Chicago cop gets street named in honor of Prairie School architect Dwight Perkins

Shaun Fleischhacker was a beat cop working the Albany Park police district in 1994 when the landmark Schurz High School, at Addison Street and Milwaukee Avenue, caught his eye.

Why wouldn’t it? Built in 1910 and designed by architect Dwight Perkins, Schurz is a Prairie School masterpiece in warm-colored brick and terra-cotta, strong vertical piers and graceful horizontal ranks of windows — angled from the intersection and topped by a deeply raked and expressive clay tile roof.

The school was being restored at the time, but Schurz’s beauty — and the architectural talents responsible for it — remained evident.

“I began studying Dwight Perkins,” Fleischhacker said. “I was surprised, as well as disappointed, that nothing was named in his honor.”

So Fleischhacker stepped up. He submitted a proposal to the school’s alderman for honorary street signs bearing Perkins’ name to be placed outside Schurz along Addison Street.

“I thought Addison and Milwaukee was ground zero — that it’s his most noteworthy design,” Fleischhacker said. “That would be an appropriate place for [an] honorary street sign for him, any student of architecture would put the two together.”

It took a few tries and 31 years — this is Chicago, after all — but next month, a four-block section of Milwaukee Avenue between Addison Street and the Metra Milwaukee District North Line’s Grayland station will carry a brown honorary street sign marking the thoroughfare as Dwight H. Perkins Way.

The street-naming ceremony will be Oct. 11 at 10:30 a.m.

“It’s satisfying because of the recognition for him,” Fleischhacker, who retired as a lieutenant from the police department in June, said.

‘A real pioneer’

Prairie School architects tend to get overshadowed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In addition to his skills, Wright had the advantages of being a relentless self-promoter and having a career that lasted from the days of gaslight and cobblestone to the Atomic Age.

But a lot of Chicago talent from that time has been overlooked as a result, including Perkins, who died in 1941 at age 74. Wright was born the same year as Perkins, but died in 1959.

Perkins fought to create the Cook County Forest Preserves a century ago — a huge accomplishment in its own right.

His Chicago work includes one stunner after another, from the Lincoln Park Zoo Lion House and Cafe Brauer to the Northwest Tower, a 12-story Art Deco skyscraper at North, Damen and Milwaukee avenues.

But his most visible Chicago works are the 40 public schools built during his tenure as the district’s chief architect from 1905 to 1910. Like Schurz, each one is a brick and terra-cotta beauty.

In addition to gracing them with good looks, Perkins did then-revolutionary things such as designing the schools with playground space, wide hallways, restrooms on every floor, auditoriums and windows big enough to let in natural light and air.

Schools districts across the country saw these advances and started doing the same thing.

“He was a real pioneer,” said Perkins’ grandson Bradford Perkins, co-founder and chairman of the architecture firm Perkins Eastman.

All of that good work got Dwight Perkins fired from the district.

He was publicly accused of incompetence, insubordination and building schools that were too fancy. School officials eventually reduced the charges to insubordination — and sacked him.

But the true reason behind the firing: School board members with ties to the cut-stone industry didn’t like Perkins’ insistence on brick and terra-cotta designs.

Didn’t I tell you this is Chicago?

Perkins’s career flourished afterward, though.

Chicago Architecture Center President and CEO Eleanor Gorski said the Perkins schools deserve landmark status.

“We should landmark all the Perkins schools. I think they should be a multiple resource [landmark] district,” she said.

A nice recognition

Fleischhacker first noticed Schurz as a kid growing up in the Northwest Side’s Montclare neighborhood.

“I’d walk down to Addison, take that long bus ride to Wrigley Field for general admission, walk-up tickets back when [the Cubs] were lousy and you could do those things,” he said. “Every time the bus pulled up at Addison and Milwaukee, it’d be pointed out, ‘That’s a landmark.’ [My] interest [in Schurz] was always there.”

Fleischhacker later became a history major at the University of Illinois Chicago. His interest in the city’s past carried over into his law enforcement career. At roll call, he’d tell officers under his command about buildings and historical occurrences within their district.

“The message is, ‘You’re out there, open your eyes. It’s in plain sight from the churches to the buildings, the art, the businesses. You’re walking in these places in uniform. That’s like a hall pass,'” he said.

First-term 30th Ward Ald. Ruth Cruz commended Fleischhacker for making the recommendation that resulted in the honorary street-naming.

“That just says who we are as Chicagoans,” Cruz, a Schurz alumna, said. “We enjoy our city … and we really appreciate the architecture that the city has. How do we value and how do we retain history? It’s through an event like [the street-renaming].”

Thanks to Fleischhacker’s work, Perkins will join a small group of Chicago architects honored with brown street signs, including Benjamin Marshall, who designed the Drake hotel, and SOM’s Bruce Graham and structural engineer Fazlur Khan, who are responsible for the Sears Tower and John Hancock Building.

And two architects have streets formally named after them — green signs and all. There is Walter Burley Griffin Place in Beverly and Mies van der Rohe Way in Streeterville.

Bradford Perkins said members of his family, including those from out of town, are planning to attend the October unveiling of Dwight H. Perkins Way.

“This is just a very nice recognition, and hopefully, it connects people to the [architectural] history that he contributed to,” he said. “One of the things that I’m very happy to see — he’s beginning to get more and more recognition.”