Chicago’s weather bell is aglow once again

Cities are ever-changing organisms, shedding elements of the past while retaining others. Striking the right balance is the challenge, and it’s easy to feel cynical about the moneyed interests driving so many changes that remove, bit by bit, the idiosyncrasies of our surroundings. Which is why it’s a pleasant surprise to learn that the office-to-residential conversion underway at the Rector Building in the Loop includes the restoration and repair of the weather bell affixed to its second story at the southeast corner of Clark and Monroe streets.

The weather bell’s very existence might spark a puzzled glance or two from anyone unfamiliar with it. Non-functional for at least a decade, if not longer, it once provided a simple forecast. When lit up red, the thermometer was expected to rise. When yellow, temperatures were expected to drop. And when green, conditions remained unchanged. The bell’s color would flash if rain or snow were imminent.

Now, after a prolonged dormant period, the weather bell is aglow once again. “The bell was in pretty rough shape,” said Gary Stoltz, the chief design and development officer at the private equity real estate firm R2, which is redeveloping the building. “It’s acrylic with stainless steel accents, and then you have the metal panel that kind of clads the armature. All of that was in some form of disrepair and, aesthetically, it didn’t represent what we wanted to do with the building.”

Something needed to be done. A pessimist might wonder if they considered getting rid of the bell altogether, instead of spending money to restore it to working condition. After all, the bell is a non-monetizable adornment, and you can picture someone deciding it’s more trouble than it’s worth. But according to Stoltz, “I think it would have cost more to take the bell down and then do repairs to the façade behind it.”

Also, “if we wanted to maximize profits, we would not be converting and adapting an office building into residential. It’s not an excellent way for the owners to make money; building new would have been less expensive. But this is absolutely necessary for Chicago’s future. We’ve been working on it for four years and two mayoral administrations; you basically have to convince their teams why this is important.”

The bell itself is integral to the building’s former identity (more on that in a moment), but also its future identity, complete with a new name: The Bellweather. “We usually go through a rebranding process, or at least try to understand a building’s history,” said Stoltz. In this case, it is a history dotted with footnotes. The high-rise was built in 1905 by the restaurateur Charles E. Rector and it is “one of the oldest surviving examples of early commercial high rises designed by architect Jarvis Hunt,” combining “classical design features with aspects of 20th century modernism from the Chicago and Prairie Schools,” according to Preservation Chicago’s website.

Rector himself fought in the Civil War for the Union. After gaining early food service experience working in railroad dining cars, he eventually came to Chicago, where he first opened a luxurious (if temporary) restaurant at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 called Café de la Marine, which specialized in “all animals from water,” according to one guidebook.

In 1884, Rector opened an oyster house at Clark and Monroe — the future site of a much larger building to come — and it became notable enough that it shows up in Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel “Sister Carrie,” when a character dines at Rector’s, a restaurant “of some local fame, which occupied a basement at Clark and Monroe Streets.” With its “polished marble walls and floor, its profusion of lights, its show of china and silverware, and, above all, its reputation as a resort for actors and professional men, (it) seemed to him the proper place for a successful man to go.” Originally, there was no weather bell. That wouldn’t be added until a half century later in 1951, when the Rector Building became the headquarters for Bell Federal Savings and Loan, a bank founded by the employees of Illinois Bell Telephone. The bank occupied offices in the building until 1997.