I was going to mark January 6 as the anniversary of a special day in the biography until the insurrection in the U.S. Capitol seemed to require holding back on any post. The idea was to note that on the night of January 6, 1909 in Chicago the Cliff Dweller’s Club was formally inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been present as one of the club’s charter members. So was Louis Sullivan I believe. Wright knew that later that year he would become a pariah for his “elopement” to Europe with Mamah. He may not have realized that as a result the Cliff Dwellers Club would expel him by early 1910. Their reason for dropping Louis Sullivan at the same time is less clear. Sullivan was in decline professionally and psychologically. His alcoholism became an embarrassment. But so great was the reputation he had built that he was made a kind of honorary member a few years later and given a place there to write.
The Cliff Dwellers enjoyed the primo location in Chicago: the penthouse suite atop Orchestra Hall looking out from tall windows on a sweeping vista of Lake Michigan. Architecture was the profession most represented in its early membership, as reflected in its early icon of an ancient Southwest American Indian bearing the tools of that profession among others.
The Cliff Dwellers were the artistic elite of Chicago but not at all progressive in outlook. A male-only club, they excluded for example Chicago’s great writer-poet-critic Harriet Monroe. And when the historic Armory Show of modern art came to the Art Institute in 1913, most of its members derided it.
Early in 1914 Wright thought he might be reinstated. He corresponded with the Club president, his old friend the writer Hamlin Garland to that end. But despite Garland’s best efforts on his behalf, some club members, many of them architects, would not let him rejoin. This may have been due to his history with Mamah who was now ensconced at Taliesin but it is equally likely to have been due to the hackles he raised by dominating the exhibition of the Chicago Architectural Club that year at the Art Institute.,
The Cliff Dwellers remains an important Chicago club. I haven’t tried to find out when they officially dropped the hyphen they once used in their name.