In the spring of 1963, on the South Side of Chicago, the city was about to lose the house that Frank Lloyd Wright himself considered the true beginning of his career. The building at 4414 Greenwood Avenue in Kenwood had stood for more than seventy years, and by then its fate had already been sealed. A massive fire had gutted it, and the photographer Richard Nickel was moving through the charred interior and exterior, documenting what remained before the wrecking crews arrived. Among the ashes, a few carved wooden panels and a burned section of the staircase column were pulled from the ruin — small remnants of a house that had marked the start of everything that followed.
The house had been built for Dr. Allison W. Harlan, one of the most prominent dentists in the country. Harlan founded the Chicago College of Dental Surgery and the journal The Dental Review, and he had written the first published article proposing the world’s fair that would become the 1893 Columbian Exposition.
In 1892, he turned to the young architect Lloyd Wright to design his home. There was only one problem: Wright was still employed by the firm of Adler and Sullivan, which forbade him from taking any outside work. So the Harlan house became one of his secret commissions, designed privately and on his own time. What made it worse was the location: it stood only a few buildings away from the home of his own employer, Louis Sullivan.
Architecturally, the house marked a departure. It was built on the northern edge of its lot to capture the southern sunlight, with large windows opening from the living room onto a terrace. Its most striking feature was a long second-floor balcony that ran along the full front facade, decorated with finely carved wooden panels in the manner of Sullivan. The Harlan family moved into the house in July 1892, and it survived for over seventy years before the fire consumed it in 1963.
The small fragments that Nickel managed to save were all that remained of a structure that had stood at the threshold of Wright’s entire body of work. That loss came decades after a series of others, each with its own circumstances, spread across Chicago, its suburbs, and beyond. The story of these lost houses begins in Oak Park, Illinois, the village where Wright lived and worked, and where he took on a building that was already old when he was called to redesign it. In 1894, Dr.
H. W. Bassett, a homeopathic physician, hired Wright to remake an existing house on South Oak Park Avenue into a combined residence and medical office. The home sat just steps from the elevated train station, and it was demolished in 1922 to make way for the expanding downtown.
That made it the first Wright house to be deliberately torn down. A year after the Bassett house fell, Chicago suffered a far greater loss on the North Side, in the lakefront neighborhood of Buena Park. The story of the Husser house began with an unexpected romance. Joseph Husser was a Swiss immigrant from Zurich who spoke five languages and had come to Chicago to work as a servant for the wealthy businessman John Marshall Williams.
In 1894, he married his employer’s daughter, Helen. In 1899, the couple commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house on Buena Avenue, half a block from the shore of Lake Michigan. The design was announced in Helen’s name, with an estimated cost of eighteen thousand dollars. It was the largest house Wright had designed to that point, and its design was revolutionary for its time.
Wright lifted the living room, dining room, and library to the second floor, placed the entry hall on the ground floor, and put the bedrooms on the third, so the main rooms received natural light and panoramic views of the lake. Wings extended from a central axis in several directions, including a prominent stair in an octagonal second-floor balcony that anticipated the famous balcony of the Robie House a decade later. Inside, one of the fireplaces was covered in gold enamel and glass mosaic depicting cascading wisteria. When the English designer Charles Ashbee toured the house personally with Wright in 1900, he described it as one of the most beautiful and wonderful creations he had seen in America.
The Hussers sold the house in 1913. Over the following years, apartment buildings rose along Buena Avenue, blocking the home’s lake views. In 1923, the house was sold to real estate developers. Its building materials were offered for sale as spare parts, and by June 1924, apartments were already being rented in the building that replaced it.
Of all that wealth of design, only the dining table and eight chairs survived, and they now sit in the Huntington Hotel in San Marino, California. Sixteen years later, on the other side of the city, in the western suburb of River Forest, the house of the man who had played a major role in launching Wright’s career was demolished. Edward C. Waller was a successful and wealthy Chicagoan, one of Wright’s earliest and most loyal patrons, commissioning apartment buildings in Chicago and a bath pavilion in Michigan.
His house stood on his property directly across from Wright’s famous Winslow house. The home had originally been designed by John Root, but in 1899 Waller asked Wright to redesign it. Wright expanded the kitchen, dining room, pantry, and upstairs bedrooms. He added new woodwork, a set of custom-designed furniture, and several of his signature copper urns, one of which topped the newel post in the front hall.
Its circular pattern was repeated in the stair landing rail. Waller died there in 1931. In 1939, the house was demolished along with the poultry barn Wright had designed on the same site. Still, anyone can stand on Lake Street today and see the rough limestone piers of the Waller gates, designed by Wright in 1901, which once marked the entrance to the property.
Only four years later, the next loss occurred far from Chicago, in the Arizona desert. Rose Pauson, an artist from San Francisco, spent winters in Phoenix with her sister Gertrude, and in the 1930s the sisters asked Wright to design a house on a hill not far from the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. Wright designed a tall, slender structure of desert masonry — local stone set in concrete — with sloping walls of overlapping redwood boards, a design very much like his desert camp, Taliesin West. The sisters spent only one winter season in the house before renting it out.
On April 11, 1943, a spark from the fireplace ignited a curtain, and the house burned to the ground. Its stone walls survived as striking ruins that locals called Ship Rock, standing for more than three decades until 1979, when the remains were removed to widen 32nd Street. The massive chimney, however, was moved a short distance south, and it still stands at the entrance to the Alta Vista Park Estates subdivision. Back in Chicago, urban expansion was reshaping Rogers Park, the city’s northernmost neighborhood.
In 1952, it swallowed the first two Wright houses to be lost there. Samuel Horner was president of the Horner Piano Company, and his wife Lena may have brought the family to Wright through her brother George Kent, a real estate man in Oak Park. Their house, built in 1908 on West Sherwin Avenue, was an elegant country design, covered in plaster and decorated with wood trim, with a low sloping roof. It had a near-symmetrical cross plan, with a long living room in the middle, rising several wide steps above the entrance and opening onto terraces at both ends, with four bedrooms upstairs.
Wright adapted a design he had already used for the Barton house in Buffalo, and which he would later use again for the De Rhodes house in South Bend, Indiana — both of which still stand. Only forty-four years after it was designed, the Horner house was demolished and replaced by a small apartment building. Four years later, fire consumed a country house perched on a rocky outcrop above Lake Michigan in Lake Bluff, Illinois. Designed in 1911 for the Angster family, it featured elegant plaster and cypress trim, with rows of shuttered windows facing the lake.
Unusually, the master bedroom was on the ground floor. The house was destroyed by fire in 1956, and the ruins were later pushed over the edge of the bluff. In the spring of 1963, the bulldozers returned to Rogers Park, this time to Sheridan Road, where Oscar and Catherine Stevens had built their Wright house in 1909 on a hill about a block from the lake. Oscar was an executive in a company founded to make sand-lime brick, which made the house’s construction of cream-colored plaster and dark wood all the more unusual.
The heart of the house was a spacious living room overlooked by an interior balcony and lit by stained glass windows with geometric patterns. It was a small house, similar to the Isabel Roberts house in Oak Park. In 1912, it was sold to Otto Bach of the Bach Brick Company. Otto’s brother Emil was so impressed by the house that he commissioned Wright to build his own home two blocks away on Sheridan Road — a house that still stands today.
After Otto’s death in 1932, the house spent the next thirty years as the King Arms restaurant. In January 1963, it was sold to a developer, O. W. Hall Enterprises, and demolished that April to make way for an apartment building.
The final loss on the list came in 1972, and it carried the strangest fate of all after demolition. Francis W. Little, a lawyer and former utility executive turned Minneapolis banker, and his wife Mary, a pianist, already owned one Frank Lloyd Wright house in Peoria, Illinois. In 1908, they asked Wright to design a summer house on Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota.
But because Wright was busy in Europe and then building Taliesin, the design was not completed until 1912. The house, known as Northome, was finished in 1914. It stretched 250 feet along the wooded shore, and at its center was a vast 55-foot living room built to host concerts. By the early 1970s, the family could find no buyer and no alternative use for the house.
When demolition loomed, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York bought it and dismantled it. The living room was reassembled in the museum’s American Wing, opening to the public in 1982, and it became one of the most famous of all Wright interiors. The library was moved to the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania, while the bedroom corridor went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The house’s windows, still beautiful, were scattered to the Dallas Museum of Art and a museum in Germany.
And so the parts of one lakefront summer house were dispersed across the world. Over a career that spanned seventy years, Frank Lloyd Wright produced more than 1,100 designs, and nearly half of them were actually built. Today, more than fifteen percent of those built works have disappeared, leaving only about four hundred buildings. Some were consumed by fire; many fell victim to urban development, as residential lots in places like Chicago were reclassified and became more valuable as sites for apartment buildings than for family homes.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the Prairie houses that had once seemed revolutionary looked old-fashioned, and there was no one to defend them when developers came calling. Organized efforts to protect Wright’s buildings as a group did not begin until 1989, when the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy was founded. What is striking is that many of these lost buildings date to Wright’s early years, when he was still developing, house by house, the ideas that would later be known as the Prairie style. That is what makes these vanished buildings more than mere artifacts: each one embodies a stage in the evolution of America’s most famous architect.
Nine houses, nine completely different endings, from a doctor’s office swallowed by a growing downtown to a living room that now sits on Fifth Avenue. Some fell to accidents, but most were lost because they seemed outdated, impractical, or simply in the way of new apartments. Today, with more than a seventh of Wright’s buildings gone, the surviving houses are the only places where his ideas can still be experienced as he intended, on the ground.
The lesson of these lost houses is simple: the time to appreciate the value of a building is while it still stands.
