Tim Samuelson, as cheerful and unwieldy and outsized as a sheepdog, plowed his hands inside his kitchen cabinets and rooted about, the clatter of plastic against plastic sounding throughout his apartment.
It was a weekday morning, an hour before he normally left for his office at the Chicago Cultural Center. As he did this, he told a story: “See, before my (exhibit) on Ron Popeil and Ronco and his products at the Cultural Center in 2004, I was scrounging around an antique mall and I came across a beautiful kitchen device, exceptionally designed. And on the label it read ‘Popeil, Chicago.'” His hands emerged from the cabinet cradling a cheap-looking plastic bowl. He continued: “Well, of course I knew Popeil. I grew up watching his ads for the Veg-O-Matic and Pocket Fisherman. So I wrote him, wondering how he made this stuff.” He pulled out long white plastic whisks, which he fixed to the bowl.
Then continued: “Anyway, his son calls back, and I learn they came from a long line of pitchmen! Guys who sold wares on Maxwell Street — guys who knew the art of attracting a crowd who thought they had no interest in what was being sold.” He pulled a plastic crank out of the cabinet and attached it to the bowl.
He looked at me with a goofy grin, pulled out a pitcher, pantomimed tossing in ingredients and fitted it flush to the bowl. “I love this stuff — I’ve collected 120 or so Popeil and Ronco products, but most are in storage, because …” He looked around the small kitchen of his smallish Mies van der Rohe-designed apartment, which he shares with his wife, artist Barbara Koenen. He shrugged, winding the crank furiously. The whisks clacked inside the pitcher until he detached the pitcher and, with bravura, flipped it upside down, over his head.
“Behold!” Samuelson boomed. “The Whip-O-Matic!”
Then, quieter, shifting into historian mode: “See, the idea was that if there were food inside, it would be whipped so thick, it would not fall on my head.” He apologized for not having actual food inside the pitcher.
He was riveting.
Samuelson, at 64, knows how to sell you a history you thought you had no interest in buying. He has been obsessive about Chicago and its geniuses, curiosities and legacies for more than half a century; since 2002 he has served the city as a kind of embodiment of institutional knowledge. In fact, there are some who say Samuelson — Chicago’s official cultural historian, unofficial Cultural Center curator, go-to resource for every outside (and inside) historian, pioneering cultural preservationist, self-taught authority on Midwestern architecture and all-around iconoclast — is the only decent thing left in Chicago government.
Daniel Schulman, director of visual arts for the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. said: “He’s not comfortable in institutional settings, which is ironic, because he’s a kind of ambassador. His thing is giving the city what it doesn’t know it needs — you could argue he’s the most essential staffer. I’m serious.”
Others call him earnest, a history savant, the most entertaining fountain of information in the Midwest. John Vinci, the Chicago architect for whom Samuelson first worked professionally as a preservationist, told me: “Tim probably could have become an actor. He’s shy, but when he gets onstage, ta da, he can hook you.”
What he is never called is careerist, but, rather, a free spirit, a hard-to-explain oddity in a vast bureaucracy, famously single-minded — so willing to retain his curatorial freedom and amorphously defined parameters that he pays for parts of exhibits from his own pocket.
He put the Whip-O-Matic away and turned to me: “But wait, there’s more! The pitch! I love the pitch. I learned the Popeil pitch,” he said. “I would do it during the (Cultural Center) show! You get the first person to stop, then the next stops. You say how this thing you’re selling does more than one thing. Multi-purpose! You keep repeating, the crowd keeps building. A good pitchman can talk 15 minutes without mentioning price. Then, the turn: ‘You wonder how much this costs? You are not going to pay $20 like you’re thinking. Or $15. Or $8. No, it’s $4.99!’ Everyone goes, ‘Ohhh.’ Then you go, ‘But wait, there’s more!’ and you pull out additional products to include. I did it once for the Popeils. They said I was great with the build but choked when asking for money. Talk about my life. I think that’s what I want on my tombstone: ‘Tim Samuelson. He couldn’t make the turn.'”
Like many reporters in Chicago, I have spoken to Samuelson once or twice (or 17,000 times), his ability to smartly summarize any quirk in Illinois history being irresistible. Geoffrey Baer, whose “Ask Geoffrey” history segments on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” are a public TV mainstay, jokes that the feature should be renamed “Ask Geoffrey Who Then Calls the Cultural Center and Asks Tim Samuelson.” But I had never spoken to Samuelson in person, so one spring morning, we met in the lobby of the Cultural Center. My immediate thought: with his larger frame and cropped white hair, he looked like a caricature of a Southern cop. When he opened his mouth, the folksy, gee-golly-shucks, singsong cadence was pure Bullwinkle — until his voice slowed and tired. Then the ders and dems of his Chicago upbringing poked through.
But his voice rarely slowed.
He launched into a walking tour of the Cultural Center, explaining how he led its restoration; how the terra cotta was painted over many times; how the original colors of the lobby were determined; how an old snack bar “destroyed the grammar of the architectural transitions”; how pulling up the center’s ancient rug revealed a marble floor; how a sizable hole in the south entrance floor was found — a hole the size of an old bronze city seal, which was miraculously found last winter in city storage, a perk of Samuelson’s vast network of friends.
“Sure you want hear this?” he asked, catching himself in the middle of a spiel.
I nodded.
He continued what became a traveling, pointing, opinionating explanation of how the Cultural Center aesthetically ties together, how “preservation was in its infancy in the ’70s, then we realized the people who designed stuff knew how to orchestrate feelings, so let’s trust those original instincts.”
Samuelson never learned to drive and prides himself on having learned Chicago by foot. To walk with him is to understand him, to hear a story, then another.
When we were at his apartment, a brief trip to the apartment below (which he and his wife use as a combination art studio/storage space) led to a history of the previous tenant, who, Samuelson said, became a movie star in Russia, moved to Chicago, then returned to Russia, to live with her daughter, “the Oprah of Russia!” Bonnie McDonald, president of the nonprofit preservation group Landmarks Illinois, which recently designated Samuelson a “Legendary Landmark,” said the first time they met was at an event that was full of donors, “and he went into this long explanation of how a man had died in the house we were in, the roots of it, the context. As I was leaving, he led me on an impromptu tour of Astor Street and history of the Gold Coast.”
He is antsy, eager. As we reached a hallway on the west side of the Cultural Center, Samuelson passed through quickly — pointing to where his history of Chicago gospel music would fit — then paused at his exhibition on the history of building preservation and stopped altogether at a black-and-white photo of two men leaning over a balcony of Adler & Sullivan’s Garrick Theater, torn down in 1961. He eyed it warmly. The men, his mentors, were Vinci and Richard Nickel, whose early attempts at saving Louis Sullivan’s work kick-started Chicago’s preservation legacy. “I was supposed to meet Richard at the old Stock Exchange on the day he died,” Samuelson said quietly.
That story remains raw and unavoidable, a strand of his DNA: In 1972, Nickel, who had taken a teenage Samuelson under his wing in the early ’60s, was attempting to salvage pieces of the Exchange, which had been condemned to the wrecking ball. When Samuelson arrived he saw that part of the building had collapsed. Debris was flying. A month later Nickel’s body was found in the sub-basement, with two steel beams across his back. Also found: two construction helmets, one of which was meant for Samuelson. “I think if I had been with him, chances are he would not have been standing in that spot,” Samuelson says now. “I don’t know. I live with that. But there’s no changing history.”
Sometimes.
He crossed the hall to a photo of the old Chess Records headquarters on South Michigan Avenue, which probably would not be there were it not for his efforts. In the 1980s, as a preservationist for the city’s Commission on Chicago Landmarks, he initiated the push that gave the building landmark status. “The members were mystified. They wanted architectural significance, and well, ‘Johnny B. Goode’ was recorded there,” he said. “I was raising nontraditional things. I tried to landmark a tree.”
Joan Pomaranc, program director for the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, worked with him at the commission: “The things he brought up were not what anyone else would. He was unassuming, and had lots of building experience, but was not an architect. We were middle-of-the-road, so unfortunately people would laugh: ‘The Al Capone house?’ People thought it was absurd. (The commission) was about important buildings only, and Tim was out on a limb, literally salvaging from sites on free time, talking (demolition) crews into letting him look around after they were done for the day.”
Indeed, he made friends with crews, buying coffee and doughnuts in exchange for access. Many artifacts used in Cultural Center exhibits on Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright came from those deals.
Among his pet causes were a number of aging, abandoned buildings in Bronzeville, a seminal landscape in African-American culture.
“I was producing reports for the commission and doing research when I realized, no, the secret was finding the story. That was it,” Samuelson said. “So I went to every Bronzeville community group and did a song and dance. If I had explained that, ‘This building was a nightclub, this housed the first black National Guard regiment, the architect was this person,’ I wouldn’t have been very compelling. But by putting a story to a building, by showing why a place was worth putting yourself out for — I guess I connected.
“I was never a fan of formal history: this means this, this date is important to know. I don’t live by mystical concepts, but a place holds vibes, and pieces of places can hold that vibe. My job became learning how to amplify vibes.”
One of the buildings was Meyers Ace Hardware on 35th Street, once the location of the Sunset Cafe, a legendary jazz club and second home for Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. David Meyers, the third-generation owner, recalls Samuelson coming to his family in the 1980s about making the store a landmark. “Serious responsibilities come with that designation. So I admit, we were hesitant,” Meyers said. “But Tim convinced us of our importance. And now people come from all over to see the store.” In 1998, nine Bronzeville spots, including Meyers, received landmark status. “Truth is, I doubt we’d still exist without him.”
Samuelson bounded up a back stairwell of the Cultural Center until he reached his office on the fifth floor. He appeared a touch winded but far from exhausted or even tired, nothing less than delighted to be at work. The man is happy. He is the city’s first official cultural historian and has been since 2002, when Lois Weisberg, the influential former commissioner of cultural affairs, decided Chicago needed czar-type cultural positions: heads of food, fashion, history.
Weisberg, 90 now, said she “rescued Tim from the (Chicago) History Museum”; he had been working as its curator of architecture and design and had grown frustrated. (He thought he “could loosen the place up,” Samuelson explained.) Weisberg’s offer was blunt, and serious: Do whatever you do.
She said the city didn’t know what that meant at first, and so she positioned his job as a branch of the tourism office. Samuelson himself said he worried that he might be asked to spin local history when it suited the city, but it has never happened.
“I doubt Tim makes a lot of money, and I’m sure that’s OK with him,” said his friend Stuart Grannen, owner of the antique store Architectural Artifacts. “But (the city) should also pay whatever he wants because he’s maybe the only person in Chicago who wouldn’t abuse the freedom he’s given.” (For the record, his salary is about $100,000 a year.)
Samuelson is the consummate Chicago booster. His office desk is positioned so he can admire at least three schools of local architecture and a Richard Hunt sculpture, and the desk itself is a salvaged reproduction of a Wright table (“so complex, you learn how Wright thought just by cleaning the dust out of its nooks,” Samuelson said). The office, tucked in its quiet corner, is so full of artifacts that pieces of buildings spill into the hallway — it’s one of the finest museums in Chicago, said cartoonist Chris Ware, a longtime friend of the historian.
Inside I noted: bronze reproductions of Midway Gardens sculptures; a microphone used on the WLS-AM “National Barn Dance” show; models of several water tanks; a souvenir paperweight for the first Ferris wheel; stage props from the artist Red Grooms; ancient floor arrows decommissioned from Marquette Building elevators; a schematic of a zeppelin; Samuelson’s first record player (a Victrola); a full-size player piano (with original song scrolls); an original set of Lincoln Logs (invented by Wright’s son, John); signs, abandoned in the Cultural Center lobby, made by homeless people (“That’s a part of history, too”); an ashtray from the Lusitania; original artwork from Ware’s “Building Stories” (signed, “With immeasurable respect”); an atlas bound in leather; McDonald’s cups from the 1950s; an original drawing from Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould; many shelves stuffed with history volumes; Elwood Blues’ room key from “The Blues Brothers”; and a chandelier winch.
Everything is here for a reason, he said. Building details are waiting to be scanned for a book he’s creating with Tom Burtonwood, a School of the Art Institute of Chicago instructor who experiments with 3-D rendering; the early-20th-century hair-straightening product packages were waiting for a Cultural Center exhibition (now through Aug. 2) on the graphic design of the old South Side-based Valmor Products, a show largely culled together from the basement of Samuelson friend Ted Frankel, owner of the now-defunct Uncle Fun curio shop.
Samuelson’s Hyde Park apartment — Eliot Ness’ handcuffs, original “Nancy” art, van der Rohe furniture — is no less a museum. But here’s the thing: Samuelson doesn’t hoard. He lends. He gives away artifacts often, particularly when he feels someone makes a connection with a piece.
“I get calls from people who want to sell something to the city, or know the value of something, and I tell them I don’t know — I don’t even care,” he said. Said Chicago historian/re-enactor Paul Durica, “Tim taught me history needs to be accessible, and literally feel like it belongs to everyone, not just historians.” Said author Paul Hendrickson, a University of Pennsylvania professor working on a book about Wright: “The guy is so giving that I had to wonder. And so I did, I raised the question of his generosity in an email. He said he received so much from people he revered, all he wants is to enrich. Then — ready for this? — he mailed me a first edition of Wright’s autobiography.”
Earlier this year when I told Samuelson I wanted to write about him, I warned that I would have to move into his home for a few days. I was joking. He laughed and said that wasn’t such a bad idea. Later, with Samuelson, I ran into his wife coming out of the Cultural Center, where she works as the director of artist resources. She patted his stomach and leaned toward me: “You’re not really going to live with us, are you?”
But before we saint Samuelson, it should be said that the man has a skeleton in his closet, one that he cringes at even as he reveals it: He was born in Evanston. But, he is quick to add, he grew up in Rogers Park. His mother worked in a dress store, his father on the production of the Montgomery Ward catalogs.
He said he was mostly on his own as a kid and caught the history/architecture bug early, transfixed by the Carson Pirie Scott building, dreaming about the old gaslight fixtures that he learned had long since been removed from his grade school, Armstrong Elementary. He was “not good at play,” as he puts it, bad at reading body language — a sad, weird child who took history so personally he would stand on the sidewalk in front of architecturally significant homes, silently admiring, often being invited in for dinner by the mystified owners.
Later, he used his high school science labs for a self-taught, amateur crash-course on paint analysis.
An adolescent calling to history and preservation is a recurring theme in his stories. Above his desk is a painting from Chicago artist Ethel Spears, fished out of the boiler-room garbage by a school janitor and given to a young Samuelson. On his desk is a doorknob with a Board of Education seal. After the Our Lady of Angels tragedy in 1958 — a fire in which 92 students and three nuns were killed — was initially blamed on door locks, doorknobs were ordered changed. Samuelson was outraged. He asked Armstrong not to change its doors. The school, Samuelson remembers, didn’t know how to respond to a junior architecture preservationist. But soon after, he was called into the principal’s office. And handed one of the old doorknobs.
As a student at Sullivan High School, he petitioned the school board to let him to attend another school because “Sullivan (named for local politician Roger Sullivan) violated principles of (architectural) modernity as advocated by Sullivan and Wright.” (Later, after asking one of Wright’s assistants for advice, he decided to stay put.)
At 12 he showed up at van der Rohe’s office to ask the architect not to build on the site of an old post office (now the Kluczynski Federal Building and Loop Post Office). “I ran my mouth,” he recalled, “there was a long silence, then Mies said ‘Someday … I hope you look at the new building and see many of the things you admire in the old building.'”
Though he would later lecture at Harvard, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Samuelson hated classrooms and said he mainly attended Roosevelt University to get closer to its Adler & Sullivan-designed Auditorium Theatre.
He studied English (so he could tell stories) but spent most of his time sneaking into the theater and hanging out with its carpenters and electricians, quietly cleaning its mosaics and salvaging bits of discarded artifice. While other students were protesting the war in Vietnam, he was manning picket lines with Nickel protesting aesthetic changes in venerable structures.
“Tim is so naturally shy and happy to be with his research and buildings,” his wife said, “he had to work really hard, from a really young age, to figure out how to relate and convey things he was passionate about.”
Nickel, whom Samuelson considered a rock star, would take him along on his salvaging trips, sometimes letting him hold the measuring tape. “Other times,” Samuelson said, “he would try to clue me in on how to pick a fight, and handle frustration when I lost.”
Vinci remembers Samuelson then as tall, thin, “strong as an ox, willing to rip into a building with his hands” — a purposeful kid who “felt things deeply,” so much so that, into Samuelson’s 20s, as his reputation spread and he was asked to consult on endangered buildings in St. Louis and Iowa, Vinci said that Samuelson wouldn’t ask for money, “freely advising when he should have been paid.”
To walk with Samuelson through Chicago today is to still witness those idiosyncrasies and allegiances. At a frame shop, he charges an exhibition piece to a personal credit card; in a print shop, every assistant to the assistant waves to him warmly. On the street, he pays silent respect to buildings he admires, and habitually ignores others, crossing La Salle before reaching the site of the old Stock Exchange, his grudge against its 1972 demolition too difficult to let go.
Samuelson, Ware put it, has become “an extremely empathetic person for whom direct social situations cause great anxiety — though that same empathy allows him to act as a sort of translator between people and buildings, helping people see importance and beauty in things that will never be able to be built again.”
In early spring Samuelson sat beside Ware in a ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel downtown and waited for Landmarks Illinois to name him a “Legendary Landmark.” A day earlier he’d confided that he dreaded it a bit; he doubted he owned shoes suitable for such a swanky place.
The room had a golden glow, and the audience, full of Chicago society types, was braying and loud and boozy, often not paying attention to the stage. To raise funds for historic preservation, attendees bid on trips to Nantucket and penthouse seats to Blackhawks games, then returned to their conversations. Vinci read a long, rambling introduction for Samuelson. The crowd grew restless and Vinci grew visibly annoyed. So Samuelson went to his side and patted his mentor on the shoulder, letting him go on.
Then Samuelson spoke.
Quickly. He did not mention sites he helped landmark (Walt Disney’s childhood home, the American School of Correspondence), or exhibitions he organized (on rooftop water tanks, teddy bears) or exhibitions yet to be staged (Chicago detectives, Greek diners).
Instead, he advocated for remaining naive, never growing up: “That’s my secret.” He argued that everyone, when needed, should simply step up and get his hands dirty.
Leave a real legacy.
Ten things Sameulson had a hand in preserving or restoring:
Chess Records offices and studio (South Michigan Avenue)
St. Louis’ Union Station
Chicago’s Union Station (the main lobby)
Pilgrim Baptist Church (1989; destroyed by fire in 2006)
Various sites around the Bronzeville neighborhood
Walt Disney’s birthplace (in the Hermosa neighborhood)
American School of Correspondence (Hyde Park)
The Waller Apartments (East Garfield Park, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, early experiment in low-rent housing)
Wright’s Robie House
Carson Pirie Scott building
Five exhibits Samuelson organized at the Chicago Cultural Center”
“Mecca Flat Blues” (2014)
“Wright Before the ‘Lloyd'” (2013)
“Louis Sullivan’s Idea” (2010, with Chris Ware)
“Isn’t That Amazing! The Appeal and Spiel of Ronco and Popeil” (2004)
“Teddy Bears on Parade” (2003)
Twitter @borrelli
