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| What a Wonderful World This Would Be (www.paleofuture.com) |
With the United
States aircraft carrier Shangri La
outbound from Norfolk, Virginia with a load of equipment “more fantastic than
any she carried in her war time strikes against Japan,” [Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1946] headed toward the Bikini
atoll in preparation of the atomic bomb test, Chicago, too,
prepared to meet the future.
On this date in,
March 20, 1946 Chicago business leaders discussed construction of special
landing decks on top of downtown buildings, a plan that would lead to
helicopter shuttle service between downtown and the Chicago airport at
Sixty-Third Street and Cicero Avenue.
Eight years earlier
an “autogiro” had landed on top of the main post office building, pointing its nose toward the future. Earlier in 1946 the Hilton
hotel chain, the owner of the Stevens Hotel and the Palmer House, announced
that they were prepared to institute helicopter service from one of its
California affiliates, the Long Beach Hilton.
According to The Tribune, “Hilton officials said that at Long Beach a
helicopter will be able to settle to a landing on the roof, 17 stories up. After unloading, the pilot will fly the
‘windmill’ plane away and the passengers will have a short walk to the
elevator.” [Chicago Tribune, March 21,
1946]
Hotel chains were
getting ready. At the Stevens, now The
Hilton, on South Michigan Avenue, the fact that most air lines were already
occupying offices downtown within a block or two of the hotel, made the prospect
of helicopter transportation between the hotel and the airport very attractive.
At the Sherman House on Randolph Street officials said “they would spread some planks on the
roof at the first sign of a helicopter hovering overhead.” Even The Drake Hotel way up there on the
north end of Michigan Avenue was described as “being hospitably inclined.”
The hoteliers were
joined by the merchants. Randall Cooper,
executive secretary of the State Street Council, said that stores had thought
of using helicopters for longer than the hotels had.
“We have known for
years that Chicago’s world famous shopping street is the number one attraction for
women visitors who have only an hour or two in the city,” he said. “When an out of town woman has a wait between
trains, she makes a beeline for State Street . . . It would be an exciting
experience for people bound over at the airport for two or three hours to be
flown quickly into the heart of the shopping district. It is something we have definitely in mind.”
According to The
Tribune on that optimistic day in March of 1946, “Hotel and store roofs easily
could be adapted to helicopter landings by placing a platform above existing
roof structures.” [Chicago Tribune, March 23, 1946]
Looking out at all
of those empty roofs close to 70 years later, one has to conclude that it
apparently wasn’t all that easy. Or that plunking a bar a dozen or more stories up was a far more lucrative proposition.
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