Ask Geoffrey: Familiar Faces on Chicago's Facades


Where are the statues that used to be on the facade of the Art Institute? Where was the Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College of Chicago? What are the terra-cotta shields and emblems on the facade of the old R.R. Donnelley & Sons building? Geoffrey Baer reveals the answers in this week's edition of Ask Geoffre.y

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In old pictures of the Art Institute, there are three statues on the facade of the building where banners now hang. Are they behind the banners?

– Brian Simenson, Clarendon Hills

Statues of Augustus, Athena, Hermes and WashingtonStatues of Augustus, Athena, Hermes and Washington

First, kudos to our eagle-eyed viewer.  I’ve been looking at historic pictures of the Art Institute for years and never noticed them!

They were removed in 1950, but prior to that, there was a statue in each of the three large arches above the main museum entrance. There was a fourth statue below them in the center archway flanked by the museum entrances which is also now gone.

The first thing to know about the statues is that they were bronze casts of original works from other great museums. In fact much of the Art Institute’s early collection consisted of replicas of this kind because the museum started as a school in 1879 called the Chicago Academy of Fine Art. The casts of famous works were installed there for students to study.

Art Institute archivist Bart Ryckbosch helped us out with finding why these particular casts were chosen for the front of the building.

The cast in the leftmost arch is of Roman Emperor Augustus in military dress. It is cast from a 1st Century A.D. statue that is now in the Vatican Museum.

The center statue is a cast of a 2nd century A.D. Roman sculpture called Athena Giustiniani, itself a replica of a Greek sculpture of the goddess Athena.  It is also now in the Vatican Museum.

The sculpture in the arch on the right was a cast of a Roman sculpture of the god Hermes from the 1st century A.D. now at the British Museum in London.

The fourth statue may be familiar to our frequent PBS viewers because we featured the original last year in our PBS special “Ten Buildings that Changed America.”

It is a cast of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s marble sculpture of George Washington, which stands in the rotunda of the Virginia State Capitol Building in Richmond designed by Thomas Jefferson.  Here’s what we said about that original sculpture in our PBS special:

“By 1950, the Art Institute had removed virtually all of its replicas to make room for its now-famous collection of original works.”

The casts in the three arches were taken down in 1950 and were donated to art schools. The Washington statue was removed in the 70s and is in storage at the museum.

You can still see six bronze casts and one plaster bust at the museum. They’re in the beautiful Ryerson Library. These two ladies came to the museum from an 1893 World’s Fair display of reproductions of art from Pompeii.


I recently bought an old classical record with a catalog card from the Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College of Chicago. What and where was the school?

– Mitch Covic, Logan Square

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel

The Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College of Chicago is not just a mouthful of a name, it was also part of the revolutionary kindergarten movement in America.

It is named for the German educator Friedrich Froebel who is credited with inventing the concept of kindergarten in the 1830s, where children would learn through free play. He also coined the word kindergarten, which translates from German to “children’s garden”, reflecting Froebel’s idea of teachers as gardeners and children as plants.

Froebel’s name was made famous by Frank Lloyd Wright, who said one of the earliest things that inspired him to become an architect was a set of these blocks which he played with as a child.

Froebel developed the blocks as part of a series of small toys called Froebel gifts. Froebel said that by playing with the toys children would learn about shapes, colors, spatial relationships, movement, weights and more.

We borrowed this set from the Frank Lloyd Wright trust, where you can buy Wright-style treasures of your own at their gift shop.

The Pestalozzi-half of the school’s name refers to Froebel’s teacher,   He was a Swiss educational reformer credited with eliminating illiteracy in Switzerland.

The Chicago school named for Pestalozzi and Froebel was founded in 1896 by Bertha Hofer Hegner, a teacher who also founded one of the early kindergartens in Chicago. She had studied in Europe with Froebel’s niece.

The college offered two-year training courses in kindergarten and primary education. At the time, teaching was one of the few career options available to young women.

A booklet for the college from 1907 makes a case for teacher training this way: “It is always a good investment for a young woman to take a teachers’ training course.  It not only secures her a desirable means of support, but it extends her general culture and rounds out her otherwise incomplete education. [This helps to] develop a young woman in the most acceptable way along cultural and social lines... especially if she aims to be a church worker, music or art teacher or best of all a home maker.” The school shared teachers and resources with Columbia College from 1928 to 1944. They were both housed for a time in the Arcade Building at 618 S. Michigan Avenue, which Columbia now owns.

A new glass curtain was installed in 2010 that has an image of the long gone original façade from P-F days etched into its surface.

Pestalozzi-Froebel itself no longer exists as a school. Its assets were purchased by National-Louis University in 1971, which seems like a good fit because National Louis began as a school for training kindergarten teachers even before Pestalozzi-Froebel.


I pass the old R.R. Donnelley printing plant while riding the Metra to work. What do the emblems and shields on the building’s facade represent?

– Cheryl Dorsey, Park Forest

R.R. Donnelley & Sons printing plant R.R. Donnelley & Sons printing plant

The Metra Electric line runs right between McCormick Place and the R.R. Donnelley & Sons former printing plant at 350 E. Cermak Road, giving riders a great track-level view of the plant, also known as the Lakeside Press.

R.R. Donnelley was historically a major commercial printer, although today that is just one part of the company’s business.

Lakeside Press printed among other things, the legendary Sears Catalog, Time and Life magazines, and telephone books, so their work was literally in homes all over America.

The building was designed by the famous architect Howard van Doren Shaw. Shaw had been asked to design a building that would “represent the close affiliation between printing and the fine arts, because the Lakeside Press specialized in high-quality work.”

When construction was completed in 1929, the Chicago Tribune called the building "Chicago’s most beautiful factory."

The terracotta emblems and shields represent the history of the printing industry. The shields feature fanciful designs evoking English heraldry. Some carry the marks of history's great printers and medieval guild symbols that refer to printmaking and bookbinding. The shields also fit in well with the overall English Gothic design of the building.

Other exterior ornaments celebrate the famous printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg and figures like Bruce Rogers, a great American typographer and book designer (shown as a Satyr!) Over the main entrance, a two-story vaulted arch features carved shields, grapevines, ships, books, and castles.

In addition to being beautiful, the building was designed to be fireproof with 10- to 12-inch-thick floors strong enough to support heavy printing machinery – and tons of paper.

However, as the printing process became more high-tech and required less large equipment, the need for space decreased and parts of the building were left vacant.

When Sears discontinued the catalog in 1993, Donnelley closed the plant and later sold the building.

Happily, the aspects of the Lakeside Press’ design that made it obsolete for printers also made it adaptable to a different kind of modern business. The building got a high-tech makeover in 2000, and the massive, strong floors and high ceilings now house a huge data center with thousands of computer servers.


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