Connecting the Windy City

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

December 18, 1913 -- William Deering Leaves Millions to Family

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December 17, 1913 – According to a will filed for probate on this day the estate of William Deering, a sum between $12 million and $13 million, is left to his immediate family.  (That's about a third of a billion dollars in today's dollars.)  The bulk of the estate is comprised of stock in the International Harvester Company and in real estate in Chicago and Evanston.  Deering was generous during his lifetime, giving nearly a million dollars to Northwestern University and establishing the Deering orphanage in Lake Bluff.  William Deering was born in South Paris, Maine in 1826 and as a young man went to work managing his family’s dry-goods business, which, by the time of the Civil War, he had transformed into a successful wholesale house.  During the war the business made a fortune selling pants and uniform jackets to the Union Army.  After the war Deering left the business with a hefty stake and headed to Illinois where he became a partner with Elijah H. Gammon, who was in possession of the manufacturing rights to a horse-drawn grain harvester.  They established a factory in Plano, Illinois and in 1880 Deering bought out Gammon and moved to Chicago where, after a series of trial-and-error efforts, he came up with a reliable twine binder for use with the harvester.  He incorporated the business in 1883 as William Deering and Company and nearly two decades later produced the first self-propelled harvester.  The company grew rapidly, challenging the undisputed leader of the agricultural implements industry, the McCormick Harvesting Machine, Co. The brutal war between the harvester companies that began the twentieth century ended in 1902 when J. P. Morgan and Co. negotiated with five companies to sell their assets to a new corporation called the International Harvester Co. [farmcollector.com]  Cyrus H. McCormick, the son of McCormick’s founder, became president of the new company and Charles Deering, William’s son, was made chairman of the board.  South Deering on the city's far South Side, the largest of the 78 official community areas in the city, is named for Charles.  William Deering died in Coconut Grove, Florida on December 9, 1913.

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December 18, 1985 – A federal grand jury hands down indictments in the Operation Greylord investigation with two former judges and ten lawyers among the 22 individuals who are named.  Two former judges, James L. Oakey and John F. Reynolds, are accused of “accepting thousands of dollars in bribes to fix cases and to allow lawyers to solicit clients outside their courtrooms.” [Chicago Tribune, December 19, 1985] Seven Cook County deputy sheriffs, a Chicago police officer and a Circuit Court clerk are also named in indictments that allege more than 200 acts of bribery. In the course of the ongoing investigation, 22 people charged in Graylord have already been convicted with one person acquitted.  Five more individuals still await trials.  The indictment charges that some payoffs go back as far as 1969.  Part of the charges pertain to a “Hustlers’ Club” established some time in 1981.  In this scheme attorneys paid out $500 a month for “the exclusive right to hustle three courtrooms in police headquarters.”  Considered unethical, the practice of approaching prospective clients with offers to represent them was made to work by bribing deputies to overlook the practice and by making secret arrangements with judges to sign orders turning over defendants’ bond money to the lawyers.  The participating judges would then get part of the bond money and deputy sheriffs received 15 to 25 percent of the proceeds for steering clients to the lawyers.  Ultimately, by the time Operation Greylord wraps up, a total of 93 people are indicted, including 17 judges, 48 lawyers, ten deputy sheriffs, eight policemen, eight court officials, and a state legislator.  

December 18, 1913 – The Chicago White Sox defeat the New York Giants in Manila by a score of 7 to 4.  It couldn’t have been a lot of fun as the Chicago Daily Tribune reported, “The spectators presented the unusual spectacle of watching a baseball game from under a canopy of umbrellas, for it rained during the greater part of seven innings, after which the game was called.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 18, 1913] After a reception and banquet hosted by Army and Navy officers, the players board a ship for a two-week trip to Brisbane, Australia where it is hoped the team will arrive in time to play a game on New Year’s Day.  The "World Tour" by the White Sox and Giants has not been matched since as the two teams began playing against one another in Cincinnati, Ohio on October 18, 1913 and ended the tour 46 games later in Cairo, Egypt on February 2, 1914.  The tour was underwritten by Sox President Charles Comiskey and Giants Manager John McGraw without a single dollar of advertising funding the venture.  At the end of the global circuit the White Sox had won 24 games and lost 20 with two ties.

December 18, 1935 – Three side-wheel lake steamers, former “floating palaces,” that originally cost more than $700,000 are sold at a federal auction.  Highest bidder is the Woodmere Scrap and Metal Company of Detroit.  It will remove the engines from the liners and convert the remaining hulls into barges, effectively ending the careers of the “City” ships of the Goodrich Transit Company – the City of Holland, the City of Benton Harbor and the City of St. Joseph.  Although the plan is to save the City of Saugatauk she, too, will end up as a barge carrying pulpwood and petroleum products.  With the sale an era ends on Lake Michigan.  The Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “Michigan’s fast fruit industry was responsible for the former prosperity of the passenger line.  Old residents recall seeing the ‘city’ boats jammed with passengers and with fruit piled high on the decks, steaming out from the lake ports.  The big paddle wheels leaving mountains of foaming water behind the trim liners added much to the spectacle.  It was a rich trade until the development of motor trucks as freight carriers after the world war.  In five years the lake fruit service was a memory.  Passenger trade alone would not support these luxury liners, so they were tied up in the St. Joseph ship canal.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 19, 1935]   The photo above shows the City of Saugatauk early in her life when she carried the name City of Alpina.

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Labels: 1913, Chicago History, Chicago Places

Thursday, July 25, 2019

July 25, 1913 -- Anesthesia Hailed as "Greatest Discovery of the Age"

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July 25, 1913 – Dr. J. R. Pennington, one of the few surgeons in the city who has operated on a patient who has been administered anesthesia, explains how anesthesia rightfully is “one of the greatest discoveries of the age.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1913]. “I have seen a patient lying apparently asleep during a serious abdominal operation,” Pennington says.  “His color was natural and when he awoke he felt no pain. He did not suffer during the operation and showed little of the usual unfortunate reaction. The local anesthetic blocks off the wound from the brain centers.”  It had been just a year before that the first medical textbook on the subject was published by anesthesiologist Dr. James Taylor Gwathmey and the chemist Dr. Charles Baskerville.

July 25, 1877 – The Battle of the Viaduct takes place as a mob of over 10,000 people do battle with the police and federal troops at the Halsted Street viaduct over the Chicago River north of Bridgeport. On July 14, a strike begins in Martinsburg, West Virginia when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cuts workers’ wages for the third time in a year. The strike quickly spreads, bringing violence to cities as far apart as St. Louis and San Francisco.  On this day, it is Chicago’s turn as thousands of men, women and children march on a route that takes them through rail yards and the stockyards and north up Halsted Street to the viaduct that crosses the Chicago River.  On the north side of the bridge the police meet the angry mob and force them back south, firing at the protestors as they flee.  Tempers run high as the rioters, angered at being fired upon while retreating, stop street cars attempting to cross the viaduct.  One car is overturned, and cars that follow “were stopped, the conductors rifled of the contents of their pockets, and the passengers compelled to ‘get up and act’ under various threats.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1877] Farther up Halsted the gun store of M. J. Pribyl is cleaned out. Reinforcements swell the ranks of the police who are joined by the Second Regiment of the United States Army, and the confrontation turns even more deadly as the police fire at the mob for a half-hour.  Ultimately at least 18 rioters – some estimates place the deaths at 30 -- are killed, over 100 are wounded, and 13 police officers are injured, one fatally. Relative calm returns on the following day, but the event begins a period in the city’s history that will lead to the confrontation at the Haymarket in 1886 and the violence that will come with the Pullman Strike in 1894. 

July 25, 1890 – Choosing two industries that the general populace associates with good times, a Chicago Daily Tribune editorial then puts the candy makers and the soap manufacturers squarely in the spotlight in order to once again rail against the smoke that chokes the city.  “Almost the entire output of a candy factory,” the editorial observes, “is for outside consumption … The furnaces refuse utterly to eat the smoke for whose make they are directly responsible, and insist on giving it in large and unpalatable doses to the public at large.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1890] Of the “cakes” of soap manufactured in the city, the paper writes, “They smell so delicious that the little Indian maids under the care of Christian missionary ladies insist on eating them and going dirty.  If the smoke that comes daily from the chimney of a big soap factory jutting on the river near Rush street bridge should get a fair shake at the delicately perfumed packages the young aborigines would get over a bad habit with dispatch.” The smoke that the city’s industries produce is so bad that “Over towards the Adams street bridge a dog in a leading string is necessary for guidance.”  No one is exempt from the critical eye.  Bookbinders and printers “whose chimneys belch out stuff as black as the ink imprints that Guttenberg’s genius made possible.”  Merchants “turn out a tremendous stock every hour of the day, and foist it on their neighbors without money and without price – a practice conducive to mining life and wages in the coal regions.”  The editorial ends with a warning of government’s newfound seriousness concerning the smoke-choked city, “The city authorities will prosecute offending smokers hereafter without the preliminary of a warning.  Warnings in the past have failed of effect, and now the service of summons will be the first intimation received by owners and occupants of buildings that their presence is desirable in court.” 

July 25, 1919 – In Room 1123 of the county building Coroner Peter M. Hoffman conducts an investigation into the cause of the fire that sent the dirigible Wingfoot Express into a fatal plummet through the skylight of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank on La Salle Street, setting off a gasoline-fueled conflagration that kills a crew member, two passengers, and ten employees of the bank.  Dramatic testimony comes in the person of the airship’s pilot, John A. Boettner, who testifies that there were no sparks or flames thrown from the engine and that the engines were running when the fire was spotted.  “I discovered the flames near the front of the bag and up above the equator,” Boettner says, “I rose to my feet and holding the wheel with one hand turned and by motions and shouts told the others to jump.  I saw them go over and then the bag buckled.  As the gondola shot forward I took a long dive toward the ground.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 26, 1919]  The above photo shows the skylight  of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank through which the dirigible fell to the banking floor.   

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Labels: 1913, Chicago Events, Medicine and Hospitals

Saturday, June 1, 2019

June 1, 1913 -- Stockyards Protest Filed

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June 1, 1913 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports on a complaint filed by a special committee of the Traders’ livestock exchange of Chicago, a group that represents 570 traders at the stockyards and handles 50 percent of all the livestock that comes into the city.  According to the group … “Thousands of diseased cattle pass through the Chicago stockyards every year without government inspection and are shipped to other points for slaughter, for breeding, and for fattening.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 1, 1913].  Government inspectors examine only the animals that are bound for the five big Chicago packing houses, according to the complaint. In a letter to the U. S. Secretary of Agriculture, David F. Houston, the president of the livestock exchange writes, “A great many of the cattle purchased on the market which receive no federal inpsection before being weighed to innocent purchasers are more or less affected with tuberculosis, and, coming in contact with other cattle in various locations, are bound to spread this much dreaded disease.”  The complaint asks the government for “equal rights and equal protection” for eastern and southern packing plants which lose up to 50 percent of the livestock they have purchased from the Chicago market because inspectors at those localities condemn animals that could have been identified through inspections in Chicago.

June 1, 1910 –Hamlin Garden, president of Chicago’s Cliff Dwellers, calls Chicago the “ugliest city on God’s earth” [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 2, 1910] at a meeting of the society.  He goes on to add that his hope is that in twenty-five years the city will be “as beautiful as it is huge.” At the same meeting sculptor Lorado Taft explains his plan to implement a “Midway Beautiful” plan in Hyde Park and appeals to his audience and Chicagoans in general to get the plan underway, suggesting that if this could be accomplished, other parts of the city would follow in creating a “Chicago beautiful.”  The top photo shows Madison Street at about the time of Garden's talk, looking east from Clark Street.  The photo below that shows the same scene today.

June 1, 1932 – The city celebrates World’s Fair Day as it looks forward to the Century of Progress World’s Fair, still a year away.  The Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “Factory whistles and bells were sounded at noon, to be supplanted in the afternoon by the first demonstration of the 25 chime carillon on the tower of the hall of science.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 2, 1932] The culmination of the day is the dedication of the Hall of Science, held on the south end of the terrace that is formed by the two wings of the building as it extends to the east.  More than 1,500 people attend.  The president of the Century of Progress, Rufus C. Dawes, uses the dedication of the hall to speak of the appropriateness of the fair’s theme.  “This is especially appropriate,” Dawes says, “because this period [the preceding one hundred years] represents also the great period of development of the physical sciences and their application to the services of man.”  Dr. Frank B. Jewett, the vice-president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, also speaks, his remarks underscoring the mission of the Hall of Science.  Jewett says that science, more than any other aspect of society, has influenced life over the past century, but “we have lagged egregiously in the development of our understanding and exercise of the social factors which these new things have introduced into human living … No amount of such understanding can even remotely touch the elements of human greed, avarice and misuse of public trust, but real understanding of the underlying forces will greatly simplify the solution of many problems.” The above photo shows the dedication of the Hall.

June 1, 1912 – Daniel Burnham dies in Heidelberg, Germany at the age of 66 while traveling with his wife, his son, Hubert, his daughter, Mrs. A. B. Wells, and her husband. At the final concert of the North Shore festival the orchestra plays the funeral march from Die Göterdämmerung while the A Cappella choir of Northwestern University offers a song of praise. U. S. President William Howard Taft offers these thoughts, “Mr. Burnham was one of the foremost architects of the world, but he had more than mere professional skill. He had breadth of view as to artistic subjects that permitted him to lead in every movement for the education of the public in art or the development of art in every branch of our busy life.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 2, 1912] The Chicago we know today and other cities throughout the country and the world would be far different places, were it not for the genius of Burnham, who did more than anyone to create the concept of urban planning. "Make big plans," he wrote, "aim high in hope and work, knowing that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die."

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Labels: 1913, Stockyards

Sunday, January 13, 2019

January 13, 1913 -- Montgomery Ward Sells Last Michigan Avenue Property

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January 13, 1913 –A “syndicate of State Street merchants” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 14, 1913] pays $1,300,000 for the Montgomery Ward headquarters building at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Madison Street, ending Ward’s presence on Michigan Avenue and his role as the “watchdog of the lake front.”  William C. Thorne, the company’s vice-president, says, “It was company property, not the property of Mr. Ward individually.  The sale should hardly be a surprise so far as it marks the passing of Mr. Ward as the ‘lake front watchdog,’ for he is in advancing years and is withdrawing from active affairs rapidly.”  The sale of the tower is the last of three property transfers by the company since August, covering property along Michigan Avenue from Madison to Washington.  In August property at 12-22 North Michigan Avenuee was sold for $1,295,000. A month later a group headed up by architect Jarvis Hunt purchased property at the southwest corner of Michigan Avenue and Washington Street for $1,100,000.  Designed by the architectural firm of Schmidt, Garden and Martin, the latest sale is of a tower that was the tallest building in the city when it opened in 1899. The 12-story building originally had a ten-story tower topped by a three-story pyramidal roof, a temple and a 22.5-foot statute, The Spirit of Progress, but the top section of the building was demolished in 1947.  Today it sits toward the north end of the city’s Historic Michigan Boulevard District and has been converted into a residential building.  The original tower at 6 North Michigan Avenue is shown in the black and white photo.  A truncated version of the tower is shown in the present-day condominium building below that.

January 13, 1961 – Chief Judge William J. Campbell of the Federal District Court and John W. Chapman, Jr., the head of the Chicago offices of the General Services Administration, pry a brick from the wall of the Great Northern Theater at 26 West Jackson Boulevard, signaling the beginning of demolition work that will clear the site for a new 30-story federal building.  The 30-story courthouse, with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the lead designer, directing a team of Chicago architecture firms that included Schmidt, Garden and Erickson, A. Epstein and Sons, and C. F. Murphy Associates, will be finished in 1964. It will the first of three federal buildings to sit on a two-block site east and west of Dearborn Street and between Jackson Boulevard and Adams Street on the north and south. The Great Northern Theater is shown in the black and white photo above.  The Great Northern Hotel on the left side of the photo was designed by Daniel Burnham and John Root and opened in 1892.  It was demolished in 1940.  The office building and theater on the right and was designed after John Root's death.  While they stood, the two buildings enclosed the largest interior court in the city.  The Dirksen Federal Courthouse, which stands on the site today, is shown in the second photo.

January 13, 1890 -- The Chicago Daily Tribune continues its crusade against the conditions on the Chicago River, especially the area we know today as Bubbly Creek.  The paper reports, “There is no perceptible current in it, and for fifteen years, it is claimed, the refuse from the packing houses has been accumulating in it.   In summertime silver coin in the pockets of tugmen turns black as the tugs plow through the mass of decaying matter…a novice who takes a tug ride to the South Fork for the fun of the thing never takes another.  If he recovers from the first trip in a week and can smell clean again he is extremely lucky.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 13, 1890]   Some aldermen propose doing nothing, saying that the area around the South Fork is mostly occupied by glue factories, rendering plants, and slaughterhouses.  Says one alderman, “Why not let the South Fork, with its awful filth, alone?  No one scarcely, except the people who are responsible for the filth, is near the South Fork.”  The problem, though, is that under the right conditions – a heavy rainstorm or rapid snow melt – the whole mess overflows into the river and is carried to the lake.  In July of the preceding summer, after a particularly violent storm, a steamship captain reported that he could trace the mess from the South Fork to the breakwater and from there to a half-mile beyond the intake crib that provided the city with fresh, clean water.  What to do?  One plan is to allow the packers to continue dumping their stinking brew into the South Fork if they agree to pay for pumping works to send the mess away from the city and into the I & M Canal.  The paper takes the simplicity of the plan to task for two reasons: (1) that this solution would mean “that the people of the Illinois River Valley must endure what Chicago gets rid of”; and (2) “if the packers are allowed to use the canal for this refuse the city will be crowded out from sending its legitimate sewage that way, and would be compelled to go to an extremely heavy expense in straightening out the Desplaines River and dredging the Ogden Ditch.”  Without parsing the difference between “legitimate sewage” and “illegitimate sewage”, It will be ten years before one of the great engineering projects in United States history sees the river reversed and sent westward away from the lake and the city’s drinking water. Not even that great project, though, will make a difference to the terrible toxic soup that was the South Fork.

January 13, 1941 -- In a meeting of 100 civic and industrial leaders at the Chicago Club, the inauguration of a $3 million development program by the Illinois Institute of Technology is announced. With an enrollment of 7,000 students, the largest engineering school in the country had been formed just six months earlier with the merger of Lewis Institute of Arts and Sciences with the Armour Institute. At the gathering Wilfred Sykes of Inland Steel makes it clear that the city's continuing development dependson its having a great engineering school, saying, "Over 20,000 engineers are employed in the Chicago industrial area. The increase in the rate of employment of engineers in Chicago exceeds that of any other city in the United States, and the number of engineers in Chicago in comparison to the total number of industrial workers exceeds that of any other city."

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Labels: 1913, Madison Street, Michigan Avenue, Washington Boulevard

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

November 13, 1913 – Unlucky thirteen, maybe … John T. Burke, an undertaker, leads four associates of the late George E. Mendun to the high bridge in Lincoln Park.  Mendun, a bartender when he was still breathing, leaves instructions that he be cremated and “his ashes be dropped from the high bridge in Lincoln park on a moonlit night.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, November 14, 1913] Thomas Creighton, to whom Mendun left his worldly goods, leads the party to the bridge, but as the five men are about to throw the ashes from the bridge, the police pull up.  The party is taken to the Halsted Street station where the police “hunt the law books to see what charge they would prosecute the men on.”  It turns out that there is nothing in the municipal code that would prohibit the act, so the bar tender’s friends return to the bridge for a final fling.  The High Bridge in Lincoln Park, also known as Suicide Bridge, is shown above.  The bridge was taken down in 1919.

November 13, 1998 – Members of the North Halsted Area Street Merchants Association, gay community leaders and city dignitaries come together to celebrate the completion of a project to create an identity for the street through a series of rainbow motif street pylons.  Mayor Richard M. Daley tells a crowd of about 200 people, “This has been a labor of love. I knew from the beginning it was about fairness – fairness to the community.  I am thanking you for what you (the lesbian and gay community) have done for North Halsted Street for many, many years.” [Chicago Tribune, November 15, 1998] After he speaks, the mayor plants a small bush in a concrete planter decorated with shrubs, flowers and a 25-foot-high iron trellis that carries the Roscoe Street name, one of 20 such installations that provide signage for the area.

November 13, 1948 – Nine trucks leave the South Chicago works of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, carrying “monsters of steel and copper” [Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1948] to the University of Chicago, where the components of the school’s synchro-cyclotorn will be assembled at Fifty-Sixth Street and Ellis Avenue.  The shipment tips the scales at 300 tons with each of the 14 magnet coils, wound at the New York naval shipyard, measuring 20 feet in diameter.  The stainless steel vacuum chamber is 18 by 17.5 feet with a depth of 26 inches.  The atom smasher came together amazingly fast . . . it was only January 13 that the university placed an order with the Bethlehem Steel Company for the 4,140,000-pound magnet that would form the heart of the machine.  Above, the cyclotron structure awaits its component parts as 1948 comes to a close.

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Labels: 1913, Chicago Bridges, Lincoln Park