Silke Jasso
Celebrating its 90th anniversary this season, the Buckingham Fountain is now spouting water into the sky while one antique dealer is trying to sell a piece of the monument.
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Stuart Grannen, a North Side resident, is attempting to sell a large piece of the fountain that he surmises must have been an extra piece from back when it was being built in 1927. He has set the price based on his own expertise at $22,000 with a $299 shipping fee, according to DNAinfo.
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While Grannen says he doesn’t know much about the history of the piece, he says he bought it from a woman who was a descendant of Edward H. Bennett, the architect who designed Buckingham Fountain. The portion Grannen is attempting to sell is a 5-by-3 foot pink marble slab, identical to the clam shells that come together in the fountain’s design.
Jessica Maxey-Faulkner, a Chicago Park District spokeswoman, told DNAinfo the Chicago Park District has no record of the slab or of any duplicates. She said they would never have sold a piece of Buckingham Fountain or of any other sculpture for that matter.
Grannen has built a reputation of recovering valuable historical artifacts however and said he originally planned on keeping the chunk of fountain for a museum he hoped to open, according to DNAinfo. Abandoning those plans, Grannen is now advertising to sell the little piece of history and will most likely sell to a museum.
“A few museums have said they want me to donate it to them,” Grannen told DNAinfo. “I want to try to sell it first.”
The fountain rests in the heart of Chicago and cost $750,000 to build back in 1927 which rounds out to about $10.5 million in today’s dollars, according to DNAinfo. That means Grannen is attempting to sell the slab for roughly 0.2 percent of what the fountain is worth in its entirety today.
