Background: John Michael Burgess was an inconsistent modernist. Every few months he became distracted by some new approach or style, often depending on the attention it was getting in the trade publications. Burgess loved architecture for the attention it drew from ordinary people — and for the good fortune it could draw to an architect. In 1940, Burgess met Ellsworth while apprenticing at Holabird & Root. Together they uncovered the Chicago Workings Folio together though they ultimatley divided the text between them, unable to trust the other one. When he opened his private design firm in 1953, Burgess had a reputation among Chicago architects for cold, dead designs and no reputation among non-architects at all.
That reputation persisted until the 1970s, when Burgess's affordability trumped all other concerns for many clients. Throughout the city's urban renewal phase of the era, Burgess snatched up sub-contracts for work on municipally funded housing projects and bloodless commercial properties. Through these contacts he eventually entered the real-estate market on his own and took up a new full-time job: renovation. From the mid-1970s until his death in 1996, Burgess made his fortune buying derelict properties and renovating them in shiny, bland modern styles. Each renovation was a small point in a complex mystical matrix across the city. Each property was another dot to connect on his mystic geometric graph, another etch in the stone of the city, another piece on the game board against Ellsworth. When he died, he had resonant properties all over the city.
In the winter of 1996, the heat went out in several of Burgess's North Side townhouses and apartment buildings. Four snowy days later, Burgess died of complications from pneumonia. When Burgess died, he was secretly buried beneath the house in an ornate triangular prism made of stone and carved with art deco designs depicting Ceres, Vulcan and a stylized skyline view of Chicago across each face. This concrete coffin was laid on its side in the house’s cellar behind a stone slab depicting the Fortuna Redux aspect of the Roman goddess of luck. Burgess's spirit resided in the house. He was not exactly a ghost and not exactly a spirit, in the sense that mages would understand them. He was little more than a willful resonance echoing throughout his mystic geometric matrix from the spiritual transmitter that is this house.
The group of mages that would become the Ebon Cross defeated his plans however and banished him to the Underworld. Later he attempted to get revenge on them there only to be defeated once more.
Description: Burgess was the house. The house was a cutting-edge design in 1959, a strict stone riff on glass-focused designs of the day. Four stories, from cellar to master suite, it looks more like a modest Deco office with its glass bricks and steel bars. Over the years its interior has been cosmetically redesigned. Today it has a bland, eggshell-white interior with shiny black countertops and matte black fixtures. Most of its ground-floor portals are barred with black iron rods. Its narrow yards are concrete slabs stained with water rings from metal flowerpots. A metal door with prison cell-style windows leads into the house at the front and back. No doors access the cellar from outside.
Inside the house has a severe 1980s design style, almost like a black-and-white version of Miami Vice. What furniture there is looks square-ish and uncomfortable. Art consists mostly of serrated abstract metal ornaments and decorative glass shapes hanging from the walls. Carpets, blankets, pillows, shelves, tiles and doors are white. Upholstery is black. Nothing is wood-colored.