Saturday, March 19, 2016

March 19, 1928 -- Morrison Hotel Selected for "Lindbergh Light"


March 19, 1928 -- The Morrison Hotel, the first building outside of New York to rise more than 40 stories, is selected by Mayor William Hale Thompson's Radio Commission as the building on which the "Lindbergh Light" will be placed. The hotel agrees to pay for the cost of the 200 foot tower on which the light will sit and assume the responsibility for its maintenance. In 1927 Mr. Elmer G. Sperry,President of the Sperry Gyroscope Company, offered the beacon, which will be seen for 250 miles, providing that Chicago find a way to mount and maintain it. GREAT NEWS! But it didn't work out. A competition began between two great beacons, one proposed for the Roanoke Building on La Salle Street and Mr. Sperry's Lindbergh Light. In the end a stationary beam was placed on the brand new La Salle-Wacker Building and the Lindbergh Light ended up at the top of the Palmolive Building, completed in 1929. It turns out that Elmer Sperry never saw his controversial beacon. He died two months before it cast its first beam into the Chicago night.  The hotel was demolished in 1965 to make way for the new First National Bank of Chicago building, now Chase, at Clark and Madison.

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