“He thought his buildings would last forever,” recalled Betty Moratz Singh in a 1990 interview concerning her grandfather, the prominent Bloomington architect Paul O. Moratz.
Moratz
Singh said her grandfather looked ahead to a time when a curious onlooker would stumble across one of his libraries, schools or homes and say, “What a beautiful building — I wonder who built it?”
This undated photo shows a 1½-story Queen Anne style house at 108 W. Wood St., Bloomington, that was the home of Paul Moratz and his family from 1896 until 1904. It was the family’s second home, which he designed. It was demolished in 2008, and a Walgreens is on the site.
His was “an old man’s dream,” said Singh.
Born in 1866 in Granwitz, Posen, in what is now Germany, Paul Moratz was the oldest of seven children born to Herman and Emelie Moratz. A year later, his father immigrated to the United States. And in 1868, Herman sent for his family and the Moratzes settled in Bloomington.
Herman Moratz was a carpenter and builder by trade. He began learning these skills from his own father by working in his building business. Herman opened a woodworking shop in a shed behind the family home at 1106 S. Main St. It was in the predominately German neighborhood of South Hill, situated south of downtown and east of Miller Park.
Herman continued to operate the shop out of the shed until 1884 when he opened a separate shop across the street on the southwest corner of Main and Miller streets (later listed at 1103 S. Main St).
As Paul grew up, he split his time between attending the German and English school and assisting in his father’s carpenter shop. He learned the necessary skills to become a carpenter, and his father also taught him architectural drawing.
Paul recalled that he was “anxious to get all the knowledge I could concerning the planning and designing of buildings.” Paul felt that since his father was taught building construction in Germany, he would need to further his education by learning how architecture, design, and construction were done in the United States.
With his parents’ approval, Paul enrolled at the Illinois Industrial School in Urbana (now the University of Illinois). He completed several years of studies there, but it is unclear whether he graduated.
Paul returned to Bloomington, continued working with his father and began applying his newly acquired skills as an architect.
Paul succeeded his father in the late 1880s and began to devote a great deal of his energy to expand the business. He guaranteed “first-class work and prices very low.”
This undated photo shows the Paul O. Moratz Hardwood Planing Mill at 500 E. Bell St., Bloomington, sometime after the original mill, built in 1905, was rebuilt after a 1925 fire.
This was a busy time for planing mills and woodworking factories in Bloomington as the demand grew for “locally produced doors, sashes, frames, moldings, and veneers” due to the rising popularity of the Queen Anne architecture style in home design. Moratz and the craftsmen in his employ were kept busy.
Eventually, he relocated his planing mill to a site near the old Nickel Plate Railroad tracks between McLean, Bell, and Evans streets.
For Moratz, the disciplines of architecture and millwork melded into one, and his “up-to-date” (that is, modern) homes were born of “ready-made plans” and “massed-produced materials.”
While business was booming at Moratz’s mill, he began to design buildings throughout the region. While no complete record exists of all the buildings Moratz designed, dozens can be attributed to him.
One of the most well-known examples of Moratz’s architecture in Bloomington can be found in the White’s Place neighborhood (today known as White Place without the apostrophe), the brainchild of prominent builder Samuel R. White.
Moratz served as the primary architect for White’s two-block residential boulevard. Moratz designed the stone gate at Empire Street, and several of the homes mirror the style and layout of those found in his 1899 plan book “Up-To-Date Homes.”
This neighborhood has been recognized as “one of the city’s first developments with a distinct suburban feel.”
Nationally, Moratz is perhaps most well-known for designing numerous public libraries, many of them Carnegie libraries, the majority of which are found in Illinois and throughout the Midwest.
According to one newspaper source, Moratz designed upward of 69 libraries. However, only 28 libraries built between 1897 and 1914 can be confirmed with available resources, and some still can be found in Fairbury, El Paso, Paxton and Tuscola.
Unfortunately, several of Moratz’s major works have fallen to the wrecking ball.
One of his more well-known public buildings was the old Coliseum that once stood at the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Front Street in Bloomington. Completed in 1898, the Coliseum hosted a wide variety of events, including horse, dog and automobile exhibitions, traveling minstrel and medicine shows and performances by military bands, opera singers and orators.
The venue became a bowling alley in 1938 and was torn down in 1961. The site now is a parking lot.
In 1991, local preservationists suffered a grievous blow with the razing of the Moratz-designed J.W. Van Schoick home at 103 W. Wood St. The nearly century-old residence, with its signature Queen Anne-style corner tower, was torn down to make way for a gas station and convenience store.
Sadly, history repeated itself. In 2008, all the houses on the 100 block of West Wood across the street from the aforementioned gas station were unceremoniously razed to make way for a Walgreens. They included what was once Moratz’s own home at 108 W. Wood and the George Miller-designed Dave Wochner residence at 104 W. Wood.
After 34 years as an architect, Moratz decided to focus his energies almost entirely on his planing mill. Business continued to grow over the years, which required Moratz to look for a new location for larger factory.
In 1905, Moratz had purchased a tract bounded by McLean, Bell and Evans streets and built a three-story structure. He renamed the business the Acme Planing Mill, and it was located at 500 E. Bell.
After a fire destroyed the plant in 1925, Moratz immediately made plans to rebuild, this time shifting his focus to solely manufacturing a type of ready-to-install hardwood flooring that he had invented and patented himself. He continued to operate this plant until his death in 1939.
The legacy Moratz built out of lumber, bricks and mortar remains today because as many of his buildings still stand; buildings, that in his mind, would last forever.
Gallery: Historic front pages from The Pantagraph’s archives
November 03, 2016 – Cubs win the World Series
November 22, 1963 – Assassination of President Kennedy
Pieces From Our Past is a weekly column by the McLean County Museum of History. Bill Kemp is librarian at the museum and Candace Summers is director of community education there.