St. Charles Municipal Building

About this property

The St. Charles Municipal Building is a historic building and civic center in St. Charles, Illinois, United States. It was constructed in 1940 and donated to St. Charles, and has since served as its seat of local government. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1991. The office of R. Harold Zook was chosen to design the structure. Zook operated out of Chicago, working with his nephew D. Coder Taylor, whom he considered his protege. Coder Taylor began working for his uncle in 1935 and recalled that they took any work they could get. Taylor described his uncle as "a good salesman" describing how he got the commission for the St. Charles Municipal Building. He described it as "a big project for the Zook office" and that the office staff at that time was "Zook, Taylor, sometimes another draftsman, and a lady secretary." Zook made a preliminary drawing, a proposed elevation, and that was as far as he went. Coder Taylor recalled the client "wasn't too impressed by it." The initial design was of lannon stone. The client wanted something more modern and impressive. Coder Taylor took over the project and from that point on made every drawing on the project. "The name credited isn't always the person who is the most influential on the project", recalled Taylor. However it wasn't quite that simple, he said that he and his uncle's tables were three feet apart. "He saw what I was doing, so he would comment. If I wouldn't do it right, in his opinion, or he didn't like what I was doing, he would comment. We'd discuss it and the thing would come out. It was mine plus his input that perfected the design." Coder Taylor described that it was changed to a "much more Art Deco type of design than it was at the outset". Quoting the Architectural Record March 1941 issue: "This building was planned for an individual who then donated it to St. Charles at the time of its dedication." Coder Taylor remembered his client, Col. E. J. Baker, "who was a millionaire as a result of inheriting quite a lot of money from Bet-a-million Gates." Taylor described that Col. Baker's niece Dellora and her husband Les Norris, who also shared in the inheritance, donated the land along the Fox River and Baker donated the building. He said that Baker wanted marble, Georgia marble because it is a hard marble and he'd had the St. Charles National Bank built, done of pink Georgia marble. In its design and construction, both Col. Baker and Coder Taylor wanted the building to last, to stand through time and to age gracefully. So Taylor went to Georgia to select the white Georgia marble and saw how to get the proper finish. "It was a rough finish, done with a hammer."

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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