Edgar Miller’s Influences:
The Bohemian Art Scene of 1910-1920s Towertown

When Edgar Miller first came from Idaho to the heart of the Midwest in order to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), his formative years outside of the school’s hallways were predominantly spent in the Near North Side bohemian enclave known as Towertown. Arriving in Chicago at the age of seventeen, with little money to his name, Miller first took up residency at the Hull-House dorms, paying a weekly boarding fee and making extra money by working within the West Side community center’s studios. This arrangement was always meant to be temporary, however, with Miller soon after beginning classes at SAIC in the winter of 1917 and moving out to what was then a more remote pocket of the city around the Chicago Water Tower, at the far north end of what would become the Magnificent Mile many decades later. The Towertown neighborhood, well before the commercial boom era began in the 1920s, was named for the prominent landmark that had survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The enclave had become a place for immigrants, day-laborers, artists, and students to live affordably while striving to make a living in the city.

Striking Out on His Own — The House at the End of the Street

During his short tenure as a student at SAIC, Miller bristled against the mostly unadventurous curricular framework that was imposed upon him. Classical art education theory emphasized specialization and technical skills. Miller already brought with him a wide range of talents and a hunger to try all media that came across his path, virtually all of which he ended up excelling in, and was unable to glean in the classroom any new, applicable techniques that he did not already know. Additionally, like in all areas of society at that time, there was a revolutionary philosophical and political upheaval taking place in the art world seeking to usher in Modernism more vociferously, and Miller was decidedly in the camp that welcomed the global movement. He was not the only student to feel the same tension with the old guard, and along with nine other students who dubbed themselves the Independents—his future collaborative partner Sol Kogen among them—left SAIC to forge what they saw as more unconstrained careers.

Outside the restrictive, narrower focus of academic art education, Miller ravenously explored every corner of a thriving, modern city, with inexpensive outlets that appealed to the appetites of a young person in the early 1920s: silent film theaters, concert venues, bandstands, art galleries, coffee shops, bookstores, and saloons (and later speakeasies) had all cropped up in Towertown by that time. A wide-range of outside thinkers including philosophers, poets, feminists, LGBTQ individuals, anarchists, workers’ rights activists, and general iconoclasts of a variety of races and ethnicities were among the denizens of the district that was emerging adjacent to Chicago’s once-affluent, lakeside Gold Coast area. As the neighborhood’s land values declined, many large mansions and townhouses began to be subdivided as a form of de facto affordable housing for many of the city’s newcomers. The neighborhood was a place where countercultural outsiders could find their voice and an audience, and also forge a true community. Towertown was also home to important local institutions, most notably the Tree Studios art colony and the Dil Pickle Club just off Washington Park. The park itself, known colloquially at the time as “Bughouse Square”, was the site of daily (almost hourly) soapbox orations from agitators, radicals, and casual debaters. The scene that is painted of Towertown, especially at the height of its activity, is one of a boisterous landscape that, day or night, was full of creativity, revelry, and freethinking.

It’s no wonder that Miller thrived in the area, finding a small corner of a cul-de-sac at the western end of Pearson Street, just blocks from the Water Tower, to set up a studio and gallery, which he appropriately named The House at the End of the Street. There he made a name for himself as a leader in modern art in Chicago, not only showcasing his own fine art and handicraft work, but also exhibiting a number of early Modernists from the US and Europe, such as Albert Bloch, Blanche Lazzell, Lyonel Feininger, and Erich Mendelsohn. These exhibitions featured an exceptional array of avant-garde conceptual drawings, colored woodcut prints, small paintings, and sculptures made of traditional and industrial materials. Visitors to the neighborhood, looking to explore the cutting-edge of modern art may have found the pieces being shown within The House at the End of the Street almost too shockingly modern. Miller’s dedication to spreading the good word about adventurous art forms was tireless, and he would often be found around town wearing a pin on his lapel with an image of Henri Matisse, marking his stalwart affinity to the icon of early-Modernism and Fauvism.

The Dil Pickle Club Scene

By the early 1920s, Miller was spending his weekdays working on commissioned projects as an artisan for his own gallery and for Iannelli Studios (an architectural and graphic design firm in Park Ridge, IL), and his weekend nights expanding his interests at the Dil Pickle Club (sometimes printed as “Dill Pickle Club”), listening to speeches from Clarence Darrow, talks held by New York woman’s rights activist Margaret Sanger, and recitations of poetry and performances of songs by Carl Sandburg. After some time operating his own studio and gallery, Miller was invited to run the Dil Pickle Press around 1924. For the Press—situated above the club at 18 Tooker Alley, about a block and a half north of The House at the End of the Street—Miller contributed artwork and design to many of their publications, including a monthly poetry magazine and posters advertising their Halloween masquerade ball. With the neighborhood being a center for literary and modernist elite thinkers, Towertown unsurprisingly was the beating heart of Chicago’s great artistic renaissance. As “Chicago’s Left Bank”, the bohemian neighborhood, more than anything, allowed outsiders like Miller to relax, explore, and take stock of the quickly modernizing world around them. The diverse, charming Towertown community members made for a constantly rejuvenating source of inspiration and subject matter for his sketchbooks.

The same locals were also some of Miller’s first independent clients. Starting out small, he was commissioned, mostly by other creative professionals, as a reliable, fast, and skilled printmaker. He produced hundreds if not thousands of woodcuts on commission for personal and professional use; everything from greeting cards, letterhead designs, business cards, announcement flyers, to illustrations for numerous locally printed periodicals, all made to order. With an almost uncanny ability to quickly sketch and reproduce wood engravings in reverse (woodcut stamps naturally requiring a mirror image in order to appear correctly when inked and printed), Miller became sought after for his commercial graphic work. In 1923, Miller was highlighted as part of a poster advertising local artistic talent called “The Parade of the Chicago Artists” where he was aptly described as: “The blond boy Michelangelo [who] sculpts, paints, batiks, decorates china, makes drawings, woodcuts, etchings, lithographs. His fluency in manual expression is only equaled by the haltingness of his speech.” Miller would soon outgrow this chapter of his early career, moving to a bigger studio space at the Carl Street Studios, and undertaking larger-scale commissions for graphic design and architectural installation across the city and the Midwest. However, Towertown’s natural sense of freedom and artistic iconoclasm that guided Miller’s roots into Chicago would always be a part of his artistic viewpoint.

The beginning of the end of the Towertown heyday was heralded by the construction of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, finalized in 1920, which began the commercializing push into the district north of the river. The creep of new skyscrapers and department stores over the next couple decades began to price the bohemian residents out of their neighborhood enclave; and this is one of the main reasons Miller and Sol Kogen began the Handmade Homes art colony projects in 1927 about a mile to the northwest, in what would become the neighborhood of Old Town, northwest of Washington Park. Miller’s address for most of the late 1920s and ‘30s is 155 W. Carl Street (now W. Burton Place), the site of the Carl Street Studios. Still, Edgar frequented the lounges and saloons of Towertown for much of the rest of his twenties and thirties, and by 1937, he was offered a very unusual but exciting opportunity: to return to live in the neighborhood at the Normandy House restaurant. Some of Miller’s artistic friends who had started a restaurant called The Normandy in the early 1930s had outgrown their space and bought one of the remaining row houses that encircled the Chicago Water Tower. Knowing of Miller’s knack for interior design, they hired him to completely reimagine the interior as a Medieval Normandy-inspired auberge; and as it happened, they also had extra bedrooms upstairs, where Miller, and later his second family, lived for fifteen years.

Towertown hollowed out towards the end of The Depression and World War II, with the local, radical element dispersing to other parts of Chicago and other cities around the country and the world. The 1950s and ‘60s saw a resurgence around the “Bughouse Square” part of what used to be Towertown, with the loosely affiliated “College of Complexes” organization leading a central contingent of the Beat Generation in Chicago. Towertown’s bohemian ethos was a major driver of creativity in the city for the first half of the twentieth century, and left its mark on Miller and his many forms of artistic output for the rest of his career.