Marion Mahony Griffin is the subject of a recent post at designslinger. Marion Mahony (1871-1962), who married Walter Burley Griffin, was Chicago born and graduated from MIT in 1894. She went to work for Frank Lloyd Wright in 1895 and was one of his premiere designers. She was his first employee and the first woman to be officially licensed as an architect. For more information see The Magic of America from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Dumpsite is posting an email they received from Preservation Chicago regarding the sale of the Richard Nickel house at 1810 W. Cortland in Bucktown. Let's hope a buyer who is sensitive to Nickel's legacy will step forward. (Photo from the Save the Nickel House website.)
One of the items on my historical Chicago wish-I'd-been-there list is hearing Mark Beaubien play the fiddle at the Sauganash. Paul Tyler, of the Old Town School of Folk Music, wrote a piece on Chicago fiddlers last year titled, What in the World? A Fiddle Club for Chicago. Great piece and full of juicy historical nuggets. The Beaubiens are still a prominent family in Chicago. Just for fun, you might also enjoy the September, 1888 New York Times article, MARK BEAUBIEN'S WIFE. It seems she was quite the fiery femme.
Phillip Armour sure knew how to get around the Stockyards! A little about Mr. Armour...
"He pays six or seven millions of dollars yearly in wages," writes Arthur Warren in an interesting article in McClure's Magazine, February, 1894, "owns four thousand railway cars, which are used in transporting his goods, and has seven or eight hundred horses to haul his wagons. Fifty or sixty thousand persons receive direct support from the wages paid in his meatpacking business alone, if we estimate families on the census basis. He is a larger owner of grain-elevators than any other individual in either hemisphere; he is the proprietor of a glue factory, which turns out a product of seven millions of tons a year; and he is actively interested in an important railway enterprise."
He manages his business with great system, and knows from his heads of departments, some of whom he pays a salary of $25,000 yearly, what takes place from day to day in his various works. He is a quiet, self-centred man, a good listener, has excellent judgment, and possesses untiring energy.
"All my life," he says, "I have been up with the sun. The habit is as easy at sixty-one as it was at sixteen; perhaps easier, because I am hardened to it. I have my breakfast at half-past five or six; I walk down town to my office, and am there by seven, and I know what is going on in the world without having to wait for others to come and tell me. At noon I have a simple luncheon of bread and milk, and after that, usually, a short nap, which freshens me again for the afternoon's work. I am in bed again at nine o'clock every night."
Mr. Armour thinks there are as great and as many opportunities for men to succeed in life as there ever have been. He said to Mr. Warren: " There was never a better time than the present, and the future will bring even greater opportunities than the past. Wealth, capital, can do nothing without brains to direct it. It will be as true in the future as it is in the present that brains make capital — capital does not make brains. The world does not stand still. Changes come quicker now than they ever did, and they will come quicker and quicker. New ideas, new inventions, new methods of manufacture, of transportation, new ways to do almost everything, will be found as the world grows older; and the men who anticipate them, and who are ready for them, will find advantages as great as any their fathers or grandfathers have had."
From: Famous Givers and Their Gifts By Sarah Knowles Bolton (1896)
1 comment:
Marion Mahony Griffin was amazing - I read about her, of all places, in Bill Bryson's book on Australia - she and Walter did the drawings for Canberra when it was being planned.
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