Antique Floor Tile Chicago’s Philander C. Hanford House Mrs. Hanford Drsg Room

Description: VERY RARE Vintage, Antique Floor Tile From Second Floor Dressing Room Of Mrs. Hanford, Hanford House Chicago 1800’s. Salvaged By Jack Simmerling When He Was A Young Man. You Won’t Find This Tile Anywhere Other Than A Museum. Measures 6 in x 6 in. This tile once decorated life inside the Philander C. Hanford house at 2008 South Calumet Avenue, but at the time Mr. Simmerling’s 17-year-old self had claimed it from the rubble of the brownstone mansion that burned in February 1953, Chicago considered it worthless.After the house fire, the young Simmerling returned to Calumet Avenue from his home in Blue Island, Illinois, 15 miles away. He salvaged glass, some blackened woodwork and as many samples of the tile as he could cart off before a demolition crew finished what the conflagration had started. The artifacts would become part of a unique collection of discarded Victorian antiques and Chicago architectural fragments that Simmerling curated over his lifetime while making a name for himself as an architectural and landscape watercolorist.Jack spoke about the Hanfords and the glory of Chicago’s all-but-vanished Prairie Avenue neighborhood — especially the six blocks of Calumet, Prairie, Indiana and Michigan Avenues south of 16th Street hugging the Lake Michigan shoreline, once said to have been home to America’s largest concentration of millionaires. Here at the end of the 19th century lived the first families of the American Midwest, Simmerling has explained, such patriarchs of prosperity as Philip Armour, George Pullman, Peter Studebaker and Marshall Field, whose names were synonymous with meatpacking, luxury rail travel, horse-drawn carriages and the department store, and whose fortunes decreed a suburb of stately pleasure domes to rival anything in New York or the capitals of Europe. In short, “Prairie Avenue” became the Gilded Age symbol of Chicago’s triumph over the Fire of 1871 — and the city’s best claim to true cosmopolitan status among the leading cities of the world.This Piece Of Chicago History Is Unparalleled. Questions Welcome.Ships Next Business Day After Payment Received.Packaged And Shipped With Care. Info taken from “The Last Victorian” by John Nagy, Notre Dame Magazine. Autumn 2016.

Price: 995 USD

Location: Riverdale, Illinois

End Time: 2025-01-13T20:16:46.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD