Plagued by Fire

Chatper 1

The Enigma of Arrival

Mother-fueled, father-ghosted, here he comes now, nineteen years old, almost twenty, out of the long grasses of the Wisconsin prairie, a kid, a rube, a bumpkin by every estimation except his own, off a Chicago and North Western train at the Wells Street

Station on the north bank of the Chicago River, into the body heat of this great thing called Chicago, on a drizzly late winter or early spring evening in 1887. It is about six p.m. Supposedly he has never seen

electric arc lights before. Supposedly he has seven bucks in his pocket. (To get most of that, he has sold off, at old man Benjamin Perry’s pawnshop on King Street in Madison, some of his departed father’s library, including a calf-bound copy of Plutarch’s Lives. He’s also hocked a semi-ratty mink collar of his mother’s that was detachable from her overcoat.) Supposedly he has managed his secret escape from his broken home on this mid-week afternoon without his two little sisters, who adore him, or his loving, divorced, and impecunious mother knowing. And now, with his pasteboard suitcase, and in his corn-pinching “toothpick” shoes, he’s made it to what he’s so long imagined as the Eternal City of the West.

He’s just one part of this disembarking, suppertime crowd, these narrow tramping columns, anonymous thousands (well, hundreds), drifting out of the depot’s great clock-towered front entry (after having checked his bag at the overnight luggage hold). He’s turning south with them onto the Wells Street Bridge, which is a swing bridge directly

outside the front door, not quite knowing where he’s headed, not willing to ask, just surfing along on this strange inland sea, possessed of his

own small reveries and desperations and unseen haunts, longing to make history on a large scale, propelled by a “boundless faith grown strong in him. A faith in what? He could not have told you.” So he will write, in the next century, on page 60, of his first version of An Autobiography.

The boundless belief is that he will somehow turn himself in short order into a world figure on architecture’s stage. It’s not only going to happen, but in not much more than a decade. Frank Lloyd Wright—who will later wish to claim that he was seventeen, not nineteen, at this arrival moment; who wishes to profess to any would-be employer that he’s finished three and a half years of college but has decided to skip his final several months before obtaining his degree because it was all bunkum anyway; who has an extraordinary gift for thinking in three dimensions—has just stepped out into one of the great building laboratories of the globe. Stepped out into a rude, teeming, black-sooted, horse-carted, Bible-belted, prostitute-prowling, not exactly cosmopolitan and nowhere close to eternal metropolis that has been remaking itself since October 1871, when an apocalyptic fire, burning for thirty-six hours, took almost a third of its whole, something like 17,450 structures, practically down to weeds and the sands of Lake Michigan. Stepped out into a city that, in this decade alone, 1880 to 1890, has been doubling over on itself in population—from half a million souls to more than a million. Chicago, which incorporated itself only fifty years ago, is now the most explosively growing place on earth. Because of the circumstances and geography of its location it has also become a world center of architectural innovation and experimentation, not to say a world center of transportation, on both land and water. (There are six major rail depots here—no other American city has anything like it.) It’s a horse-collared city whose tight downtown building core is hemmed in on three sides by a small river and a great lake: it must go up instead of out, at least inside the horse-collar. In the Lakeside City Directory there are 187 listings for architectural offices—one-man ops to firms with rows of draftsmen and delineators. Some of these names are already entering American myth: Burnham & Root, Holabird & Roche, Adler & Sullivan, William LeBaron Jenney. This small-town boy, with his large imagination, has struck Chicago, has hit architecture, the mother of all arts (so he believes), at its seeming ripest moment.

It’s such a grand American story: the lowly arrival, the startling becoming, and practically every Frank Lloyd Wright book that’s ever been written, not least his own, has wanted to deal with it in some way or other. Even accounting for all the luck and seized opportunity, no one has ever quite been able to explain how it happened, the realizing part, because artistic genius of this sort, or maybe any sort, doesn’t have real explanation.

Except what if it didn’t happen, not nearly, not even by half, in the way he himself later told it? Meaning: the arrival itself and the landing of the first job, but more than that, too. Wright chroniclers have pretty much known for years that so much of the arrival story and the first-job story, no matter how rich they are as stories, are, well, bunkum. Almost from the first sentences, the artist was once again giving himself away, leaving unwitting little breadcrumb clues as to some of his absurd falsehoods and myth-makings. I wish to try to take the bunkum a whole step further from what’s been previously reported, but not just for the sake of doing it.

Never mind that now. Let’s keep falling in step with him, pretending we believe it all, as he leaves the depot and turns right and crosses the bridge from the north bank into the city proper, gazing down at the “mysterious dark of the river with dim masts, hulks, and funnels hung with lights half-smothered in gloom—reflected in black beneath. I stopped to see, holding myself close against the iron rail to avoid the blind hurrying by.” Three pages later, in An Autobiography: “The gray, soiled river with its mists of steam and smoke, was the only beauty. That smelled to heaven.”

Not that he knows, but he’s arrived at a part of the city called Wolf Point, where the river’s north branch joins with the south to make the main stem. During the day this is the busiest trade spot in Chicago. The Air Line Elevator, over his right shoulder as he’s exiting the depot, holds 700,000 bushels of grain. By day Wolf Point is lumbermen and wharf-men and bargemen and cursing teamsters, but at this hour, the evening hour, it’s turning back into what everybody knows as “The Shadows.” Wolf Point is emptying out, and he with it. Soon there will just be the forests of the tall-mast ships bobbing in the turgid stream—and the stray, odd prostitute in a darkened doorway.

When you get across the bridge (it takes less than five minutes), you’re at the junction of Fifth Avenue and South Water, where the wholesale grocers of the city do their cursing and trading; and if you were to turn west from there, and walk along the south bank, to where South Water Street unites with Lake Street, at Market, you’d be at the site of the old Wigwam, where Abraham Lincoln got nominated in 1860. But he’s going straight ahead, which is to say south, into the heart of the commercial business district. This century and some later, you can track the pilgrim’s progress, squint and imagine him jaunting along, look down Loop alleyways and see the exposed brick sides of old nineteenth-century buildings, the ones he would have seen.

However, before he’s across, while he’s holding himself close against the rust-red iron railing, in the center of the span, above the green-gray soiled stream, peering down at its mysterious dark, trying not to get pitched over the side: look again at the photograph that begins this chapter. It’s thought to be one of the first photographs taken of him after his arrival in Chicago—maybe three months in. Don’t be fooled, such finery is part of the mask, real and not real. And yet what utter seeming sense of himself, at least on the exterior, with that slight-tilted head, those just-flared nostrils, that purposed jaw. Did he rent the duds? What’s that little pin or medallion edging from beneath his waistcoat? In any case, he has gotten himself down to Matthew J. Steffens’s portrait studio on Twenty-Second Street—it’s one of the best in the city—where maybe Commodore Steffens himself has disappeared under a black hood behind a large-format wooden bellows camera on a tripod to memorialize young Frank L. Wright onto a plate of ground glass. (A not incidental question: How did he pay for the session?) The portraitist may have printed his work on albumen and toned it with gold chloride crystals, bathing it in brown, the way Eugene Atget did, about a decade later, when he started catching, with his large-format view camera and its rectilinear lens (like this one), the hues of those perfect, empty, early-morning streets in Paris. I’ll stretch things here a tad and say that the warming hues of this old first or second surviving photograph are the prefiguring hues of all those Wright interiors not yet born but somehow alive in him all the same. Even on the hottest day of summer, his interiors can make you pine for a crackling fire in a great brick or stone hearth. He made hearths the centerpiece of nearly every home he ever drew. They stood for probity, protection, family security, this from someone who once said, almost blithely: “Is it a quality? Fatherhood? If so, I seemed born without it. And yet a building was a child. I have had the father-feeling, I am sure, when coming back, after a long time, to one of my buildings. That must be the true feeling of fatherhood? But I never had it for my children.” (How did that make them feel?)

Okay, what remarkable sense of self, at least on the surface, but a telltale clue as to the mask part: he hasn’t quite decided what to call himself or how to sign his name. Sometimes it is “F. Wright.” Sometimes it is “F. L. Wright.” Sometimes it is “Frank L. Wright.” And sometimes it is “Frank Ll. Wright,” with the double “l” (a cap and a lowercase) representing the name Lloyd, which is the common name of all his pious, maternal, clannish, prideful, Unitarian, Wisconsin-out-of-Wales people—the “God-Almighty Lloyd Joneses,” as even they like to think of themselves, never mind their semi-disdainful farming neighbors. (It’s the family’s infernal ego and self-righteousness, principally.) But it’s a supposed fact that he was born “Frank Lincoln Wright,” not “Frank Lloyd Wright,” and that his middle name was given to him by his now-spurned father. In any case, he’s in the process of shifting his way of identifying himself, but he hasn’t quite figured it out yet. (Sometimes he has been initialing himself “FLlW.”) The use of Lloyd in his professional life won’t come for almost a decade. It’ll happen as he’s finishing the last set of drawings for one of his early and important transitional houses to his fully arrived Prairie Period. Then he’ll be “Frank Lloyd Wright” for the ages.

A bell is clanging. People are starting to run. Oh, goodness, the provincial’s been in Chicago ten minutes and he’s getting “bridged.” The Wells, one of thirty-five bridges over the river, is swinging out. (The bridge sits on a pier, or piling, and a bridge-master in his little stall makes it pivot lengthwise, parallel to the shore, so that the tall ships can get through.) He locks his knees, holds on, rides it out, takes the swing, and damn if it isn’t kind of fun. From An Autobiography: “Later, I never crossed the river without being charmed by somber beauty.” Moments like that tend to get sealed in muscle memory.

God, he’s starved. Somewhere near Fifth and Randolph, which is five lines deep of horsecars, buggies, hansom cabs, every pedestrian for himself, the drivers larruping their nags with furious swearing, he ducks into a cheap eating joint and gives up seventy cents—ten percent of his entire stake. Back out onto the street, the rain harder now, shivering, drifting south again, no idea where he’ll stay tonight, turning east, coming down Washington Street: the monolith of the courthouse on his

left, the lights of an opera house on his right. It’s the Chicago Opera House, magnificent palace, with its big canopy out front. Beneath the canopy, nearly life-size cutouts of dancers hold their painted colors against the gloom and the wet. He goes in. The booth man tells him the cheapest seats range from a quarter to a buck fifty. (He doesn’t tell us this per se, but the prices are checkable in John J. Flinn’s Standard Guide to Chicago, and it tracks with his narrative.) He parts with a dollar. The performance—it’s a ballet called Sieba—won’t start for an hour. Fine by him, he can dry out. He watches the place assemble. Say this, his deserter of a father gave him the lifelong gift of loving classical music. It’s thrilling listening to an orchestra tune up. Even if this is sentimental music, it’s orchestral music all the same. Suddenly he’s sad. What must his sisters and his sainted mother back in Madison be thinking? His heart is aching for what he’s done. But he wouldn’t not have done it.

Back out onto the street, drifting with the crowd eastward again, to Wabash. He boards a cable car—supposedly he’s never been on a cable car—and takes a seat up front by the grip-man, so he can understand how the thing works. But it’s a short ride: the car is going to the barn for the night. Everybody off. He catches another car, headed back north, assaulted even more by the phantasmagoria of saloons and eateries and dry goods places, all with their signs and lurid lighting. This is the glorious Chicago? He gets a bed at the Briggs House, on Randolph and Fifth, not far from where he’d started out about four hours ago. It’s a good hotel, nothing like a flophouse. His bag’s still at the depot, so he wraps a sheet around himself and surveys himself in the mirror. “A human item—insignificant but big with interior faith and a great hope.” Tomorrow, he’ll attack Chicago.

Which he does, finding a city directory, making a list of firms he’ll call on. In his pocket, after the thinnest breakfast, the thin jangle of three silver dollars and a dime. It’s a Thursday (he doesn’t tell us this, but if you follow the logic of the narrative, it has to be), and the response is the same at every firm he steps into: no drafting work at present, young fellow, try us again down the road, won’t you? Down the road? Don’t they get it? “University man, eh?” a bigwig asks. Would that be Ann Arbor? “No, University of Wisconsin.” As he exits and enters offices, he’s starting to sweat. His feet are killing him in these stupid toothpick lace-ups. Back in Madison, they’d seemed so smart. But he’s not above critiquing for his own amusement the architectural landmarks of the city. There’s the Palmer House, supposedly one of the great palazzo hotels of the west. Looks “like an ugly old, old man whose wrinkles were all in the wrong place.” That night, again at the Briggs, he asks meekly for a cheaper room, and the clerk takes pity with a seventy-five-center nearly as good as the one he paid more than two bucks for last night. Earlier, supper was twenty cents at Kohlsaat’s Bakery, on Clark, a spot he’ll grow to love in all the Chicago years ahead.