All photos (c) Mark Hertzberg (2020)

Today was moving day – again – for Frank Lloyd Wright’s diminutive Sherman Booth Cottage (1913) in Glencoe, Illinois. The house was moved a tenth of a mile to its new site on July 21, and placed on a temporary foundation. Now it was time to nudge it onto its permanent foundation.

The cottage was threatened with demolition by the new owners of the lot it had stood on since 1916. With the help of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, the nonprofit Glencoe Historical Society acquired the home to remodel it and turn it into a museum and research center. The diminutive home, built for Wright’s attorney Sherman Booth while his larger Wright home was being built nearby, is said by some Wright aficionados to be a precursor to his post-1936 Usonian home designs. Wright scholar William Allin Storrer believes the house was actually designed by Lloyd Wright. Whoever designed, it is a historical structure and it was imporatnt to save it.

The house was nudged by the forks of a John Deere track loader on these rollers on 50′ long steel girders.

An overhanging tree limb unexpectedly had to be cut down.

Measurements were taken throughout the morning…then it was time for a lunch break:

The house is finally in place and finish work is underway.

Ron Scherubel, former executive director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, has documented the entire project. He showed me a fire pit designed by Jens Jensen, just outside the fence line:

While the July move – documented in an earlier post on this website – attracted dozens of media outlets, none came today. https://wrightinracine.wordpress.com/?s=on+the+move

Oh, and as for the owners of the cottage who wanted to demolish it when they bought the former site, they have not had any work done there since the cottage was moved off their property July 21: