99% Invisible - 90- Strowger and Purple Reign Redux

Episode Date: October 3, 2013

If you are an undertaker in 1878 Kansas City, and you learn that your competitor’s wife works as a telephone switchboard operator and has been diverting business calls meant for you to her husband, you have a few potential courses … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. We have a little different episode for you today. We have two stories. The first is an update to the purple hotel story that was episode number 58 reported by Gwen Maxi. There have been some significant changes since we reported that story. So we wanted to update you on that. But first, I have a short story that I performed live on the radio, on KLW and San Francisco, very, very early in the morning,

but I've never released it as a podcast, so I thought I'd share that one with you today. Here we go. Oman Brownstrother was an undertaker of all things. Kansas City, Missouri got its first telephone exchange in 1878. Telephone service is good for local business, and the funeral business is no exception. But at some point, Almond Brown Stroger of Kansas City noticed that he wasn't getting as many calls from potential customers. He got really suspicious when a friend of the family died and he wasn't getting as many calls from potential customers.

He got really suspicious when a friend of the family died and he wasn't even called about performing the funeral services. The story goes, and the story is really hard to verify, but I'm going to go with it because I really like it. The story goes that after some poking around, Stroger discovered that the wife of a rival undertaker in the area was an operator for the local telephone company. At the time, telephones were connected manually by female operators patching lines together

on a gigantic punchboard. Someone would pick up the receiver, asking for the local undertaker in general or even Stroger in particular, and in this case, the unscrupulous operator would only connect the call to her husband's undertaking business, not to strogers. And stroger figured it out. If you are all-man-brown stroger, Kansas City undertaker, there are a few ways you can go when you discover something like this. Number one. And it's number one for a reason, because it makes the most sense.

You can contact the local telephone company and alert them about the dishonest operator in their employ. Maybe even get her fired. Number two, you can take her in her husband's civil court. Try to sue for damages or something. Or there's always option number three. You can invent an automatic telephone switching system that allows people to dial each other directly,

eliminating any need for a telephone switchboard operator and thereby completely revolutionizing the entire telephone system forever. Almond Brown Stroger, the undertaker, went with option number three. He wasn't the first to come up with the idea, but his concept was the first automatic switcher that worked for more than a handful of phones

within a system. He was awarded a patent in 1891. Of course, he didn't know how to make the thing. He was an Undertaker, if I haven't stressed that enough already. Stroder conscripted his nephew and some business partners to help develop a working prototype. It cost more and took longer than anyone anticipated, but they finally got it working, and they

finally got a chance to try it out in the real world. Le Port, Indiana, became the first place to have automatic, operator-free telephone dialing. In a speech at the unveiling of the Laporte telephone exchange, the cantankerist, droger, addressed the issue of the hello girls, the operators who would lose their jobs because of his automated switch. Quote, I'm often told that the telephone girls will be angry with me, burrowing them of their

occupation. In reply, I say that all things will adjust themselves to the new order. Water will find its level. The telephone replace the messenger boy as this machine now displaces the telephone girl. Improvements will continue to the end of time, strike where they may. The Bell telephone company eventually acquired the technology in 1916, and the Stroger Switch, as it was called, became standard equipment throughout the 20th century. So up next I'm going to play you episode number 58 again. It's called Purple Rain about the Purple Hotel reported by a Gwen Maxine.

And then we're going to have a really, really significant, you know, like four or five minute update about what happened to the purple hotel since this was first reported. So stay tuned for that. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The hotel on the very prominent corner of Tué and Kilburn Avenue in Lincolnwood, Illinois used to be the town's most famous building. The first high at Hotel in all of Chicago land, premier accommodations, top notch restaurant. It was Swank, Roberta Flack stayed there, Barry Manelow stayed there,

Perry Como, Michael Jordan stayed there on his first night in Chicago. And every 13 year old boy in the area had his permits for there. The hotel was built in 1960, and it looks it. So if you're wondering how much potentially anachronistic lounge music I'm going to cram into this episode, oh, it's going to be a lot.

Then slowly over time, it became Lincoln Woods' most infamous building. It changed hands, got seedy, and run down. It was the home of the Midwest fetish fair and marketplace convention. There were drug-fueled sex parties tended by shady Chicago politicians later convicted of things like extortion, and of course there was the convicted mobster Alan Dorfman, who was gunned down in the parking lot. But that's not why everyone in the area knows the building. If you know nothing of its history, it's still pretty hard to miss.

Because it's purple. Really, really purple. Growing up nearby, I always thought it was really, really purple. Growing up nearby, I always thought it was really, really ugly. Lots of people did. To be fair, lots of people didn't, but everyone had an opinion about it. But Gwen Maxine, that's what I'm talking to now, by the way, noted S.A.S. in public video host, and she even created a sitcom once. She has a secret about the purple hotel.

My father designed it. My name is Jan Max. I'm a retired architect and former professor at UIC. I designed a lot of just a building. I'm talking about it. Nothing interrupts. I'm going to do a lot of... Just the building we're talking about. Huh? Don't interrupt. I don't have time for the long bio, Dad. Okay, I designed a lot of apartment buildings in Chicago.

We're here to talk about the purple hotel. I need to say, I designed... My name is John Maxx, I'm an architect. I designed the purple hotel. My name is John Maxx, I'm an an architect and I was the designer of the purple of the top. Finally, now you have to understand that when I say the building is purple, I don't mean the kind of purple of say an iris or a plum. It's purple as in lavender. Lavender purple glazed brick all over pretty much the entire thing. Which Needless to say makes it stand out.

Depending on how you look at it, like a prize jewel or a sore thumb. You know, that's one of the few buildings that if you see it once, you know, it's, you've seen it forever, you can't, you know, get the image of it all the way around. It is so purple that after it changed hands, the new owners renamed it the Purple Hotel. WB Easy Architecture Critic, Leigh Bay. I think that it's worth looking at absent the brick. The brick I like, but I wish you could sort of put on glasses. I could filter it out so you don't see the brick at least in one trip.

And really see how the building holds this up together structurally. I mean, I think it's really good. The way that John was able to put those supports on the outside of the hotel to give larger floor plates in the middle, which is what you want. You want big functional spaces inside of a hotel. And then again, the little nooks of green space

and the way that the sort of the building's kind of fit together, the complex fits together. I mean, really, there's really a lot of good things going on there. I say, come for the purple, but stay for the architecture. The thing that everybody notices first, including architects, would be the color. I mean, I think that if anybody's saying that it's not

the color that they're lying, because you can't really look at the building without noticing that it's purple. So it's the only purple building around. But then after that initial wave of color hits, you notice really what a great modernist structure it has and how the structure is expressed on the outside, which is also not something you see every day anymore. And I think it's a wonderful building. That was Jackie Kuh, founding principal of the architectural firm Kuhn Associates. We'll

get back to her in a minute. But first, the story of why and how the building got to be so purple. My dad, John Maxine. It was commissioned by the Pritzkurs, the very rich family in Chicago, and it was the first Hyatt Hotel in the Midwest. It was called Hyattaz. Nothing to do with the purple. By the way, the purple came because one of the Pritzkers, A.N., the big man among the Pritzkers in the family, as we, what color-glace style I want to use. I wanted to use gray, and he said, that's dull. I like something brighter. So I made a mistake of showing him the samples of books having on it some 35, 40 colored samples. And sure enough, you picked the purple.

And you don't argue with Ian Fritzker. and Friskard. My father tells me this story, but I suspect differently. He's always gravitated toward bold color choices. Our current argument is over bright orange balconies on a building that we always pass, he loves them, and I hate them. When I was growing up, his favorite color was blue. A color that, to me, is suspiciously close to purple. In fact, every house we ever lived in,

brick bungalow, summer house in the woods, suburban barn-shaped house with mustard colored siding, all had bright blue front doors. That my father painted. My elementary school bus driver used to call me Blue Door. Upon interrogation, my father coughed up his strange Hungarian logic. In the Near East, where ultimately I come from, the blue color on the doors, blue and green,

is to keep the evil spirit away. So that's a reason I always expected the entrance door of a house's blue to keep the evils spirit away. And they did. Do you think it worked for the hotel? So you don't think the purple kept away the evil eye from the hotel? Not really, because there was a murder in the hotel. Actually, there were two, but I digress. The beauty of that building is the exposed concrete frame. How the columns are pulled out of the structure, showing this... It's like a human being whose skeleton will be on the exterior partially.

That will be weird, right? Well, that's the way that building is. The columns are pulled out, the slabs are slightly pulled out. It's a building which reveals its structure. And that is architecturally the interesting thing about it. The purple is totally irrelevant. It could be green, okay? It would be the same good or bad building. So as an architect, I have to ask you, this is a perfect example of what the difference between what the public sees and what the architect sees. Oh, absolutely. Because the public sees Purple Brick, the architect is sitting here saying

the purple is so unimportant in the scheme of the building. It means nothing. It's just such a tiny thing. But to the public, that's all it is. That's right, because the public is ignorant. That truly ignorant. Well, you can't really argue with them there, but in our defense and I count myself as one of the public in the scenario, it's really, really purple. And despite how far the purple hotel fell from its original glory, the dilapidation, the murder, the drug-fueled

sex parties, and a demolition order. It was not torn down. Time passed. The economy fell to pieces. Mid-century architecture slowly came back into Vogue. Mad Men was on TV. The Purple Brick was kind of retro-cool. A light, however, dim was starting to shine on the building in its future. Then, the Purple Hotel was nominated for landmark status, a place on the historic registry. There was talk of finding a buyer, talk of renovation, and then while I was searching and interviewing for this very story, the Purple Hotel went up for auction. There was a lot of pomp and circumstance in the beginning of, you know, the auctioneer yelling and saying,

are you ready and, you know, in the booming voice and then, and then really there was only one bitter, so. And that bitter was Jake Weiss, of Weiss properties in Skokie, which happens to be right next to Lincolnwood. He bought the purple hotel, and while Weiss is a shrewd businessman with a keen eye and good instincts, this particular purchase was also a labor of love. When you have something that really is just not realizing its value and its potential that has such a prime piece of property, it bothers you, you know, it's part of your neighbor,

it's part of your community, and it's something that you really want to see be an asset to the community instead of a blight. Here comes the love part. Separately from that, when my, and more importantly, I think, we almost lived at the purple hotel for a period of time, when my grandfather had passed away and my father was saying the traditional codish. That's the Jewish prayer for the dead. There was no synagogue anywhere in close proximity to where he lived at the time. And because we're Orthodox and we're gonna drive on a Sabbath, that was a little bit prohibitive to say the kathish.

There's a very convenient shoulder right down the block. Also known as a synagogue. The congregation, you who in Amosha, so on every single shop is for a year, we would move into the purple hotel to accommodate my father's responsibility to say the cuddish for his father. So we lived there for about a year every single weekend and you know me and my sister the hotel was our playground. And the architect Wys has chosen to redesign the purple hotel and bring it back to its original luster is Jackie Kuh of Jackie Kuh and associates. Also, a former student of my father, the original architect, John Maxi.

One of the things that we're looking into is more of a historic restoration of the building. It would be wonderful, and especially since we have some of the old drawings, the original drawings from the 60s. And there are a lot of pieces that are still left in the building such as this wonderful monumental Tarazo stair with this wood wall behind it. I mean you can really see it as this kind of you know late 50s, early 60s kind of madmen era, panam sort of hotel that really could be very current in today's hospitality environment. The culture today, especially in the hospitality market, for somebody's imperposed a predominant color, not necessarily in the color of the brick, but in all their marketing.

I mean, you'll look at the neon lights and the color of the key fob cards and the brochures that get printed for some reason, purple is popping, and I'm not quite sure why. Have any of your buildings had this kind of history, this kind of life cycle that you know of? No, none of them. The same way that a person they go through life and you might go through different cycles

yourself and everybody goes through different rebellious times and ups and downs, I think the same holds true for a proper like this that really was a character of itself. The building was really a product of the environment around it at any given time, and to a certain extent the fact that the building did change with the decades and the environment around it, it really is the building's character. And while it's true that this character, this building, this structure of nine lives sits empty at the moment, surrounded by bored traffic and an empty parking lot, it may just be crouching,

gathering its muster ready to spring back to life, arresting that traffic, filling that parking lot, and strutting like a proud peacock. A Purple One. a purple one. I'd like to thank Red Mandel from National Reckon Company for doing all that he and his company could do to make this day a reality. Here we go! Yeah baby! So it turns out that after all of the gargantuan efforts to save the purple hotel, it would have cost 40 some million dollars. That's a million within that.

Actually, it was over 40 million dollars. It was just cost prohibitive. So despite so much goodwill on the part of so many people who wanted to see it survive, the purple hotel was torn down. Or I should say is in the process of being torn down. But at least the process of tearing the purple hotel down began with some ceremony. If everybody could start finding a seat, we're going to get started. On August 27, 2013, the parking lot of the Purple Hotel was filled with local dignitaries from Lincolnwood, Illinois. Even the mayor was there.

Thank you so much for being here, Mayor. So on the day of the demolition, it was really, really beautiful. They had a huge white tent. They had purple flowers. They had purple napkins. They gave my dad a purple brick with a plaque on it. I mean, it was just really, really beautifully done and it was a loving tribute to the building. At the same time, it was a little bit like going to synagogue

because Lincoln Wood is a predominantly Jewish suburb, or at least it was, and so all the people who had such strong feelings about the building, largely were Jewish. OK, good morning, good morning, everyone. Thank you all for coming to my bar mitzvah today. But this wasn't exactly a bar mitzvah. When John Maxx took the stage, he said it was a little more like another ride of passage. It's a little bit like being invited for your own funeral, which by the way cannot be

avoided. Kind of curious thing that an architect is invited to the tearing down of his building. The typical moment of piece of architecture and a piece of journalism coincide is when the building is first constructed. This is like writing the biography of a person, the moment that he or she is born. The real story is how the structure influences the environment, how it grows up, how it sports and changes, and even how it dies. Though this wasn't really the end of the purple hotel anyway, the wrecking ball took a couple of wax at the building and then they stopped.

It's going to take five months to tear it down because 75% of it needs to be recycled as a matter of law. Brick by purple brick, they're taking it down. So the bricks would just get thrown into a big pile and shipped off to wherever they get recycled. If there wasn't such a high demand for them. It turns out that everybody and their brother wants a purple brick. I was married at that hotel. I lost my virginity at that hotel. I used to go to that hotel every weekend with my parents.

I played in the pool at that hotel. I heard Roberta Flack at that hotel, I mean everybody has a memory associated with it, and so everybody wants a brick. And I can't even tell you how many people have asked me for a brick. Not the least of which I might add was you. Oh, I want a purple brick so badly. Um, I'm gonna get you at least a chip, if not a brick.

As long as it has some purple on it. It will have the iconic purple glaze on it. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Gwen Maxx, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio, KALW, and San Francisco, and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco in the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars. Sam Green's band tweets at Sam listens. Right now you can find pictures of the destruction of the purple hotel

and also some nice pictures of it in its heyday at 99%invisible.org. The Bender Listening to right now is called OK Akumi. We use a lot of them on this radio program along with bands like Lullatone and Melodian and Orcas. If you want to score your life like an episode of 99% Invisible, go to our web page is 99pi.org and look for our Spotify playlist. And then go buy something of theirs because all these bands are awesome. Thanks!