Vic Socotra

23 May 2008

The World’s Largest Stove

The World’s Largest Stove at the 1893 Chicago Exposition

“Don’t be like I was. Don’t be afraid of history. Take of it all you can get.”
-Charles Eames

Frank Lloyd Wright wasn’t born- not quite- when the Booths motored out the rutted street that led away from the river and into the gently rolling hills northwest of the city. The took Woodward Avenue, which was a grand title for a rutted road that was unpaved outside the downtown area. It was 1904, and was Woodward Avenue at the turn of the century.

We are going to get to Charles Eaves and his collaborator and wife Ray, and renowned Finnish designer Eero Saarinen, but how they happened to come together halfway between the Detroit River and the city of Pontiac, Michigan, requires some context. Maybe it is evolution, or entropy, I don’t know. Maybe elegance rises inevitably out of broad-shouldered practicality.

Or maybe it is just about money, and the ability of cash to soar above the troubles of the world, launching into the realm of pure form and function.

Sorry. It would be easy enough to just launch off on Woodward stories, and be done with it, but you need to pay the admission fee for this sort of thing.

I am not going to skip ahead to robbery and kidnapping, or high-octane crazy car stories. That would be cheating.

When Geroge and Ellen Booth made their motor trip out Woodward, Detroit was a town that made big heavy things of iron and steel. Rail cars were one product, and stoves were another. The World’s First Visitor’s Bureau proclaimed that the city was the largest producer of both.

The stoves were great iron contraptions that burned wood and coal and were tended by servants, of you were lucky, and by the long-suffering wife if you were not.

The stoves came to me in a personal way. A gigantic stove stood outside the gates of the Michigan State Fair Grounds when I was a kid. It was quite remarkable, even in its decrepitude. It had been commissioned by the Michigan Stove Company for display at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago to highlight the strength of Detroit’s industry. It weighed a dozen or more tons, and towered above the gates, a great rectangle of imposing carved wood.

I was living across the Avenue when they dismantled the sad remnant. After decades of exposure to the harsh Michigan weather, the titan was disintegrating. It went away to storage in 1974, part of a city that was disappearing. I enjoyed life next to Woodward, renting the maid’s quarters in a stunning mansion that had once been the property of the Burton Title Trust fortune.

The Booths would have known about the Burtons, and it is probably about damn time I got around to why the Eames Chair came to be where it was.

George Booth was born before the end of the Civil War, so he is one of the bridge generation who grew up in the long shadow of the 19th Century’s Greatest Generation, and lived through World War II to see another earn its stripes.

George was publisher of the privately-held Evening News Association, which was a coast-to-coast minor rival of big dogs like William Randolph Hearst. He got his start in the news business through marriage- he was the son in law of James Scripps, half-brother to Edward, who ran the sprawling news enterprise that eventually became the United Press.

Booth was a trendsetter and arbiter of taste in turn-of-the-century Detroit, and had the means to become, through his wife Ellen Scripps Booth’s fortune, a noted philanthropist.

In 1904, the Booths took their drive out Woodward and turned off on the track that was Lone Pine Road. They purchased a nice parcel of land with one of the pretty little lakes that mark that part of Oakland County as a place for their summer home away from the tumult of the city.

The most prominent architect of the day, Albert Kahn, was engaged to design the jewel that would grace the 319 acre estate. Kahn is credited with designing Detroit’s most productive factories and luxurious homes, and his legacy defines the high art and architecture of the city’s glory days. From the Golden Tower of the Fisher Building to the mile-long Willow Run bomber plants, Khan’s hand was in everything about the city.

The Booth’s manor was to be known as Cranbrook House, and nothing was too good for its construction. They were looking for the place to be a sort of Midwestern answer to Heart’s San Simeon, only looking forward, not back.

The house and gardens are breathtaking. The house was built in the English Arts and Crafts style, and the finest artists and craftsman of the time were engaged to do the tiles, handcraft furniture and weave the tapestries.

The estate was well-established by 1910, and the Booths began to expand their vision, and commissioned works for public use. The classical Greek Theater was built in 1915. My brother and sister performed there in summer programs, under the stars, years later.

Christ Church Cranbrook was completed in 1928, and plans were made for boys and girls boarding schools be built on the grounds to complement an art academy. It was based on concepts the Booths harvested during a visit to the American Academy in Rome.

At the suggestion of his son Henry, George Booth approached a Finnish professor who was visiting the University of Michigan. His name was Eliel Saarinen, and that is how we almost get to the Eames Chair and the Cranbrook Academy of Art as the center of a new world in design.

Albert Kahn laid the foundation of it, though. His hand is all over classical Detroit in two fundamental ways. At one time his firm was responsible for having designed fully a quarter of all the industrial plants in America. His Moscow office built over 500 factories in the Soviet Union. He was the architect of socialist realism for industry and impossible luxury for those who owned it.

Albert has sixty buildings on the National List of Historic Places. Considering what happened to Detroit, it is a little surprising that so many remain. Cranbrook House does, of course, and was the launching pad for a school of wonder.

Kahn’s wonderfully constructed Donovon Building does not. He finished it in 1922, at the very height of his first fame.

The ten-story concrete-frame building featured a marvelous blend of materials and ingenious design. As with most of his public buildings, it was a showcase.

As the city declined in the 1960s, the original tenants moved out and others moved in. Barry Gordy’s Motown Records moved out of their residential offices on West Grand Boulevard and took over the building, 1968-72, before Gordy abruptly decamped for tee West Coast. The JOWA Security Firm briefly occupied the building before they left.

The Donovan Building stood empty for more than thirty years, file cases still filled with papers, paint slowly peeling from the walls of the expansive offices.

In 2006, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick decided the building was an eyesore, and would evoke a negative image of the city before the tens of thousands of visitors who would be coming to the Super Bowl XL.

The demolition of the building along with the adjacent Sanders Confectionary Building was completed in two weeks. Due to time constraint, little was removed from the buildings prior to their demolition. Marble architectural detailing, office furniture and documents were simply smashed to bits.

On the day of the Super Bowl, the site was used to park four buses.

Things are much happier today out in Bloomfield Hills, though times are hard all across the metro area. We will visit the golden era tomorrow, since you never can tell what will happen.

When they dismantled The World’s Largest Stove back at the time of the first Oil Crisis, I assumed it had gone to a landfill.

It did not. It was in storage for over twenty years, and corporations, labor unions and individuals rallied to restore the symbol of nineteenth-century Detroit industry. It was refurbished and placed right back in front of the gates to the Fairgrounds.

That was a few years ago, though, so I would have to check and see if it is still there.

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