The Windermere Hotel
Working on the next article
I’m working on a Herald article focused on the Windermere Hotel though more as a look at the life going on in the grand residential hotels of Hyde Park, of which there were many. The district had sprung up for the 1893 World’s Fair, but it survived and expanded into the early 20th Century.
Most of them were hotels in the sense we’d think of them, but they also offered hotel services—concierge, bellhop, maid, meals (if they had the plan), recreation—to long-term residents. They didn’t have leases, but some of the residents lived for years or even decades in the communities that formed in the hotels.
I loved this 1915 ad for the elegant Hyde Park Hotel that explained why residence in one of the hotels made sense. More inexpensive and more luxurious than keeping house with a small family. Better food—and in the Hyde Park Hotel, the restaurant area had a Tiffany ceiling and fine dining. Hyde Park was quiet and clean, far from the smells, diseases, and coal dust of the Loop, and yet, you were only 10 minutes away on the Illinois Central Railroad with its 200 trains a day.
Many of them could advertise the cool lake breezes and access to the recreation in Jackson Park. The contract with the board of World’s Fair managers had meant that the whole park was at the peak of perfection. Rose gardens, yucca gardens, boating, lawn tennis, golf, horseback trails, dances in the beach pavilion, strolls past the German pavilion and Ho-o-Den, or educational days in the Field Columbian Museum still housed in the crumbling Palace of Fine Arts. It was such an attraction that there was a Jackson Park Hotel Association of the hotels that marketed their access to the park.
The residential hotels were also excellent for professional women. Edna Ferber lived in the Windermere West while writing So Big. Hyde Park’s own prolific and famous novelist Clara Louise Burnham seems to have migrated among several of them. No need to waste time with cooking and housekeeping if that wasn’t your thing!
The first talk I ever gave was a swoop through the history of hotels in Hyde Park:
The Windermere more than others tied itself into the life of the neighborhood. The Hyde Park Travel Club, formed by the women living in the Rosalie Villas, had a twice monthly event of lectures and film about the world that often welcomed the consuls of other lands. The Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce, the Woodlawn Woman’s Club, the Chrysolites, the auxiliaries of various organizations and churches filled the meeting rooms. Every week there was a wedding or a reception in the crystal ballroom.
I was intrigued that it supported the artist colony, which was close by.
Here is a photo showing the studios and small stores along 57th Street that was the last gasp of the artist colony, just a block from Windermere West (leveled in this photo) and Windermere East with the neon sign on it.
The South Side Art association, which worked with Lorado Taft, held gallery shows in Windermere West for its members before the hotel was demolished for urban renewal. They represented the more genteel members of the artist colony, as far as I can tell. After even these stores were demolished and so many of the art dealers had been dispersed, Windermere East, which survived as a hotel for both long-term residents and overnight guests, created a gallery to show a local artist’s work for a week or a month at a time.
One of the artists who lived in the hotel, Babette Kornblith, painted in Costa Rica and Mexico, and had showings in Mexico, New York, and in the Art Institute as part of the Society of Contemporary Artists. She was newsworthy at the time but hard to track down now. She did have an exhibit in the hallways of the Sun Times Building. Here she is in 1959.
I was aware in digging through the archives that there was another artist colony staple supported by the Windermere. There were weekly performances in the Chrystal ballroom in the Windermere East, organized by Mrs. Charles Orchard.
Again, she was famous then, but hard to find out more now (so far anyway!) but it turns out that the Orchard School of Music and Expression was ensconced in the artist colony along Harper Avenue. So here was a weekly opportunity for talented singers and performers to find an audience. It seems to have mostly been classical and operatic.
I like to recover forgotten moments as well as people. One forgotten moment was captured in this photo in 1953.
It was an advertising stunt by Sylvania Flashbulbs. I immediately remembered with fondness my Sylvania Bluedot Flashcube on a little camera I had. What it arranged was a night when the streetlights and traffic were shut off and 1200 super large flash arrays would go off simultaneously with fireworks from the south lawn. The Museum itself, which of course at the time was both free and working with commercial enterprises to support its mission, was gungho. They posted their photographers on top of the Windermere Hotel as one of the few locations to capture the 1/4 mile wide show. Model Camera, the shop in town, offered prizes for the best amateur capture of the night, recommending they go for human interest shots. The Museum promised to put the best on show inside.
Over 3000 photographers--amateur and professional--showed up on the front lawn to try their hand at photographing the show. Unfortunately, in person, it all looked rather disappointing. Afterwards, Sylvania explained that things look different to the camera than the human eye.
This after all is a lovely image. I was lucky after reading about the event to discover that Geoffrey Baer had been asked about it and even had found this image: https://news.wttw.com/2019/11/06/ask-geoffrey-big-shot-museum-science-and-industry
The Windermere is a gorgeous part of Hyde Park. So glad it has survived!
Fun to read this rich history! Thank you!