Any valuable information about Solon Spencer Beman and how he helped to town of pullman come to be?

Question

other than his architectural contributionsto te town? cite your sources please

Answer 1

Solon Spencer Beman (1853-1914) was born in Brooklyn, New York. Beman is best known as the architect of the planned Pullman community and adjacent factory complex. Several of his other largest commissions, including the Pullman Office Building, Pabst Building, and Grand Central Station, have since been demolished.

Beman began his architectural training in the office of New York architect Richard Upjohn, where he helped design the Connecticut State Capitol. He came to Chicago in 1879, commissioned by George Mortimer Pullman, to design what would become the nation's first planned company town. Located on the city's Far South Side, the Pullman project included more than 1,300 houses, a factory, monumental water tower, theater, church, hotel, market, and schools.

In Chicago, Beman also designed the Studebaker Fine Arts Building (1884) at Michigan and Van Buren Avenues, the Pullman Building on Michigan Avenue, and parts of George Pullman's Prairie Avenue home, which was also later demolished. In 1897, Beman also designed Pullman's monument at Chicago's Graceland Cemetery, a towering Corinthian column flanked by curved benches. Elsewhere, Beman designed the distinctive Pullman summer home at the Thousand Islands, "Castle Rest."

Beman's other projects in Chicago included several buildings at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Grand Central Station and its train shed at Harrison and Wells (1891, demolished 1971), the Kimball mansion in the Prairie Avenue District, the Blackstone Public Library (1905) in the Kenwood neighborhood, the Hamilton Club Building at Madison and Dearborn Ave. (1913, Demolished) and the First Church of Christ, Scientist, at 4017 S. Drexel Blvd.

The Blackstone Public Library Branch, built in 1905, was Chicago's first branch library. The design was a near duplication of the James Blackstone Memorial Library in Bradford, Connecticut (1896). Both libraries were built with bequests from the Blackstone family of Chicago.

Solon S. Beman also designed at least a dozen other Christian Scientist churches across the country, as well as the Pioneer Building in Saint Paul, Minnesota (1889), the Procter & Gamble factories in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Studebaker plant in South Bend, Indiana, the 14-story Pabst Building in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1891, demolished), the Michigan Trust Company Building in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1913), and the JMS Building, also in South Bend (1916).