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| jwcdaily.com |
July 17, 1886 – A Chicago Daily Tribune editorial reacts to an article published in the New York Sun in which that paper disparages the plan to locate a military base near Highwood, claiming that the base is being proposed because “competitive Chicago society women want a gold-laced spectacle to ride to at the afternoon hour of dress parade and the music from an army band …” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 17, 1886] The editorial also objects to the Sun’s claim that the base would be composed of “elegant brick barracks, officers’ residences, storehouses, hospital, magazine, and stable doubly sufficient for the twelve companies mentioned.” The Tribune proclaims, “Nothing of the kinds is contemplated.” (Nothing of the kind may have been contemplated in 1886, but by the early 1890’s the premier Chicago architecture firm of Holabird and Roche had designed nearly a hundred noteworthy buildings on 230 acres, architecture so distinctive that the National Park Service has recognized the Town of Fort Sheridan as a National Historic Landmark District.). The Tribune declares that the only reason the fort is being built near Highwood is that the site sits on a railroad line of the Chicago and North Western and “Troops and supplies can be dispatched from here without delay in every direction and with much more facility than they can be handled in remote and widely separated places.” Most probably, looking at the decision from today’s perspective, the fort was brought into being after the riot in Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, an event that scared many of the city’s leading citizens witless. It seems pretty clear that the Commercial Club of Chicago had a hand in obtaining the property with a pretty clear concept of why and when those troops would be “dispatched … without delay.”
July 17, 1977 – Paul Gapp, the architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, evaluates the new Apparel Mart at 350 North Orleans Street, observing that once the Joseph P. Kennedy family bought the land where the new building stands on Wolf Point, family members “began a leisurely study of what to do with it.” Gapp continues, “After all this high-powered cerebration, one might have expected an imposing structure to rise on a precious patch of 7.5 acres. Instead, we got the Apparel Mart, a disappointing, $56 million architectural performance that succeeds mostly in saving money … The Mart, inside and out, has that hard-edged crowd control look that speaks of hustling retailers racing up in taxis and airline limos; sprinting from showroom to showroom to buy brassieres and bush jackets; having a late dinner, then flopping into bed for a few hours before arising to catch an early plane back to Cleveland, Omaha, or Sarasota, Fla.” Gapp seems willing to forgive the buildings “windowlessness” because it “does not intrude into an elegant environment, and thus is not as blatantly offensive as [Water Tower Place] the marble monstrosity on North Michigan Avenue.” In the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill design Gapp sees “a watch-every-nickel structure of little distinction and absolutely no elegance, done by a first-rate firm.” Gapp ends his assessment with a remarkably accurate prediction, by way of Skidmore architect Bruce Graham, whose assertion that the Apparel Mart buildings are “’background buildings’ that someday may be dwarfed into nothingness. “The Mart must stand on its own demerits, even if Graham is right when he says that a skyscraper approaching the size of the Standard Oil Building may be built on the very tip of Wolf Point,” writes Gapp. A 48-story apartment building, Wolf Point West, a bKL architecture design, opened four years ago. A second, taller building is nearing completion. And the tallest building on Wolf Point will almost completely obscure the Apparel Mart when it rises in the next few years. The conceptual photo of the completed Wolf Point development project, shown above, seems to validate Graham's belief that the Apparel Mart would one day become a "background building."
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| chicagotribune |
July 17, 1933 – A parade to honor General Italo Balbo and the aviators who accompanied him from Italy to Chicago begins at the Stevens Hotel on Michigan Avenue at 2:30 p.m. and proceeds north to the bridge across the Chicago River. The Italians ride in United States Army cars and are escorted by cavalry troops from Camp Whistler on the grounds of the Century of Progress Exposition. At the bridge the troops “present sabers and leave the flyers to an escort of army officers, who will take them to Fort Sheridan.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 17, 1933] At the fort the flyers review the troops at 3:30 p.m. and watch “an aerial demonstration by Army planes from Selfridge Field, Michigan, exhibition jumping by army riders and a polo game.” The afternoon ends with a reception at the Officer’s Club. This will be the last official act in honor of the Italian airmen. On the following day, they will fire up their 24 Savola-Marcinetti seaplanes and head on the thousand-mile trip to New York City. For more on the flight of Balbo and his men you can turn to Connecting the Windy City for this blog entry and this one.
July 17, 1881 – The Chicago Daily Tribune prints the report of William H. Genung, the chief tenement house inspector, who provides figures on the work of his department during the preceding week. The report gives some idea of the size of the problem with which the city is faced as 180 houses are inspected, containing 2,086 rooms, inhabited by 559 families, consisting of 2,550 people. Small pox will claim the lives of 1,181 people in the last months of this year, and the city is hard at work to eliminate the conditions that foster the disease. In the Second Ward that today encompasses the east side of the Loop, part of the Gold Coast, and Streeterville, tenement houses such as the one Genung’s department inspected were places in which people lived in cramped circumstances in deplorable sanitary conditions.
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