original museum-quality 1892 schiller or garrick building interior staircase landing mosaic fragment

images of richard nickel, david norris, and john vinci taken in 1961 when they uncovered and carefully extracted the richly colored sullivan-designed schiller building or garrick theater (1892) mosaic staircase landing lunettes that were trucked off to navy pier where they were reassembled, documented, and displayed.

the well-preserved mosaics were first discovered by david norris after chipping away at layers of floor tiles that concealed them for decades. with very little time on their hands – wrecking of the building was well underway – norris, nickel, and vinci decided to remove the landings in their entirety (tile and concrete) by carefully breaking them into more manageable sections and loading them onto the trucks used to transport garrick ornament to navy pier. if i recall correctly, a single lunette weighed over three tons, so it’s no surprise that they struggled to move the panels from the theater to navy pier.

images and artifacts courtesy of the bldg. 51 archive, ryerson and burnham archives, art institute of chicago, and john vinci collection.