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Chicago lost another Louis Sullivan building yesterday. The Wirt Dexter Building at 630 S Wabash stood for the last 119 years. The building designed by the team of Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler was completed in 1887, and was a precursor engineering wise to the Auditorium Building completed in 1890. The Dexter was an important link in the chain of buildings that Sullivan designed.
The building has long been on my mental list of subjects for a post. I had intended dozens of times to go down there and spend some time snapping away. Especially of the rear elevation where Sullivan used unique vertical cast iron supports with circles cut out of them. Well, too late… I did take some shots of the former George Diamond Steakhouse this past June, but I wasn’t happy enough with them, and never did a post on them.
Well, this is all that I have, so I am doing a post anyway. I know little about the building outside of the basic statistics, but I do know that the George Diamond Steakhouse was a big part of Chicago nightlife in the 1950s and into the 1960s. I also know that there were ownership issues that began in 1999 between the owner Lorraine Phillips and a group of investors. I found court documents from earlier this year on the web.
The restaurant closed in the fall of 2001, it had fallen on hard times in this final years, reports of 40 year old thread bare red carpet and a single waitress, for a dining room that sat 600, and that they were only selling a few steaks a week sum up its final years. There was a brief attempt to re-open in 2003, but it didn’t last long.
The entrance has grown tired as well, the original marquee sign taken down years ago. I thought it interesting that the sign was still lit this past June. Who was paying the electric bill?
Taped to the inside of the window is a postcard from the heydays of the restaurant. There were locations in Milwaukee, Acapulco and Palm Springs. You can also see what the marquee looked like in the upper left image. I found another postcard here.
There are several shots from the fire on Flickr. Including a couple of good shots of the rear elevation taken by ChicagoSage. You never realize how much you miss something until it is gone.