Herbert Greenwald

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

After the Promontory Apartments established his working relationship with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Herbert Greenwald moved quickly to a far more ambitious commission: 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, announced in April 1949 with co-developer Robert Hall McCormick and financed by a 3.1 million dollar loan from Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company secured that July. Groundbreaking came on December 17, 1949, with more than half the apartments already presold, a sign of how much confidence Greenwald's reputation, and Mies's growing one, already commanded before a single unit was finished. The design process was not without friction. Mies originally wanted fully open interiors throughout the towers, a purist expression of his architectural philosophy, but Greenwald insisted on adding interior walls between rooms, a genuinely practical demand from a developer who had to sell the units to actual residents. The dispute became serious enough that Mies reportedly came close to quitting the project entirely before the two men reached a compromise, a rare instance of a client pushing back hard enough on Mies's formal ideals to actually change the built outcome. Greenwald went on to develop a substantial run of further projects, the Algonquin Apartments from 1949 to 1951, 900-910 North Lake Shore Drive, also known as the Esplanade Apartments, from 1953 to 1956, Commonwealth Plaza across the same years, and Lafayette Park in Detroit, begun in 1955 and continued after his death through 1963, along with an unbuilt house designed for him personally in Lake Forest, Illinois. He died on February 3, 1959, in the crash of American Airlines Flight 320, a Lockheed L-188 Electra that came down in dense fog into New York's East River on approach to LaGuardia Airport, roughly 4,900 feet short of the runway. Sixty-five of the seventy-three people aboard were killed, in what was the first fatal crash of the Electra type, which had been in commercial service only about two weeks. Greenwald's body reportedly was never recovered, an abrupt and unresolved end for a developer whose partnership with Mies had, in barely a decade, produced some of the most consequential residential towers of postwar American architecture.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Herbert Greenwald did not start out headed toward real estate development at all. He pursued rabbinical studies at Yeshiva University before switching to philosophy at the University of Chicago, and he served in the United States military during the Second World War before either path had fully resolved into a career. He entered real estate only in 1949, using funds inherited after his mother's death, partnering with Samuel Katzin on his first ventures. He married Lillian Feldman and had two sons, Michael and Bennet, and he supported working artists, including Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, at a point in their careers when that kind of patronage mattered. His decisive professional relationship began in 1946, while Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was still working on the Farnsworth House for Edith Farnsworth; the two men became acquainted then, and Greenwald went on to become one of Mies's most consistent and consequential clients, commissioning the Promontory Apartments in 1949 and then the paired towers at 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, announced that same April with co-developer Robert Hall McCormick and financed by a 3.1 million dollar loan from Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company secured that July. Groundbreaking came on December 17, 1949, with more than half the apartments already presold before construction had even begun, a sign of how quickly Chicago's market had come to trust Greenwald's eye for what Mies's architecture could deliver. He would go on to develop several more Mies buildings across Chicago and, eventually, Detroit, but 860-880 Lake Shore Drive, the project born out of that 1946 introduction, remains the clearest evidence of how completely a philosophy student turned developer had, within a few short years, made himself indispensable to one of the twentieth century's most demanding architects.