A collection of monument-sized limestone Art Deco animal sculptures designed by Chicago artist Edgar Miller are being re-installed at the former Jane Addams Homes — in the same playground courtyard they originally occupied 85 years ago.
But an unfunny thing happened as the restored sculptures made their way back to the forum: The largest of the seven sculptures — a fanciful 20,000-pound depiction of a ram with other animals nestled against it — cracked during installation Thursday afternoon and is now being repaired.
“We always knew there would be a risk,” said Lisa Yun Lee, executive director of the National Public Housing Museum, the institution that’s expected to open next year in a now-renovated surviving section of the old Addams public housing complex, 1322 W. Taylor St.
“But I’m not daunted,” she said. “It’s just, ‘OK, we weren’t expecting this as a hurdle and now it’s here.’ “
A courtyard where kids can play
Restoring the sculptures and returning them to their historic spot in the former Addams homes Animal Court is a bit of a coup for the new museum, where they’ll likely be a popular attraction and provide fond memories for the now-grown-up kids who played in and around the big stone animals.
The Rev. Marshall Hatch Sr., senior pastor of New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in the West Garfield Park neighborhood, told me last year he played softball around the Animal Court as a child in the Addams Homes in the 1960s.
He said the ram was home base. Other animals in the court included a buffalo, a lion, sheep, a bear and a bull.
“I’ve always thought about what it meant to go around through the animal kingdom, and then come back and touch home base,” Hatch said. “It was a metaphor for how that project development felt like: home.”
The Addams homes, along with the North Side’s Julia C. Lathrop Homes and Trumbull Park Homes on the Southeast Side, are Chicago’s first three public housing projects, all built in 1938.
The federally-funded New Deal Era developments were all humanely designed low- and mid-rise brick buildings with gardens and open areas — a far cry from the bleak public housing towers such as those at Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor that were built 20 years later.
Holabird & Root designed Addams homes and brought in Miller to create the Animal Court.
Miller, whose stained glass and other artistic works often featured abstract animals, used the same motif to design what he envisioned as a whimsical open place for children and residents.
“Edgar Miller always said ‘I want a courtyard where kids can play,’ ” Lee said.
A team of sculptors, artisans and union workers carved the sculpture out of limestone blocks right there in the places where they would stand.
“It’s like building a ship,” said Zac Bleicher, founder and executive director of Edgar Miller Legacy, a group devoted to the preservation and study of the artist’s work. “No one person does it.”
The animals remained in their court for nearly nine decades. But weather, time and generations of kids climbing on them exacted a toll.
Addams was closed in 2003 and much of it demolished under the Chicago Housing Authority’s massive Plan for Transformation.
And by then, the CHA built near Addams the Robert Brooks Homes, Loomis Courts and the Grace Abbott Homes, and administered them together as ABLA Homes.
A group led by resident Deverra Beverly, who chaired ABLA’s Local Advisory Council and was a CHA commissioner, came up with the idea to save an Addams building and turn it into a museum while preserving the Animal Court.
Beverly died in 2013.
Animal cracker?
The animal sculptures returned to the Taylor Street last week after almost 20 years of being in storage, then restored by Andrzej Dajnowski, founder of Conservation of Sculpture and Objects Studio, located in Forest Park.
“Twenty years ago, people were uncertain if they could be saved,” Bleicher said. ‘Are they really going to make it?’ “
Indeed, they are. Dajnowski and his team resculpted missing and worn parts and made sure the repairs matched the original portions of the artwork.
And all was well until Thursday.
That’s when the ram sculpture sat on ice that would melt and slowly lower the heavy sculpture into place. The artwork ended up cracking under its own weight in the process.
“Everyone was standing nearby and thought it was the ice [cracking] and then realized it was the actual sculpture,” Lee said.
But all is not lost. Dajnowski and his workers will now begin the painstaking process of securing the piece by inserting steel rods, erect a heated tent around the sculpture, then repair the crack.
“I think a solution has been found,” Lee said. “And now Andrzej is an animal doctor.”
Lee Bey is architecture critic for the Sun-Times and appears on ABC7 News Chicago. He is also a member of the Editorial Board.
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