Sunday, January 27, 2019

January 27, 1963 -- St. Joseph Hospital Passes Million Dollar Mark

presence health.org
January 27, 1963 – The Chicago Tribune reports that the General Chairman of the St. Joseph Hospital building fund drive, John Sexton, has the first million dollars in pledges for the new $22 million hospital that is being built at 2900 Lake Shore Drive.  Ground was broken for the new St. Joseph in 1961, and it is expected that the 492-bed facility will be completed by December, 1963. The hospital will be 13 stories high and its “Y” shape will allow 85 percent of its rooms to face either Lincoln Park or Lake Michigan.  The new facility will replace the old St. Joseph Hospital, located at 2100 North Burling Street, which is largely antiquated.  One of its two wings is 90 years old while the more recent addition is nearly a half-century old.  The origin of St. Joseph Hospital goes all the way back to 1868 when three Daughters of Charity establish Providence Hospital in a two-story cottage at the corner of what is now Clark Street and Diversey Avenue.  [presencehealth.org] In 1871 the Daughters of Charity built a new hospital at what is now Burling Street and Dickens Street.  The Great Fire of 1871 spared the facility, and it served as shelter for many victims of the fire.  That same year the hospital was the first in the city to open a psychiatry unit.  In 1893 the Saint Joseph School of Nursing, affiliated with DePaul University opened and by the time of its closing in 1964, 1,504 nurses had graduated from the school.  Today the hospital is a part of Presence Health, the largest Catholic health care organization in Illinois.  The black and white photo shows the hospital under construction in the early 1960's.


January 27, 1916 – Mrs. Lois Dunning, the president of the Three Arts Club, passes judgment on a Claude Monet painting that hangs among French and Belgian works drawn from the Panama-Pacific exhibition of 1915, a collection on display at the Art Institute of Chicago.  The Monet painting, “Vetheuil,” priced at $9,000, draws the attention of Dunning as she leads 200 women “gathered to hear her discourse on art.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 28, 1916] “Now look at this thing,” Dunning begins.  “A 10 year old could have painted it.  I don’t know whether the artist meant the lavender foreground for a bog, a stream, or a level bit of ground.  It’s awful.  It’s one of the worst things in the gallery.”  The tour continues as Dunning points to a painting by Pierre Carrier-Belleuse, “The Ballet Slipper.” The artist, Dunning declares, “ought to have known better than to have had the girl’s dress up to her knees.  You don’t see such beastly things in American art … we don’t want to see women’s faces brutalized.  That’s what this new school of art does.  It’s a far cry from that art of long ago when flesh was painted so delicately that it looks as if one might pinch it.” 


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. 


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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