John Stone, president of the university, said today, “It is only after extensive attempts to raise funds, both nationally and internationally, that we have made this painful decision. We have no alternative: The building, in its current state, is a hazard and needs many millions of dollars of renovation both inside and out. With great sadness and reluctance, we pass along a Wright treasure. The university cannot afford to keep it.”
The news has shocked architecture buffs around the world and has left Hyde Park reeling. The Robie House was the only structure Frank Lloyd Wright ever built, during a career that spanned almost seventy years, that he fought to save, and he saved it not once but twice. Many believe that the house embodies his unique spirit and vision in a timeless form. It has come to occupy an almost mystical place in the history of American architecture.
In a letter to the press, the university defends its decision as “a bold move to provide many millions of people, around the world, with access to Wright’s extraordinary work.”
A crew has already begun plans for the job. The actual dismantling of the house will begin on June 21.
As one Hyde Parker said, “This breaks my heart. Hyde Park weeps.”
Ms. Hussey looked up. For once she didn’t ask what the class thought. The tie had fallen off the end of her braid, and her words tumbled over each other: “I felt sick when I read this. A house like that needs light and air, and is one indivisible piece — the idea of carving up the structure and preserving chunks of it in museums!” She said “museums” as if it were a dirty word, which was a little confusing. The class knew Ms. Hussey loved to go to museums.
Tommy’s hand was raised, but just barely. Should he tell the class that his new apartment was right next to one side of the Robie House? Would other kids think that was lucky?
Ms. Hussey was pacing again and didn’t see Tommy’s hand.
She went on: “I know all of you have passed it many times — it’s only three blocks away. It’s long and low, but remember that it’s been almost a century since Wright designed it. Things that are normal to us now were revolutionary then, like rooms that flowed into each other; living space that moved easily between inside and outside; a hidden front entrance; deep, overhanging eaves; an attached three-car garage.
“Plus, the detail on the interior was extraordinary: Furniture, lamps, ceiling panels, rugs, and window designs all fit together like pieces of a puzzle. There were once 174 art-glass windows in that house, which meant thousands of pieces of colored glass. Amazingly, almost all of the windows are still intact.”
Another hand went up, and Tommy’s sank down.
“What’s art glass?” someone asked.
“It’s what most people call ‘stained glass,’ but Wright didn’t like that label. He described his windows as ‘leaded glass,’ ‘light screens,’ or ‘art glass.’ I like the last term — it somehow fits the man. Wright thought in a geometry that you have to see to understand, and even then it’s hard to figure out what you are seeing.”
Tommy thought Ms. Hussey was hard to figure out, too. Did she understand? And was she angry or excited?
Their teacher stopped walking and turned toward the class, her mouth in a tight line. “So: Art & Life.”
Petra Andalee was frowning. “Can’t the house just sit there empty until the money comes in?”
Ms. Hussey drew a quick breath as if she’d touched something hot. “In an ideal world, yes. In the real world, no. The university probably can’t afford to own a piece of property that they aren’t able to use, and if part of the house fell on someone walking by, the owner would be held responsible.”
“Maybe we can visit the place and come up with ideas,” Calder suggested.
“I wish we could, but they haven’t allowed visitors inside for more than a year, and no family has lived there since 1926. This is deeply ironic, of course, since the house was built for children.”
Ms. Hussey paused, twisting the end of her hair around one finger. The class waited, knowing this meant she was thinking about whether to share something.
“Actually,” she confided, “I’ve always wondered about Mr. Wright’s focus on play space. At the time he was working on the Robie House, he had just left his wife and six children. And yet here he was, thinking creatively about what would make someone else’s kids happy and safe. Maybe it was his way of asking the universe for forgiveness….”
Tommy picked at a sticker on his desk, careful not to look up. Neither one of his dads had said sorry. When Tommy was a baby, his real dad had died in South America — he’d been arrested at a political demonstration and was never seen again. And Tommy’s stepfather had started out with a bunch of promises and then broken every one.
“Anyway,” Ms. Hussey said, her voice businesslike again, “it seems like a crime to destroy such a home, don’t you think?”
“It doesn’t look like a home to me,” one of the kids piped up.
“Really?” Ms. Hussey said, looking pleased. “Perhaps we have to figure out if the building is still a home, and whether a home can exist if it’s empty. Or, beyond that, whether a home can also be a piece of art …”
The class was quiet. Someone sighed. Ms. Hussey looked around, then sighed also. “Okay — maybe it’s too much to start an investigation so late in the year. But it’s never too late to think. What could we do? Art-home or not, the Robie House has been a part of Hyde Park for as long as you, your parents, or maybe even your grandparents remember. It’s just too horrible to think of it being pulled apart.”
Their teacher sat on the edge of a radiator. She had picked up a round, gray stone that lived on her desk, a rock with two bands of white that crossed neatly on either side. She called it her Lucky Stone, and when she picked it up, the children knew that she was worried or upset. She held it now in both hands, her body a silhouette in the sunshine coming from the window behind her.
“But you said it was murder,” Calder blurted.
“Ms. Hussey, you never give up! Why aren’t you trying to persuade us?” someone else added.
“I probably shouldn’t have —” Ms. Hussey broke off as an ambulance screamed by beneath the classroom window. Everyone listening would have been frightened by the coincidence if they had known who was inside: A mason was being rushed from the Robie House to the hospital, a man who had fallen quite a bit farther that morning than the piece of chalk.
The bell rang.
Class was over, and Tommy stood up to go. He looked at Calder, three seats away. Calder glanced first at Petra and then back toward him. So that’s the way it is, Tommy thought bitterly.
He hurried toward the door, passing Denise. She opened her eyes wide and then made them narrow again, as if to say she saw it all.
Tommy sped ahead, wanting to kick something.
Return to “Writing Tips”
At the end of the day, Tommy left school by himself. He didn’t see either Calder or Petra on the way out. They lived three blocks east of the University School, and he now lived three blocks west.
He tried to tell himself that he didn’t mind walking home alone. After all, he was living next to a famous house that was going to be torn apart. He could see it from his bedroom window, and if he watched he’d be witnessing a killing. Not a real one, of course, because a house was not a living thing. But having a teacher who talked about murder was pretty interesting.
As he headed home, Tommy looked carefully at Frank Lloyd Wright’s building. It reminded him of an untidy stack of waffles, or perhaps a flat pyramid, or maybe a train car. Ms. Hussey was right, the place was long and low and had lots of layers. Everything seemed pulled out in a tricky way, like one of those magic boxes where you slide a drawer out, close it, and a dollar bill disappears — only the drawers were still out. There were walls and roofs at about ten different levels, and hundreds of windows of all sizes. The art glass in the windows was set in shifting patterns of triangles and parallelograms, and as Tommy walked slowly by, they seemed to wink and
twinkle at him. He didn’t remember noticing all the colors before — there were turquoises, blues, greens, purples. Wow — what a waste that this was all coming down.
The building was wrapped in heavy yellow tape. The tape said DO NOT ENTER over and over. Had that been there this morning? He didn’t think so.
Once upstairs in his apartment, Tommy fed his goldfish. His mom, Zelda Segovia, wouldn’t be home from her job at the library for another hour. Originally from England, she had silver hair that she kept squirrel-short and eyes that were two different colors, one chestnut and one blue.
Tommy looked like his father, who was from Colombia. Tommy and his mom had moved many times, and he was always careful to give his fish a window with a view. Goldman was a member of the family, and had been with Tommy for years. “You’re living next to an amazing building now,” Tommy told his pet. The fish opened and closed his mouth as if to say he understood.
As Tommy peered into Goldman’s bowl, he looked through the water at the back wall of the Robie House. He was quite sure the house was empty, and he had a sudden idea. What if he just crept under that tape and poked around in the garden on the other side? A wall separated it from the street, so he’d be more or less hidden. If he did some of his own digging, before anyone else from the class thought about coming over to investigate, he’d have news to share, and the kids would remember how gutsy he was. And what if he actually found a treasure?
After all, Tommy was a collector. His dad had been studying to become an archaeologist at the time he died, and his mom told him that finding must be in his blood. He’d been picking up and organizing “street gems,” as his mom called them, ever since he could walk. He could spot four-leaf clovers without trying and had at least fifty of them pressed in a phone book. He had boxes filled with old ice-cream sticks, buttons, movie stubs, and pieces of firecrackers. His prize collection, however, was fish, and he kept them on a special shelf: Some were bright rubber or plastic, and others were postcards, carvings from Chinatown, black clay fish from Mexico, and presents people had brought back from trips. A wooden zebra fish lay next to a glass flounder with one silver eye. A coconut puffer fish swelled above a tin trout. He even had a stuffed barracuda, complete with razor-sharp teeth, and a marzipan shark from Europe that was too detailed to eat.
Tommy looked at the Robie House and whispered to Goldman, “Wish me luck.” Then he zoomed out the door and down the stairs.
He waited until the sidewalk was empty, then slipped under the tape and into the garden. He crept along next to the wall in a half-crouch, his heart thudding.
Would he get in trouble if someone noticed him? He’d just tell a little lie, say he had spotted a quarter and gone after it. He knelt in the dirt and pulled out his digging tool, which had a fork on one end and a spoon on the other.
Ten minutes later he’d found a red button, a lens from a pair of sunglasses, and an earring with one broken bead on it. Then his fork hit something larger.
He was down about eight inches now. He dug with both hands, abandoning his tool. He’d uncovered a piece of carved stone about the size of a coat hook … there! The clot of earth shot up with a little shower of pebbles. Tommy sat back on his heels, scraping off the packed dirt with his fingernails.
No — could it be? Jumping up, Tommy forgot to hide and he leaped over the yellow tape with a whoop, almost knocking down an elderly woman with a cane.
“Not supposed to be in there, young man!” she called after him, but he was too excited to stop. As he raced around the corner of the house, he glanced at the building, hoping no one else had seen him. The lines between the glass in the first-floor windows looked suddenly like an empty fishnet.
He thumped up the stairs, two at a time, to wash off his find.
Petra and Calder walked home from school in near-silence, as if Tommy’s presence was all around them. Although they had often spent time together after school during the winter — puzzling over mysteries, eating, or wandering around the campus — neither felt comfortable now.
Petra knew there’d be trouble from the first moment she saw Tommy again. That was two days ago, on June 1, when Calder had arranged for them to meet in front of his house.
“Hey — you guys remember each other,” he’d said happily. Tommy had looked at the ground, and Petra at the sky.
Tommy was the smallest. From behind, his head had made Petra think of a black marble: It was amazingly round, and his hair was short and shiny. When he opened his mouth, she could see a chipped tooth that came to a point. His eyes were dark, and looked like raisins stuck in gingerbread.
He kept his arms crossed on his chest, and talked as if Petra wasn’t even there.
“Remember the time in third grade when we put squirt soap in the substitute’s coffee?”
Calder had lit up, and punched Tommy in the arm.
“And remember the time we told the girl on the playground that we didn’t speak English, and she spilled all those secrets?”
Calder had nodded and laughed, not seeming to notice Petra’s discomfort.
She had left shortly after, mumbling something about homework. It was clear: Tommy didn’t want some girl butting into his friendship with Calder. But this wasn’t fair — Petra had never been a “some girl” kind of person.
She had opened her front door that day to the faint smell of garbage and burned toast. One of her sisters galloped by with a shoe box on her head, driving their two younger brothers in front of her with a spatula. The dog rushed by with a toothbrush stuck to his back.
Petra had four brothers and sisters, and her house was a marvel of broken toys, runaway food, and sneakers of all sizes. Her father, Frank Andalee, was a physicist with family from North Africa and the Netherlands, and her mother, Norma Andalee, was a poet from the Middle East. Conversations happened at high volume and in a number of languages, and cheerful crisis was the norm: Keys vanished, an important newspaper article had been used under the cat box, a cell phone had fallen into the toilet. Nothing about the Andalee family was either simple or predictable.
Both Tommy and Calder were only children, and Petra envied them. Not having to cram down cookies when they were still too hot for fear of not getting one later, not having to help with tangled hair and sticky faces before school: It sounded so easy.
Hearing the door, Petra’s mom had poked her head out of the kitchen. “Can you pick up some milk and an onion for me? Now? Thanks, honey….”
As Petra stepped back outside that afternoon, she hoped Calder and Tommy had left. They had, and suddenly that was almost worse than seeing them again. Were they at Calder’s? Was Calder telling Tommy how much he’d missed him?
Passing Powell’s, the bookstore at the corner, Petra had glanced into the giveaway box that was always outside. Powell’s couldn’t keep all of the used books that people brought in, so many went into a cardboard carton to the left of the front door. Every Hyde Parker stopped and looked.
That day it was cookbooks, a dictionary, and a small, battered paperback, the kind that fit in a pocket. Petra picked it up. The cover was teal green and had a headless figure on it — a man standing calmly in a black suit, complete with white shirt and red tie. A bowler hat floated above the place where the face should have been. In between the hat and empty collar was a title.
“The Invisible Man,” Petra read aloud. She opened to page one. Someone had highlighted the words an unheard-of piece of luck with an orange marker. She flipped ahead, wondering whether to take the book home. She didn’t particularly like reading things with underlining in them.
At that moment a puff of warm air touched her cheek, as if to say, Yes, take me. She shrugged and tucked the book into the back pocket of her jeans.
With any luck, she had thought unkindly, Tommy would become the Invisible Man.
But now, two days later, it was she who had become invisible — Calder was happy to see Tommy, and Tommy wasn’t happy to see Petra. Even though she and Calder were finally alone now, things w
eren’t the same. Lots had happened today at school, with all the news about the Robie House, but neither was talking.
They reached Petra’s porch first, said good-bye, and she climbed the stairs quickly. Once inside, she went straight to her room.
Write, she told herself firmly, write. It always made things better. Think art. Think murder. Concentrate. All day her mind had felt dulled and kind of dented, like something had collided with it. Yeah, something like a kid with a round head, she thought to herself.
Petra’s desk was lined up with the windowsill. Gazing out, she opened her notebook and waited.
Harper Avenue was a narrow, crooked street that ran next to the tracks. Both Petra’s and Calder’s bedroom windows looked out on a landscape of horizontals and verticals peppered with gravel and leaves: metal tracks, the ties between them, the tall reach of tree trunks on both sides of the embankment. Petra loved the stories filed neatly into the flow of train windows — she had seen arguments in profile, mouths open with laughter or horror, noses squashed against glass. Depending on whether she held her eyes still or let them race with the cars, she would see either a blurry sequence punctuated with bright threads of color, or a single glitter of a moment. She recorded these impressions in a section of her notebook called Tales from the Tracks, and planned to use them one day in a novel. The trains, it seemed to Petra, were always giving away valuable secrets.
Waiting here is a bit like taking a warm bath, Petra thought, except it’s looking through glass and not sitting in water, and you don’t have to get wet. She sighed, knowing she had a weird way of putting ideas together in her mind. Metaphors and similes crackled across her brain like heat lightning in a summer sky. Sometimes she felt deep inside that she’d be respected one day for the things she wrote down, but she would push the thought away quickly. There was such a huge gap between being a real writer and being a kid who wanted to be one.
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