They All Fall Down: Richard Nickel's Struggle to Save America's Architecture

If Chicago is an architecture lover's paradise today, it is largely due to the efforts of a single individual. Richard Nickel (1928-1972) was not "just a photographer who happens to take pictures of buildings," as he modestly called himself. He was a soft-spoken missionary whose passionate one-man campaign to preserve Chicago's ornate 19th century architectural masterpieces--earmarked for destruction by Mayor Richard J. Daley in the name of progress--inspired a nationwide movement. Richard Cahan's superb biography of Nickel depicts the photographer's heroic and ultimately tragic struggle to salvage everything he could get his hands on, first with his trusty view camera and then with a hacksaw and chisel.