2312 N Kedzie Boulevard

 

The most noticeable feature of the single-family house at 2312 N. Kedzie is its wide front porch. The two squat concrete urns flanking the front stairs and the horizontal lines of the porch show the influence of the Prairie School, popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Robie House in Hyde Park was completed the year before the house at 2312 was built. This house is also clad in thin Roman brick (1), which is used to emphasize the horizontal lines and not the vertical.

The porch is anchored at each end by sturdy brick piers topped by limestone capitals with a square geometric design (2). The oversized piers do not so much support the roof as intersect its plane in passing, so that the heavy roof appears to float above the wide porch. The more traditional post-and-lintel porch supports of the houses on either side next door look rather staid in comparison.

Beyond the porch, the rest of the house is less dynamic. The wide eaves of the upper roof balance the visual weight of the porch roof, but the symmetrical façade encloses a defined boxy mass rather continuing the more-abstract intersecting planes of the porch. Large square brackets (3) made of copper visually support the weight of the extended eaves. Above the eaves, square copper roof ornaments and the swooping lines of the dormers (4) add a vaguely Asian look to the top of the house, reflecting an interest in Japanese architecture by many architects in the early 1900s.

Harris Huehl began his career in 1878 as a draftsman in the office of prominent Chicago architect Edward Baumann and rose to become partner in the firm. After Baumann’s death, Richard Schmid joined the company in 1890 and helped complete the 15-story Chamber of Commerce Building at LaSalle & Washington downtown. The partners designed numerous other skyscrapers, factories, and residences in Chicago, as well as Masonic buildings throughout the Midwest. Indeed, their best-known project is the Medinah Temple (now Bloomingdale’s), completed in 1912, a year after the Zuncker house. Huehl was for a time the Potentate (leader) of the Medinah Temple.

Zuncker and Vette dissolved their meatpacking company in 1941. Peter Zuncker retired to his lake home on Pistakee Bay in Fox Lake, Ill., where he passed away two years later. His will established a trust for Louise and the two children, but upon their death the majority of the estate would go to the Shriners Children’s Hospital. Daughter Louise Helen and her second husband, Charles Tuteur, lived in the house until the late 1950s.

- M.B.