The Carl Street Studios

Overlooking a cul-de-sac and small pedestrian square on a small half-block of West Burton Place between Wells and LaSalle Streets is one of the most visually interesting blocks in all of Chicago. Originally named Carl Street, this block was the cultural birthplace of the Old Town neighborhood and was recently designated a landmark district due to its association with the artist colony projects of Edgar Miller and Sol Kogen that began in 1927. 

Many first learn of Edgar Miller’s work by discovering the Carl Street Studios, the former artist colony apartment complex that lies at the center of the historic district. All those who walk through the small district and past the well-preserved Carl Street Studios building begin to sense that they are experiencing an urban environment outside the realm of the ordinary.

After its initial founding in the dwindling years of the Roaring Twenties, the Carl Street Studios became an ongoing “work-in-progress” well into the 1930s in spite of the Great Depression. While Kogen and Miller were light on finances, they had abundant energy and used recycled or discarded materials whenever possible. Their collaborators—including Jesús Torres, Frank Miller and Hester Miller Murray (Edgar’s siblings), and many other artists and craftspeople—completely reimagined urban artistic life in Chicago in a way that was unlike any former artist colony or center. Miller and Kogen spearheaded this project by deconstructing an old Victorian mansion and repurposing it into live-work studios and a center for an ever-growing community of artists, directors and writers, and their admirers.

Kogen, who conceived of the project, intended the studio complex to be a uniquely artistic business venture. After living in Paris from 1925-27, he wanted to create an American version of the Parisian artist studios that developed around the turn of the 20th century in Montmartre and the Left Bank. Miller was invited to join the project as Sol’s partner and the artistic director. Edgar brought his craftsmanly approach to art-making and interior design, and is credited with much of the architectural remodeling of the 19th century Victorian into individual artist studios. Another benefit of partnering with Miller is that the project under Edgar’s leadership began to foster a community of craftspeople dedicated to working together across multiple arts and crafts disciplines. Both in its early years of construction and ever since, this created an environment where visitors or occupants have been surrounded by art on a daily basis.

The Carl Street Studios were developed as a wholistic creative space, made up of multiple studio units within a gated complex. Since its inception, residents and visitors have regularly worked on any number of pursuits and projects in a cooperative fashion. Over the past century, it has served as a nexus for hundreds if not thousands of artists, writers, actors, musicians, activists, historians and preservationists.

Only twenty-seven years old, Miller began to design and build unique live-work environments. Eventually there would be more than a dozen individual studio spaces, embedded with art and unconventional materials by Miller, Torres, and other artisans. Edgar was fresh from working on large-scale ornamental design projects during his apprenticeship with Iannelli Studios in the early 1920s— for Carl Street he brought his experience, youthfulness, and ingenuity to an all-encompassing project of artistic genius.

Beginning with the original Victorian home at the heart of the site, Miller redesigned the interiors by busting through different levels to make several lofted studio spaces throughout. He moved most of the pedestrian stairways to the outside courtyards, creating a more open feel while also increasing usable space for the interiors. The street-facing side of the building was completely covered with an extended, medieval-moderne facade. The rest of the complex was constructed over several years with new structures encircling the original building with the same style throughout. The complex intentionally calls to mind Gothic, Romanesque, Tudor, and a moderne aesthetic that harken to other Miller projects inspired by the designs of his mentors, especially the architects Andrew Rebori and Barry Byrne.

Each carved animal, etched plant motif, and sculpted figure was made with the intention to inspire. Miller and his collaborators worked tirelessly to produce a total artistic environment. Most of the artists entered into the project with the progressive goal of infusing the space with art for the purpose of enriching those who occupied it. Whether intentionally or not, they created a refuge where a natural sense of art could be incubated in an otherwise mechanistic, industrial city.

Many people wonder how such a place with astoundingly intricate, handcrafted artwork could have ever come to be built in a booming, industrial city like Depression-era Chicago. Kogen-Miller’s artistic fantasia was almost antithetical to the city’s more common buildings “of big shoulders”. Chicago was the epicenter of the modern architectural movement in the United States and massive imposing skyscrapers were going up all around at the very same time the Miller-Kogen enclave was getting underway. Still, the project’s unlikely communitarian process and drastically original aesthetic hints at the underlying meaning of the project: to bring something that blended conventional architectural heritage with the modern and avant-garde in order to make a place for unusually creative people during a period of great upheaval and change.

From the onset of the 20th century, Chicago was bustling with artists, bohemians, hobos, and radicals. Different philosophies and ideas were blending with the traditional lifestyles as waves of immigrants came to Chicago, especially during the First Great Migration. Many immigrants also came from Mexico and Eastern Europe. In the Near North Side neighborhood of Towertown— where Edgar Miller was mostly living and working from 1917-1927— craftworkers of European and Central American descent learned closely from classically trained artists teaching at the School of the Art Institute, the Hull-House, and other educational venues.

Throughout the 1920s, and ‘30s, an amalgamated working class made up of migrant workers and transplants from around the country were trying to find opportunities in and around a rapidly developing city center. It was within this milieu that Miller drew inspiration for his many art projects and honed a unique, personal style and aesthetic. Many of the denizens of this area would later be drawn toward the block of Carl Street that would later become the West Burton Place Historic District. Over the subsequent decades and as the neighborhood around Wells Street developed into an artist enclave for musicians, writers, and artists of all kinds.

The Carl Street Studios were built despite many financial obstacles, including the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted nearly a decade. Materials were often acquired inexpensively from warehouses looking to unload their inventory or for free from demolition sites. Some materials were even scavenged from the Century of Progress World’s Fair (1933-34) after it closed. In a sense, Miller, Kogen, Torres and their cohort were pioneers in sustainable and green design, making use of every possible material, down to the very last broken tile fragment. 

It was this frugality that inspired other artisans and designers to replicate the idea of the Carl Street Studios project in and around the Old Town neighborhood. Over the course of the next few decades, similar rehab project cropped up around the blocks off of Wells Street and in to the Old Town Triangle district directly north and beyond.

Miller had used the Carl Street Studios artist colony project as a personal art experiment. His materials were provided and a crew of supporting artists and craftspeople surrounded him, whom he guided with an energizing expertise. Looking back on this time, Edgar often spoke of the sheer thrill of taking on the audacious endeavor that was Carl Street Studios, and his other handmade homes like the Kogen-Miller Studios and Glasner Studio only a few blocks away. 

The Artist Colonies of Old Town

Around 1935, Edgar Miller and Sol Kogen parted ways after working together for nearly eight years. Edgar became disenchanted with the business arrangement between him and Sol. Miller would leave behind his workshop and a great deal of unused decorative building material. Although much of the ongoing tile and woodwork was beautifully executed by Jesús Torres, Miller’s departure left a vacuum of creative vision for the ongoing project. Kogen developed several other “artistic” studio projects over the next two decades, but they lacked the sense of style and inventiveness that Miller brought to the original project.

Over the subsequent years, Kogen and others rehabbed other buildings on Burton Place inspired by the model pioneered by Miller and Kogen at Carl Street Studios. Andrew Rebori was registered as the architect for the Carl Street Studios, although he claimed he was rarely consulted and that Kogen “had a way about him; he went ahead”. Rebori and Miller collaborated on a number of other projects, including a four-story apartment building at the alley corner of Burton Place. (Rebori’s signature curvilinear facade with large glass-brick windows and moderne lines pictured below at top left).

Kogen built an additional set of studio apartments at the address just east of the Carl Street Studios (pictured below at top right). While not a Rebori design, it borrows heavily from the streamlined, curved style being promoted at the time by European modernists like Le Corbusier. Likewise, the Theophil Studios, rehabbed in 1940, (pictured below at bottom right) also was heavily influenced by Miller’s design work, especially the stained glass windows. Even some of Edgar Miller’s relief sculptures and painted tiles were incorporated into sections of its front wall. This likely happened by Kogen selling pieces of Edgar’s work that had been left at the Studios.

Across the street from the Carl Street Studios are a set of apartments and coach houses renovated by artist and designer Clive Rickabaugh. Originally two Victorian apartments, the buildings were completely rehabbed from 1932 to 1938. Once a resident of the Carl Street Studios, Rickabaugh undertook the project across the street as an expansion of the Kogen-Miller artist colony project. The design work (pictured below at bottom left) is in a similar rustic moderne style reminiscent of Edgar Miller’s work. Much of the woodwork in the buildings appears to have been done by Jesús Torres.

Several other buildings on the block were rehabbed over the subsequent decades. By the 1950s, the neighborhood became a mecca for artists of all kinds. Many famous creative professionals would make the block home, including painter Boris Anisfeld, TV personality David Garroway, and film critic Roger Ebert.

Check out a brief video Art and Old Town below by Edgar Miller Legacy in partnership with the local Old Town Merchants and Residence Association chronicling the history of art in the Old Town neighborhood:

Landmarking West Burton Place

By midcentury the Old Town neighborhood became a bastion for a burgeoning artistic and youth culture in Chicago. It was also was known as an enclave for grassroots counterculture movements. Art fairs, music schools, the Second City Theater, artisanal shops, and any number of performance venues attracted hippies, tourists, and artists alike from all around the Midwest and wider United States. The mosaic and tiled sidewalks embedded into the neighborhood’s urban fabric decades before by Edgar Miller and his cohort could still be seen and appreciated along the streetscapes but not necessarily identified as to author. Always a well-appreciated oasis in the city by locals and visitors alike, it wasn’t officially protected from demolition until the 2010s.

In July 2015, the condo association of the Miller-designed Carl Street Studios (155 W. Burton Place) alerted all potentially interested neighbors and preservation organizations that a developer had announced intentions to demolish the three-story residence at 159 W. Burton Place just adjacent to the Carl Street Studios. The developer planned to replace the stately Victorian with a contemporary, minimalistic structure. The block was already on the National Historic Register, and almost every house on that block was considered worthy of landmark protection by the Chicago Historic Resources Survey.

Within days, a meeting was called and a group of the most concerned neighbors and advocates met in a community unit at Carl Street Studios, as well as Alderman Walter Burnett Jr. The ad hoc committee assessed the situation and decided upon a strategy: negotiate with the developer before he received his demo permit; push for landmarking the block; and utilize personal networks to get the word out to the greater Old Town and Chicago community that there was a preservation emergency needing everyone's attention.

About halfway through the meeting, Alderman Burnett spoke up. He was hesitant to interfere with individual property rights, however he noted that the developer was not a long-time ward property owner but someone who had merely purchased a building as a speculative investment. Nearly everyone in attendance agreed that the precedence of demolishing a historic building on this block would be irreversibly destructive to the cultural fabric of the community.

The alderman decided he would allow landmarking to go forward, which brought a sigh of relief to the room. However, this only meant that he would propose landmarking, not that he could guarantee it would happen or that it would save the building from demolition in time. It would be up to everyone in attendance to figure out how to convince the Landmarks Commission to take up the issue at their next meeting, which was in only a matter of weeks.

A public petition campaign to postpone demolition was mobilized. By early August, with the developer already holding his demolition permit in hand, the local media began to take serious interest in the story. On August 6th, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks agreed to review the proposal to designate the entire West Burton Place District a landmark. Local volunteers raced to write up a landmarking report that detailed the cultural, historical, architectural, and artistic importance of the West Burton Place block. With the hearing underway, demolition was postponed by choice by the developer.

By the spring of 2016, after numerous public hearings and zoning logistics, the landmarking effort was successful thanks to the efforts of the many neighbors and stakeholders who took emergency action the year before. The building at 159 W. Burton Place was purchased by a local resident expressly to preserve and maintain the historical structure, and today it is a set of three vintage condominiums.

Some say the buildings in the West Burton Place Historic District are a work of art—individually and collectively. All of them are truly unique and one-of-a-kind treasures, tucked away in an unassuming cul-de-sac in Chicago. They continue to be cherished and maintained by residents and are now becoming better know to the entire world thanks to efforts to document and preserve Edgar Miller’s work.

To see more pictures of the Carl Street Studios, check out our photo gallery here.