“Never Stop: Edgar Miller’s Chicago Handmade Homes”
The Spring 2010 issue kicks off the magazine’s 20th-anniversary year with a stunning cover story on one of the 20th century’s most astonishing – and, until now, most forgotten – artist-designer-builders: Chicago’s Edgar Miller. During the 1920s and ’30s, Miller created a group of apartment homes and studios that, on an intimate, residential scale, house some of the most imaginative interior spaces ever conceived.
Chronicled by Chicago historian Michael Williams and brilliantly photographed by Alexander Vertikoff, Miller’s artistry is here presented to a wide audience for the first time in more than 75 years.
Classic American Bungalows
Early-20th-century bungalows from the Midwest, South and Southwest also have their stories revealed in this issue.
In Ottumwa, Iowa, Phil and Kathy Taylor, with the help of AB regional correspondent Tim Counts, show readers their antiques-filled 1914 “California bungalow,” built for industrialist Lester Christopher Hartsocg. Hartsocg was a principal in the company, founded by his father, that produced the world-famous Hartsocg Wonder Drill, which was used in projects ranging from South Africa’s diamond mines to the building of the New York City subway system and the Panama Canal.
From Ybor City, the historic core of Tampa, Fla., historian and filmmaker Del Acosta and museum educator Elizabeth McCoy take us back to the days of what Florida historians Gary Mormino and George Pozzetta called “The Immigrant World of Ybor City.” In the waning 1890s and early 1900s, immigrant Sicilian vegetable farmers like Vittoria and Salvatore Giunta and their children worked alongside their Cuban and African American neighbors in the city’s world-famous cigar industry. In 1922, the Giunta family also established the Giunta Family Homestead and Farm, which the family’s descendants still operate today from their 1925 Craftsman bungalow farmhouse.
The fact that Ybor City survives as the embodiment of a vital multicultural heritage is due in no small part to the imaginative efforts of a group of dedicated local historic preservation organizations. In the 1980s and ’90s, they teamed up with the city of Tampa and the Florida Department of Transportation to spark the rejuvenation of Seventh Avenue and the ongoing preservation and restoration of Ybor City’s historic bungalow “casitas,” which housed cigar workers and their families. Jo-Anne Peck, co-founder of Preservation Resource, Inc., tells an important part of this story.
Finally, from Phoenix, Ariz., comes Katherine Bair Desmond’s “Desert Song: A Bungalow Love Story,” in which a prairie-girl college student from Indiana grows up in the desert metropolis, befriends a firefighter, falls in love with a 1937 Spanish Revival bungalow in the historic district of Willo, marries the firefighter and lives happily ever after.
Letters, Family Album, Antiques, New & Noteworthy and From Our Friends
As always, the magazine’s lively departments are full of readers’ opinions, homeowners pride, questions on antiques, great new ideas and products for bungalow homes, and the two essays that bookend every issue – one up front, from the publisher, and the other at the back, from a friend.
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