NOTEBOOK: Butler Mansion: Toy wagons not allowed
KENT DARR May 30, 2018 | 7:54 pm
2 min read time
416 wordsBusiness Record Insider, The Insider NotebookAn amazing thing about the Butler Mansion, the 81-year-old structure that sits atop a hill on Fleur Drive beckoning new office tenants as Integer Group moves to other digs, is that you can walk from the basement recreation room to a sun porch on the third floor without pausing to catch your breath.
That’s a real calling card for desk jockeys, such as the Business Record reporter who toured Butler recently. You can thank Earl Butler, the engineer who wanted a home that was solid as a rock — it’s all concrete and steel — and featured the latest and most practical of 1930s conveniences. He teamed up with architect and friend George Kraetsch to design what American Magazine called “the world’s most modern house” in an article written in 1937, shortly after Butler and his wife and daughter moved in.
One feature that Butler and Kraetsch pondered was stairs ? whether to have them. Butler knew that many buildings contemporary to the time featured ramps. Why not a house? Stairs were dangerous, and accounted for 45 percent of household injuries.
According to the American Magazine article, Butler basically was told no ramps in a residence “just because that’s the way it is.” Wrong answer. Butler and Kraetsch settled on a ramp that gently twists its way up the house, large rooms on either side.
To settle on the angle, the two friends visited a lumberyard, where they laid out planks, elevated at one end, and walked up and down them until they determined that a rise of one foot every 10 feet, 4 inches “would get you to the top and still be easy on the legs,” according to the article. (Butler also visited a plumbing supply company in Chicago to sample bathtubs by climbing inside and going through the motions of taking a “comfortable” bath.)
Butler worried the details. Concerned that a guest — possibly after sampling the contents of the mansion’s hidden liquor cabinet — would try to climb on the ramp’s aluminum railing, Butler did so himself to make sure it wouldn’t give. He also anticipated a time when a child might try to cruise down the ramp on a toy wagon (it would be a fun ride). “So he borrowed a toy wagon from a store, started to coast from the top, and if he hadn’t quickly put on the brakes might have broken a leg,” according to the article. Toy wagons and roller skates were banned from the Butler Mansion.