Towertown, Chicago, Illinois [PHOTO] The Three Arts Club at 1300 N Dearborn Parkway, Chicago in Towertown. Started in 1912, the Club was chartered to provide a home and a club for young women engaged in the practice or study of the arts in the city of Chicago, keeping them safe from the bad influences of the Towertown community. [HISTORY] A Chicago neighborhood in the Near North Side Area. Towertown was Chicagos bohemia in the early twentieth century. Lacking precise boundaries, the district took its name from the Water Tower, which stood to its north and east on Michigan Avenue. An art colony took root in Towertown when Anna and Lambert Tree built Tree Studios to tempt artists to stay in Chicago after the 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition. No one has ever identified Towertown`s first pioneers, but the numbers of bohemians began reaching a critical mass before World War I, and their early ranks seem to have included quite a few painters of respectable if not widely recognized talent. The concentration of artists, writers, and poets attracted bookshops and coffeehouses, the most famous of which was the Dill Pickle Club. Soapbox orators gathered in Bughouse Square (now known as Washington Square - Google Map = tinyurl/m6l7l94) to debate the issues of the day. The LGBT and experimenters in free love took refuge among Towertowns radicals. By the mid-1920s, many of these writers had left Chicago After their departure, according to sociologist Harvey W. Zorbaugh, Towertown became a popular destination for “egocentric poseurs, neurotics, rebels against the conventions of Main Street or the gossip of the foreign community, seekers of atmosphere, dabblers in the occult, dilettantes in the arts, or parties to drab lapses from a moral code which the city had not yet destroyed. Rising property values driven by the luxury shopping district on nearby Michigan Avenue were pricing out many of the artists. Towertown became a tourist attraction, further alienating its bohemian denizens. By the Great Depression, the art colony had dispersed. [MORE INFO] Death Of Bohemia; Two Risky, Racy Neighborhoods That Enriched The City. - articles.chicagotribune/1988-02-14/entertainment/8803300313_1_lively-ideas-neighborhoods-russell-jacoby
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 21:27:20 +0000
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