Hunched like wizened, whimsical trolls in a land of giants, the last four residential mansions on North Lake Shore Drive are reminders of an era in which the Gold Coast signified stately homes instead of high-rises.
Built around the turn of the century, the structures standing together on the 1200 block of the inner Lake Shore Drive have somehow defied time and the profit motive, forces that have spelled doom for their elegant companions of yore.
Now, sales signs on the buildings at 1250, 1254 and 1260 N. Lake Shore Dr., all appearing within the last eight months, have prompted fears that these, too, will be razed to make room for soaring steel and concrete slabs.
The sellers of two of the three buildings being offered have said they don`t want to turn the buildings over to high-rise developers.
But zoning on all the lots on the row allows for high-rises, and some neighbors still are apprehensive. The mansions are on the federal Register of Historic Places, but do not have the kind of landmark designation that prevents their destruction.
Suzanne Reade, president of the North State, Astor and Lake Shore Drive Association, said her group, which has successfully fought new high-rise building in the past, has received several calls from area residents asking whether the mansions will be demolished.
”It is a concern,” she said, adding that the group might take the issue up at its November board meeting.
Meanwhile, the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois has been mounting an effort to save the structures.
Carol Wyant, the council`s executive director, said her staff has contacted the sellers and their agents about a program that could provide a big federal tax break to owners of the buildings if they keep them in original or restored condition.
The buildings are ”very valuable” historically and architecturally, said Wyant. ”That entire stretch of Lake Shore Drive used to look like that. They`re a piece of history that people can go see.”
Vincent Michael, Chicago program director for the private, nonprofit preservation council, said the significance of the buildings was comparable to that of the Water Tower on Michigan Avenue in showing how the area once appeared.
The adjacent buildings at 1250 and 1254 N. Lake Shore Dr. are rough-hewn stone fortresses, both built in 1891 in a style called ”Richardson Romanesque” after Henry Hobson Richardson, one of America`s most original and influential architects.
Richardson and his imitators built self-assertive Gilded Age bastions suggesting to the world that they and their owners` fortunes would endure through centuries.
Michael pointed out that though there are some similar structures in the Chicago area-including the renowned Glessner House on Prairie Avenue, which Richardson himself designed-there are no others on Lake Shore Drive.
The granite-faced building at 1250 N. Lake Shore Dr., which sprouts a conical tower reputed to be modeled from an Irish castle, was designed by architect Henry Ives Cobb and originally was owned by real estate magnate Carl Constantine Heisen.
Sometime in the 1950s, according to real estate broker Mary Prendergast, who is handling the sale, the interior was cut up into apartments. The current owner is James M. Flanigan, a real estate dealer who lives on the first floor with his wife. The second and third floors have been gutted.
Prendergast said Flanigan has no intention of selling to a developer.
”He will not talk to anybody thinking of tearing down the house,” she said, adding that she has received numerous inquiries from developers.
The asking price is $2.6 million, and rehabbing the upper floors could cost upwards of $600,000, said Prendergast. She said the interior still retains a considerable amount of the original woodwork, including
”exquisite” trim.
The Flanigans, who have owned the home since 1974, were intending to do the renovations themselves, but are planning instead to move into the house two doors down at 1258 N. Lake Shore Dr.
That building, an airy Venetian fantasy from 1895, decorated with lacy arches and intricately worked stone balconies, is owned by a Flanigan relative and already has been renovated, said Prendergast. It has always been a single- family home, she added.
It was designed by the firm of Holabird & Roche, key shapers in the Chicago School of commercial building. It was originally owned by Arthur Aldis, a real estate dealer.
The model for it, according to preservation council official Michael, was a residence in Venice known as Desdemona`s House, a fanciful allusion to the heroine of Shakespeare`s ”Othello.”
Philip Farley, owner and seller of the 1254 building, insisted emphatically that he wouldn`t sell to a developer. ”Absolutely not,” he said. ”I can guarantee it.”
He said that-like Prendergast-he had turned down offers from developers.
”I`m not against tearing down a building for high-rises,” he added, ”but this area`s not right for it.”
Farley, who reportedly bought the house in February for $1 million, has attached a $1.7 million price tag to its stone front. The architect is not known, but it was orignally owned by Mason B. Starring, an early area transit czar.
Inside, little can be found of the opulence promised by the imposing exterior of the building, which sports a soot-blackened lion face staring at the metal beasts thundering along Lake Shore Drive.
Original wood paneling and meticulous carving remains along the main staircase, but elsewhere cracked plaster, worn-through wallpaper, peeling paint, uneven floors, decaying carpeting and water stains contribute to a general air of dilapidation. The home was divided into 10 apartments some 40 years ago.
One tenant, Bernard Garbo, 31, said he feared Farley was letting the property deteriorate to back up a future argument for demolition. ”It`s a wreck,” he said.
But Farley, who acknowledged the inside needs work, said renovation could cost as little as $300,000. ”You could also spend a million,” he added. The basic structure of the building is sound, he maintained.
The 1260 building, whose front door is on Goethe Street, is also being offered. The youngest of the four, built in 1910 and also designed by Holabird & Roche, was originally owned by Warren D. Rockwell and has always been a single-family home.
Its reddish-brown brick exterior is the least distinctive of the four, reflecting an architectural reaction from Victorian extravagance toward simpler, more classical design, according to Michael.
Inside, however, its features include a four-floor private elevator, reception hall and reception room on the first floor and living and dining rooms on the second floor. A dumbwaiter was intended to carry meals from the first-floor kitchen and pantry to the dining room.
David King, a broker with McCollom Realty Co., an Oak Park firm, said the building is available for trade, lease or sale, at a price of $2 million. The family that had been living in it moved out in the last six months, he said.
King conceded that the property could be torn down for development, since no restrictions were being placed on the sale. But he noted the ”strong interest” in the area in keeping the building as it is.
The Landmarks Preservation Council plan involves a tax device known as a preservation and conservation easement, or facade easement.
Through this technique, the owner of a building ”donates” a building`s exterior to a public or private nonprofit group and agrees to maintain it in original or restored condition.
In return the owner gets a federal income tax deduction amounting up to 80 percent of the difference between the value of the property before and after the easement is attached.
That can amount to a significant sum, especially in an area where there is pressure for high-rise development, according to Cheryl Inghram, senior consultant for the acounting firm of Pannell Kerr Forster & Co. A developable piece of land could be worth millions more than one on which no high-rise construction is possible.
Inghram, a specialist in such easements, said she had participated in the conservation of 36 historic buildings in the Chicago area using this device.
