XIII
The Garden City
There was a time a city some three hundred thousand strong stood beside the shore of a great and very wonderful lake with a wonderful horizon and wonderful daily moods. Above the rim of its horizon rose sun and moon in their times, the one spreading o’er its surface a glory of rubies; its companion, at the full, an entrancing sheen of mottled silver. At other times far to the west in the afterglow of sunset the delicate bright crescent poised in farewell slowly dimmed and passed from sight. Around this city, in ever-extending areas, in fancied semicircles, lay a beauteous prairie, born companion of the lake; while within this prairie, at distances of some seven to twelve miles from the center of the Garden City, were dotted villages, forming also an open-spaced semicircle, for each village nestled in the spacious prairie, and within its own companionable tree growth. To the north and west of the city there grew in abundance lofty elms and oaks; to the south the section-line dirt roads were double rowed with huge willows all swayed toward the northeast as the summer winds year by year had set them when sap was flowing strong; while scattered through this tract were ancient cottonwoods rising singly or in groups, in their immense and venerable strength. Further to the south, where the soil becomes sandy, there appeared fantastic dwarf pines and scrub oaks, while at the Lake Shore, neighboring them, stretched a mile or more of heavy oak groves that might be called a forest. Within it were winding trails; within it one seemed lost to the world.
The city itself was more than a large village—it was a village grown robust with an impelling purpose. In and near its central business district, residences held their own, and churches sent up their spires on Court House Square. There were few tramways. Horse-and-buggy was the unit; and on the Grand Boulevard fine victorias, blooded high-steppers noisily caparisoned in shining brass, liveried driver and footman, were daily on view to the populace—wealth was growing breathlessly. The business section passed insensibly into the residential, then began tree growth and gardens—the city bloomed in its season. In winter was the old time animation which came with heavy, lasting snows, with cutters, jangling bells, and horses of all shades and grades, and the added confusion of racing; for everybody who was anybody owned at least one horse.
And then again came equinoctial spring; crocuses appeared; trees, each after its kind, put forth furtive leaves; for “April Showers” all too often were but chilling northeast rains. Indeed there was no Spring—rather a wave-motion of subsiding winter and protesting summer. But in June the Garden City had come again into its own. From a distance one saw many a steeple, rising from the green, as landmarks, and in the distances the gray bulk of grain elevators.
The Garden City was triparted by a river with two branches; thus it had its three back yards of urgent commerce, where no gardens grew; and as well, its three shantytowns.
On occasion, when a spell of hard weather had held the lumber fleet in port, one on watch might see the schooners pour in a stream from the river mouth, spread their wings, and in a great and beautiful flock, gleam in the sunlight as they moved with favoring wind, fan-like towards Muskegon and the northern ports.
The summer was dry. During September the land winds blew hot and steadily.
The legend has it that a small flame, in a shanty town, destroyed the Garden City in two awful nights and days. The high winds did their carrier’s work. The Garden City vanished. With it vanished the living story, it had told in pride, of how it came to be. Another story now began—the story of a proud people and their power to create—a people whose motto was “I will”—whose dream was commercial empire. They undertook to do what they willed and what they dreamed. In the midst of the epic of their striving, they were benumbed by the blow of a great financial panic, and when Louis returned from Paris the effect of this blow had not wholly passed—though the time was nearing. The building industry was flat. Finding thus no immediate use for his newfangled imported education, and irking at the prospect of idleness, he bethought him to see what others might be doing in their lines, and at the same time get the lay of the land, something he had not found time to do during his first visit. Daily he made his twenty miles or more in the course of a systematic reconnaisance on foot. When this adventure had come to its end, he knew every nook and corner of the city and its environs, and had discovered undisturbed all that had formed the prairie setting of the living Garden City, and all that had remained undestroyed.
Curiosity seemed to be Louis’s ruling passion; always he was seeking, finding something new, always looking for surprise sensations, always welcoming that which was fresh and gave joy to the sight. He had a skill in deriving joyful thoughts from close observation of what is often called the Commonplace. To him there was nothing commonplace—everything had something to say. Everything suggested it be listened to and interpreted. He had followed the branches of the Chicago River, had located the lovely forest-bordered River Des Plaines, and the old-time historic portage. Had read Parkman’s vivid narrative of La Salle and the great Northwest, and his wonder stories of Marquette and Joliet, and he shared in mind the hardships of these great pioneers. Thus he came to know the why and wherefore of the City; and again he said: “This is the Place for me! This remnant scene of ruin is a prophecy!”
In a while the pulse of industry began the slow feeble beat of revival, and the interrupted story of imagination and will, again renewed its deep refrain in arousing energy. The Garden City had vanished with its living story. That tale could not be twice told; that presence could not be recalled. It had gone forever with the flames. Hence a new story must be told. Naught else than a new story could be told. Not again would the city be the same. It could not be the same—men could not now be what they were. It was the approach of this new story that excited Louis; he would bide his time. He worked briefly now, at intervals, in the office of this or that architect, until he had nearly covered the field. These men were mostly of the elder generation, whose venerable clients clung to them for Auld Lang Syne. They were men of homely makeup, homely ways. Louis found them very human, and enjoyed their shop-talk, which was that of the graduate carpenter. He did not demur because they were not diplômés of the Beaux Arts. He preferred them as they were; much of their curious wisdom stuck to him. They were men of their lingering day. To them Louis was a marvel of speed. Indeed one of the younger of them, who laughed like a goat, remarked to his partner: “That Irish-man has ideas!”
He was a caustic joker and a man of brains, this same Frederick Baumann. Educated in Germany to the point of cynicism, he was master of one idea, which he embodied in a pamphlet entitled “A Theory of Isolated Pier Foundations,” published in 1873. The logic of this essay was so coherent, its common sense so sound, that its simple idea has served as the basis of standard practice continuously since its day. All honor therefore to Frederick Baumann, man of brains, exploiter of a new idea, which he made up out of his head. His vigorous years reached on to ninety-five, and as each one of them passed him by in defile, the world and its people seemed to his sharp, mirthful eye, to grow more and more ridiculous—a conviction that gave him much comfort as his vertebrae began to curve. Louis met him frequently of evenings, at the gymnasium, and liked to talk to him to get his point of view, which he found to be not bitter, but Mephistophelian. He was most illuminating, bare of delusion, and as time went on Louis came to regard him as a goat-laughing teller of truths out of school—but he, Louis, did not forget.
Reliable text books were few in those days. Due to this fact Louis made Trautwine’s Engineers’ Pocket Book his Bible, and spent long hours with it. The engineering journals kept close track of actual current doings, and thus Louis found himself drifting towards the engineering point of view, or state of mind, as he began to discern that the engineers were the only men who could face a problem squarely; who knew a problem when they saw it. Their minds were trained to deal with real things, as far as they knew them, as far as they could ascertain them, while the architectural mind lacked this directness, this simplicity, this singleness of purpose—it had no standard of reference, no benchmark one might say. For he discerned that in truth the science of engineering is a science of reaction, while the science of architectural design—were such a science to be presupposed—must be a science of action. Thus Louis arranged in his mind the reciprocal values of the primary engineering and the primary architectural thought, and noted the curious antagonism existing between those who professed them. The trouble as he saw it was this: That the architect could not or would not understand the real working of the engineering mind because it was hidden in deadly literal attitude and results, because of the horrors it had brought forth as misbegotten stigmata; while the engineer regarded the architect as a frivolous person of small rule-of-thumb consequence. And both were largely right; both professions contained small and large minds—mostly small or medium. Nevertheless they were all human beings, and therefore all ridiculous in the Mephistophelian sense of Frederick Baumann.
About this time two great engineering works were under way. One, the triple arch bridge to cross the Mississippi at St. Louis, Capt. Eades, chief engineer; the other, the great cantilever bridge which was to cross the Chasm of the Kentucky River, C. Shaler Smith, chief engineer, destined for the use of the Cincinnati Southern Railroad. In these two growing structures Louis’s soul became immersed. In them he lived. Were they not his bridges? Surely they were his bridges. In the pages of the Railway Gazette he saw them born, he watched them grow. Week by week he grew with them. Here was Romance, here again was man, the great adventurer, daring to think, daring to have faith, daring to do. Here again was to be set forth to view man in his power to create beneficently. Here were two ideas widely differing in kind. Each was emerging from a brain, each was to find realization. One bridge was to cross a great river, to form the portal of a great city, to be sensational and architectonic. The other was to take form in the wilderness, and abide there; a work of science without concession. Louis followed every detail of design, every measurement; every operation as the two works progressed from the sinking of the caissons in the bed of the Mississippi, and the start in the wild of the initial cantilevers from the face of the cliff. He followed each, with the intensity of personal identification, to the finale of each. Every difficulty encountered he felt to be his own; every expedient, every device, he shared in. The chief engineers became his heroes; they loomed above other men. The positive quality of their minds agreed with the aggressive quality of his own. In childhood his idols had been the big strong men who did things. Later on he had begun to feel the greater power of men who could think things; later the expansive power of men who could imagine things; and at last he began to recognize as dominant, the will of the Creative Dreamer: he who possessed the power of vision needed to harness Imagination, to harness the intellect, to make science do his will, to make the emotions serve him—for without emotion nothing.
This steadfast belief in the power of man was an unalloyed childhood instinct, an intuition and a childhood faith which never for a day forsook him, but grew stronger, like an indwelling daemon. As day by day passed on, he saw power grow before his eyes, as each unsuspected and new world arose and opened to his wonder eyes; he saw power intensify and expand; and ever grew his wonder at what men could do. He came in a manner to worship man as a being, a presence containing wondrous powers, mysterious hidden powers, powers so varied as to surprise and bewilder him. So that Man, the mysterious, became for him a sort of symbol of that which was deepest, most active in his heart. As months passed and the years went by, as world after world unfolded before him and merged within the larger world, and veil after veil lifted, and illusion after illusion vanished, and the light grew ever steadier, Louis saw power everywhere; and as he grew on through his boyhood, and through the passage to manhood, and to manhood itself, he began to see the powers of nature and the powers of man coalesce in his vision into an idea of power. Then and only then he became aware that this idea was a new idea—a complete reversal and inversion of the commonly accepted intellectual and theological concept of the Nature of man.
That idea which had its mystical beginning in so small a thing as a child’s heart, grew and nurtured itself upon that child’s varied consistently continuing and metamorphosing experiences in time and place, as has been most solicitously laid bare to view in detail, in the course of this recital. For it needs a long long time, and a rich soil of life-experience, to enable a simple, single idea to grow to maturity and solid strength. A French proverb has it that “Time will not consecrate that in which it has been ignored,” while the deep insight of Whitman is set forth in the line, “Nature neither hastens nor delays.”
Louis’s interest in engineering as such, and in the two bridges in particular, so captivated his imagination, that he briefly dreamed to be a great bridge engineer. The idea of spanning a void appealed to him as masterful in thought and deed. For he had begun to discern that among men of the past and of his day, there were those who were masters of ideas, and of courage, and that they stood forth solitary, each in a world of his own. But the practical effect of the bridges was to turn Louis’s mind from the immediate science of engineering toward science in general, and he set forth, with a new relish, upon a course of reading covering Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and the Germans, and found a new, an enormous world opening before him, a world whose boundaries seemed destined to be limitless in scope, in content, in diversity. This course of reading was not completed in a month, or a year, or in many years; it still remains on the move.
What Louis noted as uppermost in the scientific mind, was its honest search for stability in truth. Hitherto he had regarded his mathematics as an art; he had not followed far enough to see it as a science. Indeed he had hitherto regarded every constructive human effort as an art, and to this view he had been held through the consistent unfolding of the Idea. Inevitably this view was to return in time; through the channels of science itself. For that which at once impressed Louis as new to him and vital, was what was known as “The Scientific Method.” He saw in it a power of solution he long had fruitlessly been seeking. His key to an outlook took shape in the scientific method of approach to that which lay behind appearances; a relentless method whereby to arrive at the truth by tireless pursuit. He now had in his hands the instrument he wanted. He must learn to use it with a craftsman’s skill. For the scientific method was based on exact observation from which, by the inductive system of reasoning, an inference was drawn, an hypothesis framed, to be held tentatively in “suspended judgment” until the gathering of further data might raise it to the dignity of a theory, which theory, if it could stand up under further rigorous testing, would slowly pass into that domain of ordered and accepted knowledge we fondly believe to be Truth. Yet science, he foresaw, could not go either fast or far were it not for Imagination’s glowing light and warmth. By nature it is rigid and prosaic—and Louis early noted that the free spirits within its field were men of vision—masters of imagination, men of courage, great adventurers—men of one big, dominant idea.
In the course of Louis’s daily working life, conditions were steadily improving. His engagements in offices grew longer, he began to prosper. The quality of work was improving. He had passed the day of his majority, and was now looking out for himself. His success in this regard made him proud. He was a man now, and he knew it. He knew he was equipped to hold his own in the world. He had made a reputation as a worker, and consorted now with a small aristocratic group of the highest paid draftsmen. They met at lunch in a certain favored restaurant. They talked shop; but Louis kept his major thoughts to himself. His plan was, in due time to select a middle-aged architect of standing and established practice, with the right sort of clientele; to enter such an office, and through his speed, alertness and quick ambitious wit, make himself so indispensable that partnership would naturally follow. But this was merely a broad plan. He had no direct selection in mind, but was looking the field over from the corner of his eye. He was in no hurry. He believed in the motto: “Be bold but prudent.” He wished events to shape themselves.
Now John Edelmann returned. During the dull spell he had been away in Iowa trying to play the game of farming. The game played him instead. He showed up at lunch one winter day, clad à l’outrance as a farmer, for his usual theatrical effect. Instantly the room was filled with sound as he lustily proclaimed the joys of farming in Iowa, twenty miles from nowhere.
He entered the architectural office of a firm named Burling & Adler. The single, very large square office room he flooded with language; he literally “ate up” the work, as he spouted. Naturally he joined the aristocratic lunch-club, and made things lively. As usual he monopolized the conversation, unless rudely interrupted. One need not surmise to whom the sound of his voice was music from the spheres. He cut loose on his latest fad—single tax—and lauded Henry George in superlatives. He drew the long bow, he colored all things rosy, told Irish stories well in the broad brogue, and on the whole was a nuisance—entertaining and agreeable.
One day, after lunch, John asked Louis to come over to the office to meet Adler, of whom he had spoken at times. Louis went along to please John. They entered the large bare room, drawing tables scattered about; in the center were two plain desks. Those who had business came and went unceremoniously. Both partners were present and busy. Louis thus had time to size them up. Burling was slouched in a swivel chair, his long legs covering the desk top; he wiggled a chewed cigar as he talked to a caller, and spat into a square box. He was an incredible, long and bulky nosed Yankee, perceptibly ageing fast, and of manifestly weakening will—one of the passing generation who had done a huge business after the fire but whom the panic had hit hard.
Further away stood Adler at a draftsman’s table, full front view, well lighted. He was a heavyset short-nosed Jew, well bearded, with a magnificent domed forehead which stopped suddenly at a solid mass of black hair. He was a picture of sturdy strength, physical and mental.
Louis was presented first to Burling who reached out a hand and said “Howdy,” in the distrait manner age so frequently bears toward strangely sprouting incomprehensible youth, separated by the gulf of years. Next, John led Louis to Adler whose broad serious face, and kindly brown efficient eyes, joined in a rich smile of open welcome. It did not take many ticks of the clock to note that Adler’s brain was intensely active and ambitious, his mind open, broad, receptive, and of an unusually high order. He was twelve years Louis’s senior, and in the pink of condition. Louis was of the exuberant age. Adler thought highly of John. The talk was brief and lively; Adler said nice things, questioned Louis as to his stay at the Beaux Arts. The little talk ended, Louis left; John remained in his preserve. This was the last that Louis saw of Adler for many moons. He was pleased to have met him and to have reason heartily to respect his vigorous personality. But he was no part of Louis’s program, hence he soon faded from view, and became almost completely forgotten. Louis was satisfied with things as they were going. He was ambitious but cautious; he was waiting for the right man to show up. He did not remain too long in any one place, and each time increased his salary.
Meanwhile his days were for work; his nights for study, for reflection, and gradual formulation of ideas subsidiary to the main Idea he was consciously now working out alone. This form of solitude did not disturb him. He saw that a “Clopet demonstration” meant a matter of years of work and growth. He was disturbed, however, by the elusive quality of the main thought he was pursuing, which seemed to recede and grow larger even as he grew abler to deal with it.
On a recent Christmas his father had given him a copy of John Draper’s work on The Intellectual Development of Europe, in two volumes; still a notable work of the day. This he read and reread with absorbing interest, passing over its controversial trend, for the “war between science and religion” as it was called, was still raging. The broad division of the work into an “Age of faith,” and an “Age of reason” held his interest, as he saw set forth the emergence and the growth of science as the spirit of man sought and found freedom in the open. This coincided with his own belief, that man’s spirit must be free that his powers may be free to accomplish in beneficence. He had discovered, to his annoyance, that in the architectural art of his day, the spirit of man was not free, nor were his powers so liberated and so trained that he might create in beneficence. Not only this, but that for centuries it had been the case that art had been belittled in superstitions called traditions—and lived on by virtue of a thin and baseless faith—and John Edelmann’s theory of suppressed functions, recurred to him as broadly set forth, in confirmation, in Draper’s heavy work. Further than this, Louis felt as a result of reading Draper, that his thoughts concerning architecture must broaden into a perfected sympathy with mankind. That Man, past and present, must and would become more and more significant, would be found to have filled a greater role than any art, than any science. That man, perhaps and probably was the only real background that gave distinction to works appearing in the foreground as separated things—or perhaps was it the invisible spirit of mankind that pervaded all things, all works, all civilizations, and informed them with the sense of actuality? That his, Louis’s true work, was now and henceforth to lie in the study of what man now thought, and had thought through the centuries. Thus the task for him grew larger, and the time required, longer—for he was still in the plastic formative groping stage.
In Darwin he found much food. The Theory of Evolution seemed stupendous. Spencer’s definition implying a progression from an unorganized simple, through stages of growth and differentiation to a highly organized complex, seemed to fit his own case, for he had begun with a simple unorganized idea of beneficent power, and was beginning to see the enormous complexity growing out of it, and enriching its meaning while insistently demanding room and nurture for further grown, until it should reach that stage of clarity through the depths of which the original idea might again be clearly seen, and its primal power more fully understood. Thus, Louis, while still in a haze, felt the courage to go on. He had been reading the works of men of matured and powerful thought, way beyond his years; but what he could grasp he hung on to. He felt the enthusiasm of one who is on the way, and who senses that his goal is real.
One day John Edelmann, who meanwhile had entered into partnership with a man named Johnson, who did school work, sent for Louis to come over that evening—said he had something to say. And this was his story: That Adler had cut loose from Burling, set up independently, and, in collaboration with George A. Carpenter, a resourceful promoter, had put through the New Central Music Hall, now nearing completion, and had other work on hand. The time was early in 1879. John urged that this was Louis’s opportunity. That Adler had all the strong points, but was feeble in design and knew it. That he had talked the matter over several times with Adler, that Adler was cautiously and eagerly interested, but timid in making advances.
Louis saw the point at once. So they made a second call on Adler. There ensued a mutual sizing up at close range, very friendly indeed. And it was then and there agreed that Louis was to take charge of Adler’s office, was to have a free hand, and, if all went well for a period, and they should get along together, there was something tangible in the background. Louis took hold and made things hum. Soon there came into the office three large orders; a six-story high grade office building—the Borden Block; an up-to-date theatre, and a large substantial residence. Louis put through this work with the efficiency of combined Moses Woolson and Beaux Arts training. It was his first fine opportunity. He used it. He found in Adler a most congenial co-worker, open-minded, generous-minded, quick to perceive, thoroughgoing, warm in his enthusiasms, opening to Louis every opportunity to go ahead on his own responsibility, posting him on matters of building technique of which he had a complete grasp, and all in all treating Louis as a prize pet—a treasure trove. Thus they became warm friends. Adler’s witticisms were elephantine. He said one day to Louis:
“How would you like to take me into partnership?”
Louis laughed.
“All right,” said Adler, “draw up a contract for five years, beginning first of May. First year you one third, after that, even.”
Louis drew up a brief memorandum on a sheet of office stationery, which Adler read over once and signed.
On the first day of May, 1880, D. Adler & Co. moved into a fine suite of offices on the top floor of the Borden Block aforesaid. On the first day of May, 1881, the firm of Adler & Sullivan, Architects, had its name on the entrance door. All of which signifies, after long years of ambitious dreaming and unremitting work, that at the age of twenty-five, Louis H. Sullivan became a full-fledged architect before the world, with a reputation starting on its way, and in partnership with a man he had least expected as such; a man whose reputation was solidly secured in utter honesty, fine intelligence and a fund of that sort of wisdom which attracts and holds. Between the two there existed a fine confidence and the handling of the work was divided and adjusted on a temperamental basis—each to have initiative and final authority in his own field, without a sharp arbitrary line being drawn that might lead to dissension. What was particularly fine, as we consider human nature, was Adler’s open frank way of pushing his young partner to the front.
Now Louis felt he had arrived at a point where he had a foothold, where he could make a beginning in the open world. Having come into its responsibilities, he would face it boldly. He could now, undisturbed, start on the course of practical experimentation he long had in mind, which was to make an architecture that fitted its functions—a realistic architecture based on well defined utilitarian needs—that all practical demands of utility should be paramount as basis of planning and design; that no architectural dictum, or tradition, or superstition, or habit, should stand in the way. He would brush them all aside, regardless of commentators. For his view, his conviction was this: That the architectural art to be of contemporary immediate value must be plastic; all senseless conventional rigidity must be taken out of it; it must intelligently serve—it must not suppress. In this wise the forms under his hand would grow naturally out of the needs and express them frankly, and freshly. This meant in his courageous mind that he would put to the test a formula he had evolved, through long contemplation of living things, namely that form follows function, which would mean, in practice, that architecture might again become a living art, if this formula were but adhered to.
The building business was again under full swing, and a series of important mercantile structures came into the office, each one of which he treated experimentally, feeling his way toward a basic process, a grammar of his own. The immediate problem was increased daylight, the maximum of daylight. This led him to use slender piers, tending toward a masonry and iron combination, the beginnings of a vertical system. This method upset all precedent, and led Louis’s contemporaries to regard him as an iconoclast, a revolutionary, which was true enough—yet into the work was slowly infiltrated a corresponding system of artistic expression, which appeared in these structures as novel and to some repellent, in its total disregard of accepted notions. But to all objections Louis turned a deaf ear. If a thousand proclaimed him wrong, the thousand could not change his course. As buildings varying in character came under his hand, he extended to them his system of form and function, and as he did so his conviction increased that architectural manipulation, as a homely art or a fine art must be rendered completely plastic to the mind and the hand of the designer; that materials and forms must yield to the mastery of his imagination and his will; through this alone could modern conditions be met and faithfully expressed. This meant the casting aside of all pedantry, of all the artificial teachings of the schools, of the thoughtless acceptance of inane traditions, of puerile habits of uninquiring minds; that all this mess, devoid of a center of gravity of thought, and vacant of sympathy and understanding, must be superseded by a sane philosophy of a living architecture, good for all time, founded on the only possible foundation—Man and his powers. Such philosophy Louis had already developed in broad outline in the course of his many dissatisfactions and contemplations. He wished now to test it out in the broad daylight of action, and to perfect its form and content. This philosophy developed will be set forth in these closing chapters.
It is not to be supposed that Louis arrived directly at results as though by magic. Quite the contrary, he arrived slowly though boldly through the years, by means of incessant thought, self correction, hard work and dogged perseverance. For it was his fascinating task to build up a system of technique, a mastery of technique. And such a system could scarcely be expected to reach its fullness of development, short of maturity, assuming it would reach its fullness then, or could ever reach it; for the world of expression is limitless; the theory so deep in idea, so rich in content, as to preclude any ending of its beneficent, all-inclusive power. And we may here recall Monsieur Clopet, the book of descriptive geometry that went into the waste basket, and the thunderclap admonition: “Our demonstrations shall be such as to admit of no exception.”