Sunday, November 26, 2017

November 26, 1877 -- Chicago White Stockings Get a New Park on the Lake


November 26, 1877 – The City Council takes up a special ordinance authorizing the leasing of lake front property to the “Chicago Base-Ball Club” [Chicago Daily Tribune, November 17, 1877] for a fee of $1,000 a year.  There is a spirited exchange.  One alderman asserted that “if the city hadn’t the right to sell the ground, it hasn’t the right to lease it.”  An opposing alderman said that “there was nothing whatever in the proposition that would be detrimental to the city, and that there was no good reason why it should not be accepted.”  After various amendments are offered and rejected, the ordinance is approved.  Thus, at a cost of a thousand bucks the team that would eventually become the Chicago Cubs is given permission to play “base-ball” on the northeast corner of Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue where Wrigley Square and the Millennium peristyle stand today.  After playing four years at a park on Twenty-Third Street, the team would move in 1878 to the new lakefront park.  In 1877 the team finished second-to-last in the National League with a record of 26-33. The move bumped them up one notch and four games as the team finished fourth out of six teams with a record of 30-30.


November 26, 1963 – The first steel column for the new Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States building at 401 North Michigan Avenue is put in place at 10:00 a.m.  Workers for United States Steel place the 19-ton, 35-foot long column into place on the north side of the site that sits between Tribune Tower to the north and the Chicago River on the south.  The tower, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, will be located on the site where Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, built his home in the early 1780’s, a site that is a National Historic Landmark.  The Chicago Tribune sold the land to Equitable on the condition that the new building could not be taller than Tribune Tower.  Today the 401 North Michigan has been joined by a new neighbor to the south as the new Apple store is receiving its first holiday visitors.


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