New architecture tour details Jewish contributions

10 North Dearborn is the site of the now-defunct Covenant House, a Jewish social club. Its architect, Walter Ahlschlager, was a Jewish Chicagoan whose family was from Germany. (Photo credit: Dan Spiegel)

Many Chicagoans are aware that the Target store at the corner of State and Madison streets in the city’s downtown commercial district was home to the now-defunct Carson Pirie Scott & Co. department store. 

But they probably don’t know that Carson’s was not the original retail giant in that grand Art Nouveau edifice. That distinction belonged to Schlesinger and Mayer, a dry-goods merchant founded in the 1870s by two German Jewish immigrants, Leopold Schlesinger and David Mayer.  

They commissioned the architecture firm of Adler and Sullivan—Dankmar Adler, a German-born son of a rabbi, and Louis Sullivan—to refurbish the great emporium in the late 1890s.  

That piece of architectural history, along with many other illuminating nuggets, is recounted during the Jewish Builders of Chicago walking tour, one of the newest offerings of the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC), a nonprofit organization offering urban walking tours for more than five decades. 

The brainchild behind the tour is Dan Spiegel, a five-year CAC docent, whose proposal for the tour took several years to reach approval. After finding out last year that it was one of two new tours accepted for development, Spiegel spent the better part of nine months taking a deep dive into both Chicago’s architectural and Jewish history to craft a 90-minute walking tour that, in his words, “tells the story of the people behind every building: the architects, businesspeople, and people who use the building.” 

Spiegel said he has also striven to showcase the “heritage story of immigration,” detailing how German Jews and, later, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and their sons and daughters, “leveraged their connections to advance their careers” in architecture. 

Finally, Spiegel wanted to remind those on his tour of the vast contributions that Jewish architects have made “to our skyline and neighborhoods”—not just Adler, but also Alfred Alschuler (London House), Bertrand Goldberg (Marina City), Stanley Tigerman (Lake Street Self Park, shaped like the front grille of a Rolls-Royce), Frank Gehry (Millenium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion and pedestrian bridge), and Jerrold Loebl and Norman Schlossman (they worked with non-Jewish colleague Richard March Bennett on the Loop Synagogue), among countless others. 

Tour participants will not only stop to admire many of these buildings and learn their back stories, but they’ll also have an opportunity to hear about lesser-known Jewish building leaders, like structural engineer Eli Cohen, “who came up with a cost-effective method of merging a steel frame construction with concrete.” One example of Cohen’s achievements on the Jewish Builders tour is the award-winning 77 West Wacker Drive, a 51-story skyscraper. 

Another architectural achievement included on the tour is Millenium Park’s Cloud Gate, commonly referred to as “The Bean,” the stainless-steel sculpture serving as the venue’s centerpiece. Many think of Anish Kapoor, its creator, as a British artist of Hindu and Indian extraction, Spiegel said, but they overlook that his mother was an Iraqi Jew, his maternal grandfather was a cantor, and Kapoor himself spent time in Israel. 

Though not an architect, Spiegel, a member of Anshe Emet Synagogue in Lakeview, works in a related field: commercial real estate. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and studying in Israel for several years, he earned a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

When he and his family have found themselves traveling around the country and abroad, he said, they have availed themselves of historical and architectural walking tours to gain a greater understanding of the locales they’re visiting. While growing up in and around Pasadena, Calif., Spiegel added, he admired the Craftsman homes of Greene and Greene and other architectural gems. 

His abiding interests in Jewish history, urban demography, and architecture all come together in his Jewish Builders tour. 

To schedule the tour or learn more about it, visit: architecture.org/city-tours/jewish-builders-of-chicago. 

Robert Nagler Miller is a journalist and editor who writes frequently about arts and Jewish-related topics from his home in New York