Saks at “The Michigan-Chestnut”, Chicago, circa 1929.

840 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago. One time home of Weird Tales during the Lovecraft years. Designed by the delightfully named Holabird & Root, though their forbidding exterior obviously lacks the same fairy-tail quality. According to the newly released Archive.org microfilm of Editor & Publisher magazine, the first magazine-related tenants moved in just before Christmas 1928, and the place formally opened in 1929. Additional space was opened October 1930, possibly the artists’ studios.

The upmarket retailer Saks Fifth Avenue occupied the walk-in street floor from early March 1929, as can be seen here, when the building was known as “the Michigan-Chestnut”. Perfume and shoes were located on the ground floor, and seemingly also a beauty salon. Womenswear, junior sportswear, hats and probably jewellery were up a flight of stairs, and Saks may even have also occupied most of the first floor. Saks was an oasis for the wealthy lady shopper and thus the building faced the threat of crime from Chicago gangsters. For instance June 1929 saw Saks robbed, in a “terrifying” daylight gunpoint attack, of $20,000 of cash and jewels.

The Saks stairs photograph does at least hint at the likely style of the rest of the interior. Regrettably the upper offices and corridors appear to have eluded the camera, though there is apparently in Marginalia (1944)…

a picture from about 1937 of a part of the Weird Tales office in the “palmy Chicago days” Seated at his desk is Farnsworth Wright.

Possibly it is this one…

Weird Tales editorial office, Chicago. The business manager Bill Sprenger, then editor Farnsworth Wright seated, Henry Kuttner, and then Robert Bloch on the right.

There is however one vintage architectural view available from the windows, here enlarged and newly colorised. Note that the window casing is the same as that on the group picture above, which shows the Weird Tales office had a view of some sort. Though this particular view only has a one-in four chance of approximating the view had by Farnsworth Wright from the Weird Tales office.

Still if it was indeed more or less his daily view then, as editor of Oriental Stories and with a personal interest in the arts of the East, he might have appreciated the rather incongruous pseudo-oriental minaret. The photograph’s impression of cleanliness and order in the city is perhaps deceptive. One of Lovecraft’s correspondents felt… “unimpressed [by Chicago]… the city is filthy” after visiting the Weird Tales office. The Michigan-Chestnut building and Saks does however seem to have been at the centre of a set of upmarket ladies’ stores, according to the retail histories, so perhaps the area formed an oasis in the gangster-ridden city? Bloch had lived there as a youth and later recalled the smells…

I learned the geography of the city through the windows of streetcars, elevated trains, or double-decker buses. Sometimes my parents would even let me ride on the open-air upper level of a bus, if the wind on Michigan Avenue wasn’t too strong. Everything blew into the Windy City in the twenties — stench from its famous stockyards, smoke and steam from the daily discharge of a thousand trains. The odor of alcohol fermenting in tenement stills mingled with perfume rising from the crowded lobby of the new opera house…” (Introduction to Murder and mystery in Chicago)

Sadly his short memoir reveals nothing about the particulars of the Weird Tales office, other than that he visited it when he returned to the city. The presence of Bloch and the architectural detail of the window confirms that the above group-photo was made in the Michigan Avenue building.

Saks moved out of the building in 1935, most likely due to the stringencies of the Great Depression, and opened a new Chicago store in January 1936. Possibly the presence of Saks had meant that visitors to the Weird Tales and Oriental Stories offices would have been glad to walk in out of the stink of Chicago and through the plush and beautifully scented bazaar to reach the office elevators or back-stairs. But after Christmas 1935 this perfumed pleasure evaporated. Weird Tales followed a few years later, moving out in 1938.

Doubtless there are more small details to be gleaned from various accounts of personal visits to the Weird Tales Chicago office c. 1929-1938, buried deep in the memoirs of writers and fans such as Hoffman Price, but I lack the print resources for such a post.