The Disposable Sullivans

After the great Chicago fire--100 years ago last month--the city rebuilt itself in an original and handsome style that became one of its proud distinctions. Chicago may have been Sandburg's "Hog Butcher," but there was also the Chicago school of architecture. None of the city's architects surpassed Louis Sullivan, whose buildings combined elegant ornament with a functional austerity that was to influence the imaginations of great 20th century builders like Frank Lloyd Wright.

There is a certain civic perversity in the fact that Chicago is in the process of destroying Sullivan's works. Of the 92 Sullivan buildings once standing there, 66 have been demolished, mostly by developers who wanted to replace them with more profitable office buildings or parking garages. Some important Sullivan structures remain--the Carson Pirie Scott department store, for example. But wreckers are now at work on the last Sullivan office building in the Loop, the 13-story Old Stock Exchange, a landmark completed in 1894. Said a special mayor's committee: "It was economically and structurally unfeasible to continue to use the building." Mayor Richard Daley added that more than 20 developers had been contacted and none were willing to take over the landmark in its present form. It would have cost $12 million to acquire the building and another $4 million to renovate it.

The practical necessities of change v. impractical, even sentimental preservation is ever a difficult question. But at some point Chicago, like the rest of the nation, is going to have to decide that its vintage artifacts of genius are not disposable like emptied cans or old tires.

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