Artists and Patrons at The Cliff Dwellers Club

Poems While You Wait

In Hyde Park, there is a distant memory of the “starving” Artist Colony along 57th Street that was destroyed by urban renewal, but few remember the well-heeled, well-connected artist colony gathered around Lorado Taft. The lasting influences of the 57th Street colony are the Hyde Park Art Center and the 57th Street Art Fair. The lasting influence of Taft seems to be the Cliff Dwellers Club, still going strong on the top of the Borg Warner building on Michigan Avenue. I got to check it out—and their spectacular view—this week at their Holiday Tea.

I only recently realized how the club had emerged out of the South Side art scene. I’d discovered in researching my talk on the early Hyde Park years of Frank Lloyd Wright that he’d been a founding member. He was expelled one year later when he became a scandal after seeking a larger artistic life with the woman he called his soul mate, Mamah Cheney.

The Cliff Dwellers Club was the brainchild of writer Hamlin Garland. He was married to Lorado Taft’s sister Zulime and lived not far away from the Midway Studios complex at 6427 S. Greenwood Avenue. He was a successful novelist but is best remembered for his memoir of growing up on the frontier. It’s interestingly anti-mythic. His family went a move too far. Here’s Hamlin holding one of his books over the club fireplace.

A lot of the founders were South Siders. Louis Sullivan had been living in Kenwood. The architects, Pond & Pond, had deep ties in Hyde Park. The original home of the club was the top of Orchestra Hall, designed by Daniel Burnham (Uncle Dan to Wright) in 1904. The interior was designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw.

The club moved in 1995 to the Borg Warner building. It changed in other ways. It didn’t allow women, not even Harriet Monroe or Jane Addams or any of the women sculptors who were part of the Midway Studios. It didn’t change that rule until 1984. It wasn’t for starving artists. They expelled Louis Sullivan around the time they threw out Wright. Sullivan was drinking heavily and sliding into obscurity. They seem to have allowed him to use the club later to write his memoir.

They celebrate him now with a few fragments of instantly recognizable Sullivan decoration across from the elevators. They also have an image of Wright’s mile-high spire, though they seem to have forgotten he was a founder.

Garland insisted that 2/3 of the membership be people active in the arts. The other 1/3 were patrons of the arts. There’s some of their memorabilia in the new digs as well. Near the elevators there’s the mounted head of a water buffalo that Mayor Carter Harrison II shot. He was a member who protected the club and its desire for a convivial drink during Prohibition.

The andirons in the new fireplace were donated by patron Glessner, of Glessner House, who was a patron/member/founder. A great hearth was a feature of the old club. At the club’s inauguration, they burned driftwood sent by other arts clubs, the Tavern Club of Boston and the Bohemian Club of San Francisco. It’s a cheery gas fire now.

There’s apparently some current debate about where the name comes from. The club’s first name was The Attic. Most of the founders were familiar with the Cliff-Dwellers exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which recreated the Anasazi ruins in staff, but far more of them knew Henry Blake Fuller’s bestselling 1893 novel, the Cliff Dwellers, a caustic look at the city—its capitalists, its hustle, its unwashed immigrants. The novel’s protagonist worked on the top floor of a skyscraper modelled after the Monadnock Building. Fuller was invited to join but turned them down. Apparently, over the years, the club forgot the novel or perhaps recoiled from it. Some accounts talk about a member’s travels to Arizona, but, aside from the clear memory of where the name came from presented in Irving Pond’s autobiography, I think the poem Hamlin Garland wrote about the club shows it was Fuller’s novel they had in mind. The club was a refuge from the world Fuller portrayed:

“Down in the city’s deeps we meet in savage fashion,

And play as best we may the selfish, sordid game,”

But after hours and up in the Cliff Dwellers:

“Man greets his fellow man, and only then remembers,

Art’s magic bond of light, and beauty’s bloodless stain.”

Poems While You Wait

Speaking of poetry, one of the wonderful features of the Holiday Tea was the presence of Poems While You Wait

As their post on Instagram says, “Poeming While People Waited at the Cliff Dwellers Club Holiday Tea! With @01saratonin & Kathleen Rooney & @dandelion.tea.art & @sweetest.teeth !”

There, handed a random topic, on the spur of the moment, they produced wonderful words. Here’s the poem that Ola Faleti created for me on the theme of Chicago history. I treasure it!

And Liz Bajjalieh was psychic because I was the guest of my friend Jane Comiskey. She lets me putter in her yard maintaining her garden. When Jane asked for a poem on the theme of friends, Liz wrote this:

Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle

Kathleen Rooney, the poet in green, has written a novel about Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle, which has me so excited. I tried to explain, but I realized I couldn’t convey how special my memory was of the castle. The first time we were in Chicago, my parents and I killed a little time in the Museum of Science and Industry. My mother, who found it so very hard to show emotion, ran to find me, to drag me to see the fairy castle, which she, growing up on a struggling dairy farm in upstate New York, had dreamed of as a child. It was a rare and special moment for the two of us because I totally got it as we walked around listening to Moore’s breathless descriptions.

Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle deserves a newsletter of its own—but put January 27 on your calendars. Kathleen Rooney will be at the Museum to talk about her novel.