1. The Neighborhood
Architect’s rendering of the view from an apartment at 320 West Oakdale
320 West Oakdale Avenue was the most spectacular example in a group of buildings that redefined the character of the part of the East Lakeview neighborhood of the city then known as Meekerville, a small area bounded by Oakdale Avenue on the south, Sheridan Road on the west and the lake on the east. Benefiting from a splendid location along the lakefront just north of Lincoln Park, Meekerville had been laid out by Chicago industrialist Arthur Meeker in 1912 and developed in the following years as a mansion district housing well-known Chicago families like the Meekers, Hechts and Armours. In the 1950s no part of the city was more vibrant than Meekerville where a change in zoning in 1948 from single-family to one that allowed apartments led to a surge of construction consisting almost entirely of glassy modern apartment buildings. The most conspicuous of these was 320 West Oakdale Avenue. Dramatically located at the head of Commonwealth Street, the concrete and glass design made it one of the most striking apartment buildings of its era. Together, the remaining mansions from the 1920s and the tall steel-and-glass apartment buildings from the 1950s create one of Chicago’s most interesting and attractive cityscapes.
2. The Architect
Architect’s perspective of the Sanjil Apartments, Evanston
Milton M. Schwartz (1925-2007) was one of Chicago’s most important designers of the postwar decades and a major presence in Chicago during the heyday of American mid-century modernism. His buildings combine new artistic currents from Europe, especially an interest in sleek, minimal Modernist forms, with an American stylistic exuberance and interest in new technologies.
Although his work in the past tended to get less attention than that of some of his contemporaries like Mies van der Rohe, it is now increasingly recognized as some of the most interesting and important of that era.
Milton lived in a penthouse unit at 320 W. Oakdale from its opening until his death in 2007. His widow, Audrey, continued to live in the unit for several years afterward. She donated materials from his career to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Milton M. Schwartz was born in 1925. He attended the University of Illinois starting in 1947 and went into private practice in 1951. This was a decisive moment in architectural history. The United States had emerged from World War II as the undisputed leader of the western world in economic and military power. It was also in the process of challenging Europe’s centuries-long leadership in the fine arts. In painting, sculpture and architecture many of the leaders of the European avant-garde of the 1920s had dispersed in the 1930s as a result of turmoil and war in Europe. Many of them finally settled in the United States where they had a major impact on the arts scene. By the early 1950s American artists like Jackson Pollack, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning were widely considered the most creative in the world. The same was true in architecture where Americans like Pietro Belluschi, Eero Saarinen, and Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill developed a body of work that drew from European Modernist tradition but added a particularly American flair. This work was studied and emulated world-wide. Although not as well known as these architects, Milton M. Schwartz had a practice that was very much along similar lines, and his best work can be compared with these giants of postwar design.
320 West Oakdale Avenue, commissioned in 1952, was Schwartz’s first major design and established his reputation as one of the city’s most accomplished designers of modern residential buildings. He went on to do a number of other important residential projects among them the
Sanjil Apartments in Evanston, 1955
An apartment house at 77 E. Wacker Drive (later Executive House Hotel) 1959
The Chicago Airways Hotel at 5433 S. Cicero Ave.,1957 (demolished)
The Constellation Apartment Building at 1555 N. Dearborn Parkway, 1958
5601 N. Sheridan Road, 1961
The Rittenhouse Dorchester Apartments in Philadelphia in 1963.
Architect’s rendering of Chicago Airways Hotel
Nationally his most famous work was at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas. Schwartz first renovated the low motel structure on the site creating in the process two nationally famous restaurants, the Sultan’s Table and the Dome of the Sea. The 22-story Diamond of the Dunes Tower was completed in 1961. When it was demolished in 1993 to make way for the construction of the Bellagio, it was reputedly the world’s tallest reinforced concrete building to be demolished.
Schwartz also designed a number of other projects including the Peoria Sands Motel, at 220 NE Adams Street, Peoria (demolished) the Village Nursing Home, 9000 Lavergne Ave., Skokie Now the Grove, The Timberlake Development at Golf Road and Lewis Avenue in Waukegan.
Schwartz was clearly influenced by the great masters of European architecture, notably Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Mies had come to Chicago to teach at IIT in the 1930s and was responsible for the first starkly modernist apartment buildings in the city at 860-880 Lake Shore Drive in 1948. Mies was also responsible for the Commonwealth Promenade Apartments just south of the 320 West Oakdale Avenue building on Diversey and built at about the same time. But Schwartz was not content with the elegant but sometimes austere geometries of Mies. Like many American architects of the era, notably Morris Lapidus, architect of the Fontainbleau and Eden Roc in Miami Beach, Edward Durrell Stone with his American embassy in New Delhi or Huntington Hartford Museum in New York, or Minoru Yamasaki with the St. Louis Airport or the World Trade Center in New York, he wanted something more expressive. His first comprehensive attempt at an answer was the 320 West Oakdale building.
3. The Building
Architect’s rendering of the entry lobby of 320 West Oakdale
320 West Oakdale Avenue is arguably the most important work of Schwartz and certainly one of the most striking residential buildings in the Chicago area in the 1950s. Plans for the 21-story 50-unit building were announced in December 1952. It was one of the first postwar coop apartment buildings and the first with all glass walls and central air conditioning. A unique feature was the way the concrete slabs of the building were designed to extend three feet beyond the glass wall to provide shading from the sun and give residents a more secure feeling than in buildings with floor-to-ceiling glass. The building was expected to cost $1 million and the five- and six-room apartments to cost between $31,000 and $38,000. The contractor was Milton & Co., a firm owned by the architect. Contractors were the Dovenmuehle Company.
With its completely glass walls and cantilevered floors, the 320 Oakdale Building attracted a great deal of attention as it went up. The Chicago Tribune reported on its progress and noted the striking pattern of lights and darks that the building created on the skyline. Here was a building that was as forthrightly modern as any European structure but with some of the visual punch of the new American automobiles rolling off the assembly line in Detroit. This theme continued on the inside with spectacular mirrored walls, all-electric kitchens with metal and frosted glass cabinets by Kelvinator and Formica counter tops, bathrooms with pink fixtures, Lady Hamilton wall-to-wall mirrors and black Vitrolite walls. The building has been noted in numerous publications including the AIA Guide to Chicago Buildings and Chicago Architecture 1923-1993. Drawings for the building were exhibited in an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and are currently housed in the Department of Architecture at the Museum.
The 320 West Oakdale Avenue Building defines the optimistic American 1950s in the same way as the stylish automobiles designed by Harley Earl in Detroit, the furniture designed by Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson or the clothing of Ceil Chapman or Norman Norell. This was an optimistic, democratic design tradition, one that aimed to bring luxury to the masses. 320 West Oakdale Avenue is an authentic historic artifact from a period that can lay claim to one of the most extraordinary bursts of creativity energy the world has seen.
320 Oakdale was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. It was one of only ten high-rise apartment buildings on the register and only the third constructed since World War II. The other two were the Promontory Point and 860-880 Lake Shore Drive apartments designed by Mies van der Rohe.