The day starts like this: twenty-five people gathered on a sidewalk in Chicago staring at a brick wall. They’re on a tour – a tour of brick. Will Quam, an architectural photographer, writer and researcher, is leading it.

Will is obsessed with brick. And like any self-respecting person with an obsession, he shares it. He leads about 150 brick tours a year in Chicago through his organization Brick of Chicago.

“It is that dare of, ‘You don't think this can be interesting? It is,’” said Will.

Will’s tours are not just about brick. They’re about noticing the brick and then learning the stories brick tells about history, politics, culture and design.

“It's like going abroad and suddenly being able to understand the language everyone's speaking,” he said, “except it's suddenly being able to understand what is happening on every single building around you.”

We go on Will’s tour and stop to notice the bricks and all the stories they’re trying to tell us.

Credits:
Producer: Ryan Schnurr
Host: Dan Wanschura
Editing: Morgan Springer
Additional Editing: Dan Wanschura, Ellie Katz, Peter Payette
Music: Blue Dot Sessions

Will Quam recently authored a book about brick. It's titled, "Fire and Clay: How Bricks Reveal the Hidden History of Chicago"

Transcript:

WILL QUAM: Hello!

ELIZABETH: Hi, how are you? 

QUAM: Good, how are you?

ELIZABETH: Good. 

QUAM: What’s the name for your tickets?

DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: This is Will Quam.

QUAM: Elizabeth? ELIZABETH: Yes.

QUAM: There you are. Thanks for coming.

ELIZABETH: Great, okay, yeah. Glad to be here. 

ELIZABETH’S FRIEND: We’re excited! 

QUAM: Good! That's the right attitude to have about bricks. 

WANSCHURA: Will is standing with a group of people on a sidewalk in Chicago. He’s about to lead a tour – a tour of – brick.

QUAM:  You guys live in Chicago? 

ATTENDEE: Lakeview. 

QUAM: Great, great brick neighborhood. Great brick neighborhood. 

WANSCHURA: Will runs a business called Brick of Chicago. He gives these walking tours of brick in different neighborhoods around the city. Basically, this guy really, really loves brick. And he wants you to love it too.

QUAM:  All right everybody, we are gonna go ahead and get started. If you wanna gather up over here facing this beautiful wall. … My name's Will Quam. I'm an architecture photographer and historian, and for ten years now I've been obsessed with Chicago's bricks and its neighborhoods and all the wonderful weird things that make this city what it is.

WANSCHURA: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water, and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura. Today on the show: how Will Quam got obsessed with brick. And how he tries to make you obsessed too.

QUAM: It is that dare of, "You don't think this can be interesting. It is.”

WANSCHURA: Producer Ryan Schnurr tagged along on one of his tours to find out.

RYAN SCHNURR, BYLINE: I need to tell you up front this tour is not just about brick. I mean, it is about brick. But it’s also about history and culture and geography and all the messy things brick reveals about a place.

[Street sounds fade up]

It starts like this: twenty-five people standing around staring at a brick wall. And I have to say it’s a pretty interesting wall. If you’re imagining a sort of plain red brick, this is not that. It’s rougher and more colorful. Pinks, yellows, oranges, browns.

QUAM:  This is what is called common brick. Particularly Chicago common brick.

SCHNURR: There are basically two major categories of brick in Chicago: common brick and face brick. Common brick was made right here in the city.

QUAM:  Out of our abundant clays. Our abundant clays that were absolutely riddled and filled with junk – stones and pebbles and minerals that make some orange, some yellow, some brown, and all these pockmarks to soak up so much soot. So much so that it was considered to be the ugliest brick in the entire world.

SCHNURR: So you see common brick mostly on the sides and back of a building.

QUAM: And so we imported brick, nice bricks, to cover the fronts of our buildings, to hide our shame.

SCHNURR: This is the other brick. Face brick. It came from all over the country. Different cities have different kinds of clay, which means different kinds of brick. Detroit’s are rustic orange to deep burgundy. Milwaukee’s are cream colored. Philadelphia’s are a classic, smooth red. So, Chicago is a collage of all these different places.

[Sound of street]

SCHNURR: Today, Will is giving his brick tour in the neighborhood of Old Town. It’s a few miles north of downtown Chicago.

QUAM: All right, we’re gonna go over this way to the red brick apartment building.

SCHNURR: It’s this old Victorian from the 1800s. Old Town has a lot of them. The face brick on these Victorians is often a kind of red pressed brick. Smooth. Consistent color.

QUAM: Old Town is now frozen, visually, in those early days of the 1870s and the 1880s. But all throughout, there are still these little bits and pieces of all these other eras and people who came through. 

SCHNURR: Take that first wall. The only reason we see those quote “ugly” common bricks is because all these artists moved in in the 1920s and removed the red face brick to expose the Chicago common.

QUAM:  They loved it. … It was real and honest and true and earthy. So that's what they put on the front of the building. 

SCHNURR: It’s the kind of story Quam tells throughout the tour: here’s a brick wall, a building. Here’s a bit of history and context. And then here’s what all of that reveals about a place or an era.

SCHNURR: How did you hear about this? Or were you, like, big brick fans coming into it? Or did you know anything about brick before?

ABBY HIRSHMAN: I’m into brick.

SCHNURR: Abby Hirshman and Matt Mogensen live nearby. They said they took the tour to learn more about the neighborhood.

HIRSHMAN: I'm from St. Louis, and St. Louis is covered in, like, beautiful red brick. And he's from Milwaukee, which is, like, all that, like, white yellow brick. So it’s cool to see the in-between here.

MATT MOGENSEN:  We also live on the edge of Old Town down there, so it was personal and cool to learn more about the history of the area.

SCHNURR: It’s personal for Will, too. This whole thing started when he moved from Minnesota to Chicago in 2014, to teach theater. He taught a bunch of after-school programs all over the city. So he’s traveling around every day, from neighborhood to neighborhood. And he starts to notice that the brickwork in Chicago is kind of interesting.

QUAM:   It was kind of this incredible thing … where you get the same building in Chicago built side by side over and over and over again, but the brick is what changes. 

SCHNURR: It wasn’t some big epiphany. He was just noticing more than anything. Same sort of building design. Different bricks. And then he read a book called “On Looking.” It was by a cognitive scientist named Alexandra Horowitz. And, basically, she wrote about taking these walks around her neighborhood in New York City with different kinds of experts. A geologist. An artist. A sound designer.

QUAM: And tries to see the world the way that they see it. 

SCHNURR: What could a geologist see that she didn’t? How would it shift and refocus her attention? Would she notice new things?

QUAM: And I was like, "That is, that’s–I love that."

SCHNURR: Now Will was curious: what would an architect or photographer see when they looked at brick?

QUAM:  And you start to see that, oh, it's not all red. It's not all a red rectangle. It can be blue and purple and brown and have crazy textures and be in these patterns. There's so much more going on. 

SCHNURR: He started snapping photos with his phone and posting them on Instagram, on an account he called “Brick of Chicago.” A kind of riff on the popular account “Humans of New York.”

QUAM: I would finish teaching, you know, this hour-long after-school class somewhere, and then I'd just wander around and take pictures. And it allowed me to engage with and explore every part of the city.

SCHNURR:  What was the first photo you took for the Brick of Chicago account? 

QUAM: It was my apartment. It was my–the corner of my apartment. … A yellow brick building that had … what I now know is vertical scratch brick. So brick with these sort of vertical channels cut into it.

SCHNURR: It’s got rows of vertical grooves lined up next to each other. Like the lines in a barcode. It was used a lot in the early 1900s.

QUAM: And then the corner of these angle bay windows were these limestone blocks.

SCHNURR: That you’d never looked at before.

QUAM: Yeah, yeah.

SCHNURR: And you’re looking at it now–

QUAM: I’m looking at it, yeah.

SCHNURR: –For the first time.

SCHNURR: Turns out, Will wasn’t the only person interested in brick. People started following his Instagram account. Hundreds. Then thousands. And they were asking him questions.

QUAM: And then people would be like, "Well, I'm seeing this pattern. What's that?" I'd be like, "I don't know." And so I started– I would just like, read Wikipedia and start looking into things.  

SCHNURR: And what he found was that brick revealed so much about Chicago’s history.

QUAM:  It's like– it's like going abroad and suddenly being able to understand the language everyone's speaking, except it's suddenly being able to understand what is happening on every single building around you. 

[Street sounds]

QUAM:  All right, this is St. Michael's Catholic Church. You know it’s Saturday because there’s a wedding at St. Michael’s [laughs]. There’s a wedding here every single Saturday all year long.

SCHNURR: Case in point: St. Michael Church. It’s this beautiful, ornate, Romanesque building. Tall spire, arched windows. It’s made of limestone and brick.

QUAM: The original church was a wood church, … and,  in the 1860s, they started construction on a brick church, finishing it just in time for the great fire to sweep through and knock everything but the side walls down. 

SCHNURR: St. Michael used to be the tallest building in Chicago. And it was one of only a few buildings to survive the fire that consumed the city in 1871. Well, the brick parts did. After the fire, St. Michael was rebuilt.

QUAM: But what you see today is not exactly that same church. 

SCHNURR: It got a facelift in 1913. And he can tell, of course, because of the brick.

QUAM: If it was 1870s, it would be probably that smooth, red pressed brick. 

SCHNURR: Like the Victorians.

QUAM: Instead, what it is is this beautiful brown, purpley, bluey brick.

SCHNURR: Ironspot brick. It comes from clay with a lot of iron pyrite.

QUAM: And when it's fired, the impurities at the surface burst and speckle and vitrify – turn to glass across the face of the brick. And what that means, too, if we go over here is when you get up close to the wall and touch it. … What you're seeing is iron. … All those specks and spots is metal on the face of the brick.

SCHNURR: It was the naturalist era–earthy was good.

QUAM:  Architects in the early 20th century loved this ironspot brick because it looked so earthy and real compared to those older generations of red perfect bricks. 

SCHNURR: Frank Lloyd Wright even used ironspot brick on his Prairie-style homes.

QUAM: It’s also my favorite kind of brick. …  If you take my Rogers Park tour you can actually see my favorite wall of my favorite brick, and my favorite brick on my favorite wall of my favorite brick. [laughs]

SCHNURR: He holds up a picture of a wall with ironspot brick. All 25 of us come in closer. And right in the middle of the image is a brick with a splash of blue and purple across the front, like a hot flame.

QUAM: [oohs from people]  That one right there. [laughs] That one right there. You get it. [laughs] You get it. It’s like an oil slick on water. It’s just so full of life.

MOGENSEN:  I'm gonna be on the lookout for iron spot brick everywhere now. 

HIRSHMAN: Yeah. 

MOGENSEN: Just call it out. See the little gray hues. 

SCHNURR: Matt and Abby say they’re already seeing their neighborhood differently. With expert eyes. They’re seeing the hidden common brick. They’re seeing the different face brick.

MOGENSEN: And now I cannot unsee it on every building. 

SCHNURR: I feel like every time I go on a tour like this, it's a good way to become insufferable to everyone else around you. You know, then you're walking around–

MOGENSEN: We can't wait [laughs]. Can't wait till the parents come visit. We're gonna inundate them with brick facts. 

SCHNURR: When Will first began giving tours, in 2018, he was doing just a few per month in the summer. It was all pretty low key. He’d post about them on neighborhood Facebook groups.

QUAM: And I would bring some bricks in a backpack 'cause I had started collecting them. And it—

SCHNURR: So you're carrying around these physical bricks? 

QUAM: Yeah, like three or four in a backpack. 

SCHNURR: How much does a brick weigh? 

QUAM: Too much.   

SCHNURR: [Laughs] Yeah. 

QUAM: … But those early tours were very much like, "We are only talking about bricks, and I'm gonna teach you all about bricks." 

SCHNURR: Then COVID hit. Teaching ground to a halt. No middle school theater. The brick tours moved online. And Will expanded his research beyond the building materials themselves. He was connecting the dots between design and era, but also the kinds of people who lived there and even the cultural and political landscape of the neighborhood.

QUAM: And that was sort of incredible, like, “Oh wow.”

SCHNURR: It changed what he was doing with the tours.

QUAM: And that’s one where I really started pulling a lot of these stories that I was finding. … And that … people really enjoyed that.

SCHNURR: So the brick is like–

QUAM: It's a gateway drug.

SCHNURR:  It's a gateway drug. 

QUAM: Brick is a gateway drug. 

SCHNURR: It's an on-ramp.

QUAM: Yeah, exactly. 

SCHNURR: After the break, that on-ramp leads us to a building that tells us a lot about Chicago’s racial history.

[Sponsorship break]

SCHNURR: In 2021, theater started up at schools again. And Will went back to teaching. But it wasn’t the same.

QUAM:   The spark was kinda gone, you know, around it. 

SCHNURR: He was hooked on bricks. And the demand for tours was there. So he went full-time.

QUAM: I still love the kids, and I miss the kids a lot. But I was like, "You know what? This is what I'm gonna do." 

SCHNURR: These days, he runs about a hundred and fifty tours a year. The essence of the tour, he says, is story. The story of the neighborhood, as told through brick.

[Street sounds]

 QUAM:  So this here is my favorite streetscape in Chicago, or one of them. … Notice the chop in the corner of the building here?

SCHNURR: We’re a block down from St. Michael Church. Will motions to a brick building. It’s pretty plain overall. But the corner – or what would have been the corner – has been cut off at a 45 degree angle. And there’s a reason.

QUAM: We are standing in the middle of Ogden Avenue. 

SCHNURR: Or where Ogden Avenue used to be. It’s gone now.

QUAM: Ogden Avenue used to come right through here, right through where we are.

SCHNURR: Ogden ran diagonally across the grid of city blocks. And so when this brick building was constructed a corner would have stuck out into the street. So they just angled the front. It’s technically called a chamfer, if that helps you picture it. It probably doesn’t, but anyway, the street was removed in 1968.

 QUAM: Now 1968, the year they took out the street, is not quite coincidentally also the year the Chicago Housing Authority built the William Green Towers in Cabrini Green at Division and Ogden. 

SCHNURR: The housing project was about a mile down the road. It had low-income residents, most of them black, who had been excluded from other housing opportunities. The wealthy white people in Old Town didn’t like being so close to that development.

QUAM: And if you have developed and poured money into this historic neighborhood, and you're terrified of your neighbors, what do you do? Take out the streets. Make it a lot harder for any of them to come where you don't want them. 

SCHNURR: Removing the street created a barrier between the north and south sides of Old Town. It became much more difficult to drive from one area to the other. It’s not so obvious now. If Will hadn’t pointed it out, most of us would never have guessed a street used to cut through here – and would have missed the story of racist urban planning that shaped this area.

MUSIC

[sound of street or people milling around]

SCHNURR: The last stop on the tour is a streetcorner with buildings showcasing different eras.

QUAM:  So from this spot here we can really see the full history of … Old Town.  

SCHNURR: 1880s, 1920s, 1970s, and on and on. Two hundred and fifty years in a snapshot. And when the tour ends, people just kind of hang around. Standing on the brick sidewalk, talking about bricks.

PERSON 1:  It's, like, cool to have someone, like, walking around and kind of like point out the different layers of time in all of these buildings. So…

PERSON 2: We live in New York, but I'm an architect, and so getting to know a new city through the architecture on the scale of not just a house but of a brick has been really cool. 

PERSON 3: I feel like I pass through these areas and I’m just like–I don’t really think about the historical aspect of things.

PERSON 4: And also, like, a neighborhood that has so many different little pockets of times and styles is just really cool. 

SCHNURR: The assignment now I think is for everybody to find their own favorite brick. Favorite brick. 

PERSON 1: Yeah. This is a good homework assignment. 

PERSON 2: Are you doing multiple of these tours with him?

PERSON 2: This is our second. We're gonna do them all at some point. 

PERSON 1: Collect them all. 

PERSON 2: This is my new goal.

QUAM: If we don't do this–if we don't look with excitement and interest and intrigue at everything around us, then you just live somewhere. But if you're gonna be in the city and take part in the city, you celebrate the things that are still here and the people that are still here, and you, you know, tell these stories. And, like, keep these stories alive. … As long as you know how to see it, you can find it. And that, my friends, is the end of our tour. Thanks so much for joining me today.

[clapping]