Almost no one knew that the sagging Prairie-style house in Gary was anything special until Christopher Meyers, then a 25-year-old historic-preservation student, drove by it in 1994 while hunting for a thesis topic. The single-family home, which had been abandoned for 30 years, was a shambles, yet despite the peeling stucco Meyers detected masterful touches. “When you see a Picasso you know it’s a Picasso,” he says. “Same with Monet, same with Wright.” He took his hunch to his professors at the School of the Art Institute, then to historians at Taliesin West. Within a few months he had paperwork confirming that the collapsing relic at 600 Fillmore Street was a genuine Frank Lloyd Wright house.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Touted as “America’s Magic Industrial City,” Gary needed hundreds of new houses for workers and managers from the huge new steel mills, and ambitious architects were eager to build them. Seeing Prairie School competitors such as George and Arthur Dean win contracts to design much of the steelworkers’ housing, Wright seized on an offer from Ingwald Moe, a friend and prominent contractor who was helping to settle Gary and asked Wright to design his house. It was a large commission at 669 Van Buren Street, and Wright drew up the plans and started supervising the construction. Then he ditched the house in favor of Europe with Cheney. “So the people in charge of the Oak Park studio, basically Marion Mahony, oversaw completion of the Moe house, and Walter Burley Griffin did the landscaping,” says Meyers. “And then those two ran off to Australia. It was an interesting period. It’s like One Life to Live, it’s that dramatic.”
When Wright and Cheney had traveled through Europe he’d paid close attention to avant-garde architects and their simple, rectilinear designs, which influenced the prefabricated homes he began planning after he returned. Few people know about these experiments, says Prairie School historian Wil Hasbrouck, who was one of the first to recognize the Wynant house as Wright’s. “All of his life Wright tried to develop an inexpensive house for the common man,” he says. “He did a lot more tiny houses than he did big ones–just the big ones get all the attention.”
At two stories and 1,800 square feet, the Wynant house is model D101. Completed for about $9,000, it’s the only one of its kind ever built and one of only around 16 ASB homes known to be standing; that it survived is remarkable given that building-code enforcement in Gary is typically done with a wrecking ball. But even after Meyers found it not many people stopped by. “I think it’s been handicapped by Gary’s reputation as not really a vacation mecca,” he says.
By the time Evelyn Johnson and her daughter Wendes Jones surfaced as the saviors of the property in mid-1999, the Wynant house was close to collapsing. The year before, the two had started the American Heritage Home Trust, a company whose goal, according to Johnson, is “to identify and acquire houses that have architectural and historical significance.” Johnson, who’s 71, says she’s been interested in architecture since she lived in a vintage apartment building in Washington, D.C., in the 80s and that she became a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1990. In the mid-90s, she says, she traveled through England with her daughter, staying in architecturally significant inns while seeing the countryside, and they came home intent on creating American counterparts. “That we could rent to tourists who are interested in cultural heritage,” she says, “that is the mission.”
