When Ridge Historical Society president Sue Delves heard I was planning to write about Longwood Towers complex, 10901-10951 S. Longwood Dr., it set her to reminiscing. Sue and her husband Gene had returned to Chicago in 1957 and were looking for a place to live. Sue, reared in a downstate country town, wanted to rent a house and she wasn't about to be deterred by the small number of rentable houses in Chicago. But Gene urged her to see a Chicago apartment, and so they inspected a large vacant suite at Longwood Towers.
Flabbergasted, Sue was led through an apartment with four bedrooms, an octagonal living room, more than one bathroom, a dining room and a kitchen. As she understates, “It wasn’t so bad.”
The Delves moved into Longwood Towers and stayed a year, until they bought their home, forming friendships among the tenants that have endured a lifetime, and joining Morgan Park United Methodist Church across the street.
Longwood Towers was built in 1929 for William J. Burns, quite possibly the founder of the detective agency. The complex consists of three buildings, a long wing facing on 109th Street and two courtyard buildings facing Longwood Drive. All were designed by NT Ronneberg (1876-1939), a consulting engineer who sort of wandered into architectural practice.
Ronneberg was born in Stavanger, Norway, and studied technical subjects at Bergen Technical College in Norway and at the University of Darmstadt in Germany. He also studied languages and business at Scranton College in Liverpool, England. He came to the US in 1989 and at first worked for Westinghouse Electric in Pittsburgh. In 1900, he joined the Chicago engineering firm of EC and RM Shankland, which did extensive architectural work.
From 1901 to 1928, Ronneberg was a member of three different architectural firms. After 1928, he headed Ronneberg Inc., which designed Longwood Towers.
The Longwood Towers complex is executed in Tudor style and leaves almost no element of its extensive catalogue of decorative details unused. The eye delights in an uninterrupted succession of lights in an uninterrupted succession of half-timbering, stone battlements, crenelations at the roofline from which defenders might scan the approach of an enemy, heavy wooden doors curving to a point at the top, stone or brick entrance kiosks, and elaborate stone door and window surrounds.
The decorative elements tend to be grouped in vertical arrays which set off the apartments served by a particular entranceway. It’s impossible to discuss every feature, but some highlights of each building should be mentioned.
The building facing 109th Street has several instances of gabled half-timbered bays resting on brackets on the third and fourth floor levels. Here, as elsewhere in the complex, the space between timbers is filled with cream-colored brick instead of stucco.
There is a delightful, small stone corner turret at the roofline between two entranceways, and several chimneys reaching out of the wall and resting on limestone supports. One of the entrances is an octagonal bay, one is under a half-timbered bay, and one gives into a stone kiosk.
The building at 10911-10929 S. Longwood Dr. is the most symmetrical and has several half-timbered gables at the roofline and two sections near the rear interior corners with sloped mansard-like roofs. At the points on either side where the building is turning corners to go back from the street to surround the courtyard, there are oriel windows (like lanterns extending from the wall) on the third floor level.
Sometimes a column of window is surrounded by a limestone arch rounded in the brickwork with decorative panels of brick between the windows of two floors. Entrances are both in bays and from stone kiosks.
The building at 10931-10951 S. Longwood Dr., is also a courtyard building but is less symmetrical. The front courtyard corners are topped on one side by a cone and on the other by a castellated observation platform with a limestone parapet.
The back wall of the courtyard is dominated by an entry under a half-timbered bay and a four-story stone octagonal stair tower with smaller windows. Some of the vertical tiers of windows framed in limestone set in the brick have a remarkable basketweave pattern in the brickwork between windows of different floors.
In this building, some of the entries are through brick kiosks, and tucked into the rear corners behind the courtyard on either side are small hidden niches into which are squeezed balconies on the upper floors.
It is a curious fact that despite the overall buff color of the building, which is partly due to the color of the mortar, the bricks themselves vary in shades from red to bluish. But the truth is that the sense of delight we have with these older buildings comes from picking out the details that make them up.