A look back at Blackstone Branch Library Historical Hyde Park [ARTICLE]

The Hyde Park Herald, Volume 124, 15 September 2004, Page  15

A look back at Blackstone Branch Library

Historical Hyde Park

by Stephen A. Treffman

Archivist, Hyde Park Historical Society

T

ucked away behind a modern parking garage near 49th Street and Lake Park Avenue, stands the Timothy B.

Blackstone Memorial Library. For one hundred years, it has been one of the architectural crown jewels of the Hyde Park-Kenwood community. Its imposing exterior facades of Concord granite and lonic columns and its dramatic interior of high —————————— ceilings, a Tiffany style il dome and murals, I^^^^^^^^H bronze trimmed glass I i^i^i^i^i^i^i^i^i^ifl book stacks, marble and | jj^^^^^^^^H mahosanv fittings sim- mmmmmmmmmm

ply command respect. The library, at 4904 S. Lake Park Aye., was built over two years with $250,000 donated by Blackstone's widow, Isabella. Its neo-classical design by Solon S. Beman was modeled after the Erecfhion, a Greek temple built in Athens around 450 B.C.

On Jan. 8, 1904, a private ceremony was conducted in the library's main reading room. Mrs. Blackstone handed the keys to the building and the deed of its ownership to the then President of the Board of the Chicago Public Library, John W. Eckhart. Mrs. Blackstone was presented with a commemorative leather bound testimonial that contained words of thanks and the signatures of 237 residents of the community.

Among the other library board members present at the dedication that day was Samuel Despres (1862-1919). An appointee of reform-minded Mayor Carter Harrison 11,

Despres served during Harrison's two terms in office. A Populist Democrat and board member of the Jewish Charities of Chicago, he was a partner in a men's clothing manufacturer. His son is our beloved and much honored former Fifth Ward alderman from Hyde Park, Leon M. Despres.

The library was the first circulating branch of the CPL system and is the only ever constructed and donated by a private donor. In built to house the HChildren's library. A Hsubstantial restoration the ■building was competed

Timothy Beach Blackstone, the descendent of a Puritan minister who was the first European settler of Boston in 1622, was born on the family homestead in Branford, Connecticut in 1829. His major achievement was as president of the Chicago and Alton Railroad from 1864 until 1899. Under his leadership, the line grew from 259 miles to 850 miles in length and was among the more stable and financially successful among America's 19th Century railroads. Its trains ran from Chicago to St. Louis, Missouri and then on to Kansas City. He was also one of the early collaborators in the formation of the Chicago Union Stock Yards and its first president. He died in 1900.

Timothy married Isabella Farnsworth Norton in 1868 in Branford, Connecticut where she had been bom in 1838. Her family line also can be traced back to the Colonial period in American history. The

Blackstones had two sons, both of whom died in infancy. Their long-time home in Chicago was on the site of what is now the Blackstone Hotel on Michigan Avenue. The hotel was named after the Blackstone family but was developed by a close friend of theirs. Mrs. Blackstone was very active in the prestigious

Fortnightly Club and, after her husband's death, funded philanthropic projects in Chicago and elsewhere. She died in 1928. Solon S. Beman (1853-1914) had a career

that was intimately linked to greater Hyde Park and for part of his life he even lived in Kenwood. He first achieved national prominence as a young architect in 1877 with his design of a company town for the George M. Pullman Company near the southern-most section of the then Hyde Park Ydlage. He went on to design at least eight private homes in the Hyde Park and Kenwood communities including five still standing along Harper Avenue between 57th to 59th Streets. He was the architect of the former Christian Science Churches at 40th Street and Drexel Boulevard and near 49th on Dorchester Avenue. The Merchant Tailors and the Mines and Manufacturing Buildings at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 were his designs.

Beman's first professional connection to Blackstone was as the designer of the Chicago and Alton's train station in Springfield in the 1880s. In 1891, Blackstone commissioned him to build a library in his home town, Branford, Connecticut, in memory of his father, James Blackstone. It was to Solon Beman, then, that Isabella Blackstone turned when she decided to memorialize her husband in a library in Chicago. Indeed, our Blackstone Library turns out to be a scaled down version of that library in Connecticut. Photographs of the construction of the Branford library hang on the walls of the reading room of Hyde Park's Blackstone Library.

The celebration of our Blackstone Library centenary involves more than simply praising a lovely building. For 100 years, it has been a representative outpost of civilization

here in our community. Many hundreds of people have worked there, most anonymous to the public, and made it possible for the ideas and hopes that went into the building in the first place to come alive through all those years. Millions of books and other media have rested in its shelves and crossed its counters for use by visitors. It has been a public institution in the very best sense of the word.

Stephen A. Treffman is archivist for the Hyde Park Historical Society. This report is drawn from a more comprehensive article that will appear in the next issue of Hyde Park History, the journal of the Society.