For more than a century, Chicago’s leading painters, sculptors, writers, actors, dancers and architects congregated together in close-knit artistic enclaves. After the Columbian Exposition, they set up shop in places like Lambert Tree Studios and the 57th Street Artist Colony. Nationally renowned figures like Theodore Dreiser, Margaret Anderson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan became colleagues, confidants and neighbors. In the 1920s, Carl Sandburg, Emma Goldman, Ernest Hemingway, Ben Hecht, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Clarence Darrow transformed the speakeasies and bohemian bistros of Towertown into Chicago’s Greenwich Village. In Old Town, Renaissance man Edgar Miller and progressive architect Andrew Rebori collaborated on the Frank Fisher Studios, one of the finest examples of Art Moderne architecture in the country. From Nellie Walker to Roger Ebert, Keith Stolte visits Chicago’s ascendant artistic spirits in their chosen sanctuaries.
Keith M. Stolte has a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Chicago and has since 1998 practiced law in the fields of intellectual property and unfair competition litigation. He resides at the Carl Street Studios, one of the artist colonies featured in this book, together with Dr. Brian Ortiz, his life partner of twenty years.