Rising from the dust

This would have been a terrible year for Richard Nickel, the legendary photographer and architectural preservationist obsessed with the work of Louis Sullivan (and his partner Dankmar Adler). We’ve lost three Adler & Sullivan buildings to fire in 2006—the Pilgrim Baptist Church, the Dexter Building and a wood-frame house on the North Side. But at least we understand these are losses; we have a greater awareness about our architectural legacy and we owe that, in large part, to Nickel.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Chicago demolished such gems as Henry Ives Cobb’s Federal Building and Adler & Sullivan’s Garrick Theater. Nickel raced around Chicago documenting the structures before their destruction, and he became just as obsessed with salvaging the architectural ornamentation he encountered in the wreckages. (That stash is housed at the museum on the Southern Illinois University campus.)

His efforts ended up costing him his life: In 1972, Nickel was found dead in the ruins of Adler & Sullivan’s Stock Exchange Building. He had gone to collect some decorative ironwork when a stairwell in the building collapsed on him.

Richard Cahan told the story of Nickel’s life in the 1995 book They All Fall Down, and now with the images in Richard Nickel’s Chicago—many of which have never before been printed—Cahan lets us see the endangered city that Nickel tried so desperately to capture.

Nickel started taking photography courses in 1948 at the Institute of Design (now part of IIT), which boasted the great instructors Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Nickel’s training was interrupted by a second tour of Army duty, but he picked up where he left off and he took classes from both of the instructors when he returned. It was a class assignment for Siskind that set the foundation of his life’s work: The project involved photographing all of the known Sullivan buildings in 1954—estimated at about 100.

Nickel took the job so seriously that he discovered 38 additional buildings that had escaped inventory. At some point, Nickel became more than just a passive documentarian and stepped into the role of activist. When the Loop’s Garrick Theater was set to be torn down in 1960, he did more than take 200 images of the interior and exterior; he collected 3,300 signatures protesting the demolition. He lost—or rather, we lost—but next time you pass Second City on Wells Street, you can see a fragment of the loggia incorporated into the entrance.

Because of Nickel’s spectacular death, we know about his architectural images. But in this book we also get to see his social landscapes. Nickel took portraits of people on the streets and in places like Riverview Park, an amusement park on the North Side that was demolished in 1967. We see his humanism in such images as the poignant shot of a boy sitting on a suitcase in Union Station, and we see his artistry in his abstractions of car lights on Lake Shore Drive.

But above all, through page after page in this collection, we see the one thing that made Nickel such an important photographer: his passion for this city and its inhabitants.

Richard Nickel’s Chicago: Photographs of a Lost City (Cityfiles Press, $39.95) is available now.