IL Day 4 - A Frank and Ernest Day
Today I started things off with a trip to the hip New Age-y Oromo Cafe in the neighborhood of Bucktown, not too far from where I was comedy-ing and pinball-ing last night in Logan Square. The coffee was very tasty and a great way to start the day.
As an added bonus, I also got to park near one of the most deliriously unhinged cars I’ve ever seen. I genuinely don’t know if this person can see over their beanie babies and it started my morning off with a good laugh.
My first stop after fueling up was the small Chicago adjacent town of Oak Park, where I had the perfect weather for some suburban strolling. My visit was not just for idle perambulating, but to visit the homes of too quite different Americans who had a big influence on their respective fields and the 20th-century writ large: Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway.
Up first was the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, where I was pretty much right on time to synch up with a tour group. Our tour guide was a sweet older Mid-Western man who added a layer of folksy harm to the history and biographical details.
We started outside, and right from jump the home made an impression. The main house was built when FLW was just 22 years old and newly married. He started out working in a more traditional Victorian style with flairs of his own emerging design principles (note the exaggerated geometric forms), but, over the 20 years he lived there, he used the house and studio as a site for experimentation as he developed his signature Prairie style over several renovations and additions.
Along the exterior, there were several beautifully funky sculptures, mostly done by Wright’s friend and collaborator Richard Bock. They had a sleekness and elegance reminiscent of Art Deco, but also a sort of menacing, unsettled quality that I feel spoke to Wright’s desire to rail against the established art status quo and do something different.
Moving into the house, we started in the living room which, even before the house was part of a museum tour, was designed to be an introductory space for guests to both the house itself and to Wright’s core design principles. Fittingly, this is where the tour guide laid out some key influences to look for throughout the house. Wright said the greatest inspirations on his work were the beauty of the natural world, the harmony and composition of music, Japanese architectural designs, the geometry of children’s building blocks he used to play with, and the teachings of his mentor and employer when he first built the home, Louis Sullivan.
Some architectural innovations already present in this space were the concepts of built-in furniture and open living spaces. In the interest of pursuing his principles of harmony, Wright wanted the furniture to complement and blend seamlessly with the space and he wanted each space to flow freely into another, eschewing any doors or barriers between common areas. While these stylistic flourishes may seem fairly commonplace now, they were radical in 1889 when houses were almost more status symbols than functional living spaces, and it’s a testament to Wright’s legacy that so many things he pioneered have become standard.
In terms of aesthetics, I think my favorite part of the room was looking up and seeing the intricate, decorative molding along the ceiling as it seemed to swirl and dance about in the light.
Walking to the next room we passed by a later addition that was made to connect the home and the studio. Rather than cut down a tree that grew between the two, Wright decided to really put his belief in the integration of nature and architecture into practice by actually building the extension around the tree and incorporating it into the structure of the hallway. It’s a weird whimsical touch (though my photo doesn’t do it justice), and it really adds a nice touch of life to the sometimes clinical precision of Wright’s work.
Next up on the tour, we made our way to the dining room which featured an absolutely stunning light fixture that bathed the room in a soft warm glow through an exquisitely carved wooden screen. The beauty of the screen was only outdone by just how massively uncomfortable all the chairs looked. As much as Wright preached the importance of functionality, sometimes he did let his conviction in his vision get the best of him, and even he had to admit the chairs were not actually very nice to sit in regardless of cool and sleek he made them look. I think in some ways it speaks to the central contradiction behind Frank Lloyd Wright, in that he strove to create inviting, convivial spaces for other people to live in, but in his own home he was a closed off, cold husband and father, who put his work and his ego above his family. He couldn’t even sacrifice a little commitment to his designs to make the dining room a place where the family might actually want to sit. But provided you didn’t actually have a meal there, it was stunning to look at.
Even in one of his earliest homes, Wright’s windows designs were exceptional, and the panes in the dining room had a great mix of interesting patterns and color without sacrificing any of the window’s primary function of letting in plenty of natural light.
Next up, the tour took us upstairs to Frank and his first wife’s bedroom. The house, for its day, was on the cutting edge of technology featuring telephones and electric lights. Even still, out of a combination of practicality, philosophical desire to incorporate the natural world, and cost-effectiveness, the rooms were carefully designed to allow the architecture to make the most out of whatever light came through the windows. Wright even came up with a trick to allow natural light into the adjoining bathroom without sacrificing any privacy by creating a small slit high up on the wall. It’s a lot of trouble to go though, but perhaps he had a shy bladder that could only be activated with natural light.
The walls of the bedrooms were particularly impressive featuring gorgeous paintings of women in classical garb planting and harvesting crops as a sort of idealized homage to the prairies that surrounded the area at the time the house was built.
The bathroom itself was modest by Wright’s standards but no less lacking in charm or simple, geometric elegance.
Walking to kids’ room, we passed by a small but lovely stained glass window featuring what would become a pretty classic Wright design.
In all the bedrooms, the furniture really stood out as gorgeous examples of the craft of woodworking. Wright valued trying to use materials that were common to the areas in which his homes were built because it added to the harmony with the local environs and was also usually cheaper than importing fancy lumber. As much as his most famous homes belonged to the very wealthy, Wright did firmly intend for his Prairie style home to be ideal for the everyday middle class American so keeping costs down in little ways that also potentially boosted local craftsmen and businesses was a win-win. I’m not sure exactly how much of the furniture was original vs. recreations, though I think the FLW Trust did a pretty meticulous job trying to keep everything pretty authentic.
Spicing up these rooms, there were some family photographs of the Wrights that did a nice job reminding visitors of the people who lived there that weren’t famous architects. I particularly got a kick out of the family photo on the right because Frank is barely facing forward but for some reason his Uncle Jenkin is super prominently on display which is just a wonderfully strange bit of staging.
Next up was the children’s playroom which is often considered the most beautiful room in the house and it really is a showstopper. Wright really wanted to create the perfect area for children to play in, with a huge vaulted ceiling and windows at kid height to give the room a feeling of almost limitless space to promote freedom and imagination. His own childhood playing with blocks had inspired the career path he’d followed so he knew the value in play and wanted to make sure his kids had the room to make to make the most of it. The walls were all made out of carefully chosen brick that were easy to wash so the kids could make as big a mess as they wanted without worry. Looking over the room was a gorgeous painting by Wright’s friend Charles Corwin depicting a scene from The Arabian Nights called the Genie and the Fisherman which even now imbues the room with a sort of childlike sense of magic.
Wright scholars believe that the architect pulled out all the stops for this room almost as an apology gift to compensate for all the other things he knew he wouldn’t be able to provide for them as a generally absent and cold father. In just a few short years (when his youngest son at the time was just 6), Wright ran away with his mistress to Europe and never returned to living in the home. The room is masterpiece (and one of the sons went on to invent Lincoln Logs so having the space to play clearly made an impression), but I’m sure the kids would have also appreciated having their dad around a bit more.
Naturally, the windows in the rooms were something special, featuring a simple geometric design and lovely stained glass flourishes.
Wanting to incorporate music into the kid’s room but without taking up any of their space, he had specially built nooks right into the walls to fit pianos perfectly.
The neatest trick Wright came up with to really make the room knock visitors socks off was just a simple bit of architectural illusion. All the hallways leading into the room have dark low ceilings, so whenever you walk in it feels like an explosion of light and freedom. It’s simple but super effective a nice display of how much architecture alone could be used to create emotional responses, all the things that make Wright’s best works so enduring.
After the extravagant play room, we moved to the much more humble kitchen. The room was very utilitarian by design since I don’t think Wright expected it to see many visitors but it still had a rustic charm.
From there, we moved to the studio extension of the house. First up was the drafting area where Wright and his employees worked on architectural drawings, and the area impressed right away with its elaborate geometry and beautiful woodwork. The room was shaped like a giant octagon and featured a balcony carefully supported by chains from the ceiling so that no support posts were required that would interrupt the open space of the ground floor or the natural light streaming down.
To inspire the draftsmen, Wright would hang up various pieces of disparate works of beautiful art including Japanese prints, classical sculptures, and architectural models. As you can see in my photo, some guests were so inspired by the artwork on the walls that they turned positively blurry.
On all of the drawing tables, there were drawings and sketches of the houses that were designed within these octagonal walls. I’m not sure how many of the drawings were original or recreations but either way, it was neat to get a peek into the process. Among the tables, embedded in one wall, there was also a pretty hefty safe presumably to store all these valuable pieces of paper.
On one table there was a model of the iconic Robie House, which was designed while Wright was working out of this studio and is located not too far away on Chicago’s south side. The house is considered the pinnacle of Wright’s Prairie School design, with its dynamic use of horizontal planes, integrated aesthetics between the interior and exterior, and of course some snazzy windows. Personally my favorite part though was that model also included an old man sitting on the bench outside and shaking his fist at passersby.
After the drawing room, we made our way to the reception area where guests would wait to meet with the architectural maestro. The room was cleverly designed to impress with beautiful stained glass windows and a neat minimalist design that helped integrate the space with the green foliage outside. Crazily enough though with all that effort to wow guests, he still made the chairs look absolutely terrible to sit in.
The showstopper though was placed above guests heads with an absolutely dazzling stained glass sun roof that bathed the reception room in warm green and yellow light.
Lastly, there was the consultation room which was a small octagonal room where FLW could have one on one meetings with clients and prospective clients. The room was like a miniature version of the drafting room, almost like Wright was trying to bring some of that process to his customers.
At this point the tour guide talked about Wright’s fondness of repeating geometric forms within rooms and challenged us to find the rest of the octagons in the room. I don’t want to pat myself on the back too much, but I was the first one to anticipate Wright’s insane attention to detail and looked under the table to clock the 8 sided table legs.
After finishing the tour, I started walking towards the home of another famous Oak Park resident. On the walk, I got to enjoy another good look at the exteriors of the home and studio, and I even passed by the famous Robie House.
My next major stop of the day was Ernest Hemingway's Birthplace, which is a charmingly unassuming little home in the suburbs. Built in 1890 by Ernest’s maternal grandparents, Caroline and Ernest Hall, the house was both his actual birthplace (Hemingway’s father was a physician who delivered the first three of six children in the upstairs of this house) and his childhood home for the first 6 years of his life until his grandfather’s death in 1905. In 1992, the home was acquired by The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, and, through lots of volunteer work and about $1 million in grants and donations, they restored the house to its former turn of the century splendor.
Inside the home, I joined a guided tour and my guide was a sweet midwestern lady who threw in the occasional “You Betcha” which really made me happy because I thought that only happened in Coen Brothers movies. We started with the sitting room, which was filled with all sorts of period-specific furnishings of the type that the Hemmingways may have had. I believe that the family did donate some items, but the home had gone through a lot of hands before ending up with the Hemingway Foundation so most of the items were carefully curated by the museum.
The Hemingways were a well-liked and well-respected family in the neighborhood, and Ernest’s mom, Grace, was a voice coach and music teacher with over 50 pupils in town (for a while she made considerably more money than her husband did as a new physician) so most of the decor was geared towards creating a welcoming and artsy environ for her students. Still, her father and husband’s fondness for hunting and the outdoors was nodded at with a large deer head above the fireplace.
In one corner of the room, there was a prominent portrait of Hemingway’s mom looming over the room. It seems that by all accounts she was the dominant presence in the house and over most of Ernest’s young life.
After the sitting room, we made our way to the kitchen which was filled with pretty turn-of-the-century ceramics and glassware that suggest a daintier, more upper-middle-class life than the rugged writer may have wanted to project.
Next up the tour took us upstairs to Hemingway’s grandpa’s study. Ernest Hall was a gifted storyteller and would keep the young Hemingway children entertained in between bible readings, and the younger Ernest would cite him as an important early influence.
One item that caught my eye in the study were these taxidermied owls which were cute in a creepy sort of way. Apparently guys like these were a fairly common trend called Honeymoon Owls and they were given as a wedding gift, which is real wild.
After the study, the tour went to one of the adult bedrooms which was very charming though I’m not sure they would have thought to have a framed copy of the most famous child’s birth certificate on the wall at the time.
In the bedroom, there was an adorable photo of baby Ernest. Apparently, it was Victorian tradition to not differentiate baby clothes by gender, but Grace Hemmingway took things a little further because Ernest was only a year younger than his eldest sister Marcelline and they had such a strong resemblance that she actually raised them to look like twin girls for the first three years of his life! I’m sure that had absolutely no lasting effect on him at all and his need to assert his masculinity and macho image throughout his life was probably just a coincidence..
From there we went to another sitting room, which had a mighty comfy looking couch.
In the next bedroom, we talked a bit more about Ernest’s father Clarence. Clarence was a well liked local physician, fond of nature and exploration and prone to bouts of depression two things he would pass on to his son. My favorite story I heard about Clarence is that he at one point invented a new kind of foreceps that was really useful in back surgery but refused to patent it which is a lovely bit of true nobility.
In the hallway and stairwell of the second floor, there were lots of vintage Hemmingway photos which really sweet. I particularly liked this one of the three oldest kids and their grandpa and the resemblance between Ernest and his father in his younger days was pretty uncanny.
No historic house tour could be complete without a visit to the bathroom, and it seems that even future Nobel prize winners and their families are not immune to the necessities of biology.
Last but not least, we had the kids’ bedroom which featured wallpaper that, in a fun bit of historical coincidence, was designed by Humphrey Bogart’s mother of all people. Apparently Maud Humphrey (her son received her family name as a first name) was a very successful commercial illustrator and her work popped up in hundreds of greeting cards, children’s books, post-cards, and fashion magazines from the 1890s-1920s occasionally featuring baby Bogie as a model.
Leaving the house, I was surprised to find that even the Hemmingways bought into the Big Mouth Billy Bass novelty trend of the late 1990s.
After the Hemingway birthplace, I strolled around Oak Park and took a look at a number of private residences Frank Lloyd Wright designed while establishing his Prairie School style. Apparently, FLW designed some of these houses on the side for extra cash while he was still starting out working at Louis Sullivan’s architecture firm, which was in direct violation his contract. You would think that if these “bootleg” houses were such a risky proposition, Wright might try to be a little sneaky about them, but he couldn’t sacrifice his aesthetic principles and they are so obviously designed by him that his employer recognized them right away (one of them was only a few blocks from his own house for Christ’s sake, master crimininal Wright was not) and fired the young architect. It’s a fun story, and it was a perfect day to get in a little extra walking and sightseeing.
Last but not least of the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the neighborhood was Unity Temple, one of the young architect’s earliest works to receive major recognition. It’s considered one of the earliest modern buildings to align its aesthetics and its structure by highlighting its use of only one building material, in this case, concrete. What is now considered a masterstroke by Wright, and probably is something he would have tried to do anyways, was primarily born from budgetary restraints as there was only a very modest budget from the house of worship. Luckily, inn the architect’s own words “Concrete is cheap”. Cheap and not famously pretty as the material is, clever geometric design and really gorgeous relief work help make the building feel very welcoming and almost vibrant as opposed to the brutalist, prison-esque type of construction you tend to associate with all concrete buildings, so the building still continues to impress over a century later.
One of the few non-concrete flourishes, which I found simple but effective, was a message in gold lettering above the doors that said “For the Worship of God and the Service of Man”. Nice and to the point, and you see how FLW even has an eye for geometry in his lettering choice which gives the whole structure a pleasing unity, no pun intended.
I don’t think the church was open while I was there which is a shame because a quick google search reveals that the insides are also appropriately stunning:
After all that sight seeing, I was getting a just a bit famished so I set out to find some lunch. I settled on a fun and funky Korean-Mexican restaurant called Del Seoul, where I got some truly excellent tacos. I was very intrigued by the fusion, because, while Boston now has quite a lot of good Korean restaurants, I had not really stumbled across them yet in my youthful time there so I entered the restaurant with a buzz of excitement at trying something pretty new to me. I got two tacos, one grilled shrimp and one BBQ chicken, and they more than lived up to my excitement. The meats were grilled to perfection, and they were complemented with a delicious vegetable slaw and finished with a flavorful sesame-chili aioli that really took things to the next level.
It was a warm day, so for dessert, I made a pit stop at Amorino Gelato and Cafe for a tasty treat. Amorino’s a chain, which I generally tried to avoid on this trip, but once I saw the sign I just had such a hankering for gelato I had to go for it. I got a mix of chocolate hazelnut and Stracciatella (a traditional Italian riff on a classic chocolate chip), and it was just what needed.
After enjoying my gelato, I continued my sightseeing with possibly my favorite piece of public art in the country: Chicago’s very own Shit Fountain. This work of fine fecal art was sculpted by the artist Jerzy S. Kenar as a dedication to the neighborhood’s dogs and a whimsical reminder to their owners to clean up after them. Kenar is an internationally renowned sculptor, particularly known for religious woodwork that is prominently featured in some big-name chapels, so the fact that he just did this as a little joke for himself is pretty wonderful. Even better, the neighbors, rather than being offended by the 3-foot turd have rallied behind it, and the fountain has been a beloved bit of neighborhood flair since 2005.
The artist’s studio is right next door to the fountain and this stunning wooden angel in the window really proves the idea that people can contain multitudes:
After the Shit Fountain, I paid a visit to Chicago’s number one used bookstore: Myopic Books. Myopic is three stories and is filled to the brim with over 80,000 books, making it a true treasure trove for lovers of pre-owned literature. It’s the sort of place where I would have lost hours if I grew up in the city. They also host live music and poetry readings for more immersive artsy experiences. I picked up a book of photos and prints by the Spanish surrealist Man Ray, so even though the trip would have been worth it no matter what it also proved quite fruitful.
To hold me over until the night’s open mic, I stopped by the charmingly quirky Wormhole Coffee for a little evening pick me up. The coffee was great, and the decor was wonderfully wacky. They’re most famous for having a vintage Delorean on top of a display on the back wall, but as much as I love Back to The Future, Gremlins was always a little nearer and dearer to my heart.
The mic tonight was at a club called The Comedy Bar and it was nice to get to perform on a real stage, even if it just for an open mic. Best of all, the bar had food from Chicago pizza staples Gino’s East, and while I didn’t have room for a full deep dish (a rare thing for me) I could say know to these spectacular cheesy garlic breadsticks. If there’s one thing the midwest has completely on lock it’s comfort food, and these were really something.
I was extra grateful for the good food and good beer, because for whatever reason I just did not do very well at this mic. I don’t think I tried any jokes that hadn’t already worked well in the city, but maybe I got in my own head or maybe I really just did a bad job performance-wise or maybe things just didn’t click. It can be hard to get to the root of what didn’t work at just one performance, but I suspect it was on my delivery because even when the jokes work 90% of the time you can still easily tank them if you come in just a little off and I think that’s what happened for me.
Fortunately, the rest of the comics were solid and it was still a fun mic even if I didn’t do as well as I would have liked. My favorite comic of the night was a comic named Liz Greenwood who did a good mixture of longer conceptual bits and quick one-liners. Highlights for me included: “Socialism can work but it has to be a country full of drunk women. They will share anything you need in the bathroom” and “Riding a mechanical bull is like sex. I'm bad at it”
Other highlights:
Sonil- My mom said to me "I'm not being racist, I just think you're too dark"
Robel- I went to Mexico and they put words together that shouldn't go together like “spicy candy” or “Zip lining: no regulations”
Mike Enders- I've had my check engine light on since the Bush administration
Joe Horan- I've been trying to black out less, I have no idea how I'm doing
Charles- Someone on the train told me I have a baby face and I told him that's a real pedophile's perspective
Kate Wooters- I'm still trying to find my orientation because I don't know if portrait or landscape
My favorite part of the night though was after the mic was over a group of French tourists who were sitting in the front row just left the pizza they bought almost entirely untouched on the table (probably not enough fois gras for their sophisticated palettes) so all the comedians descended on the free pizza like the vultures we are. It was a nice little bonding experience at the end of the night.
Favorite Random Sightings: a sign that said City of Chicago: Do Not Feed the Rats; a hot dog place called Chubby Wieners; a salon called Mary Unisex (sounds like a bad secret identity); a brick and mortar store with the name “I love kickboxing.com” (insanity); a barber shop called Uncle Nephew’s Clip Joynt; a ramen joint called the Furious Spoon; and an overheard conversation where a person said to another person "I'm not the one freaking out, you're freaking out, pissing yourself on buses"
Regional Observation: Chicago has got to be the city where the most people honked at me for stopping at stop signs. They’re in a rush!
Random Joke of the Day:
Restaurant patron: “Waiter, I’d like a bottle of wine.”
Waiter: “What year, sir?”
Patron: “Well, I’d like it right now.”
Song of the Day:
A great Chicago artist performing for a (formerly) Chicago-based subsidiary of the Onion
A bonus video of me doing some stand-up about Ernest Hemmingway: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CoiSjrRtshL/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==