Holsman’s low-rise forays into the Hyde Park and South Shore neighborhoods were successful enough that he moved on to taller buildings: an eight-story building containing fourteen apartments at 5617 Dorchester (1928),[i] and a fourteen-story tower with twelve apartments, each taking up a whole floor, around the corner at 1321 E. 56^th Street (1929-30).[ii]  The taller structure on 56^th was planned with “sky playgrounds” for children on the upper floors, and what was becoming a trademark for Holsman’s developments, an “English basement,” or split-level first floor that provided privacy for the first story of residences and easy access from the street for boilers and service rooms below.  Holsman argued for higher quality in these buildings—neither was a “shirtfront affair,” according to contemporary press accounts, meaning that they were designed with face brick and stone ornament on all four sides, not just the street fronts.  Because residents had financial stakes in the buildings, he suggested, they were willing to see such improvements as investments.  Developers of traditional rentals had no such incentives; as commodity housing, their projects emphasized cost over value.  Co-ops, or “Mutual Ownership,” in Holsman’s words, not only democratized equity; they also encouraged better building.

That distinction in terms proved important when the Depression hit.  Traditional co-ops had no out clauses; if a shareholder went bankrupt, the remaining co-operative was on the hook for their annual rent.  Holsman’s arrangements were subtly different.  His real estate firm, Parker, Holsman, Leigh, Inc., actively managed these buildings, and non-payment of the monthly rents terminated a shareholder’s rights to their unit.  Other owners were spared both the cost of absorbing the obligations of bankrupted residents and the awkward, fraught legal process of ejecting a one-time neighbor from their homes.  After the 1929 crash, co-ops throughout the city suffered huge defections and failures.  The eight Mutual Ownership projects that Holsman had built by then, however, remained solvent.  “Not one person in these eight buildings in eight years has taken a loss on account of such investment,” Holsman told the Tribune in November 1931.[iii]

By that point, though, his market had been fairly safe.  All of these developments were in the relatively stable environs of the University of Chicago, within a mile or two of campus and—if not immune to the financial crisis enveloping Chicago and the world, at least not as volatile as other parts of town more directly impacted by the stock market or the Depression’s crushing losses in manufacturing.  Holsman’s focus gradually shifted; he and his design and development companies sought ways to use the technical innovation he brought from his automotive experience to address the growing housing crisis in Chicago.

He had a bully pulpit that allowed him to publicize the cause of good housing.  As former president of the Illinois AIA, he was a familiar name to the profession, and he lectured widely on the need for modern developments to house not only Chicago’s population—which grew explosively as the Great Migration brought refugees from the Jim Crow South north—but residents throughout the nation.  He authored a 1933 report, sponsored by the national AIA, that decried conditions in Chicago’s expanding Black belt, where absentee, largely white landlords charged exorbitant rents for sub-standard rentals—often carved into small “kitchenette” apartments that proved vulnerable to fire.  Speaking to the Tribune in the wake of the report’s release, he argued that

“Modern building methods and financial organization…can provide good fireproof homes in this region for from three to six times the present population and leave one-half the land for open air gardens and playgrounds at a cost to tenants of about what they now have to pay.”[iv]

While Holsman was best known at the time for the Mutual Ownership scheme, the “modern building methods” he spoke of soon came to define his operation.  In 1934, he was commissioned to design a model farm house for Chicago’s Century of Progress Exhibition.  His effort didn’t gain the attention of the Keck Brothers’ two “houses of tomorrow,” but he was nonetheless able to experiment with—and to show off—new techniques that would become part of his palette in the coming decade.  The house was supported and enclosed by precast concrete panels clad in face brick, which allowed rapid construction by modestly skilled workers.  The end result, though, was a house that appeared to be of finished masonry.[v]  Those precast panels supported floors of poured-in-place concrete, formed by v-shaped steel pans left in place to create ceiling surfaces for the spaces below.  The house’s windows were double-paned glass—an early effort at insulated glazing that predated the introduction of commercially available “Thermopane” by five years.[vi]

“Re-inforced Brick Panels Used in World’s Fair House.” American Builder and Building Age, vol. 56, no. 7.  July 1, 1934. 41.

Such efforts won Holsman leadership roles on early Chicago Housing Authority projects, in particular the Frances Cabrini Rowhouses (1942).  He led a team of architects designing 586 units for the sixteen-acre site, bringing with him ideas about economic massing and construction.[vii]  Stacking two-story family apartments above English basement one-bedroom units intended for elderly residents saved on stairs and height.  Holsman pioneered new concrete finishes for interior floors and developed precast stairs that could be quickly installed, saving time and labor.[viii]  These rowhouses would be overshadowed by the later high rises that transformed their tightly organized townscape into Cabrini-Green.  But in their early years, they proved remarkably successful; originally intended to replace slum housing in a largely Italian-American neighborhood, the development was quickly converted into wartime worker housing.  Black and white residents alike were housed there, and while not without incident, it proved to be a relatively harmonious development.  Holsman led one other major wartime housing project: Princeton Park, at Wentworth and 95^th, which was completed in 1944.  It featured 256 two-story townhomes, initially laid out along winding streets and eventually expanded to more than 1,000 units across 80 acres.  Privately funded but supported by Reconstruction Finance Corporation funds and FHA mortgage insurance, Princeton Park was, at the time, the “largest privately owned housing project” for Black residents in the U.S.[ix]

Holsman’s attitudes toward race were progressive; he saw housing for Black Chicagoans as a particularly important problem and aimed much of his effort at addressing the unique socio-economic challenges faced by those coming north as part of the Great Migration.  In his office, he hired and mentored at least two Black engineers—Lemuel G. McDougal, who went on to become Chief Superintendent for the CHA’s Associated Housing Architects, and George M. Jones, a University of Michigan graduate who was part of the consortium designing the Cabrini rowhouses.[x] 

The next phase of Holsman’s career—also the most productive—would see his firms accelerate development in both construction technology and financing to address the demographic boom accompanying the postwar era.  He would be credited with designing “the only modern things in Chicago,” and would play a crucial role in another protégé’s career, one that changed the city’s skyline and lakefront.

[cont.]

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[i] “Plans Unique Building For Harlem-North.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 20, 1927. B3.

[ii] Al Chase,  “Fourteen Story Co-operative Apartments for Hyde Park.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 17, 1929. B1

[iii] “Here’s Group Of 8 Co-Ops That Are 100% Full: All Designed By Henry K. Holsman.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov 1, 1931. 24.

[iv] “Houses Better Than Weapons…” New York Herald Tribune, May 21, 1933. C2

[v] “Re-inforced Brick Panels Used in World’s Fair House.” American Builder and Building Age,vol. 56, no. 7.   Jul 1, 1934.  41.

[vi] The Country Home Model Farm House (New York: Cromwell Publishing Co., 1934).  8-9.

[vii] D. Bowly & D.J. Bowly, D. J. The Poorhouse : Subsidized Housing In Chicago. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).  31-32.

[viii] Al Chase, “New Construction Methods Save Time and Materials in CHA Housing.”  Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug 23, 1942. B10

[ix] Al Chase,  “War Workers Move into Big Home Project: Section of Princeton Park Completed.”  Chicago Daily Tribune. Jun 11, 1944.  A7.

[x] “Race Architect to Work On $7,000,000 Project,” The Chicago Defender, Dec 9, 1939. 2; and “McDougal Named Chief Of Housing Architects.” The Chicago Defender, Nov 14, 1942. 24

Quick—name a Chicago architect in the center of a Venn diagram containing:

• Mies van der Rohe,
• A defunct automobile company,
• The 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition,
• Michelle Obama, and
• The shortest (perhaps?) federal prison term on record.

As you can tell, this is quite a story.

Henry Holsman was born in 1866 in Dale, Iowa (pop. 40). After working as a farm laborer, he earned an undergraduate degree from Grinnell College at age 25.  His early career is obscure, but he seems to have studied architecture at the short-lived Chicago School of Architecture at the Art Institute.[1]  After working for two years as a superintendent for interior decorators and contractors, he opened a practice with William L. Brainerd, an MIT graduate, in 1893.[2]  Brainerd & Holsman were successful, designing houses, churches, and college buildings throughout the Midwest, including the Rand Gymnasium at Grinnell (burned, 1940), the Kimball Conservatory of Music at the University of Nebraska, churches at Illinois College in Jacksonville and in Keokuk, Iowa, and homes, apartments, and commercial buildings in Chicago and Paducah, Kentucky.[3] 

That partnership lasted only four years—Brainerd left Chicago for Paducah, where he set up his own practice. On his own, Holsman designed several buildings at Parsons College (now Maharishi University) in Fairfield, Iowa.  As those projects were underway, he and his brother built a prototype automobile, a “highwheeler” that debuted in 1902. The car was an immediate success.  The Holsman Automobile Works produced more than 2400 of them over the next eight years from its factory at 36^th and Morgan; the company’s main office and Holsman’s architectural practice were in adjacent suites in the Monadnock Block; Holsman and his artist wife, Elizabeth Tuttle Holsman, lived in a comfortable suburban home in Beverly.

Holsman filed a dozen patents for automobile parts and systems, but the company failed to keep pace with industry developments, continuing to manufacture the buggy-style “highwheeler” even as other manufacturers moved to more compact, lower chassis designs.  After an overly ambitious financing scheme left the company with inventory it couldn’t sell, Holsman Automobile sold its patents to the Plano-based Independent Harvester Company, which manufactured tractors.[4] 

Henry Holsman returned to architecture, but his experience in the automotive industry left him frustrated by the comparatively slow pace of construction development and interested in applying automobile engineering’s more rigorous standards to building projects.  He designed suburban houses at first, gaining attention for his (understandable) interest in refining garage designs, and eventually rose within the profession to become President of the Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1919.  His inaugural address included a paean to the “professional man,” who “stands ready to serve other men in their health and happiness, in their organizations and enterprises, in all their conceptions and achievements.

“What great commercial enterprise or what mighty utilization of forces would have been achieved by the so-called masters of industry had it not been for the professional man who patiently and systematically worked it out, practically for the joy of achieving it; or what one of the great machines of finance or industry, or what government in war or peace could survive and develop, but for the continued devotion of the professional man?”[5]

Holsman’s career—as both a mechanical engineer and an architect—had thus far illustrated exactly this sort of diligent “working out” of technical problems.  In his houses, these solutions were dressed with aesthetically acceptable styles at a domestic scale.  His houses appeared alongside those of Frank Lloyd Wright, George Maher, and others in House Beautiful and similar magazines during the 1910s, but never attracted the same national recognition.  Holsman, however, was increasingly interested in the materials and systems that were typically hidden by that decade’s prairie and craftsman styles, and in how those could be applied to the city’s growing housing issues. 

In addition to suburban houses, Holsman and his son, Henry T. Holsman, built and managed half a dozen four-story walkup apartment complexes in Hyde Park and South Shore in the early 1920s, all still extant, including 5529 University Avenue (1921), 1145-51 East Fifty-sixth Street (1925), and the Rainbow Park Apartments at 7855-61 South Shore Drive (1926). All drew attention for their clever use of concrete.  Done in a nominally collegiate gothic style appropriate to the neighborhoods adjacent to the University of Chicago, Holsman noted in published accounts that their structures—concrete slabs on shallow beams, supported by girders integrated into brick supporting walls—saved considerable height over traditional wooden construction. 

“The saving in height thus secured makes it feasible to omit the usual partly underground full basement and to lay the first floor six inches above sidewalk level. This permits the planning of four floors for residential purposes and needs a height from ground level to roof of only a little over 37 feet. The usual English basement apartment house would have but three residential floors in about the same height of structure.”[7]

Exposing the concrete and painting it, rather than concealing it with plaster ceilings, further saved time and construction expense.  Holsman explained:

“The lumber for the forms for the reinforced concrete floor beams is dressed and selected for grain,” “Then when the beams are cast and the forms removed the imprint of the wood grain makes it possible to finish and decorate these beams to resemble wood.  Thus they form part of the decorative scheme of the apartment interiors.”[8]

To be sure, this was a minor innovation, and one that other Chicago architects had already put to good use—Marshall and Fox described a similar approach to decorating concrete beams in their Edgewater Beach Hotel in 1917.  The University Avenue apartments also used steel instead of concrete for their beams and girders.  But while this tentative improvement would set the stage for Holsman’s later work, he and his son also pioneered what I’ve come to think of as financial technology.  Multi-unit apartments suffered from real estate legislation grounded in archaic English common law, which defined ownership in terms of land (“real estate”).  Taking ownership of a unit above others was impossible given this definition.  Wealthy residents had long used a financial mechanism, the co-operative apartment, as a way around this, buying shares in a building corporation that gave them the right to then rent a unit within the building. The first of these in Chicago, a nine-story building at Elm St. and Lake Shore Drive, was built in 1911. The “Millionaire’s Flat,” as it became known, was a working model for other “co-ops” that catered to wealthy residents who already owned “town houses and country homes,” but who wanted a pied-a-terre on the Drive–with rooms for butlers and chauffeurs among the dozen or more rooms such developments offered.[9] 

Holsman pioneered methods for bringing the “co-op” to middle-class residents.  “Most of the shareholders of the property at 5529 University Avenue are members of the University of Chicago, and these shareholders will be the first occupants of the apartments, holding leases in perpetuity at fixed rental rates,” he explained about the first of these in 1921.[10]  The units in the building, and those in the subsequent projects, were occupied by the sixteen shareholders, who each put up an initial investment of $3000 (about $55,000 in 2026 dollars) that gave them “1/16 interest in the land and building” and entitled them to rent a unit (at a substantial discount to rates in surrounding apartment buildings) in perpetuity.  Holsman’s real estate company then managed the project’s finances and upkeep, adjusting rents annually to cover their costs and to take a 10% profit. By handling the legal and financial machinations that had been typically handled by lawyers and bankers available only to the city’s wealthy, Holsman’s company made it possible, for the first time, for ordinary residents to have equity in multi-unit buildings.

These early middle-class co-ops were successful enough that Holsman ventured higher, designing, constructing, and financing taller buildings around Hyde Park and South Shore that gently pushed concrete technology—and co-op financing—further.  While these were aimed entirely at those neighborhoods, his interest in addressing the city’s housing shortage, his latent interest in optimizing building construction based on his automotive endeavors, and his skill at putting the latter to work in service of the former would make him a Zelig-like figure through the next decades—figuring in some of Chicago’s most prominent residential buildings while constructing across the city’s economic, social, and racial lines. 

(To be continued)

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[1] “Holsman, Noted Designer, Dies in Genoa City.”  Lake Geneva Regional News, May 25, 1961.  19.

[2] Grinnell College. Quinquennial Register of Iowa College, 1897: Semi-Centennial 1848-1898. [N.p.], 1898.

[3] “Among Architects and Builders.: Building Planned or Under Way in and About Chicago.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 Apr., 1897. 34; “New Structure for Illinois College.” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 19, 1896. 10; and “Chicago and the West,” Engineering Review, Dec. 15, 1894.  18.

[4]David Young “Unhappy With Early Autos, Architect Designed His Own.” Chicago Tribune, Jun 21, 1998. J1

[5] “Inaugural Address of Henry K. Holsman, President-Elect Illinois Chapter American Institute of Architects.” The American Architect, vol. 116, no. 2271, 1919. 2-a6.

[6] “Chicago, Illinois, U.S. Housing Corporation, Correspondence with Field Agents.” Black Workers in the Era of the Great Migration, 1916-1929; Entry 64: Correspondence with Field Agents. 1918. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/archival-materials/chicago-illinois-u-s-housing-corporation/docview/2900640223/se-2.

[7] “An Economically Designed, Fireproof, Cooperative Apartment House.”  Buildings and Building Management I, vol. XXIII, no. 23.  Nov. 12, 1921.  36-41.

[8] “Space Saving Design for Apartments.”  Buildings and Building Management, Vol. XXVI, no. 24.  Nov. 22, 1926.  40-43.

[9] “Prominent Families Favor Apartments; Lake Shore Drive Scene of ‘Flat’ Building.” Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 29, 1911. 1

[10] “An Economically Designed, Fireproof, Cooperative Apartment House,” op. cit. Among those University of Chicago faculty members was Arthur Compton, a physics professor who was one of the original owners. He would win the Nobel Prize for physics in 1927.

Under the unlikely headline “Mushroom Infringement Suits,” the trade journal Cement Age published an article by C.A.P. Turner in May, 1911, announcing that he had brought suit against the Deere and Webber Company for building a bootleg version of his mushroom slab system in their new building (still standing) on Washington Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. “It is the intention of Mr. Turner,” he wrote, “to rigidly prosecute all infringers.  This news item will undoubtedly be of interest to general contractors and builders.”¹. This kicked off more than ten years of concrete patent battles between Turner and a Chicago-based group of legal rivals over the development of flat slabs in concrete.

Turner had good reason to be upset. Deere and Webber had been a licensee of his system in their gigantic factory and warehouse in Omaha, finished in 1908. That building had been built by a Chicago contractor, the C.M. Leonard Company, and had employed Arthur Talbot, of the University of Illinois’ Experiment Station, as a consultant. Deere and Webber hired Leonard to build the Minneapolis structure and gave Talbot and his protege, Arthur Lord, permission to load test its floor slabs. But they did not license Turner’s system, even though the structure bore an obvious resemblance to the warehouses and industrial buildings he had been building nearby. Instead, Deere and Webber employed a system of reinforcement supplied by the “Concrete Steel Products Company” of New York and Chicago.

Concrete Steel Products had joined forces with a handful of other engineers and builders who had developed flat slab systems and faced an increasingly combative Turner. The “Flat Slab Patents Company” (seriously) had an office on Michigan Avenue–but no factories. Instead, it provided administrative and legal support for six other systems: Condron and Sinks’ AKME (developed from Chicago’s Studebaker Building), Francis Barton’s “Spiderweb,” and Concrete Steel Products, among them.

Flat Slab Patents had cleverly dug through the archives and found that Boston contractor O.W. Norcross had received a patent in 1902 for “Flooring for Buildings” that proposed using sheets of metal mesh to reinforce flat slabs along orthogonal and diagonal lines–similar in plan to Turner’s system, but without the mushroom-shaped reinforcing cages, and supported by steel columns instead of concrete. Norcross’ claim is intriguing, given Turner’s patents:

“This invention relates to a flooring for buildings which has been designed with a view of securing the advantages, first, of entirely dispensing with all girders or floor-beams, which have heretofore been regarded as absolutely essential for supporting the floors of buildings; second, to provide a form of flooring which will utilize to best advantage the immense crushing strength of concrete, and, third, to provide a strong inexpensive solid inflexible flooring which can be laid in place by unskilled labor.”²

Norcorss went on to explain that the metal mesh was to be arranged so as to “…permit concrete alone to resist compressions and to supply a maximum amount of metal at points where the flooring is to be subjected to greatest tensions and shearing strains.” But, as you can see from his patent drawing, he (or, more likely, his draftsman) failed to show how the reinforcing would be placed to do this. In a flat slab, the greatest positive moment is at the center of the span, while the greatest negative moment is over the column supports; to work properly, metal reinforcement should therefore be placed at the bottom of the slab in the middle, and at the top of the slab over the supports.

Nonetheless, Leonard negotiated with Norcross for rights to his patent, and his company’s secretary, John L. Drum, filed suit against Turner in 1913, claiming that Turner’s entire system had been foreseen by Norcross. Turner sued Leonard for violating his patent by using flat slabs and a suspiciously mushroom-like column in the Minneapolis Deere Building. For good measure, Turner also sued Deere–perhaps out of spite that he’d been left off the construction team–and a handful of other companies that had leased space in flat-slab structures in Minneapolis. While Turner won an initial ruling, public opinion gradually turned against him. He argued that the courts were incapable of understanding the fine points of slab behavior, which may have been true, but which won him no allies in the legal profession–taking out a gloating advertisement in the Western Architect in 1914, he railed against Drum and Leonard’s claims that the Norcross system represented a complete solution:

“the astounding assertion was made by witnesses for the plaintiff that this concrete, unreinforced over the support would resists the same bending moment as though steel were present to give it rigidity, a proposition in defiance of the law of conservation of energy, the theorem of least work and the principle of rigidities.”³

Flat Slab Patents and Condron & Sinks eventually got into the melee as well, generating a slew of claims, counterclaims, and rulings that ultimately found Turner’s patent infringed on Norcross, despite the earlier patent’s technical error. “There is today,’ a federal appeals court held, dismissing one of Turner’s suits,

“neither invention nor novelty in merely placing metal reinforcement in concrete at places at which strains come…one striving to find a new principle, or to invent a new means of concrete reinforcement under the old principle, enters a well-known and widely practiced art, and must do something more than care for tensile strains at places where they are known to come”⁴

Turner eventually was forced to pay royalties to Leonard and the Flat Slab Patents Company, after the cases were finally resolved in 1922, a humiliation and financial penalty that largely ended his career as a builder of warehouses and factories. His work in reinforced concrete, however, did lead to a healthy second career as a bridge engineer. By that time, the Norcross patent had expired (though Norcross himself filed an updated version, with the reinforcement placement corrected, in 1917). Still, Turner remained bitter about the decade-long fight to claim the invention of a technique that would become standard practice in multi-story concrete construction with the patent disputes cleared. In a combination memoir/textbook published in 1919, Turner included a full appendix, written in the third person, that reiterated his case for primacy in the invention of the flat slab and argued for a full Congressional hearing to overhaul the patent system. Titled–none too subtly–“State Of the Art of Reinforced Concrete from the Patent Standpoint and the Menace to Progress by Unscientific Decisions,” the screed concluded that

“competent scientific ability is not required of the judge who passes upon the validity of the patent. Thus the final step which renders the system beneficial on the one hand or a menace to progress on the other, is taken haphazard without the guidance of competent scientific ability.”

The expiration of the Norcross patent in 1919 roughly coincides with the more widespread use of flat slab construction in high-rises other than factories — while steel remained in use for tall residential buildings, the shallower overall depth of flat slabs soon made them standard in apartment hotels and other domestic skyscrapers. While avoiding potential lawsuits surely aided the spread of the technique, a parallel effort to understand the mechanics of flat slabs — still led by Talbot but joined by other researchers at universities and laboratories — was also critical in refining the dimensions and reinforcement of those slabs.

1. “Mushroom Infringement Suits.”  Cement Age, Vol. XII, no. 5.  May, 1911.  285. ↩︎
2. O.W. Norcross, U.S. Patent No. 698,542.  “Flooring for Buildings.”  Filed Nov. 22, 1901, Granted Apr. 29, 1902. ↩︎
3. Advertisement, C.A.P. Turner, The Western Architect, Vol. 20, no. 12.  December, 1914.  XXII. ↩︎
4. Turner v. Lauter Piano Co., 248 F. 930 (3d Cir. 1918)
   U.S. Court of Appeals, January 17, 1918 ↩︎