From Utility to Art: The History of 1544 North Sedgwick Street

1544 North Sedgwick Street in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood is a respectably handsome building.

The red brick façade features two neat rows of tall slim windows along the second story and ground floor, capped by an unadorned cornice and lintel. Its south wall fits snug against the platform of the Sedgwick Brown Line stop. To the north it edges up and into a small alley.

Despite this proximity, the building feels isolated, mysteriously aloof from its neighbors. Nothing about its plain and proper front offers a hint to the role the property has played in some of Chicago’s most significant historical moments, from its emergence as a twentieth-century metropolis powered by electricity, to its rich legacy of architectural innovation and later revival as a creative center for artists. For 125 years and counting, this building has supported some of our city’s transformative possibilities.

There is a wide, recessed door on Sedgwick but the actual entrance is down the alley, where a couple of clues to the building’s current and former identity can be found. Nestled among the old cobblestones emerging through the worn away asphalt is a square, cast iron manhole cover, marked Commonwealth Edison Co., the original occupant of this building. On the blood red door itself is another metal square, marked with a different set of grouped names: Adduci Bannon Blue. Peart. Scarff. Garner Young.

All of them—John Adduci, John E. Bannon, Dan Blue, Jerry Peart, S. Thomas Scarff, Ted Sitting Crow Garner, and Michael Young—are past or present members of Sedgwick Studio, a group of artists, mostly sculptors, that has called this former industrial space home for nearly fifty years. John Bannon, who rents a studio here and has been connected to the space for decades, greets me at the door and leads me along a cramped, narrow hallway. A few steps in and everything opens up.

The interior is cavernous, over 100 feet long with a thirty-foot-high ceiling. Enormous metal beams run the length of the room and here and there, huge bolts, clasps, and chains hang on the walls, as if awaiting their turn on Thor’s anvil. Tiers of large windows along the south wall and in a narrow rooftop recess flood the space with light. Dim corners are illuminated by long fluorescent fixtures. The room is both wide open and packed with stuff: work benches and tables, tools, piles of wood. A CTA train rumbles past now and then, punctuating a loud grinding noise filling the space.

Leaning up against the wall are what looks like a series of large gear wheels, components of a public outdoor sculpture destined for a vocational school on the campus of Southern Illinois University. Bannon says the piece was first commissioned when Bruce Rauner was still Governor of Illinois. A budget impasse followed by the state elections and then the pandemic delayed its installation for years.

As Bannon describes the aluminum piece, which will be 25 feet high when fully assembled, its creator John Adduci walks up. Adduci has been a part owner of Sedgwick Studio since 1979, working in an enclosed studio on the ground floor and often living in a residence he built on the second floor. A lifelong Chicagoan with a gravelly smoker’s voice, a shock of steel grey hair, and a thick mustache, he carries a deep sense of the building and surrounding neighborhood’s history.

Adduci notes the studio used to have a fifteen-foot section that actually ran under the train platform. It was walled off and taken over by the CTA in 2007, part of a redesign of the Sedgwick stop to accommodate new technology, including an elevator. The studio owners only leased that part of the building so they had no say but Adduci says it caused a huge “brouhaha.” “They got so arrogant about it I said, ‘Well you try to come through here, I’m going to weld your equipment to the wall!’”

His passion is not surprising: At that point, Sedgwick’s owners had three decades of history and a lot of sweat equity in the building. In 1976, S. Thomas Scarff, Jerry Peart, and Paul Slepak, a trio of sculptors who were then calling themselves 3+, bought the building from a photographer, who had set up a storefront at the Sedgewick Street entrance and hoped to turn the larger space into a movie studio, a plan Adduci calls “absurd,” given the constant noise of the train. A couple of years later, Slepak sold his share to Adduci and another sculptor, Dan Blue, and they all got to work, trying to make the building habitable.

Adduci says it was a horrible mess. Originally designed to feed electricity to the train line, the structure was “like a giant electrical building,” says Adduci, adding “The old timers [in the neighborhood] used to tell me the building just hummed.” Decommissioned in 1962, he says the CTA essentially abandoned the building and removed all the machinery, including breaking down a 30-ton bridge crane and stripping out all of the valuable copper. There was no heat, hardly any water service, and big holes in the floor, which the sculptors covered with large steel plates. After a pump failed, the basement filled with four feet of standing water. As they drained it away, mounds of ceramic conduits emerged. They had to install their own small crane to lift it all out.

That it wasn’t in worse shape is due to the building’s original design. The walls are three feet thick and, along with the heavy glass windows, are built to both muffle the machinery noise and withstand a potential explosion. Safe from the elements and especially pigeons, which Adduci says “just ruin everything,” the space was ripe for reinvention. Cleaning it up took a few years but Adduci notes, to the sculptors “the most important thing was making the art, not the building,” and points to the ceiling, which fifty years into their tenure, is still a project waiting to be completed.

The lasting power of 1544 North Sedgwick is something to respect. It is one of the first buildings of its kind in Chicago and it is the oldest surviving of three substations Commonwealth Edison constructed in 1901 (the other two, 904 West 14 Street and 1235 South State Street, were both demolished). Prior to this, utility companies converted existing buildings into substations, including one very close to the Sedgwick facility on North Avenue. These new buildings were literally groundbreaking, specifically designed to hold the giant equipment—a rotary convertor, multiple dynamos, and a switchboard—required to convert and feed electricity to train lines. While it is not clear which of the three original substations was finished and went into operations first, by the fall of 1901, Sedgwick Station had begun its tenure as one of Chicago’s first “true” substations, providing reserve power to what was by then Chicago’s last privately constructed rapid transit line, the Northwestern Elevated Railroad Line.

The Sedgwick substation may have been one of the first but, eventually, it was just one node in a sprawling network of substations that stretched from the South Side to the North Shore and the surrounding suburbs of Chicago. The buildings were the brainchild of Samuel Insull, the famed energy magnate, who in 1821 immigrated from England to the United States to work for Thomas Edison, eventually becoming President of the Chicago Edison Company, now known as Commonwealth Edison.

Having figured out how to lower the cost of electricity for consumers, Insull quickly expanded Edison’s presence, buying up smaller companies and railroads, in the process inventing the public utility company. His success brought new challenges. As demand for electricity grew, the company needed a way to efficiently distribute it to more residents and more areas across the city. The substation became part of the solution.

In “The Utility Beautiful,” a thesis he wrote while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, architectural historian and preservationist Benjamin Thomas Leech champions the substation as crucial to Chicago’s emergence as a leader in electricity as well as an important, if overlooked, genre of urban architecture. He argues that the way the structures integrated their practical function and aesthetic form across different environments make them “one of the most unique collections of buildings in the city.”

Unique and ubiquitous. By 1904 Chicago had twenty-six substations in operation, creating the largest electrical network in the United States. At the peak of Insull’s success in the early 1930s, there were over 150. The substations did not generate electrical power onsite but transformed and relayed electricity over long distances, refining bulk AC power into energy that could be safely used in homes, businesses, and transit systems like the Northern Elevated, which at the time operated on DC current.

As Leech notes, their distributive function meant substations had to be built and fit in everywhere, from the busy central business district to quiet residential neighborhoods. If the initial substation designs reflected the “middlebrow dignity of socially acceptable architecture of their period,” as Leech describes them, over time they became more ambitious and intricate, designed by some of the leading architectural firms and providing a platform for emerging movements, including the Prairie School and Art Deco.

1544 North Sedgwick is the work of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge (SR&C). Based in Boston, the firm designed some of Chicago’s most iconic structures, including The Art Institute of Chicago (1893) and the Chicago Cultural Center (built as a public library in 1897) in the Loop and a master plan for the University of Chicago that brought fifteen buildings to its Hyde Park campus. SR&C also designed Edison’s Adams Street headquarters (converting an existing train station) and twenty of the company’s substations.

Other substation architects of the era include Holabird and Roche (now Holabird and Root), whose designs include the massive, iconic, and still standing Dearborn Street substation. Leech is especially interested in Hermann Valentin von Holst, who led the firm Von Holst & Fyfe and had a long and expansive relationship with Insull. Von Holst is best known for having taken over Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park-based studio for a short period. Leech goes further, crediting him with bringing a Prairie School-inspired perspective into substation design, offering a corrective to the long-standing view of Von Holt as a “friend” to rather than an active member of this school of architects.

Substation architecture and the electrical power it supported also aligned with some of the ambitions of the “City Beautiful” movement. Leech notes that Insull was an early financial supporter of Daniel Burnham and his “Plan of Chicago” (1909), seeing it as an opportunity to solidify his own role in broader civic goals and to promote his company’s contributions to the modernization of Chicago, including appealing architecture.

According to Leech, among Chicago’s many substations, the one with the most architectural merit is at 1017–19 West Lill Avenue in Lincoln Park. Designed by Samuel N. Crowen in 1909 for the Chicago Railways Company, the building fed power to the city’s trolley system. Both the company name and building date are still visible on its front. Its façade is embellished with a mix of limestone ornamentation and intricate patterns of brickwork, some forming Art Deco-style floral motifs. It has the same big windows, high ceiling, and working crane that makes these buildings perfect for constructing huge sculptures.

Like 1544 Sedgwick, the Lill Avenue substation building probably survived because it too was transformed into an artist studio, when it was purchased in 1971 by the renowned sculptor Richard Hunt. Adaptive reuse has saved a number of these structures from demolition: They have been converted into warehouses, office and retail space, theaters, and even residential properties. More surprising is how many continued to operate as substations into the mid-2000s, when Leech undertook his survey, continuing to perform their early-twentieth-century duty well into the twenty-first.

When Sedgwick Studio opened in the early 1970s, the neighborhood was different. Adduci points to bullet holes in some of the windows’ exterior panes, saying “This was the DMZ. You didn’t go south of this building or you were a goner.”

If the group was a bit of an outlier at the time, that status may be what drew some unusual clients, including a late-night commission from the Drug Enforcement Agency. Having discovered a major heroin shipment inside some terracotta sculptures coming through O'Hare [International Airport], the agents needed someone to patch them back together, so they could ship them on and bust the traffickers and their goods. Adduci said they weren’t quite sure where to start. “So we went over to the local hardware store and we got a bunch of chicken wire and Durabond and spent the night doing it. We had the DEA all over here and more guns than you've ever seen in your life.”

The work earned them five thousand dollars in cash and a segment on the television program Top Cops, which honored police officers with dramatic recreations of their major busts. Adduci says the episode was a hilarious misrepresentation, featuring him as “a guy with a goatee and kind of a German accent walking around with a cigarette” inside a rather refined-looking painting studio.

Through it all, the sculptors lived, worked, and even raised their children here, establishing separate living quarters across the building. Jerry Peart occupied the old photographer’s studio with his wife and daughter, Ave. Adduci lived at the opposite end. His children grew up here as did Tom Scarff’s son and daughter, Seaton and Siena Scarff.

Siena Scarff recalls her “different sort of childhood” with fondness, even if the conditions were sometimes precarious. All of the kids were free to roam and run around, usually with no shoes on. She helped polish some of the sculptures, learning to weld and grind and “do all the stuff.” She also saw a lot. “All doors were open. There was a lot of drinking, parents watching Jeopardy at 3:00 AM, testing each other. [There were] no boundaries. Had to teach myself boundaries in life.”

She describes the environment at Sedgwick Studio as “very male” and says her father Tom could be aggressive and angry but also kind and sweet. “He loved his people. He loved to bring community together. He lived the artist’s life.”

The artist’s life was a bit different during this era, as was Chicago’s public art scene. In a 1987 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Jerry Peart, whose 7,000-pound Blue Geisha sculpture stands in the courtyard of the Presidents Plaza Three office complex, recalls that when he first arrived in the early 1970s, there were only a handful of artists making large-scale work in Chicago, including Richard Hunt, John Henry, and Steve Urry. The Chicago Picasso sculpture in Daley Plaza would soon pave the way for other major works, like Alexander Calder’s Flamingo (1973) and Miro’s Chicago (1981) but Peart says it was still a “real radical idea, to make art that didn’t fit in a gallery or a museum.”

The Chicago sculptors worked hard to elevate their profile. For over a decade, Peart ran a gallery with Mark DiSuvero and others to showcase local work. Tom Scarff was the curator for Purdue University sculpture for eighteen years, which became a platform for his peers. Their work got attention, including Peart’s profile in the Trib and a review of Scarff’s 1978 exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center and the Museum of Science and Industry in Art Forum. Their work can be found all over Chicago, from Old Town to the Loop and far beyond.

Their independent spirit runs through everything. They didn’t turn to the City for support to turn the building into an artist space, they just “did it,” says Adduci. It was only in 2000 that their live-work situation became legal, when Adduci says the “taxes got so friggin’ high” that he worked with then Alderman Vi Daley to change the building’s zoning from commercial to multi-use.

That relationship proved critical. Daley liked having artists in the neighborhood and a year later she helped found the Chicago Sculpture Exhibit, which installs sculptures in public spaces on the North Side. That further raised their artistic profile and put the studio on the map. After flying under the radar for a long time, they opened the studio up for public and private events. They host tours with neighborhood school children and rent the space out for weddings. They have participated in the Chicago Architectural Biennial and Open House Chicago, which has brought thousands through the building.

Other things are changing. Of the original group of owners, only Adduci is still active in the space. Jerry Peart has moved away. Paul Slepak and Dan Blue died years ago, and Tom Scarff passed away in 2024. The studio remains busy. Ted Sitting Crow Garner is still producing work in the basement studio he began renting in the early days. On my visit, Michael Young was finishing up a large dragon sculpture for a botanic garden downstate, apparently a growing client base. John Bannon shows me the neon studio where students apprentice in the medium and he works on commissions, including for television productions.

Siena Scarff says there is an amazing sense of community at Sedgwick, one she believes has kept them going through the years. Everyone in the studio comes together, whether to shift things if someone needs more room for a project or to lend a hand to complete work on time. She felt the warmth of that bond during her father’s memorial last year. “Without even talking to each other they just do what they think they should do. Everybody supports each other.”

Scarff says everyone is still committed to what they are doing—her brother Seaton currently works out of the space as a fabricator. Eventually it will be up to this next generation of owners to determine the fate of the building, whether it will continue on as an historic and increasingly rare kind of artist space or evolve once again, into a whole new life.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank John Bannon, John Adduci, and Siena Scarff for providing invaluable access, background, and images for the piece.