January 28, 1994 – Continental Bank
Corporation announces that it has agreed to join BankAmerica Corporation in a
deal valued at $1.9 billion.
Continental, a banking presence in Chicago for 137 years, occupied space
in the Rookery Building before it moved into its own building just north of the
Board of Trade on LaSalle Street. With
Contiental’s $22.6 billion in assets, BankAmerica will become the second
largest bank in the United States, just short of the assets of New York-based
Citibank. Richard Rosenberg, BankAmerica
chairman and chief executive says of the merger, “There is a superb fit between
the two organizations. We complement
each other remarkably well in terms of business lines, balance sheets, and
geographic presence.”
January 28, 1929 – Two hundred passengers are shaken up, and forty-two are injured as a Rock Island commuter train crashes through the bumper at the La Salle Street station, the second serious train accident of the week. Four days earlier a passenger died and 39 others were injured when two Chicago and Northwestern passenger trains collided near Lake Street. In the Rock Island crash the vice-president of the railroad blames the cause of the accident on the engineer’s failure to have his train, made up of seven steel coaches, under control as it entered the station. The engineer, J. Boyd, maintains that fog and steam inside the train shed clouded his view and that the wheels of the train slipped on the tracks as he applied the brakes.
January 28, 1901 -- WARNING . . . This one is not for the faint of heart, but it does demonstrate that in the days before O.S.H.A. danger was constantly lurking and peril was always at hand. It happened that Dr. B. L. Reise was administering vaccinations to women at the Young Woman's Christian Association Building on Michigan Avenue. Miss Stella Thomas of Burlington, Iowa, seeing that she would have to wait for some time because of the length of the line, headed for her room. There is speculation that the sight of the injections was disquieting to her, and as the elevator approached the fifth floor, Miss Thomas fainted and fell to the floor of the car in such a way that her head extended through the grate of the elevator's door and was caught between the bottom of the elevator car and the lower portion of the fifth floor. Miss Thomas, who had come to Chicago just three weeks earlier to enter the Sherwood Musical College in the Fine Arts Building, died within minutes. The second building from the middle left (next to the mansion on the corner) in the 1901 photo above is the YWCA building where the accident occurred.
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