Sioux City History and Culture by Bicycle Part 117: William LaBarthe Steele Part 12: Update: Anatomy of saving a landmark

This is an article form the current issue of the Weekender, a free publication published by the Sioux City Journal.

Williges Returns... Or how to save an old building.

August Williges built it as a fur factory.

Back in 1930.

While the fur brought in the customers, the two-story terra cotta building at 613 Pierce St. kept shoppers safe and sound.

This was not just any terra cotta building, mind you, but one designed by architects George Hilgers and William Steele. The beauty was in the details. Bright white-glazed terra cotta sat on a base of terrazzo, accented by horizontal bands of terra cotta details in geometric and foliage patterns. A cherub-type figure appeared to sit at the top.

The Woodbury County Courthouse, built in 1918, was Steele’s first Prairie School-style commercial building in Sioux City, and the Williges, built in 1929, was his last.

By 1998 the fur and women’s apparel store started all those decades back in 1895 closed. A neighbor, Security National Bank, purchased the property. Then, in 2007, the bank decided the lot would be more valuable as parking lot, the unoccupied and crumbling building would be better off torn down.

This is the story of how a 79-year-old created by a noted architect was almost lost forever.

Jan. 9, 2007

Security National Bank announces plans to demolish the historic Williges Building to clear the way for new 65-stall surface parking lot at Seventh and Pierce streets. The bank, owner of the Williges building since 1998, anticipates an April start.

Jan. 17, 2007

SiouxLandmark, a private nonprofit preservation group, announces plans to submit the Williges nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. Listing in the National Register will not halt demolition plans, but can make building owners eligible for special tax breaks to improve properties.

May. 14, 2007

Paul Davis Restoration files for a demolition operation permit with the city’s Inspection Services Division to begin destruction of the Williges Building.

May. 17, 2007

Representatives from the State Historical Society, State Historic Preservation Office, SiouxLandmark and Downtown Partners join organizers George Wakeman and Cindy Waitt in front of City Hall to protest the demolition.

May. 22, 2007

Demolition permits issued to Security National Bank and Paul Davis Restoration are rescinded at the request of the bank’s engineering firm.

May. 23, 2007

Security National Bank senior vice president Dave Holub announces the Williges building is for sale, and developers interested in purchasing the building have until June 25 to sign an agreement.

June 1, 2007

Security National Bank refiles for demolition permits, keeping the demolition option open should negotiations to sell the building fail.

June 5, 2007

The Historic Preservation Commission moves to enact a 30-day delay on the demolition of the Williges building. This means Security National Bank will be fined by the city if they tear down the building within 30 days.

June 25, 2007

As the bank’s June 25 sale deadline hits, Holub announces talks continue between Security National Bank and two local developers over the future of the Williges building. No decision is reached.

July 11, 2007

Williges demolition permits expire.

July 17, 2007

A press conference is held to announce the Williges Building has been purchased by an unnamed local developer, who will renovate the property. Loud applause follows the announcement from a smiling crowd of about 40 to 50 onlookers.

Aug. 31, 2007

The Williges Building is officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Sept. 17, 2007

Two mysteries are solved. First, the previously unidentified commercial developer behind saving the Williges building is revealed as Bart Connelly, a veteran of historic restoration projects. Second, it’s announced Sioux City law firm Vriezelaar Tigges Edgington Bottaro Boden & Ross LLP plans to lease the entire first floor of the three-story structure.

January 2009

The law firm of Vriezelaar Tigges Edgington Bottaro Boden & Ross LLP moves into the downtown building, culminating an over year-long renovation project. About 7,500 square feet remain for lease on both the second and third floors of the newly-renovated building.

Source

Sioux City History and Culture by Bicycle Part 113: William LaBarthe Steele Part 8: Sioux City Baptist Church

Sioux City Baptist Church was formely called 1st Congregational Church. It is also known as the church with the white dome. Designed by William L. Steele a dome was not a typical design on a Christian church. This church building is unique in that is was designed and built with one. Located at the corner of 13th and Nebraska Streets the building is a Prairie School design, with the exception of the dome.

At a cost of $80,000 to build the new church, the cornerstone for the church was laid on January 12, 1917, the first anniversary of the fire of the original church that was located at 8th and Nebraska Streets. The cornerstone is from the original 1889 structure that was destroyed in the fire and likely the only surviving piece.

The original 1889 building was the first of the large church buildings constructed in Sioux City. Though not designed by William L Steele the readers of this blog will see the impressive collection of large church buildings Steele either designed or designed a remodel.

The former 1st Congregation Church, current Sioux City Baptist Church is on the National Register of Historic Places:
Sioux City Baptist Church ** (added 1979 - Building - #79000953)
1301 Nebraska Ave., Sioux City
Historic Significance: Architecture/Engineering
Architect, builder, or engineer: Steele,William
Architectural Style: Prairie School
Area of Significance: Architecture
Period of Significance: 1900-1924
Owner: Private
Historic Function: Religion
Historic Sub-function: Religious Structure
Current Function: Religion
Current Sub-function: Religious Structure

Digital scan of the article from the Sioux City Daily Tribune January 13, 1917 page 11:


Digital scans of an article called an Architectural Gem and a drawing from the thesis Sermons in Stone:




Photo's of the church as it looks today:

Sioux City History and Culture by Bicycle Part 107: William Labarth Steele Part 2: Woodbury County Court House

Typically I would save the best for last, but not in this case. I am posting about what I think is the best building William L. Steele designed, the Woodbury County Courthouse. This building is truly a beautiful monument to Prairie School Architecture in a government building. The courthouse was completed and opened for business in 1918 and is one of the best examples of Prairie School Architecture in a government building. Steele was the supervising architect on the project. William G. Purcell and George G. Elmslie designed the building. Because Steele was the supervising architect he gets the credit for the building.

When the building was first designed there was some resistance from county officials as to why they needed such an ornamental building. After some discussion and redesign the building was designed as it is today and built. As a result the courthouse has attained national recognition, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and became a National Historic Landmark in 1996.

Here is a Parabiography about the design of the courthouse:

WOODBURY COUNTY COURT HOUSE, Sioux City, Iowa

Mr. William L. Steele of Sioux City was a drafter in the office of Louis H. Sullivan at the turn of the century. He became one of the leading architects of Iowa and in 1924 missed by only a small vote becoming president of the American Institute of Architects, a position which he would have ably filled with less deference to the eastern royal family and more regard for the common man than the administration which followed during the next few years. He was one of two or three outstanding architects in Iowa, a lifelong friend of George Elmslie, and later became the business partner of Thomas H. Kimball, certainly one of the most distinguished and lovable characters in the Institute, and one of its past presidents.

In saying that Bill Steele was essentially and primarily the business man and engineer, one not leave the impression that Bill is lacking, in poetic feeling, or a sensitive soul for what is fine and good. He is a ready writer and has done a large amount of hard work for the profession. He is clever with a pencil, makes cutes caricatures. He has a clear idea of the thesis of Sullivan and Wright - but he has not creative ability as an architectural designer. It was for this reason that he wanted George Elmslie to design the Woodbury County Court House when he had finally landed the commission. Thus it came about that Purcell and Elmslie were associate architects for the building. I had nothing to do with its design. Mr. Elmslie went to Sioux City and did about sixty percent of the designing there. The rest was done at our Minneapolis and Chicago offices.

Several instances occurred in connection with this building which illustrate how far outside the field of building, either architectural or aesthetic, the determining values of a building project may go. The young architect who omits a keen understanding of the human nature of crowds, and the psychology of men and their politics, who has not got a canny perspective of events moving beneath the surface, will not go far, however able he may be in his chosen profession. Even the art of advertising is essential. No matter how brilliant your achievement, as the course of Frank Lloyd Wright clearly illustrates, the man and his work must find some sort of ties to people individual and collective. Wright was just as capable in the late 1920s but it took both publicity and the fortunate turn of the mass mind toward something the public called "modern", that outwardly resembled his thesis, to put him back again at the head of his profession throughout the world.

To secure the commission for the Woodbury County Court House was essentially a political battle. But in order to cooperate with the commissioners who wanted to see Bill land the job, and at the same time make no move that would furnish ammunition to the enemy, Bill submitted designs for a conventional style Court House, with classic orders and tin dome - the sort of thing that would not disturb the general public taste. Only when Bill had the signed contract in his pocket did he say to his friends on the County Board, "Now we will lay aside this mess of a building and design you something useful and beautiful - a building of permanent quality." Official approval of Mr. Elmslie's designs by the Board were given as a matter of routine, as Bill Steele's friends were in the majority. But not so with the public.

This absolutely radical building, different in every aspect from any public building that they had ever seen, or indeed had ever been built, was an insult to the unimaginative mind. A considerable body of citizens, led by the defeated wing of the politicians, started out to cancel the project. Probably the determining factor in our favor was the fact that Mr. Elmslie's designs called for the use of brick made by the local brickyard and as it owners and those who worked for it and did business with it represented a considerable block in the community, they, of course, were favorable, and fought for the design because of the cash which would be spent in the community. There remained, however, a great deal of opposition even when actual construction of the main walls was complete. The stark and unusual forms, plain to all, looked all the more forbidding without windows and doors.

About this time the Chicago Grand Opera Company arrived in town with a full complement of foreign artists, and when interviewed for the local press about the building, these people who had seen something of the modern movement in Europe, were high in their praise of the building. After that no word of dissent was heard from anybody.

Another and more serious opposition was that of the Indiana Limestone Association. Their efforts to have us removed were especially bitter because all public buildings had heretofore been built of Indiana limestone - occasionally marble or granite. Brick had never been used except as a substitute material or in an effort to reduce prices in very incidental court houses. Even in such cases the base of the building, window sills, trim and some of the cornice members were likely to be limestone.

But here was a building where brick was used by deliberate choice with Terra cotta trim, and the quarrymen realized that this might be an entering wedge to displace their material in other structures. At any rate, to lose the dollar business represented by a contract for the stone for this building was sufficient, and they began a bitter campaign in the opposition newspapers, attacking us from every angle, personal and professional. Of course, such propaganda gained a considerable following, but the brick people in Sioux City backed up the chairman of the County Board, and the stone men finally faded out with the rest.

It is safe to say that this Sioux City Court House is the first public building in the United States based on the philosophic concept of form and function and expressing itself in free form. With the exception of a few buildings by Richardson and his followers in Romanesque, and I suppose an occasional building with Victorian Gothic details in the [18]70s, all, public building were designed not only with classical details, but were often literal transcriptions of ancient Roman buildings.

So far as I know, neither Wright nor Sullivan ever did a public building [this draft was dated 1953, pre-Marin County Court House-MH]. In Europe Nyrup [sic: Nyrop] was architect for the Copenhagen Town Hall, which must have begun taking form in his mind about 1900. It is a purely functional building, a fact missed by most, because historical, ethnic, social and community relations are so expressed in this building that it is at the opposite pole from the constructivism which the contemporary mind demands as evidence of modernity. The great difference between Nyrop's use of historical references is that all the forms that seem familiar exfoliate from the building's concept, and are not transferred irrelevancies.

One interesting reversal of habitual planning in our building is the removal of the grand stairway - an obsolete and unused feature in every public building since the advent of the elevator. And George placed the elevators in the most strategic and convenient location, directly in front of the main entrance.

Find the right sculptor for the large groups and some incidental accents was a problem to which we gave considerable thought. In this matter I had great satisfaction in renewing my contacts with Gutzon Borglum. I had first met him in 1912 at the time H. P. Berlage came to this country; and his support of Berlage and his views on indigenous American architecture gave Borglum a clear view of how democratic thinking could find expression in sculpture.

When one who has lived his architectural days in the world set up by Sullivan and Wright, comes upon the work of a man like Borglum, it requires no great discrimination with respect to sculpture, to see how superficial is the work of special pleaders like that of Lee Laurie, for example, on the Nebraska State Capitol. Laurie is not superficial and cynical in the same way as Paul Manship, but he is essentially a style-formist using the pattern and cliches of Mestrovic and other creative sculptors of our time, to create a result that can only be designated as "modern" and which has no deep fundamental sculptural integrity as related to Time, Place and Man. In leaving his partnership with Ralph Adams Cram, Goodhue, who designed the Nebraska State Capitol began to see the light. He had an earnest desire to say something in the way of living architecture, but he was spoiled through his long association with the style-form world, and it is not possible for a man to lay aside that to which he has been conditioned, and reconditioned into the fiber of his being like a coat. Of course, the Nebraska capitol was a great thing for living architecture in American because it finally broke the ranks of official bozart, but this was largely due to Thomas H. Kimball of Omaha who wrote the program for the National Competition and selected a jury that was not necessarily free in its own collective mind, but perhaps for no really architectural reasons, set against the old crowd because they had political control, and had had it too long.

I spent an interesting couple of hours in Borglum's New York studio, an enormous barn of a place, with some bright young fellows working for him. His fee for the Sioux City work was nearly double the allowance made for a sculptor, and we reluctantly gave up the idea of having him. He however gladly recommended one of his young apprentices who had recently moved to Chicago and upon him we called. Perhaps we did just as well in the end, for Alphonso Ianelli did a very sincere and able piece of work for a fee that amounted to nothing more than journeyman's wages. The great frieze over the principal entrance was fourteen feet high and forty feet long, and contained more than a dozen life-sized figures.

This represented an enormous amount of clay to be shaped. There were four more than life-size figures at secondary entrances. And all this for $3,500 ready for the "Teco" Terra Cotta Works (American Terra Cotta and Ceramic Company). Ianelli studied his work most faithfully, and cooperated with Mr. Elmslie in order to secure a nice relation between the feeling and texture of his sculpture, and the terra cotta architectural framing and other ornamental details in Mr. Elmslie's characteristic style which lay near it. All the architectural terra cotta, including the eagle at the top of the stair tower, was done by Christian [Kristian] Schneider. The ornamental detail is superb in dexterity, translating Mr. Elmslie's designs in a way that absolutely no one else could do, but the eagle is not especially inspiring, although modeled with a force that makes it carry very well at that height. Even in its perhaps too naturalistic forms it may have more meaning than the extreme symbolistic [sic] types of eagles developed on the drawing boards of our present day competitionists [sic], and done into stone by fashion following modelers. The most popular conventions of today refer to embryonic creatures which are so far removed from the sense of birds or anything that could take flight, that they become meaningless.

Annotation by GGE on the original Parabiography draft for the St. Paul Church [Commission List 86]:

"I designed a chimes tower and clock for the Court House that was good using the chimney an an element of stablization. W.L.S. [William L. Steele] was afraid of cost, which was apparent, not a well-founded fear (at least I think so). If we had only had that to pierce the sky! I wonder where my drawing is. Have not seen it for years."

This was taken from this web site:
Purcell and Elmslie, Architects

The Woodbury County Courthouse is also part of the terra cotta tour in Sioux City. Sioux City was and I think still is the Terra Cotta Capitol of Iowa. The buildings in this city have some of the best and most beautiful terra cotta I have ever seen.

Here are correspondence regarding the courthouse:
George Grant Elmslie to William Gray Purcell (February 9, 1915)
George Grant Elmslie to William Gray Purcell (February 16, 1915)
William Gray Purcell to Gutzon Borglum (February 18, 1915)
Gutzon Borglum to William Gray Purcell (February 20, 1915)
William Gray Purcell to William L. Steele (February 23, 1915)
William Gray Purcell to William L. Steele (February 23, 1915)[separate letter from one above]
William Gray Purcell to George Grant Elmslie (February 23, 1915)
William Gray Purcell to George Grant Elmslie (March 4, 1915) [Lengthy response annotated by Elmslie]
William Gray Purcell to Gutzon Borglum (March 8, 1915)
William L. Steele to William Gray Purcell (March 15, 1915)

Up until I read these correspondence I had no idea famed sculpture Gutzon Borglum had anything to do with the Woodbury County Courthouse. Of course he is most famous for designing and sculpting Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. To me the fact that he had anything to do with the Woodbury County Courthouse adds to his fame as well as the historical value of the building. Borglum was not hired to sculpt/design the terra cotta that make up part of the building, they could not afford him. Instead he recommended/provided Steele, Elmslie and Purcell with one of his apprentices to sculpt the terra cotta. You can see Borglums obvious influences in the scuplted terra cotta created by Alphonso Ianelli.


Photo's:
These photo's really do not do the courthouse justice. One really has to come and see the building for themselves to understand its true beauty and historical value that it holds to Sioux Cityans and Iowans.

Here are web sites with photo's of the courthouse:
Woodbury County Courthouse Photo's (from county web site)
Woodbury County Courthouse (Purcell and Elmslie, Architects web site)

Here are the photo's I took:


















The Woodbury County Courthouse is located on the SE corner of 7th and Douglas Streets in downtown Sioux City, Iowa.

Sioux City History and Culture by Bicycle Part 106: William Labarth Steele Part 1: Short Bio. and Info.

William Labarth Steele is perhaps one of Sioux City's most famous architects. He was born May 1875 in Springfield, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1896. Much of his training was in Chicago under famed architect Lewis Sullivan, father of Sullivanesque architecture, who also trained with Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1904 Steele moved to Sioux City to work for, and later form a partnership with W. W. Beach. Steele designed dozens of homes and buildings, and many of these structures are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A few of his designs include the Woodbury County Courthouse, the Willeges building in downtown Sioux City, and several of the city’s Branch Libraries. For a time he lived at 2512 Jackson Street. In 1928 Steele moved to Omaha and died in 1949.

William Steele was the 3rd generation of Prairie School style architecture. It was created by Frank Lloyd Wright, the 2nd generation was Lewis Sullivan who incorporated his own style into it creating Sullivanesque style architecture and from there continued by William L. Steele.

Looking at several fo Steele's buildings it is obvious where he got his influences from.

Here is a brief description of Prairie Style architecture:
Prairie Style (1900 – 1920)
• Low, long appearance
• Low-pitched roof, gently sloping
• Widley overhanging eaves
• Often massive square porch supports
Foursquare (a sub category)
• Simple square or rectangular plan
• Low pitched roof symmetrical façade
• Entrance may be centered or off-centered
• Front porch usually extends full length of house

This post is a first in the series about William Labarth Steele designed buildings in the Sioux City area. Next will be buildings I had already posted about that were designed by Steele, starting with commercial buildings, then churches and finally houses. I have also been doing research on the other buildings Steele designed and will post about the commercial buildings first, then churches and finally houses. There will also be a post about the buildings he designed that are no longer standing. Please note not all of these buildings were soley designed by William L. Steele, some of them he helped and others he was given credit for because he had the highest influence on the design. Such info. will be posted as it becomes known to me during my research.

I think it is safe to say while men like Jon Cook founded Sioux City and men like John Peirce and William Gordon helped promote Sioux City it was men like William Labarth Steele who helped design and build Sioux City.

Thank you for reading and please enjoy this next series of Sioux City History and Culture by Bicycle.