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| The Monadnock (JWB Photo) |
On this evening,
February 4, 71 years ago a jury awarded the owners of the Monadnock Block on
Dearborn Street the sum of $104,278, settling the first suit of many filed
against the city for damages resulting from the construction of the Dearborn
street subway. In the Circuit Court of
Judge Cornelius J. Harrington the jury deliberated for ten hours before
arriving at its decision.
According to The Tribune, the owners of the building
received somewhat less than the $235,000 that they sought as a result of the
work required to strengthen the east wall of the massive
building. The city’s contention was that
the Monadnock had no right to any compensation since the original building had
encroached 12 feet upon the public street when it was completed between 1891
and 1893.
I’ve been in the
basement of the Monadnock, which is one of the geeky things you find yourself
doing when you start to nose around a city and its buildings. Even to an untrained eye, it is pretty clear
that part of the building originally burrowed space beneath the public
right-of-way, so the city probably had a valid point.
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| The Monadnock basement -- Oh the Places You Will Go (JWB Photo) |
This controversy,
by the way, about streets and sidewalks and the legal relationship between
property owner and a municipality regarding these public thoroughfares began in
Champaign, Illinois and unraveled over a decade in the early 1900’s. In Faulkner
vs. Harris the Illinois Supreme Court observed in 1903, among other things,
that “. . . the city could have no authority to accept public streets upon any
other conditions than that they should be for public use, and what is meant by
public use is that the public shall have the uninterrupted, unimpeded, and
unobstructed use of every portion and part of each public highway – not only
that they may use the ground or foundation to travel upon (which right is
co-extensive with every inch or foot of it), but that they may enjoy the air,
light, and rainfall as well upon every portion of it.” [People
ex rel. Faulkner v. Harris et al.
Supreme Court of Illinois, June 16 1903]
It took some time,
but by early 1908 the Chicago city council passed an ordinance banning any kind
of street or sidewalk obstruction.
According to the city’s corporation council the Harris case meant that “the
title to the streets, including the sidewalks, was in the state, that the city
was merely a trustee, and it could not give permission to any one to do
anything which would in the least interfere with the free and untrammeled use
of the thoroughfares or shut off the light and air from anybody.” [Chicago Tribune, February 11, 1908]
Two years earlier
the city had passed legislation requiring property owners to pay between $200
and $300 for each building that used space beneath the public way. Attorney N. G. Moore, arguing for property
owners, said in a hearing on the matter in July, 1908, “The offer by the city
to permit use of the space shows on its face that the municipality has no
public use for it and that the ordinance is merely for the purpose of
compelling payment of compensation.” [Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1908]
Well, heck, yeah.
The property
owners, of course, lost. Appellate Court
Judge Julian Mack decreed in effect that the city had the right to charge rent
for sub-sidewalk space in all that territory from Twelfth street to Kinzie
street and from State street to Michigan avenue. It was estimated that the ruling would add
$300,000 to $400,000 to the city’s revenue.
It’s interesting to
note that the legal proceedings over sidewalks had a significant effect on the
design of buildings in the city. Take,
for example, the Reliance building on State Street and Washington
Boulevard. It was completed in 1895 and,
along with the Fisher Building on Dearborn Street, is almost as open and glassy
as any modern skyscraper. Then look at
the People’s Gas Building on Michigan Avenue, completed in 1910, two years after the city's ordinance on sidewalk obstructions went into effect, and you will find a far
different look.
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| The Reliance Building (JWB Photo) |
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| People's Gas, 122 South Michigan Avenue (Library of Congress) |
There are, of
course, many reasons for the change from transparency to density. But a big reason had to do with the results
of the Harris finding in 1903. A bay
window was specifically found to be a sidewalk obstruction; in fact, the
original suit against the city of Champaign involved the construction of a bay window. When
designers lost the right to design a building with those bays, they lost the
best chance of creating a more transparent structure, at least through the technology that existed at the time.
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| The Marquette Building in 1895 |
Another great example of the effect that the 1908 ordinance had on design in Chicago can be seen in the appearance of the Marquette building, just a block north of the
Monadnock on Dearborn. If you look
closely at the front of the building as it existed in 1895 you will find an entrance far different
than the one you see today. You will also
notice that the entrance definitely uses part of the sidewalk. It’s not there today, obviously, and it’s
pretty clear why it was taken down.
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