Glessner House, The Fortress Pullman Hated to See

The granite house ahead on your left was designed to turn its back on the street, and that was exactly the problem for the man who lived across from it. Architect Henry Hobson Richardson gave the Glessner family a home that looked almost windowless and fortress like from Prairie Avenue, rough cut stone with narrow slits instead of a grand facade, because he had wrapped the real house, its light, its windows, its open rooms, around a hidden courtyard in the center that no passerby could see. It was a radical idea for a street built on showing off wealth from the sidewalk, and it was finished in late eighteen eighty seven, Richardson's last completed work. He died only three weeks later, at age forty eight.

John Glessner's neighbor directly across the street was George Pullman, the sleeping car magnate, who had built one of Prairie Avenue's grandest conventional mansions and apparently expected his neighbors to follow the same script. Pullman did not hide his irritation. He is recorded complaining that he did not know what he had ever done to have, in his words, that thing staring him in the face every time he walked out his own front door. The two houses still stand within sight of each other today, Pullman's ornate and outward facing, Glessner's deliberately closed off, a quiet argument in stone between old money and new ideas that neither man ever had to raise his voice to make. Architectural historians now count the Glessner House among the most influential residential designs built in America that century, which is a slower kind of victory than winning an argument with your neighbor, but perhaps a more lasting one.