Lost Chicago SYNOPSIS
These dazzling, poignant pages recreate the magical built environment that thrilled generations of Chicago residents and visitors alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of "progress."
Here are the grand residences and hotels, opulent theaters, legendary trains, and state-of-the-art office buildings and department stores-including the world's first skyscraper. Here too are the famous convention halls, parks, and racetracks of a great American city whose architectural treasures have been, and continue to be, recklessly squandered.
Rare photographs and prints, many of them published here for the first time, document the transformative architectural achievements of such giants as Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, John Wellburn Root, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, and Frank Lloyd Wright. But this remarkable book is much more than a portfolio of now-vanished buildings; within its pages are evocative thumbnail sketches of scores of Chicago personalities, from the world-famous (Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Dreiser, Clarence Darrow, Ben Hecht, Jane Addams, Cyrus McCormick, George Pullman, and Gustavus Swift, to name just a few) to the locally notorious.
About The Author
David Garrard Lowe, the author of Stanford White's New York, Beaux Arts New York, and Art Deco New York (to be published by Watson-Guptill in 2001), lectures frequently at the Smithsonian in Washington, the American Academy in Rome, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in his home city, New York.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Lowe's evangelistic eulogy of Chicago's destroyed architecture was a rallying cry for historic preservationists when it appeared in 1975, and it remains an icon to the movement. In the preface to this new edition, Lowe laments that, sadly, further demolition of Chicago's built heritage warrants a recapitulation. Additions include newly discovered illustrations of earlier losses as well as images of more recent ones, textual revisions (particularly regarding captions), and a final chapter that brings the work to the present. The vanished glories of Chicago residences, railways, hotels, commercial buildings, and entertainment palaces are thematically and chronologically exposed, along with a great deal of city history. Lowe is a rousing polemicist, and the photographs are wrenching. Readers today will be moved, as they first were a quarter of a century ago, by this documentary of the Windy City's ransacking. Strongly recommended for architecture, urbanism, and preservation collections, including those holding the original edition, which could likely use a facelift.--Russell T. Clement, Northwestern Univ. Lib., Evanston, IL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Internet Book Watch
In Lost Chicago, historian David Lowe explores the architectural and cultural history of America's great "heartland" city. This is a community who architectural heritage was all to often squandered during the last five decades of its growth and evolution. Lowe's elegant, and informative text is wonderfully enhanced with more than 270 rare, period photos and prints (many of them published here for the first time). Lost Chicago is a celebration of the age of Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour and the greatest stockyards in the world; when Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field were the national barons of business and industry; when Prairie Avenue and State streets rivaled New York's Fifth Avenue; when architectural giants ranging from Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright were designing buildings of incomparable excellence and innovation. Lost Chicago is a "must" for students of Chicago history, architecture, and personalities.
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