February 13, 1901 – Carrie Nation leaves Chicago at
10:00 p.m. on a Santa Fe train bound for Topeka, Kansas. In the preceding 12 hours she leads a whirlwind
tour of the city in her temperance crusade as she “visits saloons, lecturing
and threatening, and calls on the Mayor, who is ‘out.’” [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 14, 1901] Despite feeling ill when
she awakes at 5:30 a.m., she is in the saloon of Harry McCall at 152 Dearborn
Street by mid-morning, where she immediately asks the bartenders to clothe a
nude statue in the bar’s window. “I want you to take away that statue or clothe
it properly at once,” she commands bartender William Luther. “Dress it as you would wish to see your
mother and sister dressed. Now, I mean
what I say, and if you don’t obey by night I’ll make souvenirs of that statue.” The offending statue is quickly covered with
a red calico wrapper and sunbonnet. From the bar she hotfoots it over to Willard
Hall, located in the Woman’s Temple building on the southwest corner of Monroe
and LaSalle Streets. Six hundred people
jam the auditorium so densely that women are fainting and “a crunching sound …
warned the crowd that the seats were giving way.” The crowd is sent from the building, and
Nation moves on to City Hall where City Clerk Loeffler tells her that Mayor
Carter Harrison iss “not in … [as he] leaned on the railing and blew smoke
rings in the air.” The reformer “aired her
views of a city government which countenances the liquor traffic, and
incidentally reproved the City Clerk for smoking.” Then it is on to police headquarters where
she learns that the Chief of Police is also out. Twenty minutes later she is at the Cook
County Jail where she is turned away. At
2:30 p.m. she enters a Turkish bath and addresses “attendants coming, going,
and during operations.” What steam can
do to one’s hair! At 4:25 p.m. she
enters a salon on State Street and has her hair “arranged.” After dinner Nation visits Dreifus’ Saloon at
56 State Street, the engine house of Fire Patrol No. 1, and delivers a short
speech at Willard Hall in front of 200 people.
Shortly before 9:00 p.m. she makes her way to Riley and Edwards’ Saloon
at 200 State Street, “expecting to meet a gathering of saloonmen to whom she
had sent an invitation to hear her speak.”
Instead, she finds “a motley assemblage of men and women who formed a
typical ‘levee’ crowd.” Standing on top
of a table she addresses the crowd as “The sounds from the piano blended with
the laughter of the ribald crowd, which grew larger each moment and packed the
room from the door opening on State Street to the alley in the rear.” As she
speaks a voice from the crowd calls out, “There’s a beer waiting for you at the
bar, grandma.” Unperturbed, Nation talks
from the top of the table. She “talked to the saloon men, she pleaded with the women
to lead better lives, and begged everybody to help her in her determination to
suppress the liquor business.” She
declares it “the best meeting I’ve ever attended” as she steps down from the table
and heads for the railway station. As
she makes her way through the gate at the Polk Street station and her waiting
train, she shouts, “Be good! Be
good! Good-by, until I see you again.”
February 13, 1910 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that the Chicago Board of Education will be meeting in two days as a committee of the whole, ostensibly to discuss the leases the board holds on State Street property. Speculation is that since even school board members who are out of town have been asked to attend, consideration will be given to the filing of charges against the school district’s architect, Dwight Heald Perkins. School board president Alfred R. Urion says that he has obtained evidence that will be used against Perkins during inspections of a number of schools during the previous week. Thus begins another less than stellar chapter in the city’s political history, one in which a talented architect (just venture out to Milwaukee and Addison and take a gander at Carl Schurz High School if you want proof), was railroaded out of his position by school board members who accused him of “incompetence, extravagance and insubordination.” According to a great blog, “Chicago Historic Schools,” “These corrupt administrators were likely unhappy that Perkins had stopped the practice of giving inflated contracts to well-connected contractors and suppliers.” It worked out – those school board hacks have long been forgotten, but the spaces that Perkins created, and the spaces with which he surrounded them, still endure.
February 13, 1926 -- Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells are awarded the gold medal for their design of the most beautiful building erected in the north central section of the country in 1925. Architect Elmer C. Jensen, a member of the jury charged with determining the recipient of the gold medal award, says of Hood and Howell's design for Tribune Tower, "The erection of this beautiful structure has been a decided aid to the cause of good architecture. Not only will it have a good effect on architecture in Chicago, but the cause throughout the whole nation gains appreciably. I wish again to emphasize the incalcuable gain which art has made through the Tribune Tower."
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