Essay: Stairway to Memories

By: David Masello

March 2004

Although my grandfather died in 1939, long before I was born, I often take a walk where he did most days of his working life. There are two staircases in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that link the first and second floors and are also part of the permanent collection. They may be the museum’s only artworks that visitors can touch, occupy, use. Every day for decades, before they were acquired by the museum in 1972, my grandfather climbed these cast-iron stairs with their veined white-marble treads. From the same expansive landings that now look out to the atrium of the American Wing, he paused to catch his breath.

Both stairways, their copper and bronze plating agleam, mahogany rails patinaed from the touch of countless hands, came from the now-deceased Old Chicago Stock Exchange designed by architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924). The 13-story building, completed in 1894, was demolished in 1972 to make way for an undistinguished office tower. The Chicago Stock Exchange was among Sullivan’s most detailed skyscrapers, inside and out. The imposing entry portal on LaSalle Street was a 40-foot by 30-foot archway, exuberant with bordered floral detail. Deeply recessed terra-cotta arches defined the base of the building, up to the third floor. From there, the shaft of the skyscraper rose, unembellished, in an undulating pattern of bay windows, “giving the facade a corrugated appearance,” as Robert Twombly writes in Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work. The attic floor was colonnaded, over which hung a sculpted cornice. It was on this building that Sullivan first used what came to be called the “Chicago Window,” a large, fixed central pane, bracketed by operating sash windows—a novel way to let in light and air.

But it was inside the building that Sullivan indulged in ornament and detail. Elevator grilles were composed of delicate trellis-like patterns of seeds and stamens, which suggested, as Twombly writes, “the eternal life cycle.” The great trading room was a two-story-tall expanse of friezes stenciled in 65 shades of green, red, blue and gold topped with an art-glass ceiling. The stairway stringers (the main supporting surfaces) were defined by stamped, pinwheel floral motifs. Every baluster featured a shield-like ornament; a copper electroplating process highlighted the raised and recessed details. Today, visitors ascending and descending the stairways run their hands over the tapered newel posts, “reading” their Braille-like detail. To use the stairs is, at once, a tactile and prosaic experience, the occupation and experience of art.

My maternal grandfather, Samuel J. Cohn (1880–1939), came to Chicago from Russia as a boy in the late 1880s. In addition to having founded a successful tobacco store on the city’s near South Side, he purchased a “standing seat” on the Chicago Stock Exchange, where he spent part of every day—as much socializing as making trades. My mother remembers him saying that he climbed the staircases not only for exercise, but also because the landings provided a quiet respite in his day. There, he could smoke a cigarette, even jot some lines in one of the journals he kept, which I still reread.

Chicago is famous for its early Modern architecture—Sullivan’s buildings among the best examples—but the city has remained insensitive to preserving its early buildings. The Old Stock Exchange was one of many masterpieces to be torn down, especially during the 1960s and ’70s. I was a 14-year-old living in Evanston, a suburb north of Chicago, when then-mayor Richard J. Daley announced that the building was to be sacrificed, despite vocal opposition. In what remains my only act of political activism, I canvassed my neighborhood with a petition to save the building that I had come to love because of its association with my grandfather and from my visits to it. I rang the doorbells of neighbors and asked them to add their names to the list, which I intended to send to Mayor Daley. Equipped with blurry Polaroids I had taken of the building, I tried to convince people of the merits of saving it.

I didn’t expect resistance from these people I knew so well. One neighbor told me, “There are plenty of old buildings in the Loop; one less isn’t going to change anything.” Even my elderly cousin, Eva, who had worked there as a secretary in the 1920s, said, “That building felt old even then. Goodbye to it.”

I managed to fill sheets of notebook paper with signed names. Mayor Daley never responded to my petition. Months later, I learned about the building’s demolition. (An ardent preservationist, Richard Nickel, was killed by falling debris while trying to salvage interior detail.)

There are several ways to reach the second level of the Met’s American Wing, but I always take one of the Sullivan staircases. When I grasp its banister, I know that my grandfather’s hands contributed to its rich patina. The stairways are works of public art as well as personal family heirlooms, though they never belonged to my family. I am lucky that one of the few details saved from the building was an actual place my grandfather occupied. I didn’t know him when he was alive, but I do know where he stood, looked out and thought, in quiet, every day.

David Masello is Art & Antiques’ New York editor.