But the architecture profession has barely begun to resolve another long-standing issue in the matter of giving credit for buildings—an issue unrelated to gender. The 1902 Flatiron Building in New York is generally credited to Daniel Burnham (or to his firm—D.H. Burnham and Co.), when in fact it was designed primarily by Frederick Dinkelberg, a young architect working for Burnham & Co. The 1921/1924 Wrigley Building in Chicago is more often than not credited to the firm Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, when in fact it was designed by Charles Beersman, a young architect at that firm. The Empire State Building is generally credited to the firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, when in fact it was one of those three, William Lamb, who was the building’s principal architect.
Those are historical examples, but the pattern has continued in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. The 1982 Petro-Canada Building in Calgary and the 1989 Scotia Plaza in Toronto, for example, are both credited to the firm WZMH (Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden); who knows who the principal architect was? The Steinway Tower in New York and the Hudson’s Detroit tower are both credited to the firm SHoP; who knows who the principal architect was? Skidmore Owings & Merrill gives credit to architect Bruce Graham for the Sears Tower in Chicago and to architect David Childs for One World Trade Center in New York, but Skidmore, Owings & Merrill buildings such as the 2019 tower at 1865 Broadway and the 2023 Hangzhou Wangchao Center are credited only to the firm.
Imagine if a scholarly article by three Princeton University academics were credited only to “Princeton University.” Imagine if Botticelli’s Birth of Venus were credited only to the “firm” that commissioned it—the Medici family. Yet that is essentially the approach still taken by many architectural firms.
From one angle, it’s a quite defensible approach; for a moment, let’s look at things from that angle.
For my recent book of watercolor paintings, The Skyscraper and the City, I wanted in the long captions to give credit as much as possible to the architects of buildings I particularly admired. One of these was (and is) One King St. West in Toronto, a stunning sliver of a skyscraper that retains at its base the historic façade of the bank building that once occupied the site. It’s credited to Stanford Downey Architects. I emailed the company to ask if they could put me in touch with the principal architect, and they were kind enough to connect me with one of the company’s senior architects, James Rasor. I had anticipated that he would be pleased to be identified in a book as the principal architect of a building that was clearly being given very positive coverage. Not at all: he asked that his name not be used in the book. In his view, notable buildings are always the product of a team effort; giving credit to just one person does not acknowledge that fact.
Fait enough, I thought, and I did as he had asked for the book. An admirable expression of modesty and team spirit, it seemed to me—and still does seem.
And yet.
To name none of the members of the team, but only the company they work for, seems in the end an unsatisfactory way of apportioning credit. Why not do as academics do when it’s a team effort—give credit for an academic article to two, three, four, even six or seven researchers (with the person who has taken the lead always listed first)? That can be long-winded, of course, if one is trying to reel off a list of authors, but it’s not much more long-winded than reeling off “Graham, Anderson, Probst & White” or “Melvin L., Harry A. & Curtis King Architects.” And when crediting the authors of academic research papers, it’s common practice to use “et al.” as appropriate.
But the lead contributor should surely come first; if the Flatiron Building is not to be credited solely to Dinkelberg, then it should be credited to Dinkelberg and Burnham, not Burnham and Dinkelberg.
The cause of giving credit where credit is due is given a welcome and wonderful boost by the research of Robert Sharoff, whose book The Wrigley Building; The Making of an Icon was published earlier this year. Sharoff and his collaborators (Tim Samuelson [Commentary], John Vinci [Introduction], and William Zbaren [Photographer]) have created a marvelous volume—and a book that finally gives full credit to Charles Beersman as the building’s lead architect. Sharoff has uncovered a great deal of information not only about the Wrigley but also about Beersman; it’s a beautiful book and a readable book, but also an important book of architectural history.
I’ll end by recommending two other skyscraper books—Fenske’s The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York and Leslie’s Chicago Skyscrapers: 1871-1934 – both of which are wonderfully informative and wonderfully well illustrated.
* * * * * *
As a postscript, I’ll paste in below two of the short skyscraper stories that are appended to my 2016 novel, Rising Stories—-two stories in which young Robin Smith learns something of Beersman and of Dinkelberg from the aging K.P. Sandwell. What Sandwell says of Beersman was correct in 2016; the world knew “almost nothing” about him. Thanks to Sharoff, that’s no longer true.
The Wrigley Building
“If you’re going to learn about the Wrigley Building,” K.P. began, there are two people you should know about first. The strange and rather sad thing is that I can only tell you about one of them.”
“One of them was called Wrigley. Did I guess it?”
K.P. smiled. “You are not quite as clever as you think, you know, Robin. But yes. One of them was called Wrigley. William Wrigley Jr., he was. He grew up in Philadelphia, where William Wrigley Sr. made soap. No, that’s putting it wrongly. Where William Sr. owned a soap company—I very much doubt he did any of the actual making of the stuff. Little William was evidently something of a trouble maker; he kept getting expelled from school—he once threw a pie at the principal, I believe. When he was ten he ran away from home. He made his way from Philadelphia to New York and stayed there for a whole summer; he worked as a newsboy and he slept on the street, or so the story goes. He did go to work in the soap business by and by, but a sort of restlessness must have always stayed inside him. He ran away again when he was nineteen, but lost his railway ticket in Kansas City and came back to Philadelphia, broke. By the time he moved to Chicago he was not yet 30, but he had worked on and off in the soap business for almost 20 years. His big idea in business was to give people something for free—‘for nothing’ was what he called it. ‘Everybody likes something extra, something for nothing,’ that was Wrigley’s motto.
“Little William wasn’t a rich man. He had almost nothing himself; William Sr. thought a man should have to earn his way. The boy—the man, I suppose we must start to call him at this point in the story—had gotten married when he was twenty, and was earning $10 a week. He had gotten himself a wife, and soon he had a daughter too. That’s when he came to Chicago. It was 1890. There were a million people here but there were still no skyscrapers.”
“Was it in Chicago that he started making gum, then?” Robin paused. “I mean, started a company that made gum?”
“Not at first. At first he was selling soap and he offered baking powder as a premium. There seemed to be more interest in the baking powder than the soap, so he started selling baking powder—offering chewing gum as a premium.”
“That was like a prize?”
“I suppose you could call it that. Only it turned out that people wanted the gum more than they wanted the baking powder. I find that impossible to imagine. Do you like to chew gum, Robin?”
“I do, Granny.”
“You and a billion other children. Unfathomable. But yes, evidently people wanted the gum more than the baking powder. And so he borrowed $5,000 from his uncle. Not from his father, the soap maker—that’s an interesting detail. And with the $5,000 little William started his gum company.”
“And made Juicy Fruit, and made Doublemint, and made the Wrigley Building?”
“One step at a time, Robin, one step at a time. There was no Doublemint at first; what Wrigley’s made at first was called Lotta Gum. That was for children…”
“Makes a lotta sense, Granny.”
“I’m sure it does, child, I’m sure it does. It was also for grownups, apparently—grownup men, supposedly grownup men.”
“Not for women?”
“No, the women were evidently thought not to care so much as the men did about quantity. William wanted classy for the women, and that meant a different name for their gum. ‘Vassar Gum.’ I will tell you another time about Vassar.”
“All right, Granny.” But there was a pause. K.P. had suddenly lost the thread. There was a strange light in the sky. You often got that light over Lake Michigan at this hour, this time of year. Dusk. She could remember…
“The building, Granny. You’re telling me about the Wrigley Building now.”
“So I am, child. So I am. The building, and who made it. A lot of people have written about how wonderful Wrigley was. Larger than life, they say. How he gave his workers Saturdays off when everywhere else people had to work a half day Saturday, a full day sometimes. How he put baseball games on the radio when everyone else thought that would just encourage all the fans to stay home. And he… —no, I am just going to tell you about the building.”
“Yes, Granny. The building, Granny.”
“Wrigley wanted height, wanted graceful height for his gum temple. But with the Wrigley Building, the height is just a small part of it. Sometimes people make it sound as if the design was ersatz—more or less copied from some Spanish cathedral, or from the Woolworth Building in New York. But it isn’t like either of those. Even the tower is only a little bit like that silly Spanish cathedral. And there’s so much more to the whole thing than the tower.”
“The angles are all set at an angle—I remember you said that when I was here before, Granny.”
“And the proportions, child. I trust I told you about the proportions.”
“You told only me a little,” Robin lied. “Who made the angles and the proportions Granny?”
“That’s just what I was getting to, child. No one has ever heard of him. It’s the most famous building in Chicago, and no one has ever heard of the person who made it.”
“Made it, Granny?”
“Who designed it, Robin. Who made the designs. Sometimes people mention the firm—Graham, something, something and something. One of those firms where a lot of people have jostled to have their own name be part of the company name, where everyone wants to be known and remembered. And of course the more names there are, the more forgettable it all is.”
“So Graham and the Somethings had nothing to do with the Wrigley Building?”
“Graham may have done. But none of the Somethings, so far as I know. Mainly it seems to have been a young man named Charles Beersman. And we now almost nothing about him. Oh, there are some basic facts. I said ‘young’—he was just over thirty when he came to Chicago and joined Graham and all those Somethings in 1919. The Wrigley Building must have been just about the first thing he worked on—they broke ground for it in 1920. Beersman came from New York but he went to university in Philadelphia. We know that he won a fellowship there and we have a list of some of the other buildings he designed later. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago may be the best known of them. It’s a design in a certain sort of classical style, Greek pillars slapped onto a very ordinary skyscraper. Nothing hideous about it but nothing very remarkable either. Copying Greeks badly: it’s been done a million times before, and a million times since. And maybe the Wrigley Building began with copying. Copying that cathedral, copying those towers in New York—the Woolworth Building, the Municipal Building, the Metropolitan Life Building. But something magical happened. Maybe Beersman was pushed into genius by the lines of the street and the river. By the way they push together, those strange angles. Whatever it was, it was genius. And then nothing, nothing that he is remembered for. No one remembers what he was like, no one remembers his name. I tried once to look up something about him—there is almost nothing. When I was a toddler he was getting married; that much there is a record of, you can find it in The New York Times:Mrs. Sarah L. Broffe of 149 Lexington Avenue announces the engagement of her daughter, Miss Beatrice Livingston to Charles G. Beersman, of this city. Mr. Beersman is an architect at 18 West Thirty-fourth Street. He was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and is a member of the Acacia Fraternity.Who were these people? Were they happy? How did Beatrice take to Chicago? Did they grow rich? Did they…? There are so many questions, and none of them can be answered. Beersman died July 29, 1946, aged 58. A more or less forgotten life, a more or less forgotten man.”
“But you remember things about him, Granny.”
“This evening, perhaps. As a shadow, as a name, a name to give to something that was human and that gave shape to the finest of all the buildings in this city. But a name and a shadow only. And only now: there is no forever to it. Tomorrow morning there may be nothing there.”
“The building will be there, Granny.”
“Yes, child. The building will be there. There will be no earthquakes, and the building will be there in the morning.”
Dinkelberg, the Flatiron, and the Jewelers’
“Frederick Dinkelberg had worked for Daniel Burnham, you see.”
“Who was…”
“Burnham and Root was the top architectural firm in Chicago. They made their money making grand houses for wealthy meat makers, businesssmen who had grown rich by being cruel to cows and to pigs. But then Burnham and Root turned to skycrapers. Root died young, but Burnham went on to greater and greater things. So it was that Dinkelberg became involved in some of the greatest skyscraper projects of the time. He was the main architect for what some still say is the finest of them all, the Flatiron in New York—a building credited not to him but to ‘D. H. Burnham & Co.’ Burnham himself was too senior, too busy—how often that happens in life! That was—” What year had it been? K.P. could not come up with a number. “It was early in the century. The century that’s over now,” she added. “Like Burnham, Dinkelberg never believed in architecture that would break new ground. He…”
“You always have to break the ground to build a building, Granny. You…”
“It’s a metaphor, Robin. A figure of speech. They never believed in architecture that would do anything radically new or different. Burnham and Dinkelberg always wanted a bit of ancient Greece and Rome on the outside, even if the skeleton was modern steel. Nothing revolutionary, they insisted—and yet what an extraordinarily bold thing the Flatiron was! The Fuller Building, I should say. That’s what they called it originally, for the company that had commissioned it. But even before it was finished people called it the Flatiron, for the shape of the space it occupied. Not everybody was happy. Let me read you what Life magazine said.” K.P. fumbled for a few moments amongst all the books until she found the one she wanted, a whole book about the Flatiron. “Here it is—I’ll read it to you:In this partly civilized age and city, it is proposed to erect on the flatiron at Twenty-third Street an office building more than twenty stories high. New York has no law that restricts the height of buildings, and there is nothing to hinder the consummation of this appalling purpose. Madison Square ought to be one of the beauty spots of the city. It is grievous to think that its fair proportions are to be marred by this outlandish structure.Of course all that conservative huffing and puffing was soon forgotten. Within a few years everyone loved the Flatiron—the outlandish had become the iconic.”
“Translation?”
“The thing that had been mocked had become revered.” Would the child understand revered any better than iconic? One couldn’t explain everything. “That was the Flatiron. But then Burnham died, and the firm went into decline. Dinkelberg struck out on his own with a colleague, Joachim Gaiver, an engineer. The company they started took on all sorts of work, but they only received one commission to build a skyscraper—that was the Jewelers’ Building. Commissioned in 1924, constructed 1925-27, and for a brief time “the tallest building in the world outside New York City.” The style was old fashioned—Dinkelberg never gave up the fondness for Greek and Roman classicism he had shared with Burnham. But it was very modern in its way; instead of having an airshaft in the middle of the building, Gaiver and Dinkelberg used that space for cars. It was the 1920s, and most everyone wanted an automobile. Mothers especially wanted to have a secure place to park their car so that they could take their valuables straight from the safe in their office to their vehicle and then drive to—well, to wherever they needed to go. That was the idea, anyway, and a clever idea it was. Gaiver and Dinkelberg built 23 floors of garage in the middle of the Jewelers’ Building.”
“But you can’t park there now.”
“When does anything turn out exactly as it has been planned? The Jewelers’ Building had been commissioned on the assumption that jewelers would love to have one building where they could carry out all their transactions—everyone in one convenient place instead of strung out along Wabash Avenue. But for whatever reason the jewelers decided they preferred life on Wabash; almost none of them moved into the new building that had their name on it. And the garage? Well, it wasn’t used by people visiting their jewelers. Pure Oil took over most of the building, and had it renamed, and the executives loved having such a convenient place to park their cars. But their cars quickly got larger, and the tight turns on the ramps of the garage in what was now the Pure Oil building didn’t change their size or their shape at all. By the 1940s Gaiver and Dinkelberg’s wonderful idea wasn’t working anymore. They made all that garage space into storage space and dingy cut-rate office space with no light. Only now, in the twenty-first century, has the Jewelers’ been made elegant and beautiful again.”
