Lost Schwinn Mansion

This large house on Palmer Square was torn down in 1955. Known locally as the “Schwinn Mansion,” the greystone house sat on the east side of a large property extending from Humboldt Boulevard to Whipple Street. The house was built for Ignaz and Helen Schwinn, of Arnold, Schwinn & Co., the largest bicycle manufacturer in the U.S.

Photographs of the 15-room Schwinn mansion show a rectangular building with a pyramidal tile roof and a prominent, round three-story tower with a conical roof. The house was faced with Bedford limestone, rugged at the base and smooth above. Horizontal string courses broke up the bulk of the tower, and two asymmetrical bay windows provided views of Palmer Square from each floor of the north wall of the house. A colonnaded porch and scrollwork stair to the front door faced east onto Humboldt Boulevard.

Behind the mansion to the southwest stood a 1½-story brick automobile garage with a footprint nearly half the size of the mansion. A 25-foot-wide greenhouse was attached to the garage. Legend has it that Ignaz installed a turntable so that the motorcars would not need to back out toward Humboldt Boulevard. Every morning, Ignaz woke early and made the 2-mile drive to be the first to arrive at his factory at Lawndale Avenue and Cortland Street.

Ignaz Schwinn was born in 1860 in a small town in central Germany. His father died when he was 11, and Ignaz went to work to support his mother and younger siblings. In Frankfurt, he found work in the machine shops making high-wheel bicycles, which were all the rage in the 1880s. Schwinn rose through the ranks and in his after-hours drew his own designs for bicycles with two equal-sized wheels — a new design closer to the that of the modern bike known as the “safety” in England, where they were first produced. His ideas were not initially accepted by local manufacturers, but at age 29 he was hired by Heinrich Kleyer to design a factory and production line which produced some of the first safety bicycles in Germany.

Ignaz was a headstrong young man, and soon found himself in disagreement with Kleyer over the best design of a coaster brake. Within a year, he left Germany for Chicago with his wife, Helen, and a dream of running his own factory. At the time, Chicago was home to dozens of bicycle manufacturers and the center of the America’s fast-growing bicycle industry. The design innovations of the new safety bicycle — pneumatic tires, a chain drive, improved brakes, and assembly-line manufacturing — lowered the bicycle’s price and broadened its appeal to a wider audience. Sales boomed as the bicycle brought a transportation revolution and new independence for women, young people, and casual cyclists.

In the late 1880s, cycling clubs established a course for competitive bike races starting at North Avenue and Humboldt Boulevard, up to and around Palmer Square six times and back again to total five miles. By the mid-1890s, organized races were scheduled almost every summer weekend, and thousands of spectators came out to watch the “scorchers” set new speed records circling Palmer Square, which at that time had few houses built around it.

After several years of working for other firms, Ignaz Schwinn partnered with meatpacker and investor Adolph Arnold in 1895 to start his own bicycle factory. Four years later, the company purchased the March-Davis cycle factory at 1856 North Kostner Avenue and moved its operation from downtown to the Hermosa neighborhood. Ignaz and Helen Schwinn and their young children moved into a greystone three-flat at 3115 West Fullerton Avenue the following year.

By the time the Schwinns hired architect Frederick Gatterdam to build the mansion, the amateur cycle races circling the square had moved on to professional velodromes such as the one in Garfield Park. Interest in cycling crashed nearly as quickly as it had blossomed, and tastemakers moved on to the new hobby of automobiling. While many bicycle manufacturers went bankrupt, Schwinn survived with diminished sales.