Friday, December 13, 2019

December 13, 1961 -- Michigan Avenue Sees First Hotel in 40 Years

marriott.com

December 13, 1961 – In ceremonies that officially mark the completion of foundation work, the new hotel under construction at the northeast corner of Delaware Place and Michigan Avenue is officially named the Continental.  Several hundred civic and business leaders are on hand for a ceremony that marks the first hotel to be built on North Michigan Avenue in four decades.  The hotel will rise 15 stories and cost $15 million with a total of 400 rooms, meeting rooms, and a swimming pool on the top floor.  The Continental is long gone.  It is today a Westin.

landscapearchitecturemagazine.com
December 13, 2014 – Although visitors will still be kept from walking on new sod and a section of the children’s play area won’t be finished until the spring of 2015, Maggie Daley Park opens at 11:30 a.m.  Replacing the Bicentennial Plaza east of Columbus Drive between Randolph and Monroe Streets, the park is named for the former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s wife, who died from breast cancer in 2011.  Under the guidance of landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, the 27-acre park takes two years to construct at a cost of $60 million.  The park features a one-quarter-mile ice skating ribbon, tennis courts, rock-climbing walls, and a Play Garden, along with the Richard and Annette Bloch Cancer Survivors Garden, as well as many other features.  Mayor Rahm Emanuel is especially impressed with the children’s playground, saying, “It will allow kids to challenge themselves and do things they didn’t know they could do.”  [Chicago Tribune, December 13, 2014]  


December 13, 1882 – The Chicago Daily Tribune publishes an editorial in which it protests strongly against an elevated railroad in the city, saying:  “The public should organize its protest against any scheme of this kind with a promptness and emphasis that shall leave the Council no doubt about the popular disapproval which unquestionably prevails.  There is neither necessity nor demand for elevated railways in Chicago.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 13, 1882] The editorial goes on to remind those behind the elevated scheme of a provision in the Illinois Constitution that “private property shall not be taken or damaged for public use without just compensation ... such compensation, when not made by the State, shall be ascertained by a jury.”  Using this constitutional provision, the writers go on to say, “Probably the full significance of this constitutional provision has not occurred to the gentlemen who are so eager to supply Chicago with an elevated railway system which Chicago doesn’t want.  They may discover that their purses, long as they are, will not hold out to satisfy the owners of the property which they propose to destroy.”  It took another ten years of wrangling, but the elevated system’s first train left the station in June of 1892.


December 13, 1951 – Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II, Indiana Governor Henry Schricker and Cook County Board President William Erickson come together to dedicate the Calumet Expressway and its Tri-State Parkway extension, extending from U. S. Route 41 in Hammond to Doty Avenue and 130th Street in Chicago.  The new parkway allows motorists to bypass the industrial areas of northern Indiana and South Chicago in order to connect with a national toll road that will cross Indiana and Ohio and join the existing Pennsylvania turnpike. 


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