Henry Gerber House

The Henry Gerber House is located on North Crilly Court in the

Building

The house is located amidst a row of similar houses on North Crilly Court, a side street in

From the basement level, a casement window with projecting lintel looks out on the garden. A projecting string course separates the basement from the first floor. On the south, stone stairs on the south side of the front garden rise to a small porch in front of the main entrance. Above the door is a round-arched transom window with :1710" in gold lettering, itself surrounded by a round stone arch of rusticated voussoirs with a keystone; a similarly rusticated course continues along the facade to the neighboring houses. On its north is a recessed tripartite single-paned window with sidelights and transom topped by a lintel of splayed rusticated blocks.^[1]

Another stringcourse separates the first and second floors. It also serves as the sill for the arched north window, with smaller rectangular panes filling the edge of the arch. It has the same rusticated arch treatment as the main entrance. On its south is a two-pane horizontal casement window with a plain stone sill.^[1]

Above both second-story windows is a

At the west (rear) the house narrows to 28 feet (8.5 m) wide. Attached to it is a wooden deck, 16 by 9 feet (4.9 by 2.7 m), that does not appear to be original to the house. However, it too is consistent with the other houses in the area.^[1]

Interior

The main entrance is a wooden paneled door with a brass knocker. The arched vestibule it opens into has the original floor tiles. Another transomed doorway opens into the living room, with a fireplace on the north wall.^[1]

An arched entryway leads into the dining room, with an alcove cut into the south wall beneath a staircase. To its west, towards the rear of the house, is the kitchen, with modern sliding glass doors leading out to the deck. Staircases, both original, lead from the rear to the upper floor and basement level.^[1]

In the basement, drywall covers the original exposed brick walls, laid in running bond, and has also been used to enclose an added bathroom as part of a general modern renovation. Two original doors on the east and west lead to the outside.^[1]

At the top of the stairway to the upper floor is a modern skylight. It is between the two original bedrooms, one of which is now used as an office. In the master bedroom, on the east side, is a small bathroom. On its north is another fireplace.^[1]

History

While the house's historical significance comes from its association with Gerber in the mid-1920s, it has a history before and after that period.

1833–1885: Development of Old Town

The area today known as

Josef Heinrich Dittmar was born in the Bavarian town of Passau in 1892. After emigrating to Chicago at the age of 21, he started going by the name Henry Gerber. When the United States entered World War I against his native Germany, he applied for and received conscientious objector status. As a result, he spent the war years in an internment camp. In 1917 he may have been briefly committed to a mental hospital for treatment of his homosexuality, which may have helped him see it as a component of his identity. After the war ended the following year and he was no longer treated with suspicion as a German, he re-enlisted and was assigned to the occupying forces.^[1]

Gerber was stationed in

On those trips, he may have visited the Institute for Sexual Research, the world's first sexology research center. Founder Magnus Hirschfeld's advocacy for sexual minorities had inspired German gays of the time to organize for the repeal of German law against sodomy. Gerber would later cite his years in Germany after the war as formative in his later activism.^[1]

1923–25: Society for Human Rights

In 1923 the occupation ended and Gerber returned to Chicago. He took a job with the

By then Old Town, known as North Town, had become more ethnically diverse, though it was still predominantly German, which Gerber would have found beneficial. Old Town then had a bohemian reputation, tolerant of those on society's political, social or cultural margins. It also had a slightly run-down character, with many of the original single-family homes subdivided into multiple-unit dwellings. There were brothels at either end of North Crilly, making it less likely that the police would care much about a resident's sexual activities as long as he or she kept them discreet.^[1]

The situation for gays and lesbians in 1920s America was not what Gerber had experienced in Germany. The few urban American gay communities (almost exclusively male) that had emerged in the early 20th century were under constant police surveillance and frequently harassed.

Gerber was able to attract about six other men as regular members, most of whom were workingmen like himself. It is likely that they met in the house's basement, as its front and rear entrances made it easy to enter and leave undetected, while the single window could easily be curtained off to prevent onlookers from seeing who was inside. The group held monthly meetings, at which they decided to work for the repeal of Illinois's sodomy law.[1]

As the organization's secretary, Gerber handled all its official correspondence and edited its newsletter, Friendship and Freedom. It is considered the first gay periodical in U.S. history. Only two issues were known to have been published; no copies are extant. Gerber shared it with similar organizations in Europe, and it is shown in a 1927 Hirschfeld photograph alongside similar German and French magazines. Another French magazine, L'Amitié, reviewed the April 1925 issue.^[1]

The society's brief existence ended in July 1925, when the police raided the house in the early hours of a Sunday morning, accompanied by a reporter from the Chicago American afternoon tabloid newspaper.^[1] The investigating officers had found copies of Friendship and Freedom, which led them to North Crilly Court. There they seized copies of the newsletter, the society's records and Gerber's diaries and personal documents.^[1]

Charges against Gerber were at first heavily prosecuted, but ultimately dismissed at a third trial since the police had not gotten a search warrant before entering the house and seizing evidence. He would never recover the documents seized by postal inspectors looking for evidence of violations of the Comstock laws which forbid sending obscene materials through the mail. The legal struggle cost him considerable amounts of money as well as his job with the Post Office, and afterwards he left Chicago for New York.^[1]

1925 – present: Preservation and heritage designations

In the 1930s,

The owners resisted the common late 20th-century trend of gutting the interior of historic houses to create more open space within. This preservation of the original building's integrity helped it gain its Chicago Landmark designation in 2002.^[2] It was also cited in the application for National Historic Landmark status, which the National Park Service granted in 2015.^[3]

See also

• LGBT historic places in the United States
• List of Chicago Landmarks
• List of National Historic Landmarks in Illinois
• National Register of Historic Places listings in North Side Chicago

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Henry Gerber House.

• City of Chicago Landmark page