The Castle

When Potter Palmer built his house on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive in 1882, it had all the appurtenances of a princely European castle except the princes. The redoubtable Mrs. Potter Palmer took care of that. She chartered a yacht, set off for Moscow for the coronation of Czar Nicholas II, and returned triumphantly with a swatch of Russian princelings and princesses to waltz in her velvet-lined ballroom.

Potter Palmer was the merchant who brought the bargain sale to Chicago, the real-estate operator who shifted its shopping center from Lake Street to State Street, its residential district from the South Shore to the North; the hotel man who built the first two Palmer Houses* and, in the second, set a style by paving its barbershop with silver dollars. His wife brought big-time Society to gawky, brash Chicago.

The "castle" at 1350 Lake Shore Drive was its center and showpiece and beneath its 80-ft. crenellated towers Bertha Palmer ruled without challenge. The entrance hall rose, tier on carved tier, three floors to a glass dome. The great fireplace was copied from an Italian palazzo, complete to andirons of smoked silver. There was a Louis XVI salon, a Spanish music room, an English dining room, a Moorish room where the rugs were impregnated with rarest perfumes. There were no outside knobs or locks; anyone wanting to get in (and many did) had to ring.

Presidents Grant, McKinley and Garfield slept in 1350's beds, ate off its golden plates. The Duke and Duchess of Veragua came, and the Prince of Wales, who was later to become Edward VII. So did the Infanta Eulalia of Spain, but when she learned that Mrs. Palmer was, after all, an "innkeeper's wife," she salved her pride by arriving hours late, and accepting her hostess' curtsy without a smile.

Bertha Palmer died in 1918. For years, 1350 has been empty, grimily grotesque alongside Lake Shore's spare apartment buildings. The Millets and Corots were sent to the Art Institute, the furnishings sold. Last week bulldozers snorted across the bedraggled lawns, rooting out the old elms. The house was next: an apartment building would rise in its place.

* The first Palmer House burned in 1871's Great Fire, 13 days after it opened; the second, completed in 1873, was replaced in 1927 by the present Palmer House.

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