Jewelled City

Gerald K. Geerlings, architect, author, and artist, was born in Milwaukee, Winconsin in 1897. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and established his own practice in 1926, the year that he made his first print. His works capture the rapid urbanization of America through cityscapes mostly of Chicago and New York. “Jewelled City,” 1931, is a consummate example of how, in his own words he endeavored “to distill the essence of a city.” He did so not through literal depictions of the urban landscape but by carefully constructed composites of multiple viewpoints. Here, looking east from the recently erected (1928) LaSalle Street Bridge, we see the Wells Street elevated train crossing in the middle-ground with the glowing facades of the Wrigley Building (1924), the Mather Tower (1928), the Carbide and Carbon Building (1929) and the Pure Oil Building (1926) in the distance. Framed by the massive steel structure of the bridge, this romantic paean to the golden age of skyscraper design and the magical glowing jewel-like effect of electric light, though, is a fiction: a careful composite of multiple viewpoints brilliantly rendered in etching and aquatint.