Lost Chicago - Softcover

David Garrard Lowe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823028712 ISBN 13: 9780823028719

Publisher: Watson-Guptill, 2000

Synopsis

30th Anniversary

These dazzling, poignant pages recreate the magical built environment that thrilled generations of Chicago residents and visitors alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of “progress.”

Here are the grand residences and hotels, opulent theaters, legendary trains, and state-of-the-art office buildings and department stores—including the world’s first skyscraper. Here too are the famous convention halls, parks, and racetracks of a great American city whose architectural treasures have been, and continue to be, recklessly squandered.

Rare photographs and prints, many of them published here for the first time, document the transformative architectural achievements of such giants as Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, John Wellburn Root, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, and Frank Lloyd Wright. But this remarkable book is much more than a portfolio of now-vanished buildings; within its pages are evocative sketches of scores of Chicago personalities, from the world-famous (Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Dreiser, Clarence Darrow, Ben Hecht, Jane Addams, Cyrus McCormick, George Pullman, and Gustavus Swift, to name just a few) to the locally notorious.

About this title

About the Author:

David Garrard Lowe, the author of Stanford White’s New York, Beaux Arts New York, and Art Deco New York (Watson-Guptill, 2001), lectures freqently at the Smithsonian in Washington, the American Adademy in Rome, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in his home city, New York.

Review:

“Lost Chicago is more than just another coffee table gift, more than merely a history of the city’s architecture; it is a history of the whole city as a cultural creation.”

(Mark Smith New York Times Book Review)

"Lowe's book excels on its visual ground: page after page of gilded hotels, lovely parks, grand mansions and smashing restaurants, all vanished. . . . But there is more here than simple nostalgia, reinforced by mouth-watering photographs. There is also the real story of Chicago architecture, very different from the one we have been fed in textbooks and college survey courses."—Newsweek (Douglas Davis Newsweek)

About this edition

• Publisher: Watson-Guptill
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0823028712
• ISBN 13: 9780823028719
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 261