The Ghosts of the Bradley House

Sometimes, in spooky ways that could never be explained, it seems as if the histories of certain Frank Lloyd Wright houses reproduce his own history of calamitous fall, improbable comeback, lurid headlines, quiet beauty, incalculable sorrow, financial desperation, sexual intrigue, unsolvable riddle, and, not least, the determination to survive — no, to triumph.

There’s even fire, not to say front-page suicide and murder of a ghastly kind, attached to the story of the long-lived B. Harley Bradley House, which sits now, as it sat then, in my parochial ’50s childhood, at the very bottom of the same street I lived on, South Harrison Avenue, in the river town of Kankakee. Kankakee: an old Indian name, possibly from the Potawatomi, said to mean “swamp country.” It fits. There’s been a lot of sinking in this house. And yet it’s here, or maybe better said, she’s here, for there’s almost a palpable feminine quality to this magnificent great ship on the prairie that has lasted a century and more, in spite of all.

It’s been said this is the first Frank Lloyd Wright house that looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. The Bradley, so huge then, so huge now, came right at the tick of the new century, 1900; or, more figuratively, came out of Wright’s head just as the second hand was sweeping toward midnight, taking him to a new place and level and fame. More than any other Wright creation, this is the key and penultimate transitional work to all of the full-bloomed Prairies immediately ahead. But I had no clue of that then. I wonder if I’d even heard the name Frank Lloyd Wright. I was just a Catholic kid on my three-speed, gazing over at the thing he’d made, a little afraid of it, terribly pulled to it.

FIRST, ARCHITECTURALLY: HE BUILT IT IN THE CRUCIFORM plan, and he made the main axis of the cross the living room and the kitchen. To situate you: The living room is located on the first floor directly beneath a low projecting gable at the front, on the second floor, with its deep overhanging eaves. Even on canvas-dreary February Midwestern days, there can be wonderful light in this room, which is the central one of the house, and it filters and fractures through the polygonal bay windows that are tied together with cocoa-colored bands of wood trim. The ribbon art-glass casement windows offset the pale stucco exterior walls: so a kind of stark simplicity in and amid the daring, in and amid the instant strangeness to the look of the whole. (Did it come down from Mars?) When you’re inside, looking out, this curve of windows that fills up nearly the entire first-floor bay gives the effect of being in a modernist stained-glass chapel.

On either side of the living room and the kitchen — to achieve the two arms of the cross — the architect placed a reception room and a dining room. Except that he did one brilliant thing more: He elongated