Related: The Memory Collector: Lost Chicago »
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Henrici’s
71 West Randolph Street
1914
Henrici’s, the German bakery/restaurant that opened in 1868 and found a permanent home at the location shown here 20 years later, is the Proustian touchstone for Lowe’s Chicago memories. “My grandmother used to give my father and uncle 50 cents and send them there to eat,” he says. “It was not overwhelmingly grand, but it was the place where you saw theatre people: George M. Cohan, Flo Ziegfeld, the Lunts [Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne].” When Randolph Street was one of the country’s greatest theatre destinations, he says, Henrici’s was “the Sardi’s of Chicago.” Making way for today’s Daley Center—“absolutely outrageous,” says Lowe—Henrici’s closed in August 1962; in its last three days, it served 22,000 nostalgic patrons, many of them, along with the waitstaff, clad in 1890s clothing.
Photograph: Courtesy of Chicago Historical Society -
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David Lowe as an infant at Washington Park Race Track in the 1930s
Photograph: Courtesy of David Lowe -
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David Lowe several decades later on the steps of the Frank F. Fisher Apartments on North State Parkway
Photograph: Courtesy of David Lowe -
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The 2004 post card from Kurt Vonnegut
Photograph: Courtesy of David Lowe -
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Edward Morris House
4800 South Drexel Boulevard
circa 1905
Ask Lowe why he continued to produce new versions of Lost Chicago and he replies, “Things kept disappearing.” What’s more, once readers saw his ongoing collection of vanished buildings, they began providing him with images that might otherwise have never surfaced. A perfect example is this photo of a manorial Hyde Park house, provided to Lowe by his distant cousin, the Chicago banker Edward Morris Bakwin. Built in 1910 from a design by Howard Van Doren Shaw, the house was home to Edward Morris, the son of Nelson Morris, who founded one of the first meatpacking companies at Chicago’s Union Stock Yards; Edward’s wife, Helen, was the daughter of the meatpacker Gustavus Swift, and their younger daughter, Muriel—the smaller of the two girls in this photo—was the likely model for Julia, the Fascist-fighting psychiatrist in Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, which inspired the 1977 movie Julia, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. The Morrises’ older daughter, Ruth, became a prominent pediatrician.
Photograph: Private collection -
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North Lake Shore Drive
1941
Shot from the Palmolive Building by the German American photographer Andreas Feininger, this picture reveals not only a glimpse of another time but an insight into Lowe’s methods. After the first edition of Lost Chicago appeared, Lowe visited the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. “Phyllis Lambert [the architect and Seagram’s heir] kept buying photo archives, and they’d go up there. I’d go into the center and work all day, and I ended up identifying all their Chicago photos. Phyllis would ask me, ‘What is this?’ and I’d tell her. This picture was slated to appear in Life in December 1941, but then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and it was pulled. It had never been used.” Visible in the picture’s lower left (a), at the southwest corner of Bellevue Place and the Inner Drive, is the mansion of Edith Rockefeller McCormick, once the epicenter of Chicago society. Designed by Solon S. Beman, the principal architect of the Pullman community, the house was demolished in 1955.
Photograph: Andreas Feininger/Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal -
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Intersection of Clark and Madison Streets
1958
This picture, which captures the lively Loop of the Eisenhower era, reveals the old Blue Note jazz club; Sarah Vaughan began her career there, and its marquee announces that Duke Ellington and his band were appearing. The club closed two years later, and, for Lowe, the city’s heart was ripped out to make way for modernization. “Those blocks had everything a city needs: a detective agency, dance classes, the Stop & Shop [a grocery]. The density of downtown Chicago, the vibrancy, was so wonderful. It was everything I knew in the world. Those blocks are all lost. It isn’t better we don’t have saloons.”
Photograph: J. Sherwin Murphy/Courtesy of Chicago Historical Society -
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Federal Building
Photograph: Courtesy of Chicago Historical Society -
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Federal Building rotunda
Photograph: Harold Allen -
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Diana Court
Photograph: Hedrich-Blessing/Courtesy of David Lowe