Its pages well-thumbed and portions underlined in ink, the book “Lost Chicago” sits on bookshelves across Chicago and continues to amaze and inspire.
It is a poetic photographic essay about the city’s bygone public buildings and private residences. It is harshly critical of the city’s once-cavalier attitude toward architecture, filled with 200-some photos and prints, written in elegant, passionate prose.
I picked up my copy again after hearing the news that its author, David Garrard Lowe, had died in New York City on Sept. 21. He had been in hospice care. He was 91 but remains alive in this book.
Lowe had not lived in Chicago for decades, but he and his book have had a profound impact on the city. “(David’s) book was — and still is — required reading,” Blair Kamin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, told me. “Mine is thoroughly marked up. It’s timeless but very much a product of its time.