Solving Early Apartment Parking Problems

American families resist sharing their roof, privacy, and entrance with others. They want their house to stand alone in their garden. In my previous opinion piece I described some neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia, where domestic-scaled apartment buildings, which Daniel Parolek calls the missing middle, joined residences as valuable neighborhood assets that modern zoning frowns on.

Streetcars suburbs offered lots larger enough for a garage, and after World War II the garages began to swallow houses. Today apartment dwellers must leave their cars on the streetunless there is n available lot or underneath in the infamous 4+1s. 

Autos were popular curiosities at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. On Thanksgiving Day in1895 Frank Duryea won a 54 mile race from the Fair’s Jackson Park to Evanston and back averaging 7 ½ MPH in the second gasoline powered auto his brother Charles had built. The numbers and makes of cars rapidly rose. In 1900 nationwide, 40% were steam, 38% were electric, and 22% were gasoline, but gasoline would soon dominate. In Chicago in 1902 there were 600 to 800 licensed cars, and two years later there were 1000 to 2000. 

Having an auto was like having a servant—a mark of wealth, and both posed the problem of where to put them. Mansions put them below stairs, and French Flat, which arrived only after the Civil War in New York beyond the kitchen in the back. New York’s high land and construction costs solved the problem for the merely affluent. Chicago, where it was cheaper to build and land was abundant, resisted building apartments until preparing for the Fair, and it developed its characteristic open court configuration but with few intended for the affluent. The wealthy preferred mansions and commuting by rail from their families in distant suburbs, but before long they acquiesced. In 1912 Benjamin Marshall designed the 12 story Beaux Arts extravaganza at 1550 North State Parkway in the near north side’s gold coast with 10 single story 8,000 square foot apartments, each with three servant’s rooms and more elsewhere in the building, as well as a basement garage for the cars, said to be the city’s first.  

But it had a predecessor, the Pattington, designed in 1902 and ready for the affluent with a basement for their cars. Its design drew from important predecessors designed for the effluent not with no basement garage.

The Saint James Court in Milwaukee designed by A. C. Clas, an important Milwaukee architect, designed in 1895 but not built until 1903 had aclassicizing exterior that the Fair had made popular. It rose six stories from a narrow, deep court with an elevator serving each floor’s pair of 9 room apartments. Its “below stairs” facilitiesand its steel and cement structure soundproofing the apartments anticipated Chicago’s Pattington.

In 1896 Ralph Adam Cram designed the Richmond Court in Brookline that evoked a Tudor manor house for Anglophilic Bostonians. Its forty large apartments were paired on three floors with five entrances beyond a landscaped open court like those in Chicago but new to Boston.

The Pattington was an investment of a Milwaukee industrialist James E. Patton, and Clas was associated with local architect David Postle, although not mentioned on the drawings.It stolid classicism of brick and limestone spread Chicago’s open court configuration on a very generous site well north of the city’s soot laden air near the lake and public transportation. Its four stories spanned two open courts with a tea room and management office at their juncture. Its 72 apartments ranged from 1600 to 2600 square feet, each with a mansion’s minimum quartet of formal rooms (reception, parlor, library, dining) with definitive isolation from the bedrooms and bathrooms and clear separation from the kitchen with its servant’s room and its closet, toilet, and basin. This service area included and hand hauled freight elevator to the English basement that held laundry and servants’ bathing facilities, a storage room for each apartment, an apartment for the manager and another for the janitor, and a privately accessible doctor’s office. An internal telephone system connected everything and everyone, and the building’s power plant provided steam heat and electricity for lights and making ice, and for the dozen cars in the basement’s“Automobile Room” reached by a ramp and limited to electrics.

In 1905 The Chicago Blue Book that named the city’s 600 elite listed its residents with visiting hours and honorifics from Captain to General. Its apartments were soundproofed with ten entrances around the large open courts where eight apartmentsshared an entrance with the largest units unpaired. Herbert Crowly in the 1907 Architectural Record  remark that Chicago’sopen court configuration conferred an “air of domesticity”addressed a phobia against multiple dwellings. And it successfully addressed the automobile problem that loomed larger during construction. The original drawings included a power plant deep in the ground at the rear with a skylight that autos would have avoid when reaching the basement ramp. Its footings were in place, but it was moved into a separate, low building at the site’s rear edge.

When Patton died in February 1904, the building was being finished. Ownership soon passed to Edward F. Shellenberger whose patented wire fencing had given him a fortune. By 1905 abrick garage about 60 by 66 feet and a fuel tank had been tucked into the site’s northeast corner.

To address the growing parking problem Shellenberger expanded the Pattington complex out to the sparsely built up next street, Bittersweet Place, where William LeBaron Jenney had lived in the street’s only large house before moving to Los Angeles in 1903.

Behind the power building Shellenberger added a garage for electrics and gasoline cars and had Andrew Sandegren, the rising star designer of Chicago apartment buildings, add one facing Bittersweet Place. The site included a driveway along one side reaching the garage with the rest left open. The three story building used the medializing style that was becoming popular for Chicago apartment buildings with 12 apartments grouped around each of its two entrances. The apartments were two sizes, 1159 or 700 square feet, all  with the quartet of formal rooms and clear separations between the zones. Six included the servant’s rooms with its toilet, and the other six had rooms and shared toilets in the basement that included the full complement of below stairs facilities and a tunnel to thePattington. 

And the auto problem only got worse. Ford began sellingthe Model T in 1903,  15 million by 1927, and then the Model A. In 1910 there Chicago had 13,000 autos, 90,000 in 1920, andin 1925 heading to 338,000. A car was now an accessory of upper middle class families, and they had to be parked somewhere. Other things had also changed; direct current had lost out to alternating current. The Pattington’s original dark wood interiors were no longer fashionable. And the servant problem remained, worsened by immigration restrictions and by young women moving into work in sales and as clerks and teachers, leaving many housewives having to serve as hostess, cook, and servant.  

In 1923 new ownership arrived as J. B. Waller took over the empire his grandfather had built in the district. Twice elected alderman, he lived in the Sullivan/Wright Charnley House, and until his death in 1949 ran Waller & Beck with that managed the empire from the Pattington’s office. To retain the building’s status he made changes: the dark wood sideboards, hall trees, and columnar divides between parlor and library were removed to the attic, the servant’s rooms were improved with shower heads, tile floors and drains, the kitchens were updated, and the parking problem was addressed, again.

A large corner parcel immediately to the west and occupied by an old wooden house and outbuilding was bought and subdivided. On one parcel facing the street that the Pattington fronted would be built a small double court three story apartment building, and another of the new parcels that faced the side street would receive a three story plus English basement building with 24 substantial apartments along a narrow open court. Behind it a garage, 60 by 160 feet was built with two entrances, one reached from the side street, the other leading from the street the Pattington faced and beyond an open garden. Electrics were a thing of the past, but for the 84 apartment complex now there was room for 60 or 70 cars; others are now also being tucked into various nooks around the building. 

The complex is now little changed, although since 1977 it has been a condominium.

The area next to the drive to the garage from the front is now a picnic area and small children’s playground, and like the dog park next to the Bittersweet building it is a treasured area of the Pattington Condominiumowners, the fortunate recipients of early efforts to solve the parking problem.