Hooray for Benjamin Marshall
He was dashingly handsome and an A-list partier, hosting bold-face names such as the Duke of Windsor at his lakefront mansion in Wilmette.
He designed some of Chicago's best-known landmarks: the Drake and Blackstone hotels, five of the eight buildings on exclusive East Lake Shore Drive, the elegant residential high-rise at 1550 North State Parkway, and the South Shore Cultural Center, where Barack and Michelle Obama held their wedding reception.
Yet the Chicago architect who shaped those highly visible structures, while much admired by a small circle of architecture buffs, is little known to the public.
Perhaps the time finally has come for the rediscovery of Benjamin Marshall.
A group of enthusiasts who call themselves the Benjamin Marshall Society is seizing upon an obscure centennial to put the late architect back in the spotlight.
In 1911, Marshall, who doubled as a developer, began turning landfill east of Michigan Avenue into what is now East Lake Shore Drive. The street's imposing row of limestone, terra cotta and brick buildings, which rise like a cliff above Oak Street Beach, is one of the postcard images of Chicago. Among the street's former property owners: the late advice columnist Ann Landers and talk show queen Oprah Winfrey, who bought a 5,000-square-foot East Lake Shore Drive co-op in 2006, then sold it after realizing that her neighbors could look into her windows.
Marshall helped define Chicago, said the society's president, Jane Lepauw, of Northbrook. Lepauw is joining Jennifer McGregor, of Lake Forest, as co-chairwomen of the group's March 4 gala at the Drake. The society's aim: Raise enough money to mount a Chicago exhibit of Marshall's works and catalog his archives, which improbably reside at the University of Texas.
At first glance, Marshall seems an odd figure to celebrate. His high-living, Jay Gatsby ways are out of sync with the grim realities of today's economy. He was not an innovator, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. And he expressed nothing comparable to Daniel Burnham's grand metropolitan vision of teeming parks and iconic public works, though he may have been inspired by it.
Marshall matters for this simple reason: He was very, very good at what he did. And what he did was to shape stage sets for the wealthy and powerful, borrowing freely from the styles of the past — Renaissance, Gothic, Tudor, Second Empire, you name it — to give his clients the rush of visual pleasure. Ordinary people also could enjoy his buildings, though they could not afford to live in them. Contrast that with Chicago's recent spate of eyesore condo towers, and you have a distant figure who seems relevant.
Marshall "was the city's best at endowing hotels with an exotic and luxurious ambiance," the historian C.W. Westfall once wrote. His apartment buildings, with their suites of public rooms gazing out upon expanses of water and dramatic cityscapes, persuaded the rich to abandon mansions for "mansions in the sky." Along with developer Potter Palmer and his castle-like mansion, Marshall helped shift the center of gravity for Chicago's moneyed elite from the South Side's Prairie Avenue to the North Side's Gold Coast.
"Marshall does sort of set the standard," said the University of Chicago historian Neil Harris. "They were the best hotels, the best apartment houses."
Born in Chicago in 1874, Marshall lacked a formal architectural education but compensated with drive, imagination and social connections. He apprenticed for a Chicago architect, then set up his own shop after the century turned. One of his commissions, the Iroquois Theatre, was the site of a disastrous 1903 fire that caused the deaths of more than 600 people. Yet Marshall's star continued to ascend.
He partnered with Charles Fox — who had studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed theaters and other buildings across the nation — and shaped his suburban Shangri-La.
Built in 1921 — not as a home but as a place to entertain lavishly, according to a 1948 Life magazine article — Marshall's 32-room, pink stucco Wilmette mansion was outfitted with rooms for exotic partying, including a tropical garden and Egyptian solarium. He sold the place in 1936 to department store executive Nathan Goldblatt. The mansion was razed in 1950 after the Goldblatt family offered it to Wilmette and the village shortsightedly turned it down. All that remains are its iron gates.
Marshall lived at the Drake hotel until he died in 1944.
His flamboyant life and fabulous buildings surely could be the subject of a book. But Lepauw and her husband, Didier Lepauw, the founder of the Marshall society, aren't stopping there.
"It's a movie!" exclaimed Didier. In the next breath, he and his wife nominate the actor and architecture buff Brad Pitt to play Marshall.
Perhaps first things should come first, like fixing the city landmark plaque for the East Lake Shore Drive historic district. Situated across the street from the soaring apartment towers and the lordly Drake, it rests incongruously upon a base of cracked concrete. Surely East Lake Shore Drive and its foremost creator deserve a better tribute than that.
By Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune, January 16, 2011