Chicago’s fine old buildings were falling like dominoes in the 1960s and 1970s, as the works of Louis Sullivan, the Victorian manses on old Prairie Avenue and other treasures were senselessly wrecked and removed for the sake of progress.
But author, preservationist and historian David Garrard Lowe sounded the alarm as bulldozers rolled over the city’s world-famous architecture.
His 1975 book “Lost Chicago” became a battle hymnal of the city’s nascent preservation movement, showing the glorious buildings that were callously pulled down, and chastising the policymakers and developers behind the destruction.
“The people who should really be outraged are the ordinary Chicagoans, the people who live in it, shop in it, work in it,” Lowe told the Sun-Times in 2000 when the book received a major update. “These are the people who are losing their history.”
Lowe died Sept. 21 in Manhattan. He was 91.
With its evocative photos and prose of long-gone buildings, such as Henry Ives Cobb’s Beaux Arts-styled downtown federal building that was demolished in 1965, “Lost Chicago” became a staple on bookshelves and coffee tables across the city.
“When Lost Chicago was first published … city leaders were still seeing the Loop through an urban renewal lens,” said Landmarks Illinois President and CEO Bonnie McDonald. “Lost Chicago was also a warning of what our city would be if the bulldozer prevailed, [and it was] an awakening that ended the apathy around the Loop’s incremental destruction.”
Thomas Dyja, author of “The Third Coast: When Chicago Built The American Dream,” said Lost Chicago taught him that writing about city history “wasn’t a matter of ‘then and now.’ It was about layers and excavating it all, recreating those worlds and times. No one was better at it than David Lowe.”
Lowe wrote other books, such as “Chicago Interiors” and “Stanford White’s New York.” He also championed preservation causes around the country, particularly in New York.
Meanwhile, he kept his keen eye and sharp tongue focused on Chicago. In a 2000 Sun-Times interview, he said Water Tower Place, at 845 N. Michigan Ave., “is the most expensive ugly building in the world. They tell me [the exterior] is marble, but I think it’s contact paper.”
About the then-new Museum of Contemporary Art, at 220 E. Chicago Ave: “I wouldn’t use the word ‘fascist,’ but it’s imperial. You can’t even tell it’s a museum. It looks like a police station in Kuala Lumpur.”
Chicago can be thankful for its wealth of classic architecture. And we should thank Lowe — and those who have fought to protect these buildings — as well.
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com
Get Opinions content delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.
More about the Sun-Times Editorial Board at chicago.suntimes.com/about/editorial-board