opera, 87-105; Eaton, Miracle of the Met, 66-74; Briggs, Yellow Brick Brewery, 30-38; Mayer, Met, 48-64; Eisler, Metropolitan Opera, 55-171; and Dizikes, Opera in America, 239-246.
35 On Sullivan's window shopping in the vicinity of the Paris Op6ra, see
Autobiography of an Idea, 227. On the facade's unveiling and the theater's
inauguration, see Mead, Garnier's Paris Opera, 184-185, 193-195. On Sullivan's
trip back to the United States, see Twombly, Louis Sullivan, 73. By 1909 Sullivan did own Charles Garnier, Le Nouvel Opera de Paris, 2 vols. (Paris, 1880); Richard Lucae et al., Das Opernhaus zu Frankfurt am Main (Berlin, 1883); and Hans Auer, Das K. K. Hof-Opernhaus in Wien von van der Null und von Siccardsburg (Vienna, 1885). See Andrew, Louis Sullivan, Appendix 2: Inventory of Sullivan's Library, from Williams, Barker & Severn Co., Auction Catalogue no. 5533, "Household
Effects, Library, Oriental Rugs, Paintings, Etc., of Mr. Louis Sullivan," Chicago, 29 November 1909 (Burnham Library, Art Institute of Chicago). On Sullivan and Wagner, see Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea, 208-209; Wright, Genius and the Mobocracy, 49, 54-56; and Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects, 4, 161, 165. On Americans at Bayreuth, see Presto Music Times 6 (31 August 1889): 6.
36 Peck, quoted in "One of Our Wonders," Chicago Herald (16 September 1888): 17. He stated: "We intend to have the most complete stage in the world, with the best appliances. During my recent visit to Europe, I examined a number of stages with this end in view, and Mr. Adler, one of our architects, is there now.., for the purposes of examining and getting detailed plans of the finest stages in Europe, especially those of Buda-pesth, Frankfurt, Vienna, Dresden, Baireuth [sic], and La Scala, at Milan." Adler's account of his trip appeared in his talk "Stage Mechanisms," in Inland Architect and News Record 13 (March 1889): 42-43. See also Joan W. Saltzstein, "The Autobiography and Letters of Dankmar Adler," Inland Architect 27 (September/October 1983): 20-24, and Geraniotis, "German Design Influence on the Auditorium The- ater," 44-47.
37Peck, Annual Report of the President to the Stockholders of the Chicago Auditorium Association, 7 December 1889 (Auditorium Collection, Roosevelt
University Archives). 38 Henry Ericsson, Sixty Years a Builder (1942; repr., NewYork, 1972), 68. On
the strike, seeJoseph Siry, "Adler and Sullivan's Guaranty Building in Buffalo," JSAH55 (March 1996): 21, 34 (nn. 48, 49). On the Board of Trade Building, see "The Board of Trade," Chicago Tribune (28 April 1885): 9; ibid. (29 April 1885): 3; Thomas Tallmadge, Architecture in Old Chicago (Chicago, 1941), 165; and Randall, Building Construction in Chicago, 108.
39Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, 1983), 136-140. One
major study is Kenneth L. Kann, "Working Class Culture and the Labor Movement in Nineteenth-Century Chicago," Ph.D. diss., University of Califor- nia at Berkeley, 1977. Others include Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850-1910: A Comparative Perspective (De Kalb, Ill., 1983). These studies refer to Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists (Chicago, 1889), who described varied workers' meeting halls around the city. The North Side's Turner Hall was at Clark Street and Chicago Avenue, while Vorwfirts Turner Hall was on West Twelfth Street.
40 George Wharton James, Chicago's Dark Places (Chicago, 1891). See also William Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service ofAll Who Suffer (London, 1894). On the city's range of amusements, see Harold R. Vynne, Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker's Guide to the Paris of America (Chicago, 1892). On entertainments of nonradical trade unions, see, for example, "Among the Turners," Chicago Herald (2 May 1886): 16; and "Theatrical Folks' Hop" and "The Stone-Cutters' Ball," Chicago Tribune (8 December 1887): 2.
41 Editorial, Indicator 4 (9 February 1884): 96. See also "The Abbey Opera Company," Indicator 4 (19 January 1884): 62. On the Metropolitan Opera
Company's Chicago tour of 1884, see Quaintance Eaton, Opera Caravan: Adventures of the Metropolitan on Tour (New York, 1957), 8-13, and Ronald L. Davis, Opera in Chicago (New York, 1966), 35-36.
42 Editorial, Indicator4 (9 February 1884): 96. 43 Silas G. Pratt, ed., First Chicago Grand Opera Festival (Chicago, 1885). 44 Ibid. 45 On the Exposition Building, see Industrial Chicago, 1: The Building Interests,
157-158; Andreas, History of Chicago, 2, 655-657; "The Interstate Exposition at Chicago," Inland Architect and News Record 16 (September 1890): 22; Bessie L. Pierce, History of Chicago, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1957), 3, 18-19, 475; Helen L. Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (1976; Chicago, 1989), 36-39; and Ross Miller, American Apocalypse, 23, 91-92.
46 On the 1884 May Music Festival, see Andreas, History of Chicago, 3, 650-651; "The May Music Festival," Chicago Tribune (31 May 1884): 3, and "Amusements," ibid. (1June 1884): 6.
47 "The Opera Festival," Chicago Tribune (1 March 1885): 7. 48 "The Opera Festival," Chicago Tribune (30 March 1885): 9. 49 Pratt, ed., First Chicago Grand Opera Festival. Adler and Sullivan's remodel-
ing of the Exposition Building's north end for the Opera Festival was discussed in "A Mammoth Opera House," Inland Architect and News Record 5 (March 1885): 25; "The Operatic Festival," ibid. (29 March 1885): 12; "The Grand Opera Festival," Real Estate and Building Journal 27 (4 April 1885): 160-161; Editorial, "The Opera Festival," Chicago Tribune (5 April 1885): 4; ibid. (12 April 1885): 27; Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea, 292-293; Morrison, Louis Sullivan, 67-71; Denson, "Chicago Auditorium," 30-34; Yvonne Shafer, "The First Chicago Grand Opera Festival: Adler and Sullivan Before the Audito- rium," Theater Design and Technology 13 (March 1977): 9-13, 38; Grimsley, "Dankmar Adler," 184-189; Twombly, Louis Sullivan, 147-149; Gregersen, DankmarAdler, 15-16, 55, 60-61; and Frei, Louis Sullivan, 64-65.
50 "The Grand Opera Festival," Real Estate and Building Journal 27 (4 April 1885): 161.
51 On the festival's financial and cultural results, see "Music for the People," Chicago Inter Ocean (3 May 1885): 6. See also Andreas, History of Chicago, 3, 652-653.
52 Peck, quoted in "The Opera Is Over," Chicago Tribune (19 April 1885): 12.
53 "Our Vampires," The Alarm (2 May 1885): 1, and "They Want Blood," Chicago Tribune (29 April 1885): 2. See also Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists, 80-81, and Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 146-149.
54 Recent accounts of the riot and its aftermath include Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 181-239, and Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape ofBelief(Chicago, 1996), 101-176. Accounts from the period include "A Hellish Dead," Chicago Tribune (5 May 1886): 1-2. On workers' lakefront meetings held from May to November 1885, see Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 109-110.
55 Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists, 44-73, and Avrich, Haymarket Tragedy, 84-85, 218-219. See also Carol Poore, "German-American Socialist Culture," Cultural Correspondence (Spring 1978): 13-20, and Eric L. Hirsch, Urban Revolt: Ethnic Politics in the Nineteenth-Century Chicago Labor Movement (Berkeley, 1990), esp. 144-170.
56 The Reverend David Swing, quoted in Ericsson, Sixty Years a Builder, 235. For Swing's and other clerical first reactions to Haymarket, see "Denounced from Pulpit," Chicago Tribune (10 May 1886): 1-2. See also Lewis F. Wheelock, "Urban Protestant Reactions to the Chicago Haymarket Affair 1886-1893," Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1956.
57 Peck, address to Chicago Commercial Club, 29 May 1886, published in "New Grand Opera-House," Chicago Tribune (12June 1886): 9.
58 SeeJohnJ. Glessner, The Commercial Club of Chicago (Chicago, 1910), and Andreas, History ofChicago, 3, 404-405. On Chicago's first major railroad strike, see Robert V. Bruce, 1877: The Year of Violence (NewYork, 1959), 233-253, and Philip Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (NewYork, 1977), 138-156.
59 Peck, in "New Grand Opera House," Chicago Tribune (12June 1886): 9. 60 Ibid. As successful local examples of this building type, Peck cited Adler's
Central Music Hall (1879), and the Chicago Opera House (1885), on the southwest corner of Clark and Washington Streets, designed by Cobb and Frost. Adler and Sullivan remodeled its theater in 1886. On this building, see Andreas, History of Chicago, 3, 668-669, and Rand, McNally & Co., Bird's-Eye Views and Guide to Chicago, 141, repr. in Randall, Building Construction in Chicago,
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206. Peck's family owned the building's site. See "A Question of Dollars,"
Chicago Tribune (20June 1889): 10. On the Central Music Hall, see n. 81 below. 61 Glessner, Commercial Club, 20. 62 Garczynski, Auditorium, 20, recalled how, prior to the Peck proposal, "one
of Chicago's most noble and most honored citizens, who, realizing this want of the city, had from 1882 to 1885, with the prompting and assistance of Theodore
Thomas, made many brave but ineffectual efforts to convince a number of her
wealthy citizens and her supposed leaders in culture and refinement to join him in giving Chicago a great Public Hall and Opera House." He added: "The
comprehensive studies of [Adler and Sullivan] made from 1882 to 1885 in connection with certain efforts in a similar direction under the auspices of Mr. Fairbank and Mr. [Theodore] Thomas, had enabled them to show that
adaptation to a multiplicity of uses could be attained in the construction and
equipment of an Auditorium without imperiling its utility or its beauty." Theodore Thomas was the nationally known orchestra leader who played at
Chicago's May Music Festivals of 1882 and 1884.
Sullivan, "Development of Construction," repr. in Twombly, ed., Sullivan: Public Papers, 215, recalled that in about 1885, "there was a movement started
by N. K. Fairbank for the building of a great opera house in this city, and we
[Adler and Sullivan] made some sketches, but somehow the thing did not pull through. It lagged along. No one took a special interest in it, that is, interest
enough to put up the money." In Autobiography of an Idea (p. 292), Sullivan later wrote that prior to 1885: "For several years there had been talk to the effect that
Chicago needed a grand opera house; but the several schemes advanced were too aristocratic and exclusive to meet with general approval." Variations on Sullivan's account appear in local reports of the early 1880s, such as "Wanted-An Opera House," Chicago Tribune (21January 1883): 4.
63 Peck, in "New Grand Opera House," Chicago Tribune (12June 1886): 9.
64 Original stockholders and their amounts were listed in Records of the
Chicago Auditorium Association, Originally Chicago Grand Auditorium Association, December 11, 1886 to November 7, 1906, 2 (Auditorium Collection, Roosevelt
University Archives). This was a limited liability corporation created for pub- licly beneficial purposes under the laws of the State of Illinois. While not legally a nonprofit corporation, the Auditorium Association paid its stockholders a dividend only once, in 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition, as noted in
Records, 228.
65 Waterman, Chicago and Cook County, 3, 924. As the Auditorium neared
completion, Peck wrote to its stockholders that "it is desired and expected that other citizens not now identified with the project will unite with us, thus
continuing the policy originally adopted of distributing the ownership widely among our people" (Peck, Annual Report of the President to the Stockholders of the Chicago Auditorium Association, 1 December 1888. Auditorium Collec-
tion, Roosevelt University Archives).
66 "The Grand Auditorium," Chicago Tribune (10 December 1886): 1. On Peck's fundraising, see "Subscribers to the Grand Opera Hall," ibid. (26
September 1886): 7; "The 'Grand Auditorium,' " ibid. (28 November 1886): 7; and "A Magnificent Enterprise," ibid. (5 December 1886): 15. See also
Morrison, Louis Sullivan, 86, and Twombly, Louis Sullivan, 164-165. 67 Peck, Annual Report of the President to the Stockholders of the Chicago
Auditorium Association, 12 December 1891. Auditorium Collection, Roosevelt
University Archives.
68 On these buildings, see n. 30. 69 Peck stated that "it is the wish of the projectors that the Auditorium shall
eventually come to be the great art center of America" ("The Pride of
Chicago," Chicago Daily News [Morning Edition, 9 December 1889]). Similar themes recurred in speeches at the theater's opening. See "Dedicated to Music and the People," Chicago Tribune (10 December 1889): 1-2. The Auditorium's national significance stemmed partly from its intended use for national politi- cal conventions, which began with the Republican Convention there in June 1888. Later President Benjamin Harrison and Vice President Levi P. Morton, nominated at that convention, joined several state governors and Canadian officials at the theater's dedication. Peck wrote that the "Auditorium will be in a
sense nationalized by the presence of distinguished men of the country" (Peck, Annual Report of the President to the Stockholders of the Chicago Auditorium Association, 7 December 1889. Auditorium Collection, Roosevelt University Archives).
70 Adler, "Chicago Auditorium," 415. Krehbiel, Chapters of Opera, 91, cited a claim by John B. Schoeffel, a partner of Henry Abbey, the impresario who
managed the Metropolitan in its first season (1883-1884), that Abbey had lost
$600,000. See Briggs, Yellow Brick Brewery, 22, 28-29; Mayer, Met, 43-47; and
Eisler, Metropolitan Opera, 50-53. Garczynski, Auditorium, 20, noted that, in contrast to Cincinnati, whose capacious Music Hall had succeeded from its
opening in 1878, "New York, with a far greater population, and with infinitely
superior wealth, had built the Academy of Music, and still more recently the
Metropolitan Opera House, with no better financial result than the obligation of the owners of these temples of the Muses to pay annual assessments for the maintenance of these structures."
71 Garczynski, Auditorium, 122. 72 Adler, "Chicago Auditorium," 423, wrote: "The boxes, forty in number,
are arranged in two tiers upon each side of the parquette. The lower tier forms an arcade of semi-circular arches with rather light treatment and but little effect of inclosure, while the upper boxes are entirely open. In fact, there is nothing at all of the boxlike and stuffy effect produced by the conventional treatment of the open box." The lower boxes' arches framed their occupants on view, yet interfered with views outward.
73 The Auditorium's boxes were sold for a season. See "An Opera Box for
$2,100," Chicago Tribune (23 November 1889): 1. The Met's first patrons paid $17,000 to own a box permanently.
74 Sullivan, quoted in "The Pride of Chicago," Chicago Daily News (Morning Edition, 9 December 1889).
75 Adler, "The Theater," 22-23. 76 Ibid., 23.
77 Adler, "Chicago Auditorium," 423, wrote: "This unusually great rise of the main floor has also made practicable the arrangement of six entrances, similar to the 'vomitoria' of the Roman amphitheatre, by which the lower half of the parquette seats are reached without rendering it necessary to climb to the upper level of the main floor." Schuyler, "Glimpses of Western Architec- ture: Chicago (1891)," in American Architecture and Other Writings, ed. William
Jordy and Ralph Coe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 1, 260, saw the Auditorium's entrances as vomitoria. He wrote (p. 258): "A place of popular entertainment, constructed upon a scale and with a massiveness to which we can scarcely find a parallel since Roman days, would present one of the worthiest and most interesting problems a modern architect could have if he were left to solve it unhampered."
78Adler advocated a larger number of narrower aisles in "Paramount
Requirements for a Large Opera House," 46, and "Theater Building for American Cities; Second Paper," 815.
79 Adler, "Chicago Auditorium," 421. 80 Gregersen, Dankmar Adler, 10, notes that the idea of seating rows not
having curvatures centered on the source of sound followed from the theaters of Adler's early employer, the architect Ozia S. Kinney, who died in 1869.
81 Adler worked on the plans of the Central Music Hall for perhaps three
years, adapting suggestions of its patron, theatrical manager George B. Carpen- ter (1835-1881), who had visited theaters throughout the United States for ideas on the design ("Real Estate," Chicago Tribune [2 March 1879]: 6). See also "The New Central Music Hall," American Architect and Building News 6 (8 November 1879): 8, and "The Music Hall," ibid. (5 December 1879): 6. Views and seating plans appeared in a pamphlet, Central Music Hall (Chicago Histori- cal Society). Later accounts are in Joseph Fort Newton, David Swing: Poet
Preacher (Chicago, 1909), 34-35; Morrison, Louis Sullivan, 66, 286-289; Condit,
Chicago School, 31-32; Twombly, Louis Sullivan, 98-99, 139-141; Grimsley, "Dankmar Adler," 80-130; Gregersen, Dankmar Adler, 47-49; Bluestone, Con-
structing Chicago, 101; and Frei, Louis Sullivan, 50, 63.
Dean, World's Fair City, 71, wrote of Peck: "Although holding no decided views regarding religious belief, he may be seen with his family at Central Music Hall nearly every Sunday, listening to the logical and symmetrical discourses of Prof. David Swing." Among the many publications of this minister's words, a
comprehensive collection from the period of the Auditorium is David Swing, Sermons (Chicago, 1884).
82 Gregersen, DankmarAdler, 11-19. OnJohn Scott Russell's methods for the
banking of auditorium seating, see Izenour, TheaterDesign, 71, and Appendix 3 (597-599), which is a republication of Scott Russell, "Elementary Consider- ations of some Principles in the Construction of Buildings Designed to Accom- modate Spectators and Auditors," from Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 27 (1838). See also Forsyth, Buildings for Music, 235-243.
83 Adler, "Paramount Requirements of a Large Opera House," 46.
156 JSAH / 57:2, JUNE 1998
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" Ticket prices for the Auditorium's inaugural season of 1889 were noted in Minutes of Executive Committee of the Chicago Auditorium Association, 3 May 1887 to 11 December 1907, 146 (Auditorium Collection, Roosevelt University Archives). On prices for the festival, see n. 50 above.
85 Adler, "The Theater," 22. 86 Mallgrave, Gotifried Semper, 123-124. At the end of his discussion on
different types of theater plans, Pierre Patte, Essai sur l'Architecture Thidtrale (Paris, 1782), favored the ellipse for acoustic reasons. On Patte's treatise, see Izenour, TheaterDesign, 57-59, and Tidworth, Theatres, 102.
87 In addition to Patte, European treatises on architectural acoustics predat- ing Scott Russell's studies included George Saunders, A Treatise on Theatres (London, 1790);J. G. Rhode, Thiorie der Verbreitung des Schallesfiir Baukiinstler (Berlin, 1800); Ernst F. Chladni, Traiti d'Acoustique (Paris, 1809); and Carl F
Langhans, Uber TheateroderBemerkungen iiberKatacoustics (Berlin, 1810). See also On the Principles of Sound and their Applications to the New Houses of Parliament
(London, 1840). Scott Russell read two papers on acoustics of theaters before the Royal Institute of British Architects in February and March 1847, summa- rized in Builder (1847), 82 and 118, and in Building News (26 November, 3 and 10 December 1858). American variations on such studies predating Adler's mature career included Jabez B. Upham, Acoustic Architecture (New Haven, 1853), and Alexander Saeltzer, A Treatise on Acoustics (New York, 1872).
88Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1926), book 5, chap. 3, 138.
89 Ibid., 139. Matthew Hurff, "The Context of Tradition in the Chicago Auditorium," seminar paper, Wesleyan University, May 1992, noted that Vitru- vius (Ten Books on Architecture, book 5, chap. 3, 138-139) wrote that sound
"moves in an endless number of circular rounds, like the innumerably increas-
ing circular waves which appear when a stone is thrown into smooth water," and that Adler ("Theater Building for American Cities: First Paper," 722) wrote: "The sound waves, produced in the open air, travel very much as do the
ripples in a pool when a stone is thrown into it."
"James Fergusson, quoted in John A. Fox, "American Dramatic Theatres. III," American Architect and Building News 6 (2 August 1879): 35.
91 Fox, "American Dramatic Theatres. III," 36. 92 One observer of the Auditorium Theater's opening wrote: "You could not
feel the sense of immensity till you turned from the footlights and looked back under the white and gold-ribbed vault of the body of the Auditorium to the balconies, which flattered the eye and then bewildered it; for, first, there sloped back from the parquet a stretch like a flower garden; then came the curving balcony, black with thousands, as if more people were there than anywhere else; above it the straight line of the second balcony, with banks of sightseers; and last and highest of all the gallery, whose occupants looked like dots. Now came the
triumph of architecture-for, while you felt the largeness, you also felt the
compactness of the whole. Despite the distance, you knew that these dots in the
gallery were near you, and could hear every word or note uttered on the stage" ("Dedicated to Music and the People," Chicago Tribune [10 December 1889]: 1).
93 Izenour, TheaterDesign, 568-569.
94 Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper, 260-262, noted Semper's innovation of the double proscenium in his unbuilt project for Munich's Festival Theater as the source for the triple proscenium enframing the stage at Bayreuth. It accommo- dated the orchestra's placement in a deep pit, or "mystical abyss" between the audience and stage-an idea important to Wagner.
95 Adler, "Theater-Building for American Cities: First Paper," 724. 96 Ibid.
97 At first there was to be a fifth arched segment in the ceiling nearest the stage, but this was omitted to place the organ there. See Gregersen, "Chicago Auditorium: A History," 23.
98 Adler, "Chicago Auditorium," 432.
99 "The Great Auditorium," Chicago Tribune (17June 1888): 5. '0 Ibid. 101 Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (Chicago, 1909), 177-178. 102 "The New Auditorium Building," Chicago Tribune (16 April 1887): 5. o03 See Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago
Area, 1880-1930 (Chicago, 1991), 22-39. See also "Electric Lights in Chicago Theaters," Western Electrician 5 (3 August 1889): 55-56. Dizikes, Opera in
America, 243, noted boxholders' requests for raised houselights during the Met's first seasons of German opera (1884-1891). Geraniotis, "German De-
sign Influence in the Auditorium Theater," 45, noted that Adler in 1888 had visited several German theaters with advanced electric lighting systems.
104 Van Rensselaer, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 87, noted the configura- tion of its houselights. Their technology was described in "Gas-Fitting, and Gas Lighting by Electricity of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York," Sanitary Engineer 9 (27 December 1883): 89-90. Other accounts of the old Met's first interior include "A Grand Temple of Music," New York Times (14 October 1883): 5; Schuyler, "Metropolitan Opera-House," 886-887; and Krehbiel, Chapters of Opera,
86-88. Soon after the theater opened, plans for its remodel- ing were noted in "Improving the New Opera-House," New York Times (30 October 1883): 8. The main purpose of this remodeling was to improve the boxes' decor. The scheme, devised by Francis Lathrop (a painter who contrib- uted murals to the original interior) was described in "The German Opera Season," New York Times (2 October 1884): 4. After a fire had gutted the Metropolitan in August 1892, architect John B. McElfatrick replanned the interior, eliminating the half tier of baignoire boxes and transforming the uppermost full tier of boxes into row seating to accommodate a larger general audience. See William H. Birkmire, "The Planning and Construction of American Theaters: Part I," Architecture and Building 21 (13 October 1894): 175-179. The old Met's auditorium was remodeled again in 1903. See Curtis C. Blake, "The Architecture of Carrare and Hastings," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976, 301-302.
105 "Opera and Drama," Indicator 6 (4July 1885): 553. Sullivan, "Develop- ment of Construction, I," in Twombly, ed., Sullivan: Public Papers, 214-215, recalled that in the 1885 renovation of McVicker's Theater, he had invented "the first decorative use of the electric lamp ... placing the lamps in a decora- tion instead of clustering them in fixtures." He thus departed from gas chandeliers and wall-hung gas lights. See "Amusements; McVicker's Renovated Theatre," Chicago Tribune (19June 1885): 5; "Amusements" and "McVicker's Theatre," ibid. (2 July 1885): 5, 7; "McVicker's Theatre: A Thespian Temple Worthy of Chicago," Real Estate and Building Journal 27 (18 July 1885): 783; Clarence H. Blackhall, "Notes of Travel: Chicago," American Architect and Building News 22 (24 December 1887): 299-300; and Adler and Sullivan, letter, "The Decoration of McVicker's Theater, ibid., 23 (11 February 1888): 70-71, in Twombly, ed., Sullivan: Public Papers, 41-45. There (p. 43) Adler and Sullivan noted that the ornamental carver was James Legge, whose firm also did the ornamental plaster relief in the Auditorium Building.
106 "Dedicated to Music and the People," Chicago Tribune (10 December 1889): 1.
107 Adler, "Theater-Building for American Cities; Second Paper," 817. Peck wrote: "The plan of decoration is consistent and elegant throughout the building, the Auditorium and main rooms of the hotel being finished mostly in gold and ivory tone of color. This has been costly, the quality of the gold leaf being exceptionally fine (23 carats), but it is permanent and grows more beautiful with age, and therefore is wise economy as well as effective in beauty" (Peck, Annual Report of the President to the Stockholders of the Chicago Auditorium Association, 7 December 1889. Auditorium Collection, Roosevelt University Archives). Sullivan wrote: "A single idea or principle is taken as a basis of the color scheme, that is to say, use is made of but one color in each instance, and that color is associated with gold" ("Plastic and Color Decoration of the Auditorium," in Twombly, ed., Sullivan: Public Papers, 74).
108 Mme. Lion Grandin, Impressions d'une paisienne d Chicago (Paris, 1894),
117: "En outre, l'il1ment dicoratif, peinture et sculpture, si abondant, trop abondant mime en n6tre Acadimie de musique, fait ici complktement d&- faut."
109 Peck, Annual Report of the President to the Stockholders of the Chicago Auditorium Association, 7 December 1889. Auditorium Collection, Roosevelt
University Archives. Peck noted that the French government had paid the equivalent of over $7 million for the Paris Opera House, plus $2 million for the ground, while Chicago's Auditorium cost $3.1 million to build, plus a ground rent of$1 million for the lease period.
110 Garczynski, Auditorium, 128. 1 Bart Swindall, Auditorium Theater Council, noted this motif in the
course of a theater tour on 13July 1997. The same milkweed pod recurs as the motif on the newel posts at the bottom of the Auditorium Hotel's main stairway. On the relation of botanical and historical sources for Sullivan's ornament, see Siry, Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store (Chicago, 1988), 153-157.
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 157
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112 Garczynski, Auditorium, 114. In a later interview, Sullivan said of Adler's
and his design for the synagogue for Kehilath Anshe Ma'ariv, Chicago (1889-1890): "It is the nineteenth century school. ... That is all I can say for it. It has no historical style. It is the present. We have got to get away from schools in architecture. As long as we adhere to schools of anything there is no
progress; nothing gained, no advancement. Look at the Auditorium. What school does that represent? None" ("Church Spires Must Go," Chicago Tribune
[30 November 1890]: 36). 113 Garczynski, Auditorium, 128. 114 Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea, 208-209, recalled that Lohengrin had an
impact on his appreciation of Wagner, whose portrait, along with Haydn's, appears in gold relief in the arch spandrels of the organ screen to the stage's left. See "Auditorium Supplement," Chicago Inter Ocean (11 December 1889).
Johannes Gelert (1852-1923) sculpted these reliefs and those of Shakespeare and Demosthenes to the stage's right.
115 The illusionistic backdrop for the Auditorium's stage consisted of a continuous canvas roll on which were painted panoramas of the sky in different seasons and weathers. The backdrop, 300 feet long and 75 feet high, was
painted by the Kautsky Brothers of Vienna, whose system of hydraulic lifts was
adapted for the Auditorium's stage. See Adler, "Chicago Auditorium," 428-429, and Garczynski, Auditorium, 133-135. Sullivan's designs of foliate ornament to frame naturalistic stage imagery recurred in his studies for the proscenium and curtain of the Pueblo Opera House (1888-1890). See Lloyd C. Engelbrecht, "Adler & Sullivan's Pueblo Opera House: City Status for a New Town in the
Rockies," Art Bulletin 67 (June 1985): 287, 290. 116 Sullivan, "Plastic and Color Decoration of the Auditorium," in Twombly,
ed., Sullivan: Public Papers, 75.
"117 Ibid., 76.
118 The title that Sullivan originally selected for the poem "Inspiration" was "Growth and Decadence." See Twombly, Louis Sullivan, 224-225. On Sullivan's
presentation of "Inspiration," see "Western Association of Architects," Chicago Tribune (18 November 1886): 6, and American Architect and Building News 20 (27 November 1886): 254. Analyses of the poem include Paul, Louis Sullivan, 36-40, and Weingarden, "Louis H. Sullivan: Investigation of a Second French
Connection,"JSAH39 (December 1980): 297-303.
"11 Sullivan, "Plastic and Color Decoration of the Auditorium," in Twombly, ed., Sullivan: Public Papers, 75.
120 "Pride of Chicago," Chicago Daily News (Morning Edition, 9 December
1889). 121 Ibid. 122 At their meeting of 28 August 1889, Peck and his colleagues resolved
"that the architects and the decorative contractor [Healy and Millet] proceed with landscape paintings for the side arches in the Auditorium-the cost thereof not to exceed two thousand dollars ($2,000). It being fully understood that if not satisfactory they are to be taken down at the expense of Healy and
Millet... the landscapes to be subject to modification in the original designs and subject to the approval of the Executive Committee" (Minutes of Execu- tive Committee of Chicago Auditorium Association, 141. Auditorium Collec- tion, Roosevelt University Archives). On 5 June, the Executive Committee had "voted to authorize Architect Sullivan to have figures placed over the prosce- nium arch of the Auditorium, the cost thereof not to exceed $2,000, and the
design subject to the approval of this committee" (Ibid., 111). On Fleury, see Francis E. Towne, "Albert Fleury, Painter," Brush and Pencil 12 (April-Septem- ber 1903): 201-208. On Healy and Millet, see David Hanks, "Louis J. Millet and the Art Institute of Chicago," Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 67 (1973): 13-19. On Sullivan's friendship with Millet and Fleury in Chicago, see Connely, Louis Sullivan, 206. On Fleury's murals, see Garczynski, Auditorium, 130-132. Fleury also painted the twelve murals in oil, each showing a different American regional scene, in the Auditorium Hotel's Banqueting Room. He soon became an instructor in mural painting at the Art Institute and completed a number of later such commissions. Fleury wrote of his approach to painting open-air scenes in "Picturesque Chicago," Brush andPencil6 (September 1900): 273-281.
'23Towne, "Albert Fleury," 204. 124 "Pride of Chicago," Chicago Daily News (Morning Edition, 9 December
1889). On Peck's affinity for spending time in Wisconsin's woodlands, see Dean, World's Fair City, 69-70.
125 Sullivan, "Plastic and Color Decoration of the Auditorium," in Twombly, ed., Sullivan: Public Papers, 75-76.
126 Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea, 300. 127 On the chronology of the Auditorium's exterior design, see Gregersen,
"Chicago Auditorium: A History," 18-24. See also Morrison, Louis Sullivan, 86-89, and Twombly, Louis Sullivan, 164-170.
128 On the Auditorium's siting and urban visibility, see Garczynski, Audito-
rium, 41-49. 129 At their meeting of 7 May 1887, the Auditorium's directors, headed by
Peck, voted to change the upper walls to limestone (Records, 71. Auditorium Collection, Roosevelt University Archives). Paul Mueller, "Testimony," in Kauf- mann, ed., "Wright's 'Lieber Meister,' " Nine Commentaries, 49, and Wright, Genius and the Mobocracy, 48, both recalled that Sullivan's initial designs for the
upper walls were in brick and an ornate terra-cotta, cladding structural iron columns.
130 Adler, "Architects and Trade Unions," Inland Architect and News Record 27
(May 1886): 32. Adler's ideas on labor and politics also appeared in "Delibera- tions of the Architects," Economist6 (21 November 1891): 857-858; "Municipal Building Laws," Inland Architect and News Record 25 (May 1895): 36-37; "Open Letter to Chicago Mason Builders," ibid. 29 (February 1897): 2-3; "The General Contractor from the Standpoint of the Architect," ibid. 33 (June 1899): 38-39. On the building trades strike of 1887, see Industrial Chicago, 1: The Building Interests, 556-581.
131 Adler, quoted in "Why the Strike Must Fail," Chicago Tribune (17 June 1887): 1.
132 Ibid.
33 Adler, "Chicago Auditorium," 417. 134 Field's Wholesale Store was 325 feet long east-west on Adams Street and
its seven stories stood 130 feet high. The Auditorium's front on Congress Street is 362 feet long east-west, while its ten-story block is about 144 feet high. Both thus had a ratio of frontal width to height of 2.5:1. John Van Osdel's Farwell Wholesale Block (1886), on the west side of South Market Street from Monroe to Adams, was the other recent building of comparable size in central Chicago. See Rand, McNally & Co., Bird's-Eye Views and Guide to Chicago, 105-106, and Randall, Building Construction in Chicago, 112, 123.
135 "Death of Henry Field," Chicago Tribune (23 December 1890): 1; and Robert W. Twyman, History of Marshall Field & Co., 1852-1906 (Philadelphia, 1954), 62. Henry Field was a director of the Auditorium from December 1886 to his death (Records, 8, 175. Auditorium Collection, Roosevelt University Archives). Field's Wholesale Store's sandstone was quarried near Springfield, Massachusetts, less than thirty miles from Marshall Field's birthplace near
Conway. On the building, see James E O'Gorman, "The Marshall Field Wholesale Store: Materials Toward a Monograph," JSAH 37 (October 1978): 175-194. Sullivan, Kindergarten Chat VI: "An Oasis," Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, ed. Isabella Athey (New York, 1947), 30, described the Field Store as a monument to Field, "to the strength and resource of individuality and force of character." Field's associate, Harry G. Selfridge, noted that the firm's architecture "met the moral requirements of Mr. Field himself" as "a
lasting monument to his character" (Harold I. Cleveland, "Fifty-Five Years in Business: The Life of Marshall Field-Chapter XI," System 11 [May 1907]: 459).
136 Adler, paraphrased in "The Western Association of Architects," American Architect and Building News 20 (27 November 1886): 253.
137 O'Gorman, "Marshall Field Wholesale Store," 190. See alsoJordy, Ameri-
140 On the ancient Latin usages of the word "auditorium," see Birgitta Tamm, Auditorium and Palatium: A Study on Assembly-Rooms in Roman Palaces during the Ist Century B.C. and the Ist Century A.D., Stockholm Studies in Classical Archaeology 2 (Stockholm, 1963), 7-24.
141 Editorial, "The Auditorium Opening," Chicago Inter Ocean (9 December 1889): 4.
1'42 On Peck's involvement with the World's Columbian Exposition, see Flinn, Hand-book of Chicago Biography, 283, and Gilbert and Bryson, Chicago and Its Makers, 625. Peck's enthusiasm for its architecture appeared in his Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900, 6 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1901), 1, 60.
143 On the unit's local history and reputation, see Souvenir Album and Sketchbook of Chicago's First Regiment (Chicago, 1890); Andreas, History of Chicago, 3, 586-587; and John J. Flinn, Chicago: The Marvelous City of the West, 2nd ed.
158 JSAH / 57:2, JUNE 1998
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(Chicago, 1892), 387-389. Workers earlier referred to this regiment's men as "Marshall Field's boys" ("Our Vampires," The Alarm [2 May 1885]: 1). Wright,
Autobiography (1932), 96, identified Adler and Sullivan's draftsman, William
(Billy) Gaylord, as "a candidate for pugilistic honors in the First Regiment at 'the Armory,' " presumably meaning the regiment's earlier armory building at
24Jackson Street, opened in 1878. On this structure, see Industrial Chicago, 1: The BuildingInterests, 185.
44 On the First Regiment's Armory, see Inland Architect and News Record 13
(une 1889): 90; "Was Laid with Pomp," Chicago Tribune (13 July 1890): 1-2;
Julian Ralph, "The First Regiment Armory in Chicago," Harper's Weekly (3 December 1892): 1163; Donald Hoffmann, The Architecture ofJohn Wellborn Root
(New York, 1973), 139-144; and Robert Fogelson, America's Armories (Cam- bridge, Mass., 1989), 81, 146-147, 151, 158-159, 160-162.
45 Flinn, Chicago: Marvelous City, 389. 146 On Adler and Sullivan's "Trocadero Theater" inside the First Regiment's
Armory, see Gregersen, Dankmar Adler, 86-87. On Ziegfeld, the father of the famous twentieth-century showman, see Flinn, Hand-book of Chicago Biography, 395. On the Parisian Trocadero Palace and Theater, see Rabreau et al., Gabriel Davioud, 89-102.
147 "Music for the People," Chicago Inter Ocean (3 May 1885): 6.
148 On the Chicago Citizens' Association, see Frederic C. Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana, 1982), 505. On the Chicago Citizens' Law and Order League, see Andreas, History of Chicago, 3, 288-290.
49 Garczynski, Auditorium, 111. 150 See Corroyer, "Romanesque Architecture," Inland Architect and News
Record 13 (March 1889): 39-40; (April 1889): 51-53; (May 1889): 65-68; (une 1889): 83-86; (uly 1889): 95-96; 14 (August 1889): 3-6; (September 1889): 18-19; (November 1889): 48-50; (December 1889): 73-76; (anuary 1890): 90-92; 15 (February 1890): 3-5; (March 1890): 31; (April 1890): 43-45; (May 1890): 55-57. Another contemporary view of the relation of Roman to Ro-
manesque appeared in Montgomery Schuyler, "The Romanesque Revival in New York (1891)," in American Architecture, 1, 191-195. On Romanesque in
Chicago's architecture, see Industrial Chicago, 1: The Building Interests, 67-68, and Henry Van Brunt, "John Wellborn Root," Inland Architect and News Record 16 (anuary 1891): 85-88. On Otis, see Henry E and Elsie R. Withey, Biographi- cal Dictionary of American Architects (1956; Los Angeles, 1970), 450, and Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Architects Design (New York, 1982), 44.
151 "The President's Party," Chicago EveningJournal (9 December 1889): 2. A
rendering of Peck's house was published in Inland Architect and News Record 10 (October 1887). Peck and Jenney were both members of the Union League Club, whose building of 1886Jenney designed. See Charles B.Jenkins, "W. L. B.
Jenney and W. B. Mundie," Architectural Reviewer 1 (February 1897): 2-9, and Grant, Fightfor a City, 81-95.
152 On the Athenaeum's headquarters from 1890, see Industrial Chicago, 1:
The Building Interests, 275; Flinn, Chicago: Marvelous City of the West, 265; Rand, McNally & Co., Bird's-Eye Views and Guide to Chicago, 31-32, repr. in Randall,
Development of Building Construction in Chicago, 253. See also Nineteenth Annual
Report of the Chicago Athenaeum 1889-'90 (Chicago Historical Society). The Athenaeum's earlier building stood on the west side of Dearborn Street, just north of Adler and Sullivan's Borden Block on the northwest corner of
Randolph. On the Art Institute's original patronage from its organization in 1879, see Andreas, History of Chicago, 3, 421, and Helen L. Horowitz, "The Art Institute of Chicago: The First Forty Years," Chicago History 8 (Spring 1979): 2-19.
153 "Warming Its New Home," Chicago Tribune (10 May 1891): 1. 154The Reverend Edward I. Galvin to Ferdinand W. Peck, 13 December
1889, in Auditorium, Dedication Volume (Newberry Library). On Galvin and the Chicago Athenaeum, see Andreas, History of Chicago, 3, 417.
1'5 Adler, "Chicago Auditorium," 433. 156 Garczynski, Auditorium, 132. 157 Studies that revise views of the Chicago School by examining its architec-
tural patronage include Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, and Berger, They Built Chicago.
158 Paul Bourget, Outre Mer (Paris, 1895), 1, 161-162, trans. in Schuyler, Critique of the Works ofAdler & Sullivan, in American Architecture, 2, 380. Bourget in this context was discussing the exteriors of Chicago's tall commercial buildings. SeeJordy, American Buildings and Their Architects, 4, 52-53. Schuyler wrote: "The
type of an opera-house, which the [Chicago] auditorium essentially is, is so well settled and so universally accepted that the variations ordinarily attempted upon it, even by architects of original force, are comparatively slight. While the component parts of the accepted type are retained in this interior, they are transmuted into an entirely new result." The theater, in "extending and
proclaiming a hospitality as nearly as may be equal and undistinguishing, illustrates, as plainly as the exterior of many-storied buildings, and in contrast with the 'royal' and 'imperial' opera houses, M. Bourget's conception of 'a new kind of art, an art of democracy' " (Schuyler, Critique of the Works of Adler & Sullivan, in American Architecture, 2, 384-385).
Illustration Credits Figures 1, 10, 13, 16, 17, 20. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago Figures 5, 14. Library of Congress Figure 6. Museum of the City of New York
Figure 7. Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich
Figures 8, 9, 18, 22. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society Figure 23. Courtesy of Alinari-Scala/Art Resources International, New York
City
SIRY: CHICAGO'S AUDITORIUM BUILDING 159
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