This abandoned 54 unit Apartment Building features a large Central Light Court

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Built in 1892-1893 the Yale exemplifies the Romanesque style design that was particularly popular in Chicago residential and commercial architecture during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Before establishing his own practice and designing the Yale, John T. Long had worked for Adler & Sullivan and W. W. Boyington, architects who had designed distinguished Romanesque-style buildings. With the seven-story Yale building, Long and his client Edgar M. Condit departed from the scale of the two-story wood frame houses that lined suburban Englewood's streets. The jump in scale reflected something of the boosterish optimism concerning Chicago's possibilities for physical and commercial expansion on the eve of the World's Columbian Exposition. Condit placed 54 apartments on a piece of land that would have accommodated at most two single-family houses if built according to the neighborhood's prevailing pattern. The Yale was visible from Condit's own detached two-story wood frame house that stood one block away, on Harvard Avenue. The rounded bays and other picturesque elements of the Yale design comported with the neighborhood's late Victorian eclectic architecture; nevertheless, the Yale's greatest significance turns upon its inventive solution to the perceived problems of living and working at the densities made possible by modern elevators. Adopting a form more readily found in Chicago's tall office buildings than in contemporary apartment plans, Long designed a building around a central light court atrium closed by a rooftop skylight and open to the building's lowest residential floor. The skylight flooded the Yale's primary public interior space with light in a manner quite uncharacteristic of contemporary tall apartment buildings. The design monumentalized the contemporary architectural and cultural concern over light and air in the increasingly crowded conditions of the modern city.

Despite their contrasting form and scale, the Yale and the detached suburban houses that surrounded it shared important design inspiration from popular cultural ideals related to the importance of natural light and air. The late-nineteenth-century scientific development of bacteriology, which linked microscopic organisms to specific diseases, made only modest inroads against older miasmatic theories of contagion. Many people believed that miasmas, polluted air and noxious odors arising from organic decay, caused human disease and accounted for epidemics. Popular notions of health suggested that sunlight and freely circulating air were the surest cure for unhealthy urban conditions. Sun and air were considered the "great disinfectants" that made urban living viable. The promotion of Chicago suburbs like Englewood was premised in part upon the benign effects of sunlight, breezes, and the harmonizing effects of trees and grass. In fact, the community's name itself was drawn from the impressive mid-nineteenth-century forested suburban landscape of Englewood, New Jersey.

Englewood's promoters boasted of the suburban advantages of light, air, and its mature stands of oak trees. They also pointed to the community's superior transit connections with downtown Chicago. In 1882, for example, the Directory of Englewood insisted that Englewood "enjoys advantages as an accessible point which none of her sister suburbs can claim. Seven leading lines of railway furnish forty-five trains each way daily, and within three months two more railroads and a line of street cars will be added. All of these trains must stop at Englewood." Englewood's residential development and population boomed during the 1870s in the aftermath of the Chicago fire and continued to grow as the pattern of downtown expansion, particularly the 1881 relocation of the Board of Trade to a site adjacent to the railroad stations serving Englewood, favored southern suburban development. The lots that the Yale stood on were sold in the early 1880s, without buildings, for $6,650. When Condit purchased them in 1892 he paid $21,000.

With the development of the Cook County Normal School for training teachers and a large number of other public and private schools the Directory pointed with pride to the schools that enabled "residents to fit their children for Yale and Harvard, for teachers, or for business vocations, as they may elect." The solicitousness about education and the possibilities of Yale and Harvard was perhaps captured in the local street nomenclature. Skinner & Judd's 1868 subdivision of Englewood land included Yale and Harvard as streets. In settling on the street names Judge Mark Skinner, an early Chicago resident who had been elected Judge of the Cook County Court of Common Pleas in 1851, undoubtedly recalled his native New England as well as the law school affiliated with Yale College where he studied in the 1830s. Local authorities completed the collegiate trio when they changed the name of School Street to Princeton Avenue.

Before taking on the Yale commission, John T. Long had contributed designs for prominent features of the suburban landscape in and around Englewood. Born in Ohio in November 1849, Long began to practice architecture in Chicago in the mid-1870s. For years he served as a draftsman in various architectural firms.

Besides Adler & Sullivan and W. W. Boyington, he worked with Lorenzo Cleaveland and Charles Nothnagel. Long's shaping of the suburban landscape was evident, for example, in the fine suburban railroad depot he designed for Morgan Park around 1890. Here the design for the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway depot, clearly influenced by Henry Hobson Richardson's suburban Boston depots, included steeply pitched gables, extended platform roofs, and a Romanesque arched entrance. The depot codified the area's romantic domestic imagery at the gateway to the community.

Schools and churches were also important elements of the suburban landscape, fostering a rooted and morally uplifting image of the community. Long excelled in such work. In 1891 the anonymous editors of Industrial Chicago lavishly praised Long for his church and school designs, many of which stood in Englewood and adjacent neighborhoods; their biographical note reported:

John Long's earlier Englewood work may well have provided the personal and professional connections that led to the Yale commission. Edgar M. Condit, the developer of the Yale, worked on LaSalle Street as an insurance and real estate broker and lived in Englewood. His relative Albert B. Condit, a livestock commission merchant at the Union Stock Yards, just north of Englewood, served as a town supervisor in Englewood before the area's annexation to Chicago in 1889. In 1892, when Condit initiated the Yale project, he was fifty-two years old and lived on Harvard Avenue with Eliza, his wife of 26 years. Edgar and Eliza were born in Ohio and had no children.

Long's suburban work may have helped him win the commission for the Yale but he looked more readily to the commercial downtown than to the suburb in arriving at the building's distinctive light court and gallery plan. In the development of high-rise office buildings many leading architects from the 1870s onward developed great architectural effect by designing light courts that permitted light to flood the interior of their increasingly massive buildings. George H. Edbrooke's Farwell Block, built in 1870 took a difficult and potentially dark building site and created a bright interior by introducing a grand central light court. The Farwell Block stood between Arcade Court and an alley and extended behind the Republic Insurance Building which faced LaSalle Street between Madison and Monroe. The Farwell took the form of a hollow rectangular block with a six-story central light court surrounded by hall galleries. Windows off of the gallery admitted light to the inner portion of each office. Partially destroyed in the 1871 Chicago Fire the building was reconstructed and rented out by the federal government until a new federal building was completed. W. W. Boyington's five-story Superior Block on Clark Street was built in two sections across a relatively deep lot. A 30-foot by 40-foot light court spanned by bridges at the different floor levels stood between the front and rear sections of the building.

When office building construction resumed after the economic depression of the 1870s the concern for improved natural light continued to influence office design. Continuing earlier experiments architects expanded the light shafts found in earlier standard office buildings into impressive central light courts. The modern light court became an integral and monumental part of the building's architecture, enjoyed by tenants and visitors alike. In 1881, for example, Burnham & Root designed the six-story Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad's office building at Adams and Franklin Streets. They provided a light court of over 100 feet by 50 feet in the center of a building that measured only 176 feet by 122 feet. Iron galleries encircled the light court, giving access to the offices from the stairs and elevators. Here light and air streamed into offices from windows on both the street and the light court. Wheelock & Clay adopted a similar plan for the Open Board of Trade Building in 1884. In 1888 architects Baumann & Huehl incorporated a 35-foot by 108 foot light court into their thirteen-story Chamber of Commerce Building and in doing so developed an even grander architectural expression for the ideal of light and air. Visitors and tenants passed through the columned building's portico and mosaic and marble vestibule, past the ornate elevator enclosure and into a two-hundred-foot-high light court rimmed by ornate balustrades and galleries on every floor. Burnham and Root's 1893 Masonic Temple contained a central light court that ran 302 feet to the rooftop skylight. Many other Chicago office buildings did incorporate central light courts but they did not fully develop the dramatic architectural effects of buildings like the Chamber of Commerce and the Masonic Temple Building. Buildings like Burnham & Root's 1885 Rookery had a central court, but it was topped at the level of its two-story lobby rather than at the top of the building. In the Rookery an internal double-loaded corridor system gave access to offices that had windows facing either into the court or onto the street. In contrast to the Rookery, buildings like the Chamber of Commerce that combined the central court with a hall gallery system took fuller advantage of the dramatic architectural effects of the buildings' high-rise verticality.

The effort to provide a high level of natural light in Chicago office buildings also extended to the development of building facades. Cylindrical corners and projecting bays increased the air and light and window surface that illuminated office interiors. These projections gave the facades of buildings like Burnham & Root's 1891-1892 Ashland Block and the 1889-1891 Monadnock Building their dynamic exterior effects.

Starting in the late 1870s and continuing through the turn of the century many commercial buildings in Chicago's downtown and suburban residences, churches, and factories in the outlying areas adopted elements of Romanesque architecture. Originating in Western Europe between the tenth and twelfth centuries, the style's characteristic round arches, massive masonry walls, and foliated ornament were revived in the tremendously influential work of architect Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886). Richardson's work, represented in Chicago by the Glessner House on Prairie Avenue and by the Marshall Field Warehouse, provided distinguished local examples of this style and quickly influenced the designs of a host of Chicago architects including Adler & Sullivan, Burnham & Root, Holabird & Roche, Solon S. Beman, W. W. Boyington and John T. Long.

Few other Chicago architects joined John T. Long in his innovative appropriation of commercial architectural elements for the design of residential buildings. Clinton J. Warren's 1891 designs for the Metropole and the Lexington Hotels, built on South Michigan Avenue, included cylindrical corners and projecting bays; a facade organization quite similar to Yale's. In fact, the Yale's exterior facade corresponded to a formal pattern for several contemporary hotels and large apartment buildings. Despite the exterior similarities, Clinton Warren's buildings employed either exterior light courts or central light courts with a lobby level skylight and relied on standard double-loaded corridors for office access.

The Mecca Apartments, designed in 1891 by Franklin Pierce Burnham and his partner W. J. Edbrooke, represented an extraordinary exception to the somewhat limited appropriation of commercial design form in residential buildings. Built at the northwest corner of State and Thirty-fourth streets the Mecca extended 266 feet from State to Dearborn and the same distance from front to back. The four-story building facade included numerous projecting bays. The building was u-shaped in plan with a large exterior courtyard opening to the street between two main wings. A particularly striking feature of the Mecca design was that each wing was organized around a central light court that measured 35 feet by 150 feet and was topped by a skylight. Hall galleries with ornate balustrades, designed in a foliated pattern, ringed the court. The Mecca's relatively lower plan also suggests another important architectural source for these interiors; nineteenth-century American and European retail arcades. Doors and windows lined the galleries in the Mecca. Located four miles north of the Yale's Englewood site, the Mecca may well have provided John T. Long with an important model for his design. The Illinois Institute of Technology demolished the Mecca in 1952 after a decade-long battle with its tenants who fought to preserve the building.

The Brewster Apartments, designed in 1892 by Enoch Hill Turnock, is the only other Chicago residential building from the late nineteenth century that incorporated a central light court and a galleried plan similar to those of the Yale and the Mecca. Built at the northwest corner of Diversey Boulevard and Pine Grove Avenue, the eight-story Brewster has the cylindrical corners, the projecting bays, the highly ornamented cornice, and the gabled rooftop skylight that Long designed for the Yale at almost the exact same time. The narrower building site for the Brewster led to a somewhat different pattern of circulation. In the Brewster, a stair wraps around the elevator shaft and gives access to a single gallery on each floor that extends along the center of the light court with short sections branching off to each apartment. The gallery decks are made up of small glass blocks that let light penetrate to the floors below. The central placement of the gallery means that small light wells stand between the branching walkways and bring light directly to the windows of the inner tier of rooms. The Brewster is well preserved and its design compares favorably with the Yale. The play of light in the Brewster through the grid of the gallery floors and balustrades is visually more intricate than in the Yale; however, the Brewster's light court lacks the breadth and spaciousness of the Yale and its exterior, with rock-faced stone covering the entire facade, lacks the detail and architectural refinement of the Yale.

Like many downtown office buildings, the Yale rose above the buildings that surrounded it. The outside rooms enjoyed light, air, and unobstructed views over the surrounding houses and the suburban landscape. Thus the Yale, despite its urban commercial provenance, partook of the cherished ideals of suburban living. Despite the architectural contrasts between the Yale and its neighboring buildings it is important to understand that the very people who occupied downtown office buildings as tenants were also the people who built and lived in Chicago's suburbs. They were largely members of a growing middle class of white-collar workers. Downtown they wrote, typed, filed, and otherwise processed ever-increasing amounts of paper. The downtown skyscraper landscape was created for people who saw their access to refined workplaces, filled with light and air as an important element in their social identity. In both work and residence, they were comfortably separated from the increasingly polluted and contested settings of Chicago industrial production and working-class residence. One did not have to travel very far from the corner of Yale and Sixty-Sixth Street in the 1890s to reach the Union Stock Yards or the factories that were located in Englewood, along the same railroad tracks that brought commuters home from downtown Chicago. But these places were a world apart.

When the federal census enumerator visited the Yale seven years after it opened he found a collection of middle-class native-born families. George Adams a 38-year-old civil engineer and native of Illinois lived with Mimmie, his wife of twelve years who was born in Iowa and worked as a school teacher. They lived with their 11-year-old son Warren. Edwin Brown, a 58-year-old manufacturer's agent and native of Massachusetts, lived with Ella, his 50-year-old wife of nineteen years, and a native of New York. Belle Jones, a 19-year-old Illinois-born servant also lived in the Brown's apartment. The Adams and the Browns counted as their neighbors people who gave their occupations as dentist, real estate dealer, a patentee of a letter sealer, a restaurant proprietor, a bookkeeper, a manufacturer of sashes and doors, a steam engine engineer, salesman, physician, manager of a stock car company, railroad agent, store clerk, stenographer, editor, journalist, lawyer, grain broker, school superintendent, horse buyer, several managers, and traveling salesmen, and Hugh McCain the building's 29 year old porter who shared his apartment with a cook, three waitresses, and a laundress who in all likelihood worked in the building's ground floor cafe. Mimmie Adams could count fifteen other teachers as her neighbors in the Yale. Some tenants had children and a few took in boarders to share the rent. In 1910 and 1920 enumerators found different people living at the Yale but they held the same white-collar, middle-class, positions as the people who had lived there in 1900.

The question arises in looking at the Yale why more buildings like it were not constructed for middle-class tenants. It clearly found a market among Englewood residents who partook in many of the advantages of suburban living. The only clear distinction between residents of the Yale and residents of the single-family detached houses adjacent to it was that people in the Yale lived with fewer people; they had smaller families, fewer servants and boarders, or were at different stages of the life cycle. There are several explanations possible for why the light court atrium plan despite its architectural distinction did not proliferate in residential areas the way it had in the downtown. As is evident in Englewood, developers did not build high-rise residential structures randomly in Chicago neighborhoods. They tended to cluster in a narrow band along the lakefront. There, the great scenic and recreational resources presented by Lake Michigan promoted higher land values and buildings with plans that maximized views of the Lake by incorporating elevators. In the high-rise areas architects placed a premium on exterior views rather than the grand effects of interior light courts. Moreover, developers were less willing to make such generous allotments of interior space when the real amenity of the location was outside along the lakeshore.

If buildings like the Yale, the Brewster, and the Mecca represent the road not taken in middle-class multiple-family housing, the small Chicago flat building with two, three, and six units and the low-rise courtyard apartment building dominated the middle-class apartment market in the early twentieth century. These building types all arose in the face of a somewhat entrenched social and class prejudice against apartment living. Some apartment buildings led the way in providing technological and human services to residents far in advance of single-family houses. Hot and cold running water, electricity, steam heat, elevators, telephones, doormen, maids, valet, and dining services provided more amenities and conveniences than many suburban neighborhoods offered. Still, cultural critics insisted that apartment buildings and residential hotels threatened to destroy the cherished ideals of domesticity, child-rearing, and familial privacy, eroding the institution of the nuclear family and the fabric of American society. Apartment buildings were often unwelcome additions to the single-family neighborhood. They brought, it was argued, transient renters rather than owners and people of more modest means. Apartments threatened to introduce urban density, congestion, and cosmopolitan social diversity into communities that were built to counter these very urban conditions. Apartments also threatened the ethos of single-family home ownership and the property values tied to the ideal of the single-family home.

The cultural ideal favoring single-family living failed to counter the pressure of numbers and the economics of housing in turn-of-the-century Chicago. Multiple-family construction accelerated at the turn of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, many Chicago apartment architects did internalize the critique of apartment living and developed buildings that wore a "domestic aspect." They designed apartments that incorporated suburban residential forms and could be more compatibly placed in single-family areas. In particular, these architects drew upon the suburban promise of landscape, light, and air. Apartments that developed around an exterior landscaped court open to the street brought the grass of the suburban lawn directly into the midst of the multiple-family building. Balconies, sun porches, and large windows did what the Yale light court did; they captured the contemporary concern for natural light and ventilation; again, a major feature of suburban plans.

In distinction to the Yale plan, the courtyard apartments drastically cut down on the provision of interior circulation. Separate entries ranged around the courtyard and gave access to stairs that reached landings with just two apartments per floor. This plan offered a measure of separation between residents and, to some degree, countered the complaint that apartment living encouraged indiscriminate mixing of residents, compromising domestic privacy. The separate courtyard entries meant that tenants really only shared the building with the six or eight families in their entry as opposed to the thirty or forty families who resided in the building. While the courtyard separated people the gallery system in the Yale's light court intensified the feeling and the fact of human aggregation in the building. With the galleries and the open cage elevator potentially everyone coming and going from the building was under the same roof and immediately accessible to the view of their neighbors. This more gregarious arrangement put the Yale's density on parade; the gallery design ran counter to the favor increasingly being given by builders, architects, and middle-class tenants for the more private, less cosmopolitan, arrangement of units in multiple-family buildings. Courtyard buildings proliferated after 1900 and ended the further elaboration of the residential innovation represented by the Mecca, the Yale, and the Brewster.

Edgar Condit seems to have weathered the economic depression of the 1890s; directories of the late 1890s listed his position as that of the proprietor of the Yale rather than the insurance agent he had been previously. By 1900 John T. Long's most productive years as an architect were over. He was a 50-year-old widower living with his widowed sister, her 29-year-old daughter, and two boarders in a 60^th Street apartment. When Condit sold the Yale in 1901 the price reflected the economic dislocations of the 1890s. Condit had spent $21,000 for the land to build the Yale. The building cost another $150,000. When he sold it to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1901 the building was debt-free but he received only $80,000 for the property. The American Board kept the property for its rental income into the 1940s. The Yale later reflected some of the decline of the surrounding area and yet while many single-family residences have been demolished on the adjacent blocks, the Yale's sturdy masonry construction has stood up very well. Plans are now being considered to completely rehabilitate the building.

Building Description

Built in 1892-1893 the Yale is a seven-story Romanesque-style brick and limestone apartment building. Located at the northeast corner of Yale Avenue and Sixty-Sixth Street, the Yale is a prominent landmark in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, seven miles south of the Chicago Loop. As one of the few high-rise buildings constructed in a neighborhood of two-story wood-frame houses and a few three-story brick apartment buildings, the Yale has always dominated the surrounding landscape. Built at the edge of its property line the Yale is approximately 80 feet wide by 130 feet long. The first floor of the Yale provided space for the building's office, lounges, and a cafe. The upper six floors have 54 apartments. The interior's most notable feature is a central light court atrium, that measures 25 feet by 82 feet. Access to every apartment is made through this space; second-floor apartments are reached across the floor at the base of the court. The apartments above are reached along the rectangular galleries that form the perimeter of the court on the five upper floors. An open stair and elevator shaft on the western end of the light court provide access to the galleries. A secondary service stair and elevator core are adjacent to the northeast corner of the light court. A gabled metal and glass skylight, which rises from the building's flat roof, lights the stairs, the elevator, the galleries, and the entire central court. The skylight also illuminates the inner tier of rooms in each apartment through windows lining the galleries.

The Yale is currently unoccupied. Many panels of the gallery balustrade have been removed. A small section of the cornice, at the southwest corner of the building, is missing. Still, the most notable aspects of the exterior, the Romanesque form, the projecting bays, and the classical and foliated ornamental details, and the significant element of the interior, the soaring space of the central light court with its unusual hall gallery plan, maintain both their design integrity and historic feeling and intelligibility.

The first story of the Yale's west and south facades, fronting on the streets, are faced with rough-cut rusticated limestone. The upper floors are enclosed by yellow brick. On the west facade a two-story entrance surround of finished limestone and foliated ornament, with a classical egg-and-dart molding, frames a shallow Romanesque entrance arch with its rusticated voussoirs. Under the arch, a stone lintel over the door carries two foliated panels and projecting letters spelling--"THE YALE." This entrance is further emphasized in the front facade by a slight projection of the building's central three windows. This modestly projected entrance bay extends in a single upward line to the roof interrupted only by the projecting cornice above the sixth-floor windows. A dentil molding tops this cornice, which is decorated with festooned terra cotta panels. Even more boldly molded festoons and dentils, and foliated corner acroterions, form the terra cotta cornice at the top of the building, along the low parapet wall above the seventh-floor windows.

The two-story entrance surround provides the visual base for the third floor's arched window openings. The arched windows have brick voussoirs and terra cotta hood molds. The arched window motif is repeated on the seventh floor; here narrower and more numerous arched openings bracketed by the sixth and seventh floor cornices visually terminate the building.

The three-window-wide entrance bay is flanked on either side by three-window-wide vertical wall bays. The front facade is bracketed by cylindrical bays at each corner. These projecting corners, with two windows at each floor, rise from the second floor to the top of the building. Four arched windows on the seventh floor stand in place of the two square windows on the lower floors of the corner bays. The underside of the bays carry handsomely carved foliated limestone. Heavily molded terra cotta sill courses located on every floor of the cylindrical corners help balance their vertical line.

The southeast corner of the building, on Sixty-Sixth Street, has a design identical to the two corners that face Yale Avenue. Also two, three-sided bays project from the south, or Sixty-Sixth Street, facade of the building. These bays have three windows at each floor; the windows are the double-hung, single-light, wood frame windows that are found throughout the building. Like the corner bays the projecting bays on the south elevation rise from the second to the seventh floor; they carry foliated ornament at their bases and sill courses on each floor. Adjacent to the cylindrical corner bays, the south facade of the building is framed at either end by an expanse of flat wall unbroken by windows. These zones are flanked by two-window-wide vertical bays patterned on the three-window wide bays on the Yale Avenue facade. Next, toward the middle of the south facade comes the two projecting bays. A flat two-window wide bay fills the wall between the two projecting bays.

Unlike the cylindrical bays on the other three corners of the building, a three-sided elongated projecting bay, facing north, terminates the northeast corner of the building. The north and east facades of the building, the ones not facing public streets, have reddish-brown common brick in place of the yellow face brick, limestone, and terra cotta of the two street facades. The east and north facades lack the projections, articulations, and ornamental details of the two street facades. Both facades do continue the arched window openings at the third and seventh floors that line the two primary facades. On the east facade, there are six tiers of windows, one of the tiers includes narrower and shorter windows than the others; this tier admits light to a bathroom in the apartment in the northeast corner of the building. Eleven tiers of windows cross the north facade between the projecting corner bays. Six metal fire escapes are in place on the exterior of the building. The flat-topped bitumen roof is broken by the projecting skylight over the central court and by a single penthouse room on the west side. A slightly projecting brick chimney extends up the east facade of the building, close to the northeast corner of the building.

The exterior of the building is in a good state of preservation. There have been no significant alterations to the original design. The acroterion ornament topping the southwest corner of the building is missing. Many of the double-hung, single pane, wood, sash windows have been broken and some have been removed.

Across the front threshold of the Yale is an entrance lobby. The elevator cage and stairs stand on an axis across the lobby. The left and right spaces initially dedicated to the building office and lounges were converted, between 1935 and 1985, into two apartment units. The layout and modern fitting of these spaces have certainly obscured their original layout and finish. A hallway to the south of the main stair has three rooms with concrete floors and plaster walls that were used originally for lounges and a cafe that were later turned into storage space. The boiler room stands in the northeast corner of the ground floor. A large single room extends along the north side of the first floor between the boiler room at the rear and the apartment space at the front; this space was most recently used as a laundry room. The first-floor rooms were, and are, extremely simple with concrete floors, plaster walls, and steam pipes crossing the ceiling. Their current form, their changed historical uses, and their current emptiness do not adversely affect the building's most significant features which are located on the exterior and on the floors above the first floor.

Above the first floor are the six apartment floors. Access to these floors is by the open metal cage elevator or the metal stair that winds around the elevator shaft, with three flights and two landings between each floor level. Access to the apartments are off of the gallery halls that form the perimeter of the central light court. The hall gallery balustrades were designed with the same simple open cage diagonal metal weave that encloses the elevator shaft. The panels are topped by curled metal strips located below the rounded metal railing. This open design permitted the play of light and the circulation of air coming from the skylight. On the wall side of the galleries simple pointed arches frame the entrances to each floor's nine apartments. Between these arches, square double-hung windows admitted natural light and air to the inner tier of apartment rooms. A continuous chair rail wood molding runs along the gallery wall just below the windows. It is this central space and pattern of circulation upon which the primary significance of the interior rests. It is the space itself, as enclosed architectural space more than any particular architectural detail, that is most architecturally significant.

The apartments generally have one or two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and in some cases a breakfast room, as well as a single room that serves as a combined living and dining room. The kitchens, bathrooms, and breakfast rooms constitute the inner tier of rooms. They have windows that open onto the galleries of the central light court. The bedrooms and the combined living and dining rooms form the outer tier of rooms with windows overlooking the streets or the adjacent lots. A clear hierarchy between apartment spaces exists. The inner tier rooms are smaller than the outer tier rooms. The bedrooms have flat outer walls while in seven of the nine units on each floor, the living rooms have a more spatially dynamic plan; they occupy the building's projecting bays. Occupying the space behind the full entrance bay, the living room of the eighth unit enjoys a spacious run of three windows. The ninth unit is on the north side of the building and is simply a more modest unit than the others.

Front and side facades (1997)

Front facade (1997)

Rear and side facade (1997)

Light court (1997)

Stair and elevator cage (1997)

Skylight (1997)

Corner bay (1997)