Make Me a City

by Jonathan Carr

  I was thirteen years old when the Great Fire swept through our city on October 8, 1871, old enough to remember some of the magnificent buildings that we lost. After the calamity, I felt like a child who had begun life with the gift of sight and then, suddenly and without warning, been struck blind. My recall of certain buildings was excellent. But they existed only in my mind and, unlike a blind person, I could no longer walk around them, touch them or sense their brooding physical presence. I made some drawings from memory. But how I wished I had the level of proof to back up those drawings, proof that only a photograph can provide. It therefore became my mission to seek out as many photographic records as I could of the city before the Fire. They were hard to find. This, I believe, is a tragedy. How dearly I would have liked to possess images of those buildings I badgered my father to keep taking me back to, like Mr. Potter Palmer’s marble-fronted hotel on State Street or Mr. Chesbrough’s North Side Waterworks with its huge flywheel and giant pumps.

  This exhibition displays photographs of a single building, the Home Insurance Building, taken over a period of more than one year. My choice of this subject matter was mostly a matter of luck. I had long admired the Leiter Building, a seven-story warehouse on Wells and Monroe. The walls looked as though they were comprised more of glass than of stone, and its innumerable panes mirrored the sky into which they soared until they seemed almost indivisible from the air itself. How full of light was the interior, and with what delicate simplicity did the exterior please the eye. Which artist had conceived of such a building? It was the work, I discovered, of Major William Le Baron Jenney.

  So when I heard that Mr. Jenney had won a contract to build the Chicago headquarters for the New York Home Insurance Company, I was eager to see what he would do. I happened to make my first visit to the site in the spring of 1884, on a day when the bricklayers were on strike. I took advantage of the relative quiet to snoop around, and that was how I was discovered by Mr. Jenney himself.

  He engaged me in conversation before I had realized who he was, expressing surprise at seeing someone on-site in such attire, and even more surprise when I told him I was a photographer. We discussed his frustration with the delays to the project caused by the strike. Nothing could be done until the bricklayers came back to work and finished the foundations. This was when the idea came to me that it might be fascinating to document the construction of Mr. Jenney’s new building, from this very early stage to its completion, whenever that might be. I seized my chance and asked his permission. My proposal was so speculative I was not even certain Mr. Ayres would lend me his portable darkroom to set up on-site, nor that I would find a patron like Mr. Hutchinson, defender of photography as an art form, to fund my experiment. I am grateful to Mr. Jenney for granting his permission at once. Neither he nor I had any idea that this particular building would be different from anything else that has ever been built.

  Plate I

  The Fat of the Land

  This print was taken shortly before the end of the bricklayers’ strike to which I refer in my autobiographical sketch. I chose to position my lens at such a low angle to emphasize the immensity of the flattened site and of the sky itself (which the viewer will notice occupies approximately two-thirds of the plate) while minimizing the two figures in the foreground. The scale renders the men insignificant, incidental to the scene in which they have been placed, more trespassers than participants. The title of the photograph is intended to be ironic. The land on which Chicago has been built is notorious for containing a subsoil of mud, sand and clay that is favorable for neither the cultivation of the land nor the erection of the multistoried buildings that now dominate the downtown area. To establish foundations strong enough to hold firm on such an unstable base is the greatest of engineering challenges. The two men in the picture are the architect, Mr. William Jenney, and his main contractor, Mr. Gus Swanson. Mr. Jenney is the shorter man on the left, seen here making an upward gesture with his arm, hence the blur on the plate, while Mr. Swanson is the taller, leaner figure with his hat cocked backward. He appears to be looking up at a specific point in the sky. Notice how, at this distance, his elongated form unconsciously imitates the iron columns he will one day install. Forgive my reading more into this than was known or intended at the time. But art often seems to work on a bigger canvas than we can visualize at the moment of its conception. In the poses my two subjects have struck in this plate, I like to imagine that the roles they are destined to play are being foreshadowed. Mr. Jenney, a fount of innovative ideas, is making an extraordinary proposition about the height of the building, while Mr. Swanson is pointing to the engineering details. Perhaps he can already see, in what to an untrained eye is merely an emptiness of sky, the topmost point of the building’s ninth floor.

  Plate VIII

  Metal Skeleton

  This captures a moment in the late afternoon shortly before the end of the bricklayers’ strike. I had taken a photograph earlier, in brighter conditions, but the glass negative cracked while I was processing it in the darkroom. As it happens, I believe this was fortunate. It is the silver-gray quality of the later afternoon light that provides such an evocative background for the ironwork of the wheelchair and the human figure seated in it. When I arrived on-site that afternoon I expected to see work under way at last. Instead, I found Mr. Jenney in animated discussion with the man in the wheelchair. Mr. Jenney was as charming as always, though I cannot say the same for his elderly visitor, a Mr. Atkins. He was offhand in his greeting and questioned why I was still using wet plates instead of dry. I told him I considered the quality of reproduction in a wet plate superior, and more consistent, than in a dry plate. It was clear he judged one such as I to have no place on a building site. I fear I may have brooded overmuch on his behavior, and this most likely prompted the moment of inattention in the darkroom when I dropped the first negative. I requested his permission to take a second portrait, but Mr. Atkins criticized my “ineptitude” at having ruined the first one and declined to sit for me again. If I wanted to take a photograph, that was a matter between Mr. Jenney and myself, but he would waste no more time sitting for one. I suspect it was because he was trying to spoil the photograph that he is pictured leaning forward, pointing. But, as the viewer will observe, that stretching movement integrates his figure into the complex network of interconnecting lines already created by the spokes and frame of the wheelchair, creating an effect that fortuitously imitates the construction style for which the Home Insurance Building would become famous. Afterward, Mr. Jenney told me that Mr. Atkins had given him a good idea as to how he might make himself less reliant on bricklayers. Whether this was the idea that lay behind the structural innovations introduced by Mr. Jenney over the next few months, I cannot say, but there must be good grounds for thinking it was. As far as I know, Mr. Jenney never claimed those innovations for himself. He once told me there was absolutely nothing new about them, and that if anyone deserved the credit, it should be the inventor of the balloon frame house. He was using, he said, the very same principles of skeleton construction in the Home Insurance Building as are employed by a stack of two-by-fours and a bag of nails. Who will ever know the truth? In view, though, of the way in which this plate happens to imitate the construction techniques for which the Home Insurance Building has become renowned, I have taken the liberty of naming it “Metal Skeleton.”

  Plate XVII

  Stairway Resting on the Earth

  After construction work resumed, some months passed and there was nothing to distinguish the Home Insurance Building from any other big building. The solid pier foundations, embedded at their roots in a grillage of crisscrossed steel smothered in portland cement, rose as far as the second floor. The piers were encased in concrete (see plates X and XI). In the middle of September, though, something strange began to happen. I had recently observed the delivery of a large quantity of iron, in many different sizes and lengths (see plate XV), but I had no idea as to their purpose. I should mention that by
this stage the contractor, Mr. Swanson, had become my chief informant about the progress of the building (as well as my guardian in the face of a boisterous workforce). He had taken a special interest in my project and did everything possible to assist me, even ordering work to be halted on some occasions so that dust levels would subside, and movements that might spoil a picture were minimized. But I had not had an opportunity to consult with Mr. Swanson on this occasion, and was therefore as surprised and puzzled as my subjects in this plate when I saw what was happening on-site. It was impossible, given the field of vision to which my lens is subject, to include in the photograph what everyone was looking at. I hope this only serves to enhance the sense of mystery in the plate. Everything in the composition is posed as a question. Who are these people and what, out of camera, are they looking at? Why have such a disparate group of citizens paused to look up at the same thing? What drives their curiosity? Fascinating questions with no answers. A few years ago, when in Europe, I traveled to Brussels and was fortunate enough to see a work by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, titled Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In this painting are three human figures—a shepherd, a fisherman and a plowman—all of whom ignore the flailing legs of poor Icarus as he plunges into the sea. They lack curiosity. I see this plate as a mirror opposite to Brueghel’s painting. Here, we see not three figures but an auspicious twelve. They are urban, not rural dwellers. They demonstrate the very opposite of indifference. The invisible (rather than the visible) object of their curiosity is not falling from the sky, but rising into it. Finally, the main subject has not been ejected from the heavens, as was the fate of Icarus, but is climbing toward them. Icarus was foolhardy, and features in a pagan myth. I hope it will not be considered taking the concept of the mirror image too far to have named this plate after an event recorded in the Book of Genesis, in which Jacob dreams of a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven.

  Plate XXIII

  An Inspector Visits

  The metal skeleton was almost at the fourth floor, when work was halted without warning. Influential voices had spoken out against the structure. It was unsafe, it was destined to collapse, it would be unable to support the weight of a multistoried building. This kind of reaction is normal with innovations. The inventor must endure the skepticism of his contemporaries. I am told that when the first balloon frame house was built, the naysayers claimed it would take off from the earth like a balloon—hence the moniker. And much doubt and consternation greeted Daguerre, when he unveiled an image on a sheet of silver-plated copper. The unnamed subject in this plate, such an anomaly on-site in his Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, has been sent by the Home Insurance Company to evaluate whether or not the structure is safe. Notice that his eyes are not on the building works but on his own waistcoat, as though he is concerned some motes of dust or other foreign bodies have landed there and created a tiresome stain. This evaluator lasted a single day on-site before Mr. Jenney succeeded in having him replaced by a more competent man called Mr. Burnham, a former draftsman of his. Mr. Burnham (see plate XXV) would declare himself satisfied that the design was sound. The other aspect of this plate worth noting is the view afforded of a half-covered iron pier. By this stage of the exhibition the viewer will not need to be reminded that Mr. Jenney’s design innovation centered on the use of iron piers, iron columns and iron girders in place of traditional brickwork and masonry. The upper floors would be launched into the sky not on masonry-bearing walls but on an iron frame. Here, we see one such iron pier half bricked up. Better than words could do, this photograph illustrates the enormity of the design change that has taken place. Brick walls are not being used to support the upper floors of the Home Insurance Building. They merely act as fire cladding for the iron frame.

  Plates XXX to XLI

  A Portrait Cycle

  Since the subject of the next twelve plates is one and the same, I shall write a single introduction for them all. When taking a portrait I believe a photographer should aim to draw out particular, defining characteristics of the subject. No single photograph or painting can capture the full complexity of a human being. I say this because, without wanting to engage in a debate about the merits of photography versus painting, it is undeniable that while the painter remains at liberty to avoid a “warts and all” approach, the camera’s attachment to instantaneous truth dictates that the photographer cannot. Included in plates XXX to XLI are twelve portraitures of Mr. Gus Swanson. I suggest that when taken together, these plates present a composite artistic rendering of their subject. I have always encouraged my clients to be photographed in a place and/or with possessions that are important to them. I was therefore delighted when Mr. Swanson agreed to pose on the remarkable metal skeleton he was building to support the higher floors of the Home Insurance Building. I have learned that the closer the relationship between photographer and subject, the more natural and revealing a portrait is likely to be. By this stage, I think it fair to say that I knew Mr. Swanson reasonably well. It was helpful that we shared a Swedish background although, unlike Mr. Swanson, I was born in America. The viewer will realize that for portraits to be taken at these elevations it was essential for the photographer and her equipment to go up there too. This was challenging, and I would like to put on record my gratitude to Mr. Swanson for providing assistance in this regard.

  These plates were taken on different days between September and December 1884. As portraits, they require no introduction. But I would like to talk about the intent behind one of them, plate XXXIX, as a way of introducing the compositional process common to them all. Mr. Swanson led the work on-site by example, taking personal responsibility for the construction of each new level. In plate XXXIX he is bolting down the first girder for the floor of the ninth and top floor. I am on the eighth floor, the tripod balanced in a way that angles the camera upward. Just as it is hard to take a photograph at a height of eighty, ninety or a hundred feet (it was, necessarily, a windless day), so too it is a challenge for anyone to pose at that height in the way Mr. Swanson does here. I held my breath as he climbed the ladder. One wrong move and who knows how many floors he would have fallen? Then came the agonizing process of raising the girder with ropes and pulleys. When that great length of iron was eventually balanced between two columns, it then had to be secured. There are two opposing forces at work in the plate. On the one hand, the way in which Gus kneels and looks down into the camera eye, while apparently turning the bolt (I asked him to pretend, for those long seconds needed to take the photograph) makes the whole process look effortless and safe. He might as well be at ground level, sharing a joke with the camera. It is a simple act, the turn of a screw, that has been done millions of times before. At the same time, though, the camera captures the terrifying truth. Mr. Swanson is suspended on nothing more than a fragile triangle of iron while engaged on a task that requires great strength, agility and expertise. He is an acrobat, and there is no safety net. It would be the easiest thing in the world to err ever so slightly and lose his balance. Maybe the bolt gets stuck, but then unexpectedly spins free. Maybe he doesn’t know that something slippery is gummed to the sole of his right boot so that when he leans forward, there is no friction at work and he cannot prevent himself from falling. Anything at all could happen. The viewer, on seeing this dangerous juxtaposition, feels a nervous tingling down the spine. Humans are neither fish of the sea, nor fowl of the air. This image puts everything we take for granted out of kilter. No wonder, then, that I feel a seizure in the stomach as with trembling fingers I set the wet glass in its light box. If he were to fall, it would be my fault. And for what? For a photograph. He never even wanted to be photographed in the first place. I had observed that as a boss he was not a demonstrative man. His laborers respected him because he wasn’t always shouting at them, the way some do in this trade. But they also recognized he was a perfectionist, and that if their work failed to meet the high standards he set, they would be out of a job. Demanding but fair, is how I would su
mmarize his reputation. That, though, was only one side of him. Gus was a more driven man, more passionate about what he was doing, than anyone else I had ever met. A gleam came into his eyes whenever he climbed up his giant metal skeleton. I realized, in that moment, I was lost to him. His concentration was so absolute, his mental and physical energies so focused on pushing the Home Insurance Building higher and higher, that everything else was banished from his mind. It was like watching a boy play with his favorite toy. Maybe I thought like that because I had learned there was a playful side to him too. I suggest we can see this in plate XXXIX in the self-conscious grin he is trying to hold back. He feels embarrassed to be enjoying himself so much on the job. When I first suggested I might take his portrait, he demurred for a long time. He did not like being the center of attention, nor did he want to be involved in anything that might distract him from the task at hand. I implored him. And so, I am grateful to record, did Mr. Jenney. Finally, Mr. Swanson relented. But whenever I asked him if I could take a photograph, I had the feeling he was doing it more for me than for himself. I confess I could not resist. The camera does not lie, though it might not always tell the whole truth. In these portraits of Mr. Swanson (did I call him Gus earlier?) I knew I had found an artist who was an exemplar of his time and place. He was a man of air who had the balance of an angel. His feet gripped those girders like claws, he stood as still as a bird on a wire, he exhibited no sign of fear. While I was quivering like a leaf, even though I had wide solid timbers beneath my feet, he remained perfectly still. When he climbed, long arms reaching upward, one leg bent and the other straight, head aligned with his back, he was like an iron column himself, melding into the frame around him. I asked him once whether he had ever suffered from a fear of heights. He said that as a child he had been terrified by heights. But then something happened. “Falling down from high,” he said, “is scareful to think about, but when I do this thing there is no afraid in my heart.” He said he would tell me more about it one day, if I wanted to hear. I said I would like that very much. I regret to say that I am still waiting. If I don’t hear anything soon, I shall have to remind him. And, oh, what a handsome subject for the camera he is too. Not in a pampered way, but weathered, with a prominent brow and a firm but generous mouth that suggests to me warmth and finer feelings. A man with skin that is the perfect shade for my lens, dark enough to make key features stand out, not so dark that there is a danger of becoming lost in shadow. He is forty-five years old. I know because I asked him.