Showing posts with label 1920. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1920. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

August 26, 1920 -- Children's Memorial Hospital Bequeathed a Million Dollars



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August 26, 1920 – The will of Mrs. John C. Black is filed in Probate Court with the bulk of the $2 million her husband accumulated as a leader in the meat-packing industry going to charity.  Almost a million dollars (nearly $13 million in today’s dollars) will go to the Children’s Memorial Hospital, with an immediate grant of $250,000 with another $250,000 payable at the end of 20 years.  Any money left over from other bequests and gifts specified in the will also will be given to the hospital, a sum expected to approach $500,000.  Another $250,000 Is placed in trust for employees of the Continental and Commercial National Bank where Mrs. Black’s husband served as president until the end of 1902.  Other bequests include:  Visiting Nurses’ Association of Chicago, $250,000; United Charities of Chicago, $150,000; Art Institute of Chicago, $100,000; Salvation Army of Chicago, $50,000; and the Glenwood Manual Training School, $25,000.  All of the oil paintings and etchings in the Black collection are bequeathed to the Art Institute of Chicago.



August 26, 1927 – The new Adams Street Bridge opens at 2:00 p.m. when Mayor William Hale Thompson uses a pair of golden scissors to cut a ribbon that stretches across its center.  Nearly a thousand cars join a parade from Grant Park to the bridge as boats stream up the river to watch the ribbon-cutting and listen to speeches from Mayor Thompson, Commissioner of Public Works Wolfe and Deputy Commissioner Edward F. Moore.  The new bridge cost $2,500,000 (over $37,000,000 in today's dollars) and had been under construction since 1923.  It sits on piers that go down 95 feet to bedrock and extends 265 across the river.


August 26, 1927 – John Philip Sousa conducts “Stars and Stripes Forever” on a terrace east of the new Buckingham Fountain as the fountain is dedicated before 50,000 Chicagoans.  And “As though responding to the direction of the bandmaster and the magic of his baton, the fountain began to glow with misty blue lights circling each of the three tiers.  A moment later the rush of water started.  For half an hour the lights were played on the 134 jets, through which 5,500 gallons of water were poured each minute, and all the various lighting effects were displayed.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 27, 1927]  Walter B. Smith, a friend of Kate Buckingham, the woman who donated the fountain to the city in memory of her brother, Clarence, makes an address explaining the donation for Buckingham, who is present among the guests in the grandstand.  Michael Igoe, a member of the U. S. House of Representatives and a commissioner of the South Park Board, accepts the $700,000 (close to $10,500,000 in todays dollars) fountain on behalf of the city.



August 26, 1926 – Mrs. Frances Kinsley Hutchinson, the widow of the late Charles L. Hutchinson, a Chicago banker and civic leader, agrees to give Wychwood, the family’s 72-acre estate in Lake Geneva, to the State of Wisconsin as a nature preserve.  The estate dates to 1901 when the Hutchinsons began their quest to “preserve the natural beauty of an isolated wilderness of native flowers and plants.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 26, 1926] The estate drew scientists, botanists and horticulturists from all over the country as the couple was “vigorously interested in keeping their estate out of the hands of vandals and yet making it available to the nature loving public.” The late Charles L. Hutchinson had been the president of the Art Institute of Chicago while his wife served as president of the Wild Flower Preservation Society of Illinois, and even before Hutchinson’s death the two had set out to find a means of carrying out the plan to keep the estate as a nature preserve.  The agreement with Wisconsin did not last long.  Charles Hutchinson had also been a member of the Board of Trustees at the University of Chicago, and that connection led his widow to seek an agreement with the university in 1933 to donate Wychwood to the school with a 25-year trust to maintain the property.  Frances died in 1936, and the trust expired in 1957 at which time the U. of C. decided to separate itself from the preserve.  Philip K. Wrigley bought the eastern part of the estate, a tract that bordered on his own property.  George F. Getz, Jr. bought the western portion of the property while the middle section which contained the original Hutchinson home was purchased by Clarence B. Mitchell, who removed the top two floors to create a ranch-style home designed in the architectural style of the late 1950’s. Mitchell kept the home for a little more than a year before it, too, went to the Wrigley family.  The original home of the Hutchinson's is shown in the top photo.  Below that is a photo of its appearance today.

Chicago Daily Tribune
August 26, 1893 – Even as the World’s Columbian Exposition continues to draw crowds that will eventually total more than 27 million people before it ends in October, trouble looms on the horizon.  As the nation’s economy begins to sour, the voices of the jobless and the downtrodden grow louder. On this day police battle with the aggrieved in front of City Hall with at least nine men badly hurt.  The trouble begins at the corner of Washington and La Salle Streets when a United States mail wagon tries to drive through a parade of protestors that is marching toward a rally on the lakefront.  A few marchers grab the harnesses of the horses, stopping the wagon.  The Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “In a minute several thousand paraders and hundreds of onlookers, swept by the impetus of the paraders were fighting around the wagon.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 27, 1893].  A small contingent of police inside City Hall fights its way through the crowd on Washington Street, which “from Clark Street to Fifth Avenue [today’s Wells Street] was packed with human beings.”  The force is successful in freeing the mail wagon, but another fracas breaks out when protestors turn over a horse and buggy belonging to a private citizen.  The inspector in charge of the small force of officers takes his men to the overturned buggy, rescuing its occupant, but the crowd presses forward, battering the officers and their leader until “some one struck a terrible blow on the head [of the Inspector] with a paving stone and he fell senseless.”  At this point 50 officers from the Central Station arrive, and moments later 25 more men from the Harrison Street station follow.  Fifteen minutes after the trouble begins “the street was clear and hundreds of officers drawn from every station within a radius of three miles were patrolling the streets about the City Hall keeping every one on the move.”  Eventually, 350 officers are deployed.  The day had begun peacefully enough with a mass meeting on the lakefront where speeches were made and a brass band played.  The meeting breaks up, and a parade of several thousand men begins to make its way through the Loop with the group’s leaders exhorting the crowd to “maintain order and keep the peace.”  As the head of the parade turns east on Lake Street from La Salle, the tail end of the marchers is adjacent to City Hall where the violence begins.  One of the men arrested in the overturning of the wagon says, “I will get a razor and cut my throat.  I have had nothing to eat for two days and now I get clubbed.  I don’t want to live.”  Mayor Carter Harrison is just down the street from City Hall, getting his hair cut, when the trouble begins.   He makes his way to his office and immediately issues an order that there be no more parades. In the meantime, the first part of the march, far removed from the action in front of City Hall, makes its way back to the lakefront where speeches continue as a large group of policemen surrounds the scene.  A resolution is read and cheered loudly.  It asks the mayor to use his influence “to distribute at once public work which will give employment to the workless and at the same time tend to materially improve this great city.”  Then Mayor Harrison shows up and urges patience, saying, “The Eternal Jehovah took six days to make the world, and you cannot remedy all the ills of your situation in twenty-four hours.  If you are quiet and go home and do not disturb the peace you will then be conserving your own interests … I am sworn to protect the city, and I will do it. While doing it I will try to help every man I can.  I am older than most of you, and I know that peace and order will serve you best. Don’t listen to incendiary speeches. They will only harm you, and none must be made.  I appeal to you to listen to reason.  You cannot make money out of speeches and disorder.”  Around 6:00 p.m. “the puffing of Illinois Central engines became so incessant that the speakers could not be heard by any one twenty feet away,” and the mass meeting slowly dissolves with a resolution to assemble once again on the following day at Madison and Market Streets.  As the meeting breaks up and the protestors head for home, so, too, do crowds of people crossing the viaduct at Van Buren Street, lucky folks who had spent a day on the Great White Way of the fair.
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Monday, May 11, 2020

May 11, 1920 -- Chicago Mobster "Big Jim" Colosimo Killed

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May 11, 1920 – “Big Jim” Colosimo is shot to death in his own restaurant at 2126-2128 South Wabash Avenue just 15 minutes after he opens for business.  Coming to Chicago from Italy at the age of 17, he quickly began a career in crime, helped along the way by First Ward Aldermen Michael Kenna and John Coughlin, who made him a precinct captain, a move that gave him the kind of political connections that helped his rise in Chicago’s underworld.  Colosimo and his wife, Victoria, a brothel operator, used prostitution as the foundation for their rise.  Opening their first brothel in 1902 led to an estimated 200 brothels that he controlled at the time of his death.  Along the way he incorporated gambling and racketeering into the mix.  Things began to unravel for Big Jim in early 1920 when Prohibition began.  Colosimo refused to get involved in bootlegging, a position that set off others in the organization, particularly John “The Fox” Torrio and Al Capone, both of whom Colosimo had brought to Chicago from New York.  No one was apprehended in the murder although it was Torrio who phoned Colosimo, asking him to come to the restaurant to receive an important shipment, and it was Torrio took over the outfit, later followed by Al Capone.  Colosimo’s funeral was quite the affair.  There were over 50 pallbearers, including some of the most important men in Chicago society.  A thousand marchers followed the funeral procession to Oak Woods Cemetery.   

May 11, 1925 – Ten thousand people jam Michigan Avenue as Ray Schalk, catcher for the Chicago White Sox, shows the crowd how to catch a ball thrown from the 560-foot top of Tribune Tower. Traffic is blocked on the Magnificent Mile for 20 minutes as Schalk makes three attempts to catch the ball. The first ball bounces off scaffolding and never makes it to the catcher’s glove. The second bounces off his glove, but he can’t make the grab. Using both hands on the third attempt, Schalk makes the catch. With the ball successfully in hand “ . . . the coppers on horseback were needed to get Ray back out of the throng so he could get to the ball park for the afternoon game.” [Chicago Tribune, May 12, 1925] The police could have taken it easy. Although their catcher caught the ball thrown from Tribune Tower, the Sox dropped the game to the Washington Senators, 9-0. Ray Schalk did not play. 
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May 11, 1924 – Cardinal George William Mundelein returns to Chicago, making Chicago the first city west of the Allegheny Mountains to have a cardinal as the head of the Catholic Church.  At Holy Name Cathedral he dedicates his first hour in the city to the young men of the church.  The Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “Quietly, intimately, and rapidly Chicago’s first cardinal gave his blessing to the little boys, youths, and young men who jammed the transepts, filled up the nave, and spilled over into the spaces in front of the altar …” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 12, 1924]. Mundelein says, “On returning from a long, long journey, it is but fitting that the first to welcome the first cardinal of the west should be the little ones … Your cardinal needs you; he needs the young men.  With your help and enthusiasm, the church can go still further forward.”  Mundelein was named the city’s archbishop in 1916 and spent little time in letting people know that he was a different prelate than those who had preceded him.  He avoided tragedy by skipping the soup at a University Club banquet in his honor and worked to break down the barriers in the various Polish, German, Bohemian, and Irish parishes in the city.  When he returned as a cardinal on this day in 1924 a million Chicagoans lined the streets to hail his return.  Before his death in 1939, a reporter asked him if he had ever considered returning to the city of New York, where he grew up on the Lower East Side.  He replied, “You and I live in the greatest city in the world. The only way they will get me to leave Chicago is feet first.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 20, 2014]  The crowds outside Holy Name Cathedral are shown in the above photo on May 11, 1924.

May 11, 1894 –The Pullman Car Works closes until further notice at 6:00 p.m. after 2,000 employees walk out with “no excitement and no demonstration.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 12, 1894] A meeting of the Grievance Committee convenes on May 10 at the Dewdrop Saloon in Kensington that lasts until 4:30 a.m. at which point the 46 members of the committee vote unanimously to strike.  At 7:00 p.m. On May 11 American Railway Union Vice-President George Washington Howard begins to address a packed Turner Hall in Kensington.  He urges the men against violence, “Now, men, you have work before you and you must do it like American citizens.  Use no threats, no intimidation, no force toward any one who gets into the works.  It must be distinctly understood that there will be no violation of the law … My advice to you is let liquor of all kinds entirely alone.  If you drink at all you are liable to lose your senses, and if you lose your senses God knows what will happen … keep sober and straight, and every laboring man in the country will be with you.”  Then Howard turns the crowd’s attention to the path ahead.  “In the past,” he begins, “corporations used to divide men who are on strike, but they can’t do it now … I heard Mr. Pullman say the other day that you men owed his company $70,000 for rent which you could not pay.  If that is so how long will it be before he owns you soul and body … I am under the opinion that it is so long since he has done any work that he has forgotten what ill-usage means, and does not know that kind words and courteous demeanor are becoming even to the President of a great corporation.  If he had taken the trouble to come down here two days ago, as he should have done, and had listened to the men’s grievances from the men, the strike would never have occurred.”  George Pullman claims he is totally surprised by the work stoppage, going into detail about how he has tried to take care of his employees.  “[The strike] not only surprised but pained me,” Pullman says., “for I had taken a great interest in keeping the men employed … I did and was doing all in my power to keep the men at Pullman supplied with work … We also spent $160,000 for improvements at the works and in the town during the last few months that we would not have made for several years had we not wanted to give the men work.  I had this done because I was exceedingly anxious for the welfare of the men.”  The strike idled the Pullman works with no end in sight when, on June 26, 1894, American Railway Union President Eugene V. Debs called for a boycott of all Pullman cars on American railroads, an action which eventually led to a walk-out of 250,000 workers in 27 states.  U. S. President Grover Cleveland ordered 12,000 federal troops to end the strikes that idled the entire western portion of the country’s transportation system. Over the course of the trouble, 30 strikers were killed and property damage exceeded $80 million.  Ultimately, Debs and Howard both went to federal prison, the American Railway Union was broken up, and Illinois ordered Pullman to sell off its residential holdings.  Strikers gather outside the Pullman Arcade Building in the above photo.

May 11, 1894 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports on a mystery solved at Fort Sheridan.  The tale begins with “uncanny noises” being heard at “unearthly hours” in the big drill hall just southwest of the fort’s tower.  The noise was compounded by the sound of “a body falling heavily on the floor,” followed by “the crash of steel and strange cries from an excited voice.”  Some believed that a ghost had haunted the drill hall … such stories had been prevalent since the end of 1893 when three separate sentries saw the ghost of a murdered officer, one of the sentries even swearing that the ghost had knocked his hat off his head.  So it is that the officer of the guard organizes a raiding party and with “fixed bayonets and forty rounds of ammunition to each man the guard moved on the big room prepared for ghosts or anything else above or under ground.”  Entering the huge hall, the men find their commandant, Colonel R. E. A. Crofton, pictured above, lying on the floor, tangled up in a bicycle.  For the time being, the mystery is solved. 
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Wednesday, October 23, 2019

October 23, 1920 -- Franklin Street Bridge Opens


October 23, 1920 – The new Franklin-Orleans bridge is opened to traffic amid a celebration of “Bombs, daylight fireworks, and a parade of thousands of gayly decorated trucks and automobiles …”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 24, 1920]  The $2 million bridge took four years to construct and is expected to divert much of the heavy truck traffic from the Lake and Wells Street bridges.  In the opening celebration trucks and automobiles assemble in Grant Park and wind through the Loop by way of Monroe, State, Randolph and Franklin Streets.  Nearly every large trucking company in the city is represented by one or more trucks in the procession.  At the bridge Mayor William Hale Thompson cuts a red, white and blue ribbon stretching across the approach to the bridge and the procession passes over the new span, headed north.


October 23, 1915 – Three thousand striking women and girls march through the city’s wholesale clothing district and down Michigan Avenue, led by the only man in the entire parade, Sidney Hillman, the head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.  Two hundred policemen, 48 sergeants, and eight lieutenants are assigned to the parade.  The strike by the Chicago garment workers would go on for more than two months, and over 1,200 workers would be arrested, most of them immigrants.  The strikers were asking for an eight-hour work day for women and a commission that would fix the lowest amount an employer would be permitted to pay the girls and women working in factories. Three days later the strike turns deadly when a 35-year-old tailor on picket duty is shot in the back of the head near Halsted and Harrison Streets.  Hillman says, “One is dead and about four are wounded — one of them a bystander who has nothing to do with the strike … Chicago citizens have to realize that all the laws for protection of life have been suspended during the strike and they must express their opinion for their own protection … Statements of alleged violence by strikers have not been proven.  The city must determine whether it is going to stand idly by while all this lawlessness exists in the city.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 27, 1915]  

John G. Shedd
October 23, 1926 – Funeral Services for John G. Shedd, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Marshall Field and Company, are held at Fourth Presbyterian Church.  Officiant is the Reverend John Timothy Stone of Fourth Presbyterian, assisted by the Reverend Albert Joseph McCartney, pastor of the Kenwood Evangelical Church, which Shedd attended.  Shedd was born on July 20, 1850, the youngest of eight children, in Alstead, New Hampshire.  At the age of 16 he walked away from the farm life, taking positions in dry goods stores in Vermont, New Hampshire, and, in 1872, Chicago.  A year after the great fire destroyed the city, Shedd began work for Marshall Field and Company as a stock boy, rising through the ranks to become president of the company in 1906 upon Field’s death.  Five years before his death the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography wrote of the man, “Mr. Shedd’s aim is to supply nothing but serviceable merchandise, when possible, of better quality than furnished elsewhere; always to satisfy his customers, no matter at what cost or inconvenience, so that they will become the best advertisers of the store, to treat employees with the greatest consideration and thus inspire their loyalty.”  Shedd was one of the founders of the Commercial Club of Chicago and instrumental in the organization’s underwriting of the Chicago Plan of 1909, the first large scale attempt at urban planning in the country’s history.  He contributed extensively to Chicago museums, charities, and institutions with perhaps the most important gift being the contribution that led to the construction of the aquarium named after him.  He is buried in Chicago’s Rosehill Cemetery.

Police Commissioner John McWeeny
October 23, 1913 – I will admit this up front -- every time I see a news report about the Chicago police commissioner of this era, I have to cover it.  I love this guy’s name.  It was on this day that the city’s top cop, John McWeeny, walks off the job after Mayor Carter Harrison fails to support him in a controversy that has developed between McWeeny and Major M. L. C. Funkhouser, newly installed in the department to take charge of morals investigations, efficiency reports and business affairs. Funkhouser’s seventh report, printed in the Chicago Daily Tribune, alleges that “. . . there were more than 100 objectionable houses operating openly.  In the old red light district there were more than thirty resorts running without concealment, although the district is supposed to be ‘closed.’  Along State street and adjoining thoroughfares ‘wide open’ conditions prevailed from Sixteenth street to Thirty-First street.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 24, 1913]  McWeeny’s response to the report was, “I have had Funkhouser’s report investigated.  Some of it is stuff we have known right along and some of it we can’t verify at all.  If I were investigating serious matters I wouldn’t tell the world about it, as some people do.  Funkhouser can’t give me any orders.”  That was probably the last straw for Mayor Harrison, who chose to back Funkhouser, prompting McWeeny to walk.

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Saturday, August 24, 2019

August 24, 1920 -- Lorado Taft's "Fountain of Time" in Plaster

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August 24, 1920 – The full-sized plaster model of Lorado Taft’s “The Fountain of Time” is completed after years of work and stands at the head of the Midway Plaisance, west of Cottage Grove Avenue.  The sculptural piece is described as comprising “ . . . scores of figures, arising from mystery, moving through life, and vanishing in mystery.  Some are dancing, some proceed sorrowfully, some are Galahads, some are satyrs.  Towering over all is Mr. Taft’s conception of Father Time.  The huge, weird figure dominates the movement of the pushing mob it faces.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 25, 1920]

August 24, 1968 -- Seven leaders of the Youth International Party and their candidate for the Presidency of the United States, a 150-pound pig named Pigasus, are arrested at the Civic Center, today’s Richard J. Daley Center.  The Chicago Tribune reports, “Moving quickly and without incident, 10 uniformed policemen and several detectives under the personal direction of Comdr. James Riordan of the First District, loaded the pig into a police wagon as soon as it was placed in the plaza.”  The seven leaders of the demonstration are loaded into the wagon with the pig.  The Yippie leaders are taken to police headquarters where they are charged with disorderly conduct and released on $25 bonds with a court date scheduled for September 19.  Pigasus is taken to the Anti-Cruelty Society where he is “given a bath, fed, and placed in an outside pen,” according to the society’s director.  The demonstration, attended by about 50 Yippies and watched by 200 spectators, apparently is enough to scare Country Joe and the Fish away as the San Francisco  rock group withdraws from the Hippie Festival of Love, scheduled to begin in the city later in the day. 

August 24, 1982 – Archbishop Joseph Louis Bernardin is installed as the seventh Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago in a candlelight service at Holy Name Cathedral. Reverend John Richard Keating reads the papal letter assigning Archbishop Bernardin to the archdiocese of Chicago at 8:01 p.m. before 1,500 priests in attendance. After the reading of the letter is completed, the priests provide Archbishop Bernardin with a two-minute standing ovation.  The Archbishop’s homily is entitled “I Am Joseph, Your Brother,” and in it he promises, “We will work and play together, fast and pray together, mourn and rejoice together, despair and hope together, dispute and be reconciled together.  You will know me as a friend, fellow priest and bishop.  You will know also that I love you.  For I am Joseph, your brother.” [Chicago Tribune, August 25, 1982]
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Thursday, December 20, 2018

December 21, 1920 -- Rush Street Bridge Swings for Last Time

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December 21, 1920 –The Rush Street bridge is swung to the middle of the river for the last time.  It is anticipated that the lower section of the new Michigan Avenue bridge will absorb the traffic that the Rush Street bridge has carried since 1884, primarily heavy vehicles.  When the United States granted permission for the construction of a bridge across the river at Michigan Avenue, it stipulated that the center-pier Rush Street bridge had to be taken down within 90 days of the opening of the new bridge to full traffic.  For decades the Rush Street bridge, the third bridge in this location, was the main route across the river for traffic entering or leaving the Loop, especially large wagons in the early days and trucks, later on, carrying freight back and forth from river-side warehouses and railroad yards.  It was so busy that in July of 1911 Charles Wacker, the head of the Chicago Plan Commission, said it was the busiest bridge in the world. That same year a traffic census counted 9,725 vehicles of all descriptions crossing the bridge in a 24-hour period.


December 21, 1922 – Fire destroys much of the Dearborn Street station at Dearborn and Polk Streets as a crowd of thousands crowd the streets to watch.  The fire starts on the third floor of the station and “raged across the entire top floor and roared up the tower, which the watchers momentarily expected would fall into the street.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 22, 1922] Six hundred employees along with passengers waiting for trains evacuate the station with just one injury.  Mrs. Hazel Locker, the assistant chief auditor for the Chicago and Western Indiana Railroad, had to be carried from the structure after being trampled in the crowd escaping the burning building.  Three switchboard operators, Mamie Scully, Lillian Michnick and Betty Fennell, are among the last to leave as they work the phones directly under the floor where the fire started until they are commanded to leave.  The crowds surrounding the station watch a spectacular blaze.  As the Tribune reported, “When the fire reached the tower it roared up the long shaft, which was soon a blazing torch.  The clock in the tower stopped at 3:55 o’clock.  One by one the big hands on the three faces of the clock dropped into the furnace below.  Slowly the flagpole on the top of the tower bent at its base and the crowd which had waited for it to fall cheered when it crashed.”  Railroad and postal employees save tons of mail as the fire continues to burn, and officials of the eight railroads that use the station announce that service will continue from the train sheds to the south of the station itself.  The station, completed in 1884, was thought to be one of the finest in the nation when it opened.  The station came close to being razed over the years, but in 1986 it was listed on the National Registry of Historic Places even as its train sheds were demolished.  Today it offers over 120,000 square feet of leasable office and retail space, and it has acted as one of the important anchors that led to the resurgence of the Printers’ Row district and the creation of the Dearborn Station residential development to the south. 


December 21, 1915 – A banner headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune screams, “Weeghman Admits He Has Secured The Cubs”.  Charles H. Weeghman began his career in Chicago as a waiter making ten bucks a week and parlayed a small stake into a collection of 15 Chicago diners that served cold sandwiches.  Weeghman loved baseball even more than he liked cold sandwiches, and he wanted desperately to own a professional team.  After his attempt to buy the St. Louis Cardinals proved unsuccessful, he teamed up with a renegade group of owners controlling teams in the Federal League.  Weeghman gave his Chicago Federals a new concrete and steel stadium near the elevated tracks on the north side of the city on the former site of the Theological Seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.  After the Federals, renamed the Whales, barely won the championship in 1915, American and National League executives, tired of the Federal League raiding teams for their players, asked for negotiations before Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.  The upshot was that the Federal League disappeared, but two owners were given opportunities to buy teams in the older, more established leagues.  Weeghman was one of those owners, and it was on this date back in 1915 that the news of his purchase of the Chicago Cubs was announced.  His first action as an owner was to hire Joe Tinker as the manager of the team.  His second was to move the Cubs from their west side location to Weeghman Field at the corner of Addison and Clark Streets.  A century and a year later Weeghman’s Cubs would win the World Series.  The above photo shows Weeghman Field in 1915.
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Friday, September 28, 2018

September 28, 1920 -- Chicago River Gets the Suds

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September 28, 1920 –Here is a sad day in Chicago history … 180 barrels of "High Life" beer are poured into the Chicago River. It is the last part of a cargo from the ship Mineral City which was seized by government officials as it entered the city from Kenosha over a year earlier. The seized ship is shown above.  


September 28, 1911 – After Mayor Carter Harrison ventures forth with his brother, William Preston Harrison, and walks from the north side of the city as far south as Harrison Street “under the cover of darkness … to learn how his people conducted themselves,” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 29, 1911] He informs his police chief, James McWeeny, that he has found State Street “rotten … a cheap imitation of a Midway show”.  In the letter to McWeeny he directs the chief to clean up the street, saying, “One of the last acts of my administration before leaving office in 1905 was to give orders looking to the cleaning up of the old time levee.  Today State street, south of Van Buren, while not so vile as it used to be, is a cheap imitation of a Midway show.  At 408 State street they advertise the ‘grizzly bear’ dance.  They have also suggestive pictures of women in costume.  They have a barker in front and regular Midway music.  This character of show has no place in a city.”


September 28, 1924 – In a day that was “replete with fervent pulpit oratory, congratulations, stately music and solemn ritual” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1924] the Chicago Temple at Clark and Washington Streets is dedicated. Even though there are three services at the new church, throngs outside are still so great that two outdoor services are held in the morning and afternoon.  The president of the Temple’s board of trustees reads a letter from President Calvin Coolidge in which he writes, “I join heartily in the hope which moved its founders, that it may be the means of expanding and increasing the effectiveness of the great spiritual work to which it is devoted.  Unique in many ways as an ecclesiastical type of architecture, it will bring together the spiritual and lay activities of the church, giving from each a helpful inspiration to the other.”  The congregation is one of the oldest in Chicago, beginning in an 1834 building on the north side of the river.  In 1838 that building was floated across the river and rolled on logs to a location on the southeast corner of Washington and Clark, the same plot on which the First United Methodist Church of Chicago stands today.
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Wednesday, January 17, 2018

January 17, 1920 -- Prohibition Begins



January 17, 1920 – Chicago wakes up to the realization that the day of the hangover is gone as Prohibition begins at midnight.  On the previous day “auto trucks were at a premium during the late afternoon and early evening” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 17, 1920] as individuals pursued the last chance to buy liquor for home consumption and transport it to their homes.  Major A. V. Dalrymple, the “head of the prohibition enforcers” promises that no effort will begin at enforcing the new law for ten days. “Of course I don’t mean that you can sell the stuff tomorrow,” he says. “Far from it. But we will not start any search of seizure until this ten day period has passed.”


January 17, 1915 – South Halsted Street between Polk and Madison Streets becomes a battle ground as 1,500 unemployed men, women, boys and girls battle the police.  According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, “Shots were fired, clothes were torn, eyes blackened, and heads cracked while clubs, blackjacks, and revolver butts were used with bruising effect on heads, arms and knuckles” as the “hunger procession” proceeded up Halsted Street.  [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 18, 1915] The battle occurs after a meeting of the unemployed at Bowen Hall at the Hull House settlement.  Two detectives inside the hall, dressed as unemployed workmen, listen as Lucy Parsons, the widow of Albert Parsons, who was hanged for alleged complicity in the Haymarket Riot of 1886, speaks.  The detectives, Sergeants Fred Krueger and Herman Eastman, report that trouble is brewing.  Frist Deputy Superintendent of Police Herman Schuettler, who himself was at his post during the Haymarket riot, orders, “Demand a permit from them, and if they haven’t got one order them to disperse. The reserves will be on the way to help you.” A procession forms on Polk Street, just west of Halsted and begins to march, six people abreast, up Halsted, carrying a large black banner with one word, “Hunger,” displayed in white letters.  The police order the marchers to disperse, but the marchers continue onward, a voice crying out, “To h___ with the orders.  We’re hungry!”  The policemen, small in number and waiting for reinforcements, are surrounded.  According the paper’s reporter, “In a minute the cluster under the swaying ‘hunger’ banner was a maelstrom of fists and clubs.  Girls and women shrieked and fell to the ground in the fray.  A small, dark haired girl, climbing on to the shoulders of a man, dove head foremost into the center of the fight, her fingers reaching out for the eyes and hair of the policemen … The detectives drew their revolvers and began to lay to right and left, felling all within reach … Women threw their arms around the necks of the plain clothes men, biting them and tearing their faces with finger nails.”  On the marchers move, coming up to a phalanx of policemen at Harrison Street; the procession breaches the line and continues north to Adams Street where they encounter mounted officers.  On they continue to Monroe Street.  Battered at each new block “the ranks of the marchers were becoming noticeably thinned.  Those remaining appeared to be the more vindictive who had succeeded in fighting their way through.”  Finally, at Madison Street the marchers find themselves surrounded, and many of those who are left “made for doorways, alleys, saloons, lunch rooms, and basements, where they mingled with the surprised patrons and escaped.”  At each intersection along the route of the march arrests are made, and those taken prisoner charged with rioting, unlawful assemblage and parading without a license.  At the conclusion of the festivities the Tribune reports, “Halsted street looked like an armed camp with squads of police stationed at the corners and mounted men patrolling the middle of the street.”  Mrs. Lucy Parsons is shown above, missing a glove, after her arrest.


January 17, 1903 -- Judge Arthur Chetlain sentences George Wellington "Cap" Streeter to an indeterminate term in the penitentiary at Joliet for manslaughter for the killing of John S. Kirk on February 11, 1902 in the "District of Lake Michigan." The dead man had been a watchman for Henry W. Cooper, a man lakefront property owners had engaged to protect their interests on the north side of the river near Oak Street. "Cap" Streeter was not personally connected to the scene where the killing occurred; he was held responsible because testimony indicated that he had told the occupants of the district that if anyone "came fooling' around" to shoot him. After being found guilty in December 3, 1892, Streeter said, ""They found us guilty but it only goes to show that when a lot of millionaires get together and get the help of the state the liberty of a man ain't safe. This whole thing is a scheme." The captain and his missus are pictured above.
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