BRAINSTORM
Did you know that Frank Lloyd Wright designed and built a restaurant in Oak Park in 1934? It was located on the second floor at 1120 Westgate. The building is on the north side of Westgate, but the numbers have been changed. The restaurant, called The Blue Parrot Patio, involved Wright, the Taliesin Fellowship and many famous Oak Parkers.
Wright’s space was called “The Celebrity Room” and was off the main dining room of the Blue Parrot, owned by Grace Pebbles, who ran Le Petit Gourmet, an upscale restaurant on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
My idea: recreating the Wright cafe.
An original Wright design in the original space might be a real winner. The Wright name is a big draw. We already have the largest assemblage of Wright-designed houses.
We already have a Wright foundation that gives thousands of tours. We have a world-famous gift shop that has an impressive mail order department. We know about Wright-designed houses, churches and assorted buildings. But restaurants may be a novelty.
We have a large amount of information about the Blue Parrot, which was researched by Randolph C. Henning, an architect from North Carolina, who turned his findings over to the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest.
The walls of the Celebrity Room were decorated with silhouettes of nine Frank Lloyd Wright structures, which he deemed most notable. The black designs were painted on lemon yellow walls. The structures included the following local houses: W.E. Martin; Arthur Heurtley; Frank Thomas; Isabel Roberts; Mrs. Thomas H. Gale; Edwin H. Cheney, William Winslow and Unity Temple.
A novel feature, which provided the name for the room, was a mammoth scrapbook, a veritable “who’s who” of Oak Park’s famous sons and daughters. Part of the Historical Society’s collection, it is filled with photographs and newspaper clippings, it was designed to be compatible with the decor of the room, which was about 1,100 square feet, rectangular, with two square columns, seven windows and cabinets and woodwork in the Prairie style.
Grace Pebbles was a well-known interior designer and real estate developer who was a good friend of Wright’s. In 1907, she had commissioned Wright to remodel the existing building at 1107 Lake St., where she operated the Pebbles Decorating Company, then one of the oldest businesses in the community dating from 1868.
The new Pebbles and Balch interior decorating shop showed the influence of Wright’s trip to Japan and was a stunning, innovative design. The store was altered in 1923 and virtually demolished in 1937 when Leo Bramson opened his dress shop that same year. Pebbles relocated his business to the new “English Village” (Westgate) that he had helped develop with pioneer businessman Robert Nicholas. His new locale was at 1126 Westgate, adjacent to his wife’s Blue Parrot.
William Beye Fyfe, an Oak Parker then studying at Taliesin, was charged with execution of the design murals. Fyfe had an illustrious Oak Park family: Beye School was named for his grandfather, William Beye; his father was the architect of the 19th Century Woman’s Club; his mother, Hannah Beye Fyfe, illustrated May Estelle Cook’s book Little Old Oak Park.
The opening was a much-heralded event. The Oak Leaves wrote, “Oak Park now has a celebrity room of such designs and of such decor that it promises to become a celebrity itself.” Many of the “celebrities” of the Celebrity book, including authors. artists and musicians were in attendance. The color scheme of the new room was described as “yellow, beige, orange and black. The skyscraper ‘setback’ type of design has been carried out in the shelves and the furniture … created in the modern Wright tradition.”
Wright had not lived in the village for 25 years. The purpose of the book, according to its preface “was to start an informal collection of interesting material concerning our founding families and concerning such reputations, national or international as have been or still are closely associated with Oak Park and River Forest.” Admittedly, the number of outstanding people associated with our village is unusually high, then and now.
Names included Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Bruce Barton, Doris Humphrey and Dr. William Barton. The murals have been painted. But now, with discussions about the future of downtown Oak Park and Westgate, couldn’t a new Blue Parrot put some bright feathers in our hats?