Category: General

Chicago History Museum, ICHi-89163, Raymond W. Trowbridge, photographer

About a Wall at Taliesin That No Longer Exists

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I wrote this to myself over a decade ago.

When I was asking questions about the history of Taliesin (as I often do). But, to start off: this post is about the photo at the top of this page.

I’ve been trying to figure out the history of a wall between two rooms in Wright’s living quarters at Taliesin. These rooms, known as the Loggia and the Loggia fireplace, were, in 1911, a guest bedroom and a sitting room (which had a fireplace then, too). Taliesin’s living quarters were destroyed by fire down to the foundations and chimneys in 1914.

Wright rebuilt the living quarters in 1914-15 and renamed them Taliesin II. In the rebuilding, he took the guest bedroom and redesigned it into a room he called the Loggia (then added a guest bedroom to the south of the sitting room). He picked “Loggia” as the name for the room because there were stone piers on one side of the room (and it had a stone floor).

What is a “Loggia”?

Wikipedia has a nice definition of loggia.

Wright noted that the Loggia “looked up the Valley to the Lloyd-Jones Chapel.” [this quote is in his autobiography, published in Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings, v. 2, 241.] The ‘Valley’ is the Wisconsin valley settled by his Lloyd Jones family.

The east side of the Loggia looked toward the family Valley; its west side opened to the Loggia fireplace, and you can see it in a Taliesin II floor plan that’s online here. The room is labelled “sitting room” because it worked with the bedroom to its right.

The living quarters were again consumed by fire in 1925. Reconstruction occurred on the building throughout that year, giving us (as he later named it) Taliesin III. This version of the living quarters is what still exists. Although it looked lot different in 1959 than when he rebuilt in 1925.

I mean, it’s still rectangular and constructed of stone, plaster and wood, with cedar shingles on the roof and plate glass in the windows, but…. The man made changes in almost every part of the building so understanding old photographs takes a little bit of reconfiguring in your brain.

There aren’t many photos for either of these spaces (today’s Loggia and loggia fireplace) before 1950. That’s why, when I first saw the photo at the top of this page, I didn’t know what room I was looking at.

The photo is in the public domain, which is why I feel fine showing it.

You are seeing the interior of Taliesin, though. This is looking northeast from the Loggia fireplace area (the fireplace is behind the photographer). The stone wall you see on the right stood between the Loggia fireplace and the Loggia. It was probably a foot wide, close to 5 feet tall, and about 10 feet long. No other photograph shows it, and Wright removed it some time in the 1930s.

When was the photo taken? Evidence suggests the photograph took it in the summer of 1930. I’ll explain how I know that in the next blog post.

What are you seeing in this photograph?

The photo is cool if you don’t know Taliesin, but it’s probably pretty confusing if you do. If you stood at this same spot at Taliesin today, only two things are the same: the radiator cover to the left of the chair on the left is the same (the radiator cover is what looks like a wooden table with spindles). And the passageway behind the chair, through the wooden door, is still there,

Only the door itself isn’t. That’s because Wright no longer needed it.

When this photo was taken, you would have gone through the door, take a left, then through another door. Then you’d be outside. In the 1940s, Wright changed that entryway. Because of that, he removed the wooden door since he no longer needed it.

What the photograph shows that is now different:

Now that I’ve covered what’s the same, there’s what’s different. Or some of it, anyway.

What’s most noticeably different to anyone at Taliesin today is the stone wall (with wood above it) on the right. The wall had a glass door framed in wood and that doesn’t exist anymore. And, at the top of the photo, there’s the parapet (the stucco wall) with vertical wooden piers.

What you would see today:

If you were at Taliesin today you would not see the stone wall or the parapet. That’s different because of the other major change: the ceiling is much lower. In 1933-34 he lowered ceiling to build rooms above for his daughter, Iovanna (1925-2015).

And of course when I write that Wright “built” anything: the people who did this were either workers or architectural apprentices. And, after 1932, most of the work was by his apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship.

One of them, Abe Dombar, wrote about the changed that lowerd the ceiling in “At Taliesin”. This was the regular newspaper features. This one was published February 9, 1934:

          Two new rooms added to the pageant of Taliesin’s 40 rooms merely by lowering the ceiling of the loggia and raising the roof above it to get the most playful room in the house.  The boys call it a “scherzo.”  This is little eight year old Iovanna’s room.  Until now she was the only apprentice who didn’t have his or her own room.”

Randolph C. Henning, ed. and with commentary. At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937  (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois, 1991), 20-21.

That change made everything you see in the upper half of the photograph different. And everything you see in the lower part of the photo is different because of the removed wall and door.

The stone wall that no longer exists:

That wall, though. I’ve spent a lot of energy on trying to figure out when, exactly, he had it removed. And I’ve tried to figure out what was going on underneath it, allowing it to stand without damaging the floor. Because looking at its possible dimensions (I think it was about 1’x5’x10’—30cm x 1.5m x 3m, or so), the wall (built in limestone) probably weighed around a ton (just over 900 kg).  

But I’ve checked, and there’s no wall below taking the weight. You’d think that he would have done something to the floor below to hold something that heavy, but no.  

And, while I often say “Taliesin keeps its history within its walls”,

There’s nothing around this area that tells you a wall was there. I’ve walked along the floor (probably even gotten on my hands and knees and crawled along it). There’s nothing there that lets you know that a substantial wall, about a foot wide, once stood on it. While normally at Taliesin, you can’t just hack a stone wall down and not leave a footprint. But, that’s not what’s going on here.

I think what might have happened is that Wright rebuilt the living quarters in 1925, and after it was done, decided to add the stone wall on top of the preexisting stone floor. Then he later decided to get rid of it.

But there’s no record of anyone taking it down. His apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship were doing so much that they didn’t have time to note things or take photos of their work.

And studying the building usually doesn’t result in tracking down every change (even if you knew it happened). Or, frequently, figure out how to ask who did what/where/when.

I think the Administrator of Historic Studies at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Indira Berndtson, has done the best job tracking things down in part because she has lived at Taliesin (and Taliesin West), and has known people in Wright’s life so well. Starting in the mid-late 1980s, she began doing interviews with former apprentices, clients, and friends of Wright’s. Because she knew (and knows) so many of these people, she might be speaking to them, and be reminded of something someone else said. Then she could add, “So-and-so said they remembered you all doing this,” and that would push someone’s memory to add to the story.

Information at changes to Taliesin:

The only time you get actual, on-the-spot information is when Taliesin Fellowship apprentices wrote letters to family, wrote the weekly “At Taliesin” newspaper articles (1934-37) or, in the case of one, kept a daily diary (this was Priscilla Henken who was in the Taliesin Fellowship with her husband in 1942-43). There are books and articles that people wrote about their time in the Fellowship, but other than those things, there’s no consistent way of getting information on changes at Taliesin as they were happening.

Sketches of the wall exist, but nothing definitive. There’s one drawing which appears to match reality, but it doesn’t show the wall. I’ve dated that drawing to  1936-37 based on architectural details and you can get to it through this link.

If you look at the drawing, the Loggia fireplace is the fireplace that’s at the lower right, backed up against a rectangular roof.

Back to the wonderful photograph above:

Ken Hedrich took the next, dated, photograph of the space in 1937. That doesn’t show the wall.

btw: he took this photograph (linked through here) for the January 1938 issue of Architectural Forum magazine, which focused on Wright.

In the end, at this moment,1 I have the curiosity that there was a wall at Taliesin that was later removed, for which there really isn’t any evidence and I can’t quite figure out why the wall didn’t mess up the floor (making the stone floor, or the ceiling below, crack with the weight).

Although I always hope that I’ll come across a diary entry where someone wrote, “we were asked to take down a stone wall. I had stone grit in my food for 3 days afterwards.”

First published 1/21/2021

The photograph at the top of this post was by Raymond Trowbridge and is at the Chicago History Museum, ICHi-89166. It is in the public domain. This is a larger version on the keiranmurphy.com website.

1 Although I wrote this originally over a decade ago, I still don’t know how the wall was standing without causing an effect on the floor, I still haven’t come across many photographs of it, and I haven’t come across anyone writing about taking it down.

Photograph by Kevin Dodda of Taliesin in snow.

How did Frank Lloyd Wright feel about Christmas?

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Someone asked me that question in early December. Yet, I’ve tried to answer it, with no clear success, for years. After all, Wisconsin can be charmingly Christmas-Themed, with a dusting of snow and a chill in the air.* In addition, in his autobiography, Wright described Taliesin in winter as being a “frosted palace roofed and walled with snow”. But, he didn’t seem especially fond of Christmas, particularly in the first years after he built his Wisconsin home in 1911.

Wright talking about Christmas

In 1924, when Wright had a new love in his life, his future wife, Olgivanna, he wrote her a letter saying that Christmas reminded him of his children he had left in Oak Park, IL in 1909. His letter to her is in The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, 234.

However, less than a decade after they met, the Wrights began the Taliesin Fellowship, and eventually Wright would leave Wisconsin in the winter, spending that time with his family and apprentices at Taliesin West in Arizona. Thus, Christmas became an activity enjoyed by the group in the desert. To read about their Christmases, read The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright.

Wright’s Christmas-card moments

He did have plenty of these in the 1890s/early 1900s with the family in Oak Park. They were described aplenty in the book written by Wright’s second son, John. In John’s book, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright (first published in 1946 under the amusing title, My Father, Who is on Earth), he wrote about growing up in Oak Park, and later working with his father. These memories also include how he felt about his dad as a father; the day of Taliesin’s 1914 fire; and the day his dad fired him! It’s unique and you should pick it up.

John wrote memories involving Christmas while growing up. One of these is of a Christmas Eve night when he was perhaps 5 or 6.

I’ll leave you with John’s description of watching his father put the presents out, then his father “caught” him and carried him back to bed:

…. He unboxed toys on a big white sheet under the tree, sat on the floor and played with each one before placing it. When he played with the mechanical donkey that jumped up and down I almost dashed in. When he pulled out a monkey that climbed a string, I giggled so loud the jig was up! Out rushed Papa, swooped me up in his arms, whisked me backed to bed, told me I had been dreaming. I still like to think it was a dream—and good old St. Nick, a reality. And not too long ago, Dad said, “I still believe in Santa Claus.”
John Lloyd Wright, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright (Dover Publications, Inc., New York; 1992), 40.

First published, 12/23/2020
The winter photograph taken at Taliesin at the top of this post is by Kevin Dodds and was reproduced with permission.

* overlooking the fact that, one time after 1992 (the year I came to live in this state), it reached -25F (-32C) degrees on Christmas day.

Looking east at Taliesin's agricultural wing.

“This stuff is FUN for me”: Taliesin photographs from Frank Lloyd Wright’s lifetime.

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The photograph above was published in a “Flashback” article from December 4 by Ron Grossman at The Chicago Tribune: “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin was a refuge for illicit romance. But tragedy tore apart the love he built”. It’s one of two photographs taken at Taliesin on December 25, 1911. That was published in my entry, “I looked at stone.”

That’s what I said to journalist Ron McCrea in 2010 after I’d spent my weekend looking at photos of Taliesin (he was writing about them, Wright, and Mamah Borthwick in his book, Building Taliesin, published in 2012). 

What prompted this statement here has to do with the photos on this link (archived from The Wayback Machine).

The photos didn’t just capture my attention. No: I yelled in a way that they show you in movies or cartoons. It’s yelling with lots of special characters: “Holy C*$#!”

What made me yell:

The article’s two photographs—exteriors of Taliesin I (Taliesin 1911-14)—I’d only seen as dark/dusty photos, or drawings made from them.

And it appears the photographer took these the on Christmas day, 1911. On that day, Wright (and his partner, Borthwick) gave an (unintentionally disastrous) press briefing at Taliesin. They did this because they hoped to stave off public damnation. Wright thought he could do that by addressing the press.

(or the “war correspondents” as he called them, in the Day Book newspaper, on Jan. 4).

The “newspaper men” put them back on the front pages because, while they’d left their families in Oak Park, Illinois in 1909, Wright returned alone in late 1910. Everyone reading the newspapers thought Wright and Borthwick had ended their relationship.

That was not true:

Wright was in the US, but acquired land in Wisconsin to build his home. Meanwhile, Cheney was in Europe. She had to wait until she could divorce her husband based on “abandonment”.

They divorced on August 5, 1911. Thereafter she petitioned a judge to allow her to reclaim her maiden name, Borthwick.1

The “war correspondents” found the two, realized that Wright had not reconciled with wife Catherine, and descended on Taliesin.

The hope by Wright (and Borthwick) that a public statement would calm the press didn’t work out. Even though Wright said in Baraboo News (Baraboo, WI, January 4), “may not the matter be left in privacy to those whose concern it chiefly is?”, it was too late. That newspaper, on December 28, said that Taliesin was “known as Crazy House.”

I encourage you at this point, if you haven’t done so already, to click the link to Grossman’s story so you can look at the “Crazy House” photos.

A drawing in 1914 made from a 1911 photograph

Drawing showing Taliesin's north facade

If you read the article, the first photograph, underneath the article’s title, shows the building’s northern face, with a parapet ending in a stone pier to the immediate left. I had never seen the photo before. But someone took the photo and made it into a drawing. That appeared in the Des Moines Daily News (published August 18, 1914). I put that drawing above. I think I should be ok to publish it. Given its age, it’s now in the public domain.

I wanted to show how you’d see that same part of the building today, but I couldn’t. Almost nothing in the photograph from Taliesin I (or the drawing) is the same. That’s because Wright kept adding on and changing the building. However, I say that, “Taliesin keeps its history within its walls.” So I’ll show where that history marker is, but I’ll orient you first.

A view toward Taliesin’s entry steps

You walk up the steps at Taliesin to Wright’s studio at Taliesin (the north wall of the studio is to the right). The parapet from the Taliesin I photo ended at the stone that is to the left of the tree trunk (the tree trunk is to the left of the window that’s on the extreme right in the photograph) .

The next photo is the other side of that stone wall. That tree trunk I just mentioned is just to the right of the end of wall. 

That little black rectangle you see is where the cap on the parapet terminated into the stone.

The second image in the Grossman article, near the bottom, shows that same wing (the agricultural wing) from its broad western façade. That photograph is at the top of this entry, because it first appeared in print before 1924. The images, while not being unknown to me, are probably pretty rare for fans of Frank Lloyd Wright or even Taliesin. That’s how many changes Wright made to the structure over time.

This second image (showing Taliesin’s far western facade), shows the building’s hayloft ending on the right side with a garage that has the cantilevered roof. I don’t know if the garage ever held cars since there are no photographs of cars in there and no photographs with wheel tracks leading up to the garage either. There are no close up photos of it, but you see the garage across the hill in this photo at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Another photograph used in a newspaper article

Grossman’s article used a second image taken in late December 1911, the day of Wright and Borthwick’s press conference.

I found this image because of a habit I had (and have). I search online for old Taliesin photographs. When I worked, I did this on my Friday afternoons after I had finished any other projects. I would type “Taliesin” and other qualifiers into a search bar to see what came up.

Note to the neophyte: make sure to narrow the search so that you aren’t seeing results regarding Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona; things about the 1914 murders/fire at Taliesin; some movie out there about vampires with a character who is, I guess, named Taliesin*; and information on actor/voice actor, Taliesin Jaffe (I’m sorry Mr. Jaffe, but I’ve never seen anything you’ve been in).

One day that brought me to a newspaper article in the Chicago Evening American, published on December 29, 1911:

I don’t remember my first thought in seeing the agricultural wing photo, but I’m sure I was really excited. And, ultimately a little disappointed, because the photograph was muddy and a little dark and, well, just newspaper print. It’s very likely I looked at it, tried to get what information I could by scanning it, then expanded, lightened, and darkened, and gave up.

I thought that these photographs, if they existed, were in a drawer or a folder, stuck away or mislabeled. After all, I had no idea of the photo of Taliesin’s north facade existed at all out there. But, obviously, I was wrong and the original photos were NOT lost.

* Here’s part of the problem in not exploring what comes up in my website searches: “Taliesin Meets the Vampires” is not a movie. “Taliesin Meets the Vampires”—if I had taken a moment to click on the link—is a “Vampire blog” where you “will find views and reviews of vampire genre media, from literature, the web, TV and the movies.” Well, I’m glad I did that because I prefer looking at a page on a website to finding, then watching, a vampire movie.

First published, 12/11/2020.
The photograph at the heading for this post comes from the Chicago Tribune Historical Images.

1. That was reported in the Chicago Daily Tribune on December 24, 1911.

Orson Welles during a taping of The Shadow

Nights on the weekend with OTR

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How I learned about Old Time Radio1

While driving in the car one Sunday night in the late 1990s, I switched on the radio and caught a show that permanently changed my routine. The radio was tuned to 91.3, a Wisconsin Public Radio station, and that’s when I heard this: “Bob Bailey, in the exciting adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account; America’s fabulous freelance insurance investigator: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.“

I’m pretty sure I yelled, “WHAT?!”, and laughed maniacally while repeating “action-packed expense account!” and “Freelance Insurance Investigator!!” as I drove home. On top of that was the name of the character: Johnny Dollar.

(As someone said to him in the Johnny Dollar episode, “The Alvin Summers Matter“: “You can think up a better one than that…”. To which the fictional character in question replied, “Wise up, buster: it sounds so phony, it’s gotta be legitimate.”)

And there was the “action-packed expense account”. It was, really, an expense account rattled off by Dollar throughout the episode: “Item number 1: Cost of a cab across town, 1 dollar 10 cents. Item number 2: Steak dinner, 1 dollar 25 cents….”  

That’s how I learned

that Sunday evenings on that station, from 8:30-11 p.m., was time for Old Time Radio Drama. Two-and-a-half hours of old radio programs. The station later  expanded the time to three hours. Then they added a three-hour block on Saturday nights.*

But all I knew at that moment was that I seemed to have stumbled into some surreal landscape. Some of which I knew, like Burns and Allen, and Jack Benny. Most of which I didn’t (like Dollar and comedians “Bob and Ray”). From then until decades afterward, I spent Sunday (then Saturday) evenings attached to the radio, listening to old radio plays. I tuned in to hear: Westerns, comedies, mysteries, the dramas of the programs “Suspense” and “Escape”, and many others.

The start of a dear habit:

I was obsessive about listening after first coming across “OTR”. At that time, 91.3 only had the show on Sunday nights. Because those Sunday evenings were my one shot for the week, I turned down invitations to do things. And, on going out, I’d try to get home as the time inched up to 8:15.

So, yes:

with OTR as my consistent source of entertainment (and because I remember my complete addiction to television when I grew up), I’ve missed classic shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad.

But, really, why old radio plays?

I’m devoted in part because of their oddness. The shows include, among other things, casual sexism, characters instantly falling in love, offers of cigarettes and booze (oh, yes: booze; never wine or beer), and people—most often, detectives—getting knocked unconscious. These situations in the old shows are so humorous because they’re so absurd.

I also discovered through OTR the intelligence of the writing and of the audiences.

Here’s the thing: these people of the 1930s to 1950s understood what was being asked and expected of them. They weren’t patsies blithely accepting the objects that were put up for sale. They seemed to understand the falsity of whatever the purveyors put out there. Like an episode I listened to early on from Fibber McGee and Molly: the actors are approached by Harlow Wilcox who—as he always did—worked in an ad for “Johnson’s Wax“, with Molly McGee adding humor in her voice as everyone in the audience knew what Wilcox was doing—paying the bills for the show through advertising.

OTR also had a comforting formula:

the problem presented and most often resolved in a half-an-hour, or hour, whether it be in comedy, drama, or mystery. Although there are science fiction stories (like those from Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and others) that continue to disturb me (see Dimension X and X-Minus One, below).

And there are also the memorable lines, only a few of which I’ll introduce you to:

  • The ad for Quaker Oats Puffed Rice: “the only cereal that’s shot from guns!”
  • A line from Let George Do It: “A drink should be like a woman: stimulating, but easy to see through.”
  • And my all-time favorite: Jack Webb, in the series Pat Novak, For Hire saying that someone “looked more badly used than a dictionary from a family of stupid people.”

My surprise in finding depth in these programs comes from a portrait created for me when I was little. One perhaps, made by those who grew up with these programs themselves & later thought that “oh, that was so naïve.” An adult coming across an ad for the “cereal shot from guns” would see the consumers as childish because children were the main audience. But I also suppose, as we come further into popular culture (and where our culture can now be broadcast from our Smartphones), we have to learn, again, that our ideas are not new.

Some Old Time Radio programs to explore

So, knowing there are things I don’t have space to write about, some of my favorites are below. These are in no particular order. Most of them are about a half-hour long and you can find them by using a search engine:

  • Gunsmoke. (I’m not usually interested in Westerns, but I like its moral complexity.)
  • The Lives of Harry Lime. (This is the network-palatable version of Lime from the movie The Third Man. It’s offered in ½ hour segments with the entrancing narrative by Orson Welles.)
  • Escape and Suspense. This can go up to an hour, and be thoughtful and/or disturbing (Case in point: “Three Skeleton Key“.)
  • Comedy:
    • The Jack Benny Show. (It took me a couple of weeks to realize this radio program was a “show-within-a-show”. The cast, in front of an audience, continuously prepares to perform the show, to be in front of an audience, which they never actually perform.)
    • The Burns and Allen Show. (Allen’s work was genius and those two – George Burns and Gracie Allen – were smart for realizing that. In 1940, she runs for President of the United States on the show. Her party? The Surprise Party – I mean, come on!)
    • The Bob and Ray Show. (The comedy duo of Bob Eliot – comedian Chris Eliot’s father – and Ray Goulding. Their 15-minute shows took a surreal path that at times was completely hilarious. I turn your attention to, for example, The Great Lakes Paper Clip Factory, which makes me laugh out loud thinking about.)
  • Detective shows:
    • Nero Wolfe. (Orchid- and beer-loving Wolfe fortunately has Archie Goodwin go out and gather information and murder suspects; except in the unfortunate moments in which Wolfe has to leave his house.)
    • Boston Blackie. (“Enemy to those who make him an enemy; friend to those who have no friend”)
    • Sam Spade. (A detective, like Philip Marlowe, with a secretary and a snappy recitation of the case.)
    • Richard Diamond. (The singing detective who, while he’s figuring out the crime, frequently gets hit in the head, which renders him unconscious.)
    • Rocky Jordan. (This takes place in Cairo. As the blog Mystery File puts it: “Effort is put in using authentic music and locations, respect is paid to the different culture, and because of that Cairo comes alive to the listener.”)
    • The Adventures of Frank Race. (Which often seems to involve some unbelievably sexy woman that Race has to comment on, and kiss. As he put it in The Shanghai Incident, “The kiss created a pull in my chest. Like the feeling my chest had during my first pull on a cigarette.”)
    • Bold Venture. (A radio series with Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall that lasted two seasons. The two could record a score of shows then go on vacation for months; in addition to the two characters, there was a Calypso singer that gave synopses of the plot throughout the show – after commercials for hard liquor and cigarettes I’m guessing.)
    • The Adventures of the Thin Man. (The same characters from the movie, in which you happily follow along with a rich couple that drinks too much.)
    • The Saint. (Vincent Price as charming and sly, not the man I saw in the schlocky horror movies aired on Creature Double Feature on Saturday afternoons in the ’70s.)
  • Very odd history/culture series (I’d love to write about all of them, but I’ve gone on long enough):
    • Crime Classics
    • Damon Runyon Theater
    • You Are There
  • The “extreme formula” series, where you know that the same characters will show up in each episode: Our Miss Brooks, Fibber McGee and Molly (with, occasionally, an opening of the hall closet <–look it up), The Great Gildersleeve, and others.
  • The Science Fiction shows of Dimension X and X-Minus One. Some of their episodes are haunting (“With Folded Hands“, “The Veldt“, and “Colony“, among others).

This changed in 2020:

*The local radio stations stopped airing Old Time Radio after June 14 of that year.
Their sexism noted above, but also their racism, prejudice against different ethnicities, their frequent (PG-rated) violence (lots of killing with guns but very little blood), and other things I’m sure I’ve missed, were in large part the reason that WPR stopped the program, effective two days after the announcement on June 12. The decision to end the program came about 7 weeks after the murder of George Floyd and the United States was having a lot of conversations and protests about racism. Because of this, it was dumbfuckingly obvious that the shows needed to go off the air. But for another “obvious” statement: one of the reasons I miss the shows is that I won’t listen to episodes unless someone else makes the decision and picks what I’m apprehensive about.

What makes this all odd is that I, personally, can listen to this stuff whenever I want, but others may not because they don’t have computers or smartphones. Although, given what I’ve written, I can only assume that my serendipity will happen to someone else in the future.

First published 11/17/2020.
The photograph at the top of this post is Orson Welles during a taping of “The Shadow”. Public domain image. From Wikimedia Commons.

Link to another post of mine:

I wrote about an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright’s in my post, “Gene Masselink“. Gene wrote about the listening to the radio in 1937. Of course, when he wrote about Old Time Radio, it was just. . . radio.

Notes:

1 I have childhood memories of hearing Old Time Radio programs in the car when dad would drive us home at night from some evenings out. But I didn’t really remember them until my reintroduction to it as an adult.

Photograph of Taliesin's living room taken in 1930 i89164, Raymond Trowbridge, Photographer

Taliesin as a structural experiment

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IPhotograph by Raymond Trowbridge looking south at the dining area in Taliesin’s living room (read my post about Trowbridge and Taliesin here).

Taliesin in Wisconsin was Frank Lloyd Wright’s laboratory. This statement is not marketing: it’s truth. Wright experimented with materials, engineering, the play of light, colors, spatial concepts and more all over the Taliesin structure. I am not an architect or engineer, so I don’t intuitively understand the structural experiments. But I do think I understand the engineering in Taliesin’s living room—where things shouldn’t be working, but do—so I’ll write about that space here.

I can write many things to write about the space—bucket-loads—but I’m not going to address them here. Because when I start thinking about the room, I think “and another thing… oh, and also… and one more thing…” and I don’t know when I’ll finish.

Taliesin’s Living Room

In order to understand what I’m talking about, I have to introduce the basics of the room to you. Taliesin’s living room (from north to south, west to the east where its wooden floor stops) is a 986 square foot (91.6 sq. meter) rectangle. Wright initially constructed the room in 1925 after the structure’s second fire that year (its first two incarnations were in the same place, and a little smaller between 1911 and 1914). In those versions of the living room he had “tray” ceilings: like a little attic space before you got to the pinnacle.

The Living Room after 1925

Not so in this third incarnation. In this version you look up and you’re seeing the underside of the roof (with plaster on it). There’s a gabled section (with a clerestory) on the southern part, with the north ending in a hip (with a section with another little hip going to the northeast). Inside the room, a stone wall dominates much of the south, and stone takes up about half (or a little less) on the west side. Then there’s a stone pier in the room near the northeast corner. And all of this 986 sq. feet is without an attic or collar ties. But the attic’s not there. There’s nothing acting like the bottom of an isosceles triangle; and there’s no collar tie holding the opposite walls in place.

And there isn’t any steel. There’s only stone, wood, and plaster (with glass windows). So: what’s keeping the roof up? Why are the walls stable?

Because if the roof weighed too much, the glass windows with their wooden frames (4-by-4 feet) would crack, while the walls would splay (or lean) out. In truth, we’re not really sure what is keeping the roof in place (“we” as in those who have done preservation work at Taliesin—now the Preservation Crew within the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation). We don’t know in part because there are no detailed plans of the roof by the architect. And, sure, while Wright could be verbose on some things, he was silent on others. Maybe because he didn’t care about those details so much.

The living room impressed the “Grand Old Man of Architecture”

Apparently, famous architect Phillip Johnson (1906-2005) also had no clue on what kept Taliesin’s living room roof up. Johnson came to Taliesin in about the year 2000. I was giving tours at that time and was told that Johnson made an appointment “just to sit in Taliesin’s living room.” I’m told that one of the staff members heard him musing to himself, while sitting alone in a chair in the room: “how did he do it?”

After having been at Taliesin for a long time and seeing people study the room, what I know is that the roof’s mass is borne through a bunch of sleight-of-hand.

How the room seems to hold up the roof:

Visible weight support comes in three places: the stone on the south wall, about half of the west wall (with the chimney), and the stone pier inside the footprint of the room near the room’s northeast corner. But other than that, there’s no obvious way to figure out how the weight is being dropped. There are summations, though. The ceiling has two decks (two horizontal shelves) on the east and west sides. The decks have trusses in them, laid horizontally. These help hold the roof in place. Also, on the inside above the decks, there are verticals; those verticals are a little section of wall on the back of the deck. The little verticals form one side of a triangle; the other two sides being formed by the roof and the soffit. These triangles lend stability.

Another sleight-of-hand is the roof sheathing. The sheathing holds the roof rafters in place and stiffens the roof against snow. And the mullions—the vertical pieces between the windows—form posts that support more weight. And the window glass (described by a former Taliesin Preservation estate manager, Jim, as a “diaphragm”) in part holds the frame together. Which you can kind of figure, but what was theorized by Jim was that Wright saw the glass as part of the structural system. Just like Wright thought of the wall plaster and the roof sheathing—it kept the wall together and held it in place but also apparently took a bit of the weight.

Taliesin retains so much of Wright’s thinking

So I think that’s what Wright meant when he wrote about organic architecture. That all the parts work together. The great thing about Taliesin is that these things for the most part still exist; they’ve not been replaced over time by someone with today’s engineering, who “fixed” what they thought to be a mistake on the part of the architect.

I really hope these things can stay as long as possible, since you still get to see and think about the architect’s thoughts on these things. At the very least, it can fill you with wonder. The stuff you can’t really explain. Or I can’t anyway. Because despite “knowing” these tricks he’s doing doesn’t stop the feeling of gratitude one gets in Taliesin’s living room.

Some links:

  • Photographs of the living room are in Wikimedia commons are here.
  • Photographs of Taliesin’s living room and other Wright spaces are in this page of “Wright in Racine”, the blog by photographer and author, Mark Hertzberg.

First Published 11/1/2020.
The photograph at the top of this page is in Chicago History Museum, i89164, Raymond C. Trowbridge, photographer, collection. The image is in the public domain and a larger version from the Keiranmurphy website is here.

A Trip Into Hillside History

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In the late 00’s, I wrote a “comprehensive chronology” of Wright’s Hillside building with the principal of Cornerstone Preservation (which specializes in architectural research and planning). This led me to reading all of those old newspapers I wrote about recently (where I detailed some of what you learn by reading old newspapers1).

That work informs the information I’ll write here

It’s a short, intense, introduction to Hillside, a building on Wright’s Taliesin estate. Hillside (the Hillside Home School) was once designed by Wright for a school for his aunts. Then, starting 30 years later, he began making changes to it. The building today includes a dining room and kitchen, an assembly hall, studio, and  theater.

Hillside history:

Frank Lloyd Wright originally designed the Hillside Home School in 1901. It’s on the south part of the Taliesin estate. After he started the Taliesin Fellowship, he added on to it by in the 1930s and ’40s, and then changed it after a fire occurred there in 1952. “Hillside” seems to be the only building by Wright that shows, distinctly, 4 time periods in his work, spread out over half a century.

The oldest part of the building (1901-02) looks over a dining room reconstructed under Wright’s direction in the 1950s. Walk again through the oldest part (a 1901 hallway), into the Hillside Drafting Studio. This was designed and built in the 1930s.

A walk outside brings you to the Hillside Theater foyer; Wright did that in the late 1940s. The foyer is right next to the theater, also redesigned after the 1952 fire.

So, in Hillside, you jump back and forth in time through Wright’s designs from 1901 to the last part, completed in 1955.

The buildings commissioned by the Aunts:

The building was commissioned initially by two amazing women who were aunts of Frank Lloyd Wright’s: Ellen (“Nell”) and Jane (“Jennie”). The structure served their school, which was also known as the Hillside Home School. Everyone in the area (including the schoolchildren) knew them as Aunt Jennie and Aunt Nell,2 or just “the Aunts”. The school was a coeducational day and boarding school that served children grades 1-12 and ran from 1887 to 1915. Wright actually designed three buildings for the Aunts: the “Home Building”,3 a dormitory and library, built in 1887 (when Wright was 20); a windmill, “Romeo and Juliet”,3 built when he was 30; and the Hillside Home School structure, finished when he was 36.

Those three structures were within a school campus that had additional housing, a greenhouse, a laundry, and a barn with horse stables.

Here are some hyperlinks to photos at the Wisconsin Historical Society that show things at the school:

  • A photo looking at most of the campus, with everything but the octagonal barn, the West Cottage, and the windmill.
  • A photo showing some of the buildings with the Romeo and Juliet Windmill in the distance.
  • And a photo of the octagonal barn.

If one were to go through Hillside today, you would just see the Hillside Home School and the Romeo and Juliet Windmill. Wright slowly eliminated the other school buildings, destroying the last one in 1950.

OK! So I gave you the basic background, here’s info on the school and Jennie and Nell Lloyd Jones.

The Aunts:

Both were educators:

Nell (1845-1919) taught instructors in kindergarten education. Jennie (1847/8-1917) was the head of the history department at the River Falls Normal School.

Ok, why did Wright call her “Aunt Jane” in his autobiography when you keep writing “Aunt Jennie”? I think he introduced her as Jane because he had a sister named Jane (Jane Porter), who was apparently known as Jennie.

Two things about my ignorance:

(1) Kindergarten education

It’s more complex than I knew before I started giving tours in the 1990s. To me, kindergarten was that fun school I went to as a little girl where we took a nap each day.

But kindergarten was a method of teaching children invented by Germany Friedrich Froebel (froy-bel). He created these learning devices called the “Froebel Gifts” that were designed to teach children about the underlying geometry in nature.4

Wright’s mother discovered the Froebel Gifts at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and introduced them to her son.

Here’s the 99 Percent Invisible podcast episode about the Kindergarten and Froebel:

Froebel’s Gifts

(2) Normal Schools:

Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that “Normal Schools” were schools for teaching people how to be teachers. As opposed to how to be, you know, “normal”.

More on the Aunts’ Hillside Home School:

There’s a great book on the Hillside Home School: A Goodly Fellowship, by educator Mary Ellen Chase. You can find the book in libraries, or for purchase through www.abebooks.com.

The Aunts gave Chase her first teaching job. While I wish I could copy everything she wrote, I’ll give you this:

Chapter IV, “The Hillside Home School”, p. 85-121.

p. 90
[D]uring the three years I lived and worked with [the Aunts], they always took me by surprise and left me in wonder…. I was later to understand how together they gave the warmth and the fire, the stability and the strength, the soul and the spirit which for nearly thirty years sustained and supported the most wholesome and abundant of schools….

Some graduates of Hillside:

The students who went to the Hillside Home School included:

  • Future illustrator (and author), Maginel Wright Enright (Wright’s youngest sister);
  • The first woman elected to the state legislature of Illinois (Florence Fifer Bohrer);
  • Future Wisconsin Governor, Phillip LaFolette;
  • A female doctor who was Chief of the Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic in the 1920s at Long Branch Hospital in Long Branch, New Jersey (Dr. Helen Upham);
  • Wright’s sons, future architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. (known as Lloyd Wright) and Wright’s second son, John Lloyd Wright (who famously also invented Lincoln Logs).

In 1907, the Weekly Home News (Spring Green’s newspaper), ran a story on the school  and stated that by that year those who graduated from Hillside were automatically accepted into the University of Illinois at Chicago, or to Wellesley College.

Below is the link to the short piece I was asked to write in early 2020 while at Taliesin Preservation. It was from a call from the National Trust for Historic Preservation 1000 Places “where Women Made History”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200920033632/https://contest.savingplaces.org/egiguylh?_ga=2.51589609.1571769439.1600570401-1325809123.1580253164

The Aunts closed the school in 1915.

Their ages, economic problems caused by poor real estate choices, a lack of a successor and, yes, the murders at their nephew’s home less than a mile away (in August 1914) were among the reasons the Aunts had to close their school. They sold the buildings and land to Wright and died a few years later.

The buildings were unused between 1915 and 1932. In the late ‘teens-early twenties, Wright was working in Japan on the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, then had commissions in California. Then another devastating fire occurred at his house in 1925, followed by lots of personal, legal, and economic problems (that are too numerous to go into here).

Wright looked back to the Hillside buildings:

In 1928, he started thinking about using the buildings for a school (he called it the “Hillside Home School of the Allied Arts”). That didn’t go anywhere for a variety of reasons. So, in 1932, he and his third wife, Olgivanna, opened the Taliesin Fellowship, an architectural apprenticeship program, with him at the head. 23 apprentices arrived that October to work with Wright. At his home, Taliesin, he converted the former hayloft, horse stable and cow barn into dormitory rooms.

Wright’s career after the Fellowship’s founding in 1932:

Upon founding the Taliesin Fellowship, Wright sent the apprentices to work at Hillside. They built onto the existing school by starting a 5,000 sq. foot drafting studio with eight dormitory rooms on each side. By November of the next year, they had converted the school’s gymnasium into a theater, named the Playhouse by Wright. Here are links to a couple of photographs that show the Hillside Drafting Studio and the Playhouse:

Construction work on the Hillside studio:
https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM25967

The Playhouse its opening weekend:
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-new-taliesin-hillside-theater-looking-toward-the-rear-news-photo/1139715311

While construction of the Hillside Drafting Studio began pretty early in the Fellowship history (1932? 1933?), Wright didn’t structurally complete until late 1938. It’s cute reading accounts by Taliesin Fellowship apprentices in the mid-’30s: they wrote about how the drafting studio be in use soon!5 However, they didn’t get it all set up and opened until July 1939.

The Hillside Drafting Studio becomes the main studio for Wright in Wisconsin:

Once the Fellowship and Wright moved into the Hillside Drafting Studio, all of the drafting work in Wisconsin was done there (not in his first studio at his house).

Here‘s for a photo of Wright working in the Hillside Drafting Studio. It’s from the collection of photos by his photographer, Pedro Guerrero. I don’t know, but I would imagine that having the larger space with less distraction was a goal for working with young architectural apprentices. The only outdoor light came from clerestory windows above and two doors on the north side of the room.

I’m not sure what happened while World War II was going on, but drafting was definitely done in the studio when World War II was over. I looked at one of the major books cataloguing Wright’s architecture (William Allin Storrer’s The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion) to count the number of commissions. Looks like Wright and the Fellowship designed and executed 240 buildings from 1945 until the architect’s death in 1959. And, in the summer, the Fellowship did all of the design work at the Hillside Studio in Wisconsin.

Wright did more construction at Hillside after World War II:

By 1948 he added a foyer onto the Playhouse. The foyer is made mostly out of stone with no insulation. That’s in part because by 1948, Wright and the Fellowship were spending every winter in Arizona at Taliesin West. I’ve not seen ice inside the building in April, but I have seen my breath in the cold (as of September 2020, tours don’t go into Hillside after Halloween and before May 1).

In 1950, Wright had the Home Building torn down.

Two years later there was a major fire at Hillside:

I don’t know if Wright would have changed things at Hillside in the 1950s, but a fire, caused by brush, happened on April 26, 1952. It destroyed the part of the building that had the 1901 classrooms on the building’s south side. The fire also mostly destroyed the Playhouse. In the edition of The Weekly Home News on May 1, Wright said “… the building will be much better looking…” when he rebuilt it. And that, “That smoke-tone is wonderful… I couldn’t have darkened it so evenly if I’d done it myself. Nature is God’s technician.”

The building was cleaned up in the summer of 1952 with construction happening the following two summers (click here for a photo of Wright by Pedro Guerrero supervising an apprentice Kelly Oliver on the roof at Hillside during reconstruction). The building was apparently complete by Wright’s birthday, June 8, in 1955.

This Hillside Theater (or Theatre depending on how fancy you feel) has two sections of metal seats, set into poured concrete and 90 degrees to each other.

Because this part of the building was constructed during the summer, Wright didn’t seem to care so much about drainage or things of that nature. After more than 50 years, this was a growing concern. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation received a Save America’s Treasures grant for the Theater, announced in 2018. Restoration work began in 2020.

First published 9/23/2020.
The photograph at the top of this post shows the Hillside Assembly Hall. I took this in 2008.

Notes:

1 In part, you learn that a lot of people died 100 years ago from, say, fever, dropsy, appendicitis, or what happens when you lean your loaded shotgun against tree while jumping over a fence (note: if it’s in the newspaper, the loaded shogun probably fell over, shot you and killed you).

2 I didn’t even know I was referenced in this article until over 2 years after I wrote this post above.

3 Disclosure: I initially wrote the Wikipedia entry.

4 The first kindergarten was in Wisconsin.

5 You read these cute accounts in a weekly newspaper column entitled “At Taliesin” that were found, transcribed, then edited into a book by Randolph C. Henning.

Did Wright ever live in Wisconsin in the winter?

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The simple answer is yes.

But today anyone walking into his living quarters at Taliesin sees flagstone floors and floor-to-ceiling French doors with single-pane glass (as you see in this interior photo at the Wisconsin Historical Society). So, it’s a natural thing to wonder, if you know Wisconsin at all (or have heard of the IceBowl), how the hell someone could have lived in this house in a Wisconsin winter.

In 1911, when Frank Lloyd Wright first designed Taliesin, he did intend it to be a year-round home. And he knew the state gets cold in the winter, so it was more airtight at that time (as you see here) and had radiators as well as fireplaces. His Wisconsin home worked with Wisconsin winter weather up until the 1930s. After that, Wright left for Arizona practically every fall/winter. He was going there with his family and apprentices in the Taliesin Fellowship to live and work. After a few years of searching for a site, he found land in Scottsdale in 1937, signed the papers on it the following February, and began building his winter home (Taliesin West).

Wright started Taliesin West, including, very importantly to the architect, a drafting studio, so he could work in the winter. After he began Taliesin West, Wright, his family, and the Taliesin Fellowship, moved between Wisconsin and Arizona each year. They would leave Wisconsin in the fall, and arrive back the next spring. Leaving and coming back allowed Wright to see his homes “fresh” eyes and ideas. So the two Taliesins (Wisconsin and Arizona) changed constantly under his direction.

Taliesin reflected Wright’s winters in Arizona

By 1959 (the year that Wright died), Taliesin in Wisconsin reflected his time in Arizona. By the end of his life, Wright hadn’t worried about Wisconsin winters for over 20 years. He returned every spring, moved out or eliminated walls, and added more glass and stone.

Of course, when I write that “he” did this or that at the buildings, the physical work was really done by his apprentices—young men and women—in the Taliesin Fellowship.

Click on the links below for photos from the Wisconsin Historical Society that show the inside of the house in these later years during the summer. You’ll see all of the stone and glass:

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM64955

https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM64906

The man writing about winter weather

Of course, all of this didn’t stop the man from having, sometimes, overly romantic views of the winter. Among what he wrote in his 1932 autobiography about his home in the winter is that Taliesin

“was a frosted palace roofed and walled with snow, hung with iridescent fringes, the plate-glass of the windows delicately fantastic with frosted arabesques.”

Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), 228.

Took me awhile to realize that when he lovingly described “frosted arabesques”, he meant frost. When he was writing in 1932, Taliesin was still where he would live in the winter, and he described frost growing on the inside of the windows in his house. I’ve lived with frost inside the windows in Wisconsin. It’s, um… unpleasant, to say the least.

First published 9/8/2020.
I took the photograph at the top of this post in 2016.

Here’s a link to a post I did about a book by a member of the Taliesin Fellowship.

I never knew he was such an S.O.B.!

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Frank Lloyd Wright, that is. Still, after the documentary about Wright by Ken Burns came out in 1998, that’s what all of my friends said to me that Christmas.

The stuff you hear about Frank Lloyd Wright

I wasn’t surprised that they said this. Let me tell you: among other things, what’s heard about Wright is that he was arrogant, his buildings all came in over-budget, they all leaked, and his furniture is uncomfortable. But working at Taliesin teaches you a lot about varying degrees of acceptance of the man and his work. I’ve seen people burst into tears while walking into rooms at Taliesin (the beauty hits at the gut level). Kids and adults will go into the first room they see in the Hillside building on the Taliesin estate and go, “wow!” Someone reminded me that people come to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s home Taliesin from all over the United States, South America, Japan, and at least a couple of countries in Europe.

And “He was such an S.O.B.” is the other side of Wright’s fame. He was in his early 40s after building over 100 buildings when he became known nationwide—not because of his genius in design—but because of a notorious set of relationships that landed him in newspapers, where he could be the subject of press conferences (as well as the murders in 1914, but that’s not what this post is about).

Wright: forced to become adept at working in mass media

Personally I think that by the time he turned 60 in 1927—after two divorces, a child born out of wedlock two years earlier, and “shacking up” with a “dancer” 30 years his junior/the future third Mrs. Wright (with whom he would spend the rest of his life)—he’d spent almost two decades as the subject of newspaper columns. I think he realized he could turn his notoriety on its head. He’d already been on the “bad” side of press; might as well use those columnists to get press that he controlled.

As for his genius in architecture, that’s too much to really get into here,1 but his buildings at times are more than the sum of their parts and are more beautiful than you can find all the reasons for. It’s a reason people have said to me that they’ve waited their whole lives to come to Taliesin. It’s also why I had an eleven year old tell me excitedly that her parents gave her a tour of Taliesin for her birthday. I think that girl had a few years before hearing the parts that could make him an S.O.B.

First published 8/9/2020.

1 I wrote about some of his genius in “Taliesin as a structural experiment”, and “Frank Lloyd Wright Buildings are Smaller Than You Think”

Adventures in Reading Old Newspapers

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Over ten years ago, I went to the archives room at the local library to read the microfiche files of our newspaper, The Weekly Home News. The Home News started in the 1860s. I was looking because I was researching Hillside. That’s the building on the Taliesin estate originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his aunts and their school, the Hillside Home School. I was trying to figure out what happened to the building from the time that Wright’s aunts closed the school, until he opened his architectural apprenticeship called the Taliesin Fellowship. He and the apprentices used the old school structures on the Taliesin estate for their program. So I had to look at newspaper issues from June, 1915 to October, 1932.

Reading all of that was a trip. It made me think everyone should read old newspapers just to see how life has changed. Pick a year and a place – the year your great grandparents got married and the town nearby with a newspaper. Read every issue of the newspaper from the month before and the month after their wedding.

Here’s a sense of what it’s like: something I wrote after one of those days in the local library, reading newspaper issues from the 1910s:

Have you ever had that feeling…

That we worry too much about things? Just look at old newspapers. OH. MY. GOD.

A list of traumas and tragedies in your local newspapers

People are dying from everything. Just sitting down in a chair in their living room and droppin’ dead at the age of 47. Getting an attack of appendicitis, and not getting to a doctor in time. Succumbing to “infant paralysis” (which I really think was Polio before it was Polio). Burning—horribly—all the time. Mangling themselves constantly—chopping off limbs, hitting themselves in the face with an axe—and all this was just reported in your local newspaper.

March 1, 1917, p. 1 “Herb Scholl received a painful injury to his right eye Tuesday. While opening a box of goods a splinter flew and pierced the eyeball. No serious result is anticipated.”

Pierced the EYEBALL.
Wearing protective eyewear while opening a large wooden box? A GOOD. IDEA.

I read one story that noted that the fire brigade of Madison, Wisconsin, had noted that over 400 fires had taken place in Madison, just in the month of January (1916).

Aside from “Stop, drop, and roll”? old newspapers made me aware of these ideas and creations:

  • Having fire-retardant children’s clothing? A GOOD. IDEA. 
    • You would not believe how many children died after their clothes caught on fire.
  • The Heimlich maneuver? A Good thing.
  • Taking the bullets out of your rifle/gun so people don’t accidentally shoot themselves? A Good thing.
  • Not propping your loaded shotgun up against a tree as you climb over a fence while out hunting game? A Good thing.
  • OSHA: A Very good thing.

I mean, you know you’re in trouble when you’re at the front page and see a small item with a headline in bold that just says, “PITCHFORK”.

First published 8/9/2020.

East facade, Taliesin I

What was on the menu the day they were murdered?

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Looking (plan) northwest at Taliesin’s living quarters (the part of the building where the architect lived). On August 15, 1914, fire destroyed every part of the building you see in the photograph that’s not stone. 

On August 15, 1914, while Frank Lloyd Wright was working in Chicago, a servant named Julian Carlton – for reasons that will probably never be known – murdered seven of nine people at Wright’s Wisconsin home, Taliesin, while they were eating lunch. Six out of the seven were murdered with an axe. Before/ after/ or while he was doing that (we don’t know), Carlton set fire to Taliesin’s living quarters, pretty much destroying that part of the building down to the stone (that’s why one of the victims, David Lindblom, died from his burns). Among those murdered was Wright’s partner, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick (formerly Mrs. Edwin H. Cheney).

The 1914 fire was a historic detail until the book, Loving Frank

Aside from Frankophiles (fans of Wright’s), this horrible act was mostly unknown to people for decades. In part because it happened before the existence of radio and television. In addition, it’s unbelievable (“Wait – you’re telling me that there was a MASS MURDER at the house of the guy who designed Fallingwater?”). 

The murders were a strange, sad, fact until the August 2007 publication of Loving Frank, a novel of historical fiction by Nancy Horan. The book’s main character is Mamah Borthwick.

It was a huge hit: Loving Frank stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 54 weeks.1

Curiosity about that day’s lunch came unexpectedly

One thing I didn’t anticipate with the book’s release was people calling us2 wanting to know what the victims were eating for lunch that day. Sometimes people called just wanting to know that day’s “menu”. And some wanted to know what soup was being served.

Soup? Could you explain that?

That question is because of the book, Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders, by William Drennan. It so happens that  Drennan’s book was published 5 months before Loving Frank. I think it would have faded into obscurity otherwise.

Drennan chose to write that Carlton served the victims soup before attacking them.

So – how to you know they didn’t eat soup?

I’ve read lots of newspaper accounts about the murders (over 75), but I’ve not found any proof that they were eating soup for lunch. And, aside from the fact that the victims were attacked at lunchtime, no one wrote what they were eating. And I doubt the reporters would have asked the two survivors (Herbert Fritz or William Weston).

Furthermore, let me tell you: southern Wisconsin can get very warm in the summer. Soup is kind of improbable. Drennan’s choice therefore led some of us at Taliesin Preservation to wonder if Carlton, or his wife, Gertrude (the cook), had perhaps served vichyssoise or gazpacho that afternoon.

Additionally, Taliesin wasn’t an upscale abode with a chef and butler. It was a house in the country:  Gertrude would not have had planned, printed menus.

Regardless:

Fritz (who escaped by jumping out a window), and Weston (who survived, but lost his son, Ernest) probably didn’t think or care about what was on the table since that day. It ended with horrific murders that were mostly done with an axe. If I sound intense, it happens when you think about seven people murdered, only one of whom died as the result of his burns, and three of whom were under the age of 14.

First published 8/9/2020.
Photograph at the top of this page was taken by Taylor Woolley, 1911-12. It shows the east facade of Taliesin. ID 695917. A larger version of this photograph is located through here at the Utah Historical Society.
The entire Taylor Woolley photograph collection is here. See this and other Woolley photographs in Ron McCrea’s book, Building Taliesin: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home of Love and Loss.

1 By the way: people have asked me how “true” Loving Frank is. It’s remarkably accurate. The author definitely did her research. Obviously, the conversations that took place between Mamah and Frank are fiction, but many more things are backed up by research.

2 “us” being employees of Taliesin Preservation, in Wisconsin. Where I worked for half of my life before Covid.