Bootleg Homes of Frank Lloyd Wright, The: His Clandestine Work Revealed

By Bob Hartnett

Uncover the secret Chicago laboratory of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style. Before Frank Lloyd Wright officially launched America's most famous architectural career, he was designing the building blocks of his legendary prairie style on the side. In violation of his contract with his employers, Adler and Sullivan, Wright moonlighted as an independent architect from his Oak Park studio. From 1892 through the spring of 1893, he experimented with the elements that would become his signature in houses in Chicago, La Grange and Oak Park. The full roster of these "bootleg homes" has remained a matter of mystery and debate. Robert Hartnett seeks to provide the first definitive account of the hidden artifacts of Wright's storied legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781439678251

Bob Hartnett

Bob Hartnett has had a lifelong interest in Frank Lloyd Wright's work--he found it interesting that this world-renowned architect began his career in Chicago. Hartnett has been a member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust as a tour guide at two of the most iconic buildings Wright created during his Oak Park years, namely the Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio and Unity Temple. Hartnett lives in the Chicago suburbs, where he and his wife, Lin, raised their two children.

Book preview

Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC

www.historypress.com

Copyright © 2023 by Robert J. Hartnett

All rights reserved

Front cover, center left: Blueprint courtesy of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York).

First published 2023

E-Book edition 2023

ISBN 978.1.43967.825.1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951596

Print Edition ISBN 978.1.46715.406.2

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

boot‧leg‧ger (noun): a person who makes, distributes, or sells goods illegally

—Oxford Languages

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PRELUDE

1825 TO1866: WILLIAM C. WRIGHT AND HIS NOMADIC LIFE

1863 TO1888: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S FORMATIVE YEARS

1886 TO1887: APPRENTICESHIP WITH JOSEPH LYMAN SILSBEE

Unity Chapel, Spring Green, Wisconsin

J.L. Cochrane Edgewater Subdivision, Lakeview, Illinois

Unitarian Chapel, Sioux City, Iowa

Hillside Home School, Spring Green, Wisconsin

Helena Valley Residence No. 1, Spring Green, Wisconsin

Helena Valley Residence No. 2, Spring Green, Wisconsin

1. 1888: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT JOINS THE FIRM OF HIS MENTOR

2. 1891 TO 1893: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S BOOTLEG PHASE

THE CHICAGO HOMES

Berry/MacHarg House

George Blossom Home

Warren McArthur Home

Dr. Allison W. Harlan Home

THE LA GRANGE HOMES

Henry Cooper Project

Robert G. Emmond Home

W. Irving Clark House

Peter Goan House

THE OAK PARK HOMES

Thomas H. Gale and Robert P. Parker Homes

Charles E. Roberts Project

Walter H. Gale House

Francis J. Woolley House

3. 1893: THE YEAR OF TRANSFORMATION

EPILOGUE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Introduction

When someone hears the phrase Chicago bootlegger, they might conjure up images of Al Capone, the man who controlled most of Chicago’s illegal liquor trade during the Roaring Twenties.

People might not readily think of Frank Lloyd Wright as a bootlegger; they will likely remember the grand Prairie-style houses he designed, or the summer home for Edgar Kaufmann called Falling Water or even Taliesin or Taliesin West.

The homes that Wright nicknamed his bootleg commissions were completed in the early 1890s, almost twenty-seven years before the real Chicago bootleggers were making headlines for their exploits. Capone, his friends, and his rivals were glorified in newspaper headlines; Capone thought of himself as a modern-day Robin Hood, even though J. Edgar Hoover had placed him at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Maybe Frank Lloyd Wright liked to suggest he, too, was a well-dressed socialite, able to come and go as he pleased, hobnobbing with the rich and famous of the day and being the center of attention regardless of the circumstances, just like those speakeasy gangsters.

I have tried to present the information contained herein with as much accuracy as possible. We must keep in mind that there has been some confusion as to the dates of Wright’s early commissions and some of the events that occurred in his life.

To address the misunderstandings regarding the dates given to Wright’s commissions, the reader must be aware of four points that are linked to Wright’s early career.

(1) Some projects were dated to the time when drawings were first commissioned, while others have been dated to the time the buildings were constructed.

(2) Building permits for Wright’s early commission were never issued or have been lost or destroyed.

(3) Some commissions have been given an identification number from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, even though the project is also included in the catalog of works of Adler & Sullivan; and finally,

(4) Neither Frank Lloyd Wright nor the people who were the first ones to place his works in chronological order were exempt from human error.

John O. Holzhueter addressed the issue of how the determinations for the original dates of Wright’s work were chronicled in his 1988 article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History.

I think Holzhueter’s comments on this issue are well articulated, and I include an excerpt from his article here:

Wright was a busy man, preoccupied with work and the necessity of meeting professional and financial obligations.

This sentence is straightforward; it does not contain any ambiguities. The same cannot be said for the following sentence, which reads as follows (emphasis mine):

His chronologies and dates went askew, not because of some overall plot (though there may be exceptions), but simply because he and others forgot details or reshaped them along the lines of long-held impressions and faulty recollections.

The second sentence gives not just one phrase that raises suspicion, but five. Dates went askew: this phrase suggests that dates were mistakenly recorded out of order. The phrase though there may be exceptions implies that misdating may have been done on purpose. The last three emphasized comments—Wright and others forgot details or reshaped them, and there were faulty recollections—all point to someone(s) involvement in publishing dates that were inaccurate.

Other authors have tried to label which commissions were thought to have been bootleg designs, but these authors have not included all the commissions from this phase of Wright’s career, or they have included commissions that, at the time, may have been suspected to have been bootleg commissions but since have had the dates of the project revised to place them either prior to the time Wright’s bootleg phase began or after the phase was over.

The only database that lists all of Wright’s work, including both built and unbuilt commissions, is the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. One book that uses the data from Wright’s archives to list his commissions is the book by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Peter Goessel, Frank Lloyd Wright. Complete Works. Vol. 1, 1885–1916.

Based on the research completed, I will try to determine which of the fourteen commissions from 1890 through 1894 that have been proposed as bootlegs deserve to be labeled as such.

To present the material discussed in this book in a sensible order, I have listed the commissions and projects by location (Chicago, Illinois; La Grange, Illinois; Oak Park, Illinois) and then by the number assigned to the work by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, which are held at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York.

Wright may have created the numbering system himself, or it may have been the formula provided by the University of Wisconsin’s Engineering Department for dating documents. As we will come to find out, Wright was enrolled at this university for two semesters, in 1885 and 1886.

Wright’s first three recorded drawings are from his time as a college student. His first recorded drawing is numbered 8501.01. The number 85 stands for the year 1885. The number 01 references the project number for that year. The number .01 stands for the number of drawings done for a particular project.

Wright rarely included on his plan sheets which month during a particular year a commission was (1) received, (2) begun or (3) completed. For these dates, other sources must be researched, including trade journals, where projects were announced; newspaper articles that reported on real estate transactions and construction news; and correspondence between a client and the architect, if available.

Very often, there is no empirical evidence of the exact date of a commission. In these cases, family archives or personal histories may need to be consulted.

The numbering system used in the volume for the works of Adler & Sullivan is derived from the same classification numbers used in the book titled The Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan, written by Richard Nickel and Aaron Siskind with help from John Vinci and Ward Miller, published by the Richard Nickol Committee in 2010.

Today, the numbers for Wright’s collection of drawings have had another decimal place added. Therefore, the correct number for Wright’s first drawing is now considered to be 8501.001.

For the commissions being reviewed here, only the primary four-digit numbers will be listed, unless one of a collection of drawn documents includes pertinent information. The Frank Lloyd Wright archives uses the word project to identify unbuilt work; wherever possible, I have tried to use this definition also.

To put Wright’s bootleg phase in the context of Wright’s employment, our review should begin when he was first employed by Adler & Sullivan in 1887. However, as we will see, there are instances prior to 1887 when Wright names himself as a draftsman when he was only an office clerk and when he titles himself as an architect when he was just a draftsman.

In 1897, Illinois became the first state in the Union to establish a licensing act for architects; prior to that time, anyone designing buildings in Illinois could call themselves an architect. Wright was not saying anything that was not true per se; it is just that his employer may not have given him the same title.

Prelude

1825 TO 1866

William C. Wright and His Nomadic Life

William C. Wright was not a genius like his son, but his journeyman compositions are not without their earnest charms.

—Ken Emerson, commenting on the record album of works composed by William C. Wright

William C. Wright, the man who would become Frank Lloyd Wright’s father, was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1825, where his father was a Baptist minister. Westfield is located one hundred miles southwest of Boston, Massachusetts, near the city of Springfield. His future wife, Permelia, was also born in 1825, to Albern and Elizabeth Holcomb. She was raised on her parents’ farm in Herkimer County, New York. William and Permelia met in Utica, New York, where William was teaching music after graduating college. It was from here that William and Permelia Wright began their nomadic and—yet unknown to them—tragic family life. In the mid-1800s, the infant mortality rate in the United States was near 22 percent, and this heartbreaking truth did not escape the Wright family. Their first child was born and subsequently died on May 23, 1854, while the couple was living in Hartford, Connecticut. The family had moved to Hartford so William could study law. He was sustaining the family on the meager income he achieved from teaching piano lessons and passing the hat at the sermons he provided at various lecture halls. It was said that William had a commanding presence, and when he spoke on the ways of the Lord, people listened.

William Wright.

Permelia Wright. Courtesy of the William C. Wright Collection, State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City, and Hope Rogers.

The Wrights’ second and third children, both sons—Charles, born in 1854, and George, born in 1856—survived to adulthood. Charles was born while the family was still living in Hartford, which can be found on the west side of the Connecticut River. By the time George was born, the family had moved to East Hartford, located on the opposite side of the river. William must have been persuaded by the news from America’s western frontier as he and other young families began to leave the comforts of eastern cities to become pioneers in what was to become a wave of western expansion.

In 1860, William moved his wife and their small family west, first to Iowa, where they came to stay in the town of Bell Plaine. On their travels west, Permelia was found to be with child again, and on the tenth of July, their daughter Elizabeth Amelia was born.

The family did not stay long in Iowa; soon, they were off to Lone Rock, Wisconsin, where the family