Now and again, when I set out to write about some aspect of Agincourt history, it occurs to me to review previous entries for coverage of that topic and the likelihood of duplication—a very real possibility, given that I’ve been writing about this for ten years, more or less. So I apologize for writing again about the Northwest Iowa Traction Co. transit station at the corner of Louisa and South Broad Street.

During my pre-college days I was a huge fan of trolleys, which still ran on Chicago streets when I was much younger. I never rode on the South Shore Line, nor on the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin—respectively serving the south suburbs and those on the far west of the city—but the Chicago, North Shore & Milwaukee was scheduled to cease service in January 1963, so I dutifully rode it as far as Waukegan, I think, some time during early January, just to be able to say that I’d done it. Those trains were packed with rail fans, for precisely the same reason, cameras dangling from neck straps and recording the hell out of the event, as an era of rail transit passed into history—as I, too, will, soon enough. So please pardon another of my many trips down memory lane.

The NITC serving northwestern Iowa communities from Fort Dodge to Storm Lake is patterned, unconsciously, after my CNS&M experience. And its depot in downtown Agincourt grew from several postcard images I have seen of depots throughout the Midwest. Today I ran across a truly stunning example that once stood in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, now sadly gone the way of the dodo.

The street-view card is currently on auction (for $45!) and confirms my contention that the NITC depot would have accommodated a diagonal path for the trains themselves through the building. Buildings of this sort are more common than you might suspect; including not only the passenger ticketing and waiting area, but also the company’s offices and some commercial activity. In the waiting room itself there would certainly have been a news stand and tobacconist and I’d guess that a barber shop might have been somewhere close by. The Wilkes-Barre depot is unusual for allowing cars to park within the building, but also to pass beside its covered trackside platform. Notice that cars could loop for convenient reversal of direction; presumably this was a dead end station.

Some day soon, I should put links here to the other dozen or so entries related to this important Agincourt building. But for the time being, enjoy the Wilkes-Barre images that I’m unlikely to afford.

Two previous entries here dealt with Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstore in Chicago, a favorite hangout on Saturdays when I was fourteen and fifteen. Henry Tabor, shepherd of the art and architecture section on the K&B mezzanine, sold me my first three books about Frank Lloyd Wright, wise investments and books still on my shelves. And while Wright himself is unlikely to have designed a building in Agincourt—he did get as far into Iowa as Mason City, but the whole of Iowa is well seasoned with the Prairie School that Wright initiated. If you need evidence, visit The Prairie School Traveler website and prepare to be swamped with examples.

In addition to Wright, Sullivan and their immediate associates (Walter Burley Griffin, William Drummond, Barry Byrne), there are houses by George Maher and dozens of works by William Steele and a large number of names you’ve never heard. So why not a homegrown Prairie School building, say the country club circa 1908-1910. There are some preliminary sketches in my journals, schemes that started out quite large and gradually shrank to something appropriate for Agincourt’s population at that time. I’m thinking about something half the size of William Drummond’s River Forest Women’s Club.

Frank Lloyd Wright—about whom I’ll be doing an adult education course later this month, or is it April? I forget—probably means a great deal more to me than he does to the majority of students I interact with every day. That’s not a value judgment; just a matter of fact, since he played such a pivotal role in my career choice—or at least the career I had hoped to pursue.

Not only was I fixed on Wright from about the age of fourteen, Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstore in downtown Chicago contributed significantly to that preoccupation. Certainly the most important book I purchased during the late 1950s was Drawings for a Living Architecture, a 1959 production from Horizon Press. Underwritten by the Kaufman family (of Fallingwater fame) as a gift to Wright, I just learned that my $35 purchase had actually cost $75 to print, the difference was their subsidy to produce one of the most lovely books ever published about Wright. But there were two other early acquisition that had a more direct and more immediate influence on my emerging architectural point of view.

My first Wright-focused book was Grant Carpenter Manson’s first volume of a projected three-volume series, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: the first golden age; sadly, volumes two and three never materialized. I recall buying 1910 in 1958 when I was thirteen and still have that copy, though one of its corners was chewed by a dog I once had during my student years at OU. Manson covered the period of Wright’s work most easily available to me: his Prairie style work concentrated in Oak Park, just seven miles north of my home in another nearby suburb. I especially recall Manson’s treatment of the Chicago townhouses Wright designed for Robert Roloson on South Calumet Avenue; I went to see them when that was hardly the safest neighborhood in the city. Roloson and his father-in-law Edward Waller, by the way, were frequent Wright clients during those early years.

Though I’ve not had an opportunity to visit any of the four townhouses, Manson’s reproduction of early black-and-white images inspired me to visit them and that led to yet another Wright book which included fragmentary plans, with sufficient detail to challenge my ability to manipulate architectural space in my head—the split-level interiors are that complex. So my third Wright book was an older one, published in 1940 but still in print: Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s In the Nature of Materials.

Hitchcock—better known as Philip Johnson’s collaborator on the International Style exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art—worked directly with Wright on the book’s writing  and supplementary material, especially a list of projects in the appendix. It was there that I was entranced by a project identified only as “Three Houses for Honoré Jaxon”—ask me about that some time but bring plenty of bourbon.

So by the time I got to high school, the “Wright” shelf in my library had grown to three. And I’m pleased to report that all three are still on my shelves.

One of my usual haunts in downtown Chicago was located at 29 South Wabash, in the shadow of the “L” and not very far from either the Art Institute or the Berghof, where, in my late ‘teens, I now and then had a late lunch when the crowds had thinned a bit. This would have been during the late 1950s, while I was in junior high school. I speak of Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstore.

The Art & Architecture section of Kroch’s was under the watchful eye of an always immaculate Mr Henry Tabor, who stood barely five feet tall, if even that. Mr Tabor didn’t know me but I was clearly recognized by him and taken seriously—even as a teenager; my presence there as a lower middle class kid was never questioned nor was I interrogated about my intentions in his domain. I often heard him take calls from more regular (i.e., actual) patrons—while I was merely a frequent visitor; I had never been a conspicuous customer—and always felt it a badge of honor that I was accepted in those ranks. I searched recently for a photograph of Mr Tabor but was disappointed to find none, except for a brief obituary when he died in 2003. If I’d known of his last illness, it would have been my honor to write him a happy recollection of those Saturday mornings fifty years previous. Next year I will have lived as many years as he had but will leave a retirement and passing far less noble than his. Tabor lives on, not incidentally, in the Agincourt character of Howard Tabor, mild-mannered reporter for a mediocre small-town newspaper in an obscure corner of Iowa, and I genuinely hope he wouldn’t mind.

Drawings for a Living Architecture

One of those Saturdays, in a far corner of Tabor’s mezzanine, behind glass, there was a book new to his stock. I inquired to see it and knew immediately it had to be in my nascent library: a large horizontal format volume titled Frank Lloyd Wright Drawings for a Living Architecture [there may be a colon in there somewhere; I don’t recall] published in 1959 very shortly after Wright’s passing in April of that year, so my discovery must have been some time in the late summer or fall. It was the last book about Wright that was actually supervised by him. The $35 price was far beyond my means, however. So this purchase would have to involve Roy and an advance on my meager allowance. But how to approach dad about such a luxury.

An on-line inflation calculator has just shocked me with the reality of that $35 brought forward to 2018: $298.12 or a cumulative inflation rate of 751.8%. No wonder Roy’s eyebrow was slightly askew. Nevertheless, I was duly issued a twenty, a ten and a five for my return to Kroch’s the following Saturday—with the desperate hope that all Tabor’s stock had not already been exhausted. Would he have held a copy at my request? I wonder.

From sheer curiosity, I searched this morning for information on the volume, which I knew had been produced in limited numbers. Here is what I found from a dealer who had recently sold a copy:

An excellent copy of the Limited First Edition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawings and sketches, the only significant monograph of Wright’s drawings published in color during his lifetime [Wright died the year of its publication]. The book was published at the expense of Edgar Kaufmann Jr. as a gift to Mr. Wright [at a cost of $75 per copy]. Only 2000 copies were published at a retail price of $35. Numerous drawings are herein published for the first time, with several two-page color renderings, presented in Wright’s most famous style. Some of the drawings were executed by Marion Mahony, son Lloyd Wright, and Jack Howe, all superb delineators. The covers & spine are clean & neat, with little visible wear. The Dust Jacket is about as good as it gets; margins nearly perfect, some soiling & yellowing, but much of the original luster & color still fresh & bright; a tiny, tiny near invisible hole in the rear panel; front flap is NOT clipped. The terracotta cloth binding is tight, with the hinges secure; text is clean and crisp throughout. Overall an exemplary copy, a collector’s must have. Considered by many to be a cornerstone of Wright’s literature. Ref: Sweeney #1265. Bookseller Inventory # 001521