Charles L. Hutchinson

[12] Herbert Kinsley had, in the last decades of the 19th Century, become one of Chicago's premier caterers and restaurateurs after having made his reputation during his peripatetic career in part by hosting a ball for the Prince of Wales at the Anglo-American Hotel in Hamilton, Ontario Canada.

The drive for what was intended to be a permanent facility also began that year when Hutchinson acquired a lot at the southwest corner of Michigan Avenue and VanBuren Street that had built on it a two-story commercial building that was leased in part to a medical college, for which he advanced the Art Institute the purchase price of $45,000.

[35] The Art Institute moved its offices into the vacant part of the building,[36] and subsequent to the purchase a three-story addition of pressed brick was built on the back portion of the lot.

Classes moved from the armory into this new space on January 8, 1883 [37] and these accommodations remained the extent of the Art Institute's real estate holdings until 1885, when the lot to the immediate south was acquired for expansion.

[38] Contemporary news reports credited the efforts of Hutchinson as being the drive behind the construction of the new building and "the one man to whom the Art Institute owes its splendid status".

The Art Institute moved into the new structure in November 1893 after the fair closed, and Hutchinson spent the next several years leading the effort to reconfigure the interior of the new building.

[41] The New York Press sniffed at this effort in what was perceived as an example of Chicago's cultural barbarism, considering the city's position as hog butcher to the world and its philistine reputation as a resolute accumulator of wealth for its own sake by whatever means: "He (Hutchinson) probably paid $1,000 a front foot for them, and we assume the citizens of Chicago will give him a triumphal procession when they arrive, carrying them and him in huge floats, drawn by teams of milk-white Berkshire hogs that have been newly washed with a ten inch hose jet of water until their pink flesh shows under the clean bristles.

[46] Hutchinson believed that a man's secret of success lie not only in "intense industry", but also in "his recreations [that] make or break him as surely as do his business habits".

Among those were included: The Art Institute was never far from Hutchinson's mind, and on his deathbed he was heard remarking to a friend "I love to lie here and think of it -- of all it will do for the people in the years to come!

"[92] He died at Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago on October 7, 1924, after a brief attack of bronchial pneumonia, at which time he was remembered for the "many official positions [he held] in charitable, philanthropic and educational bodies.

Charles and Frances Hutchinson were residents of Chicago's elite Prairie Avenue , living for over three decades in this house at 2709. The original house was designed in 1881 by George O. Garnsey and built in the Queen Anne style, and remodeled as shown here in 1888 to French Gothic tastes by Francis M. Whitehouse. After the neighborhood became less fashionable in the early years of the 20th century, the Hutchinsons moved to a cooperative apartment on E. Walton Place and their former home became a boarding house . [ 2 ] It has since been demolished.
State Street looking north at Monroe c. 1900. Pike's Building at 170 (now 106 S.) State Street, where the Art Institute first opened its doors as The Academy of Fine Arts, is shown to the far left, with the second Palmer House (1873) directly across the street on the far right.
Battery D Armory stood on the east side of Michigan Avenue at Monroe Street. The building was used for various purposes, and "It appears that it occasionally required some pretty quick work to put the building into suitable condition for the morning art classes, after [the building] had been used the night before for a boxing match or a ball." [ 29 ] It was demolished in 1896.
The John Wellborn Root -designed building at the southwest corner of Michigan and Van Buren, which opened in 1887. The building was sold to the Chicago Club in 1891 for $425,000, [ 30 ] and collapsed during an extensive renovation of the property by the club in 1929.
1902 exterior view of what is now the Allerton Building of the Art Institute of Chicago. Although the building was originally designed as a closed rectangle, it was initially constructed with a U-shaped footprint for lack of funds, with the area between the wings of the U in the back filled in 1895 with a temporary structure designed to house the classrooms of the School of the Art Institute . Alexander N. Fullerton Memorial Hall, with its Tiffany stained glass dome, was completed in 1898, and in 1901 the Ryerson Library was finished, [ 31 ] funded with a $50,000 donation ($1.8 million in 2024) provided by Hutchinson's friend Martin Ryerson. [ 32 ]
St. Paul Universalist Church, 3005 S. Prairie Avenue, 1887, Burling and Whitehouse, architects (demolished). The chapel was donated by Hutchinson and Harlow Higinbotham, [ 77 ] who was a partner of Marshall Field and Company and would become the president of the World's Columbian Exposition and a founder of the Field Museum . [ 78 ]
Beata Beatrix - Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Artist's rendition of his original painting but adding a predella depicting the artist and his wife (the model of the painting in the upper panel) meeting in paradise, with a frame designed by Rossetti. Hutchinson had acquired the painting in London for his private collection in 1883 and paid £ 1,200 for it [ 91 ] (about $97,000 in 2015).
Hutchinson's grave at Graceland Cemetery