Nothing's Set In Stone
If you try and look up the address inscribed in stone on the building pictured above
whether it's on an online map or the old fashioned printed-on-paper kind, you won't find a 3270 Sheridan Road, even though it was cut into that block of granite to survive the ages. And, Chicago winters.
As a statement of the building's importance, the original developer and the architect of
this early 1920s era apartment house, picked a rather elaborate (and hard-to-read) font to announce to all comers that you had arrived at a prestigious location.
Library of Congress; View of Lake Shore Drive, once named Sheridan Road, View of Lake Shore Drive, June 14, 2009
Images & Artwork: designslinger]
North Sheridan Road was a quiet, residential avenue in 1912, when the B&W photo was
taken, and a fashionable address to have on your calling card. As the automobile came into wider use, the street may have picked up a little more traffic, but it was still a street serving a fairly upscale clientèle. The views of the lake were (and still are) something that you had to be willing to pay for.
But times changed, and so did Sheridan Road. As the city filled in the Lake Michigan
shoreline to create a harbor and park along the lake front, the city fathers also used the landfill to extend the multiple lanes of Lake Shore Drive northward. As a result Sheridan Road became Lake Shore Drive and 3270 sat at the edge of a four-lane inner roadway and an outer, eight-lane highway.
The other day, we were walking past the building and Mitch asked me why it said
Sheridan Road? I told him about the evolution of the street's history and how it came to be that these older, large-roomed, luxury apartment buildings fronted 12 lanes of automobile traffic. He couldn't understand why anyone would choose to live so close to a roaring highway. Well, as the carving on the building indicates, some things are set in stone, like prestigious views from very grand apartments that come with a life lived directly along Chicago's lake front.
Posted by designslinger at 6/16/2009 2:32 AM 
Categories: Architecture, Urban Planning, History
Tags: luxury apartment buildings Lake Shore Drive Sheridan Road
Categories: Architecture, Urban Planning, History
Tags: luxury apartment buildings Lake Shore Drive Sheridan Road
Has the street address changed at all? It is actually interesting that they disguised the street number in plain sight, almost as though they do not want it to be found.
Nicolette
http://www.furnitureanddesignideas.com
The street address has remained the same, just the street name changed from Sheridan Road to Lake Shore Drive.