Uptown Broadway Builing and Walter Ahlschlager

Legend of the North Side

By Eve M. Kahn

Unverifiable legends persist about the Uptown Broadway Building on Chicago’s North Side. Al Capone allegedly built the place and ran a speakeasy in its basement, which extends deep below the Broadway sidewalks. But the truths about the Uptown Broadway are as interesting as the tales.

The Spanish Baroque 1926 building is engulfed in terra cotta depicting rams, musical instruments, military trophies, garlands, volutes, Medusas, fruit, fringed curtains and tasseled ropes. The roofline bristles with urns and Poseidons, and the building’s triangular footprint, which backs onto the Red Line elevated tracks, narrows to an improbable 9-in.-wide point.

The Uptown’s now-underappreciated architect, Walter W. Ahlschlager (1887-1965), was prolific and charismatic. He ran offices in Chicago, New York and Dallas, working in a variety of Classical Revival modes (and after World War II, he segued gamely into curtain-wall Modernism). His 1920s masterworks are as high profile as Cincinnati’s Carew Tower, Manhattan’s Roxy and Beacon theaters, and Chicago’s InterContinental hotel...

Read complete article at Traditional Building

The Last Northern Frontier

I stumbled across this today, an article in an online magazine called Jargon Chicago about the Uptown neighborhood:

Idiot Soldier at the Last Northern Frontier

by Andrew Reilly

When Thadeus Wong bought the Uptown Broadway Building for a cool $1.1 million in 2003, he probably wasn't thinking about the perpetual mystery he was about to foist onto a part of town that for so long has wondered when it was going to get a taste of that sweet, sweet municipal facelift going on everywhere else. He probably wasn't anticipating the legends that would eventually spring forth from the bookstore set to open across the street, nor was it likely he was licking his chops over the $4 million the city would later hand over to cover the cost of the seemingly endless renovation of that hulk at 4707 N. Broadway...

Read the rest at Jargon Chicago.