January 27, 1929 – The Chicago Motor Club opens
its new 17-story headquarters at 66 East South Water Street, inviting members
of the public to inspect the gleaming interior of this new Art Moderne
masterpiece. The structure is a
testament to the marriage of design and the labor necessary to bring the design
into reality. It is the first office
building in the city to “embody the ‘art moderne’ theme,” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 27, 1929] for one thing. It is impressive that the building was
completed in just 234 days, a period that included the razing of the building
that originally stood on the site. The
touring bureau for the club occupies the first floor of the tower, a site that
reaches 30 feet in height and has no columns or posts. The artwork is particularly impressive. The Tribune
offers this description, “The east wall is marked by three large windows,
extending from floor to ceiling. On the
west wall is painted a map of the United States. It was executed in modernistic style by John
Norton, widely known Chicago mural decorator.
The size is nineteen by twenty-nine feet. On it are portrayed nineteen
transcontinental highways, together with the various mountain ranges and
national parks.” The Chicago Motor Club moved its headquarters to Des Plaines
in 1986, and the building on South Water Street closed in 2004. In 2013 MB Real Estate led an effort to
convert the unused tower to hotel space, paying about $9.5 million for the
building and overseeing its rebirth as a Hampton Inn.
Also on this date from an earlier blog entry . . .
January 27, 1901 -- The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that there are only five wolves left within Chicago's limits where once there were thousands. When the great herds of bison on the Great Plains were slaughtered almost to extinction, the wolves that depended on them suffered as well, often turning to the herds of domestic cattle for sustenance. That, of course, only hastened their already tenuous existence as they were hunted ruthlessly with a good gray hide bringing $5 or more. "In America," the paper wrote, "no one renews the game supply and evybody seeks to destroy, blindly, selfishly, unreasoningly . . . There is no other country of equal enlightenment with this which allows its wild game, the property of the whole people, to be stolen for the individual profit of a few." The 1903 photo above shows one of the five wolves in Chicago on display at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
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