Showing posts with label 1969. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1969. Show all posts

Sunday, October 11, 2020

October 11, 1969 -- S.D.S. March through Loop, 105 Arrested


October 11, 1969 – A march through the Loop by 300 members of the Students for a Democratic Society breaks bad as police face off against “demonstrators, using tire chains, clubs, railroad flares, and their fists smashed windows and fought a running battle … in the three-block area from La Salle street to State street.” [Chicago Tribune, October 12, 1969] When things finally wind down 105 demonstrators are under arrest, 27 police officers have been injured and two corporation counsels are hurt with one of them, Richard Elrod, suffering permanent paralysis when he attempts to tackle a demonstrator fleeing police. The march is supposed to proceed down La Salle Street to Jackson Boulevard, but it breaks apart a half-mile north at Madison Street and marchers head east, smashing windows in 15 buildings as they run.  After the Loop is cleared, Governor Richard Ogilvie calls 300 Illinois national guardsmen into the area, but by 7:00 p.m., concluding that the trouble is at an end, he releases all 2,600 guardsmen on alert in the city since they had been summoned earlier in the week. 

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October 11, 1954 – The rain finally stops.  On October 9, 1954 rain begins to move into the Chicagoland area, and from that Saturday afternoon until Monday morning, the storms continue, bringing 6.21 inches of rain, surpassing a record that has stood for nearly 70 years.  The Chicago Sanitary District orders the locks at the mouth of the river opened at 6:25 p.m. on October 10 and “A gigantic swell of water roared into the lake as the river for a time returned to the original direction of its flow before it had been reversed by canals to the Illinois waterway." [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 12, 1954] Water flows into the counterweight pits of most of the downtown bridges, immobilizing them, and traffic on the river is halted.  The new Edens Highway is closed, and the Racine Avenue pumping station is put out of commission with four feet of water on its main floor.  Before the locks are opened, the Chicago River rises five feet, overflowing in several locations, including the area around Union Station where stormwater pours into the basement of the main post office, where it short-circuits pumps that could have helped keep the water level lower.  Flowing through drains, the floods enter two sub-basements of the Chicago Daily News building, today’s Two Riverside Plaza, where 42 feet of water eventually collects, destroying paper stock valued at a quarter million dollars and shorting out electrical circuits to the paper’s pressroom.  The Chicago Tribune prints seven editions of the Chicago Daily News while fire boats and several fire engines pump the water out of the basements.  the above photo shows the railroad yard near Van Buren Street under water that has also flooded the counterweight pits of the bridge.


October 11, 1926 – Machine guns spread a wave of death across the street from Holy Name Cathedral as two mobsters are killed and three others are wounded.  The sniper targets his victims from the front room of a second-floor apartment at 740 North State Street, a building next door to William F. Schofield’s florist shop, about which you can find more information in this entry at Connecting the Windy City.  One of the men killed is Earl “Hymie” Weiss, a member of the North Side Gang that controlled bootlegging and other illegal activity on the north side of the city, a rival to a gang controlled by Al Capone.  Also killed is Patrick Murray, a known bootlegger.  Weiss holds in his pocket a list of all the men called for jury duty in the trial of Joe Sallis, a south side gang leader who is charged with the murder of another mob captain.  Weiss also has $5,300 in walking-around money on his person.  This is the fifth in a series of gang-related murders in the space of two years, beginning with the murder of mob boss Dean O’Banion in the florist shop on Sate Street.  Police search the rented room from which the shots were fired and find 35 empty .45 caliber shells near the window and “a hundred or more” cigarette butts, “indicating a long period of watchful waiting.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 13, 1926] The Chicago Chief of Police says, “We knew it was coming sooner or later.  And it isn’t over.  I fully expect that there will be a reprisal, then a counter reprisal and so on. These beer feuds go in an eternal vicious cycle. I don’t want to encourage the business, but if somebody has to be killed, it’s a good thing the gangsters are murdering themselves off.  It saves trouble for the police.”


October 11, 1918 – A city commission passes a resolution that all public dancing must be stopped in order to check the influenza-pneumonia epidemic.  Dr. C. St. Clair Drake, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, says, “The order will take effect at once.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 12, 1913]  The commission also adopts a resolution that “attendance at all funerals, contagious disease or otherwise, shall be restricted to the immediate relatives, close friends and necessary attendants.”  In the 24 hours before the commission adopts its resolutions 124 people in the city have died of influenza and 89 from pneumonia.   The commission orders the cancelling of all dances as a necessary step “because of the close contact of the dancers, the exercise of the dance and the frequent chilling of the body that is apt to follow.”  The 1918 pandemic, believed to have begun in a French hospital processing soldiers wounded in the war, led to the deaths of between 50 and 100 million worldwide.  According to the digital encyclopedia at http://www.influenzaarchive.org  “Between the start of Chicago’s epidemic on September 21 and the removal of restrictions on November 16, the Windy City experienced a staggering 38,000 cases of influenza and 13,000 cases of pneumonia . . . Yet, despite these numbers, Chicago actually did fairly well for a city of its size.  In fact, with a population of 2.7 million, Chicago’s epidemic death rate for the period was only 373 out of 100,000, not much worse than its long-time rival St. Louis.”
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Tuesday, September 8, 2020

September 8, 1969 -- Reverend Jesse Jackson Jailed on Trespassing Charge

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September 8, 1969 – The Reverend Jesse Jackson, leading a group of 600 protestors, is arrested on charges of criminal trespass at a construction site at the University of Illinois Circle campus after refusing to leave the site.  Jackson, along with two other men arrested for the same offense, refuses to make bond of $250 and is held in custody.  The demonstration is the result of Jackson’s effort to fight racial segregation in the city’s trade unions, an effort that was born of the belief that public construction contracts should include Black workers.  In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, Jackson says, “It’s not understood.  The same people who call us lazy lock us out of trade unions.  We’ve had to fight to get the right skills ot work … In the fight to rebuild where we live, there are countless jobs.  There are probably more jobs than people.  People ask how can you police poverty.  You can’t police poverty.  But you can develop people where you live so there’s less need for police.”  [New York Times, September 23, 1969].  In marching to the site at Halsted Street and Newberry Avenue where an $18 million science and engineering building is being constructed, the protestors defy an injunction issued on August 14, limiting the number of pickets at a construction site to six.  The injunction had been dutifully observed, but on the previous day, according to coalition leaders, union leaders walked out of talks scheduled between them and Black leaders.  It is a day of contrasts for Reverend Jackson as earlier in the day he had been honored as one of Chicago’s 10 outstanding young men at a luncheon at the Palmer House.  This evening he would spend the night in jail.  In the above photo Reverend Jackson uses a police microphone in the back of a police squadrol in an attempt to quiet demonstrators at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus.


September 8, 1973 – Led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, more than 8,000 people march through the Loop from a starting point at State Street and Wacker Drive, headed for a rally in Grant Park.  A spokesman for the Coalition for Jobs and Economic Justice, the sponsor of the march, says, “We are facing a crisis of everyday living.  It is the story of the jobless at the employment gate. It’s 40 million school children facing the loss of milk.  It’s the crisis of the welfare mother trying to fend off malnutrition at supermarket prices, the closed down factory, the bus line that died.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1973] Jack Edward, the Vice-President of the United Auto Workers says at the Grant Park rally, “In 1963 we had a friendly wind at our backs—John F. Kennedy. Now we have adversity at our faces—Richard M. Nixon, whose interest in economic and social justice was clearly demonstrated by his veto this week of a bill that would have raised the minimum wage in steps to $2.20 an hour and extended the protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act to about 7 million workers.”  Organizers had predicted a turn-out of 50,000 protestors, an estimate that was clearly optimistic.  As the above photo shows Reverend Jackson is still at it in 1975 as he leads a rally in favor of the Humphrey-Hawkins act that advocated using government-paid positions to combat the ravages of inflation and unemployment. 

September 8, 1929 – Gompers Park at the corner of Foster and Pulaski Avenues, a 39-acre expanse of green space that is divided by the Chicago River, is dedicated.  Originally a part of the Park District of Albany Park, one of 22 independent park districts that were brought into the Chicago Park District in 1934, the park’s plan was the work of landscape architect Henry J. Stockman. Clarence Hatzfield, a Chicago architect and member of the Albany Park board, designed the park’s fieldhouse.  The park was originally named after Samuel Matson, who had been the Superintendent of Albany Park’s Park District.  According to the Chicago Park District’s website, “Albany Park District President Henry A. Schwartz, an official of the shoemakers’ union, soon convinced the park board that it was inappropriate to name the park for a living person.” Therefore, on this day in 1929 the district renamed the park in honor of Samuel Gompers, who had served as the president of the American Federation of Labor from 1886 until his death in 1924.  A major donation from the Edward M. Marx Foundation led to the dedication of a life-sized statue of the labor leader on Labor Day of 2007.

September 8, 1860 – The schooner Augusta sails into Chicago, reporting that sometime during the night she had collided with the Lady Elgin on the lake.  The Lady Elgin, with somewhere between 400 and 700 passengers aboard, most of them members of Milwaukee’s Irish Union Guard, is holed below the waterline when the Augusta strikes her amidships in the midst of a lake squall, and within 20 minutes she sinks.  No one will ever know how many drown in the lake off Winnetka or die on the rocks just off shore.  Bodies continue to wash ashore well into December, some of them almost 80 miles from the wreck. Many of those aboard the Lady Elgin are never found.  Those who could be identified are returned to Milwaukee for burial, but a number of the unfortunate souls onboard the ship are buried in a mass grave In Highwood, not far from the Port Clinton lighthouse, a place that has since been lost to time.




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Saturday, May 23, 2020

May 23, 1969 -- First National Bank of Chicago Makes a Move

J. Bartholomew Photo
May 23, 1969 – Brink’s armed guards move all of the money and securities in the First National Bank of Chicago through a temporary underground tunnel and into the hands of waiting tellers in the bank’s new building on Monroe Street, between Dearborn and Clark. The whole operation takes less than 30 minutes. At the close of business on this Friday tellers are told to move to their spaces in the new building just to the east, where they find workers still installing bullet proof windows at their counters. The following Monday the new bank will open, and the process of tearing down the old one will begin.


May 23, 1959 – With a royal visit from Britain’s Queen Elizabeth coming on July 6, city officials are working feverishly to tidy up the city for Her Majesty.  This day brings news that an area one thousand feet south of the Chicago River and just east of Lake Shore Drive which has for more than 30 years been used to load thousands of tons of garbage onto railroad cars will be cleaned up.  “When the wind is right,” the Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “odors are wafted over Lake Shore drive and into Grant park, where the queen will enter Chicago” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1959] The shut-down of the operation on the lakefront is made possible by the completion of a new incineration plant at One-Hundred Third and Doty Avenue and a new system in which large trailer trucks are used to haul refuse to Lake Calumet.  The area shown in the photograph isn't far away from where Studio Gang's Vista Tower is being constructed today.



May 23, 1913 – In another of a series of articles dealing with the “new slogan” for the city [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1913], “Where ‘We Will’ There’s a Way,” the Chicago Daily Tribune discusses the impact that the railroads have had upon the city.  Leading with a description of the business district, an area circumscribed by Chicago Avenue on the north, Sixteenth Street on the south, Halsted Street on the west, and the lake, the paper states, “Of this 2,140 acres the railroads own approximately 50 per cent, one-half of all downtown Chicago.  Something like 1,000 acres in the heart of the city are given up to railroad terminals and rights of way.” Taking one portion of that area, the paper veers toward the unimaginable, the development of the huge railroad freight yards south of the river, east of Michigan Avenue, and north of Randolph Street.  “By way of violent and impossible supposition,” the article states, “imagine that the eighty acres now occupied by the freight yards and houses could be thrown open to office and business buildings.  There would be plenty of sites out there on the lake shore which would offer almost unequaled opportunities for fresh air, sunlight, ventilation, and unobstructed views.” Of course, that development eventually did occur – over 60 years later in what is now Illinois Center and Lakeshore East.  The article also traces the impact the railroads have had on getting from place to place within the city.  Because of the blockade of railroad tracks, the article asserts, there are only four streets left, running form the center of the city to the west side, “on which any sort of retail business can be expected to develop as it overflows from the east side of the river.”  It is even worse on the south side of the city … “Running to the south from the business center there are only three streets possible for retail business and one of these, Michigan avenue, is already almost solidly filled with the salesrooms of a single line of trade [the automobile].”  The top photo shows the extent to which the rail yards dominated the South Loop in 1929 when the river's course was changed in a massive construction project.  The photo below that shows how dramatically things have changed since that time, a change that continues with the development of land east of the river, south of Van Buren Street and all the way to Roosevelt Road today.

chicagotribune.com
May 23, 1897 --  Mayor Carter Harrison leads over 6,000 city cyclists, 3,200 of them representing 34 riding clubs, over the streets of the city.  Before him, clearing the way, are “a dozen husky policemen, who felt the awful responsibility that rested upon them riding with the eye of the Executive upon them.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 24, 1897].  The grand tour starts at Thirty-Fifth Street and Grand Boulevard, finally rolling to a stop at the Thistle Cycling Club House at Washington and Paulina Streets.  The only glitch comes when the keeper of the Rush Street Bridge turns the bridge just as the Delaware Club comes to the river … “So the Delawares stopped and said things to the bridge man, and spent their money for pink pop and other things, until they finally found their way across, and went pounding over to the West Side like a suburban fire company responding to a four-eleven.”  The mayor wears a suit of “somber brown,” with a Red Cross emblem on his arm as he rides with the Red Cross corps attired “in blue suits and wearing the red emblem,” attracting “the eyes of every one that had not been hypnotized by the fierce glances of the fat policemen in front.”  The tour starts at 11 minutes before 11:00, and the procession proceeds down Michigan Avenue “at a lively clip,” touring the North Side before heading back south with contingents still heading north passing riders heading south at Ohio and Rush Streets.  In an hour and 45 minutes it is over and at Union Park “several thousand people were going in several thousand directions, and everybody apparently trying to beat the best record, whatever it is, of a hungry man riding to a dinner.”   In 1896 the Chicago Daily Tribune observed, “Chicago is the bicycle center of the United States.” [Chicago Tribune, May 3, 2014]  In the half-dozen years from the early 1890's Chicago’s bicycle manufacturing had grown from four companies to 25.  The average cost of a bicycle was $75 (That would be $2,000 today}.  The manufacturers in the city were cranking out 250,000 bicycles a year.  Mayor Harrison even had a campaign picture taken on a bicycle in 1897, observing that in a city with 50 cycling clubs with 10,000 members the photograph “would carry weight with the vast army of Chicago Wheelmen.” Whether the photo helped or not, this would be the first of his five mayoral wins.  The above photo shows the Lakeview Cycling Club in the 1890’s in front of their clubhouse on Orchard Street.

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Sunday, April 5, 2020

April 5, 1969 -- Vietnam War Protest Draws 20,000 Marcher to State Street


April 5, 1969 -- More than 20,000 people march down State Street in opposition to the war in Vietnam. As the march assembles, demonstrators are given printed instructions to cooperate with police and ignore counter-protestors. A select group of 800 Chicago police officers is also instructed to show courtesy to the marchers. The only major disruption comes at Fourteenth and State where a protestor and counter-protestor get into it with each other. National Guard troops, already in the city because of incidents stemming from the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King a year earlier, are not needed.

April 5, 1962 – The maiden flight of a new Alitalia DC-8 from Rome to O’Hare is marred as the jet is forced to circle at 20,000 feet while thunderstorms sweep through the area.  Among the passengers on the jet, which lands nearly two hours after its scheduled touch-down, are 14 former Italian pilots, men who were part of a squadron of 96 flyers who came to Chicago on July 14, 1933 in two dozen sea planes.  The impressive display was a part of the great Century of Progress World’s Fair that took place on the city’s lakefront in the summers of 1933 and 1934.  Marshall Italo Balbo commanded the group, and the citizens of the city were so impressed by the heroic display of the aviators that they named a street for Balbo.  The flight in 1933 took 16 days to complete.  The return flight on this date in 1962, even with the weather delay, took 11 hours and 49 minutes.  You can learn more about the feats of Balbo and his men here and here.  The above photo shows the Balbo column, presented to the city by Marshall Balbo.  It still sits on the lakefront path just north of McCormick Place.
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April 5, 1961 – The tallest building on State Street is “topped out” as more than 200 onlookers watch a three-ton steel beam hoisted to the highest point of the new United of America building at State Street and Wacker Drive.  The ceremony takes place just 364 days after ground is broken for the 41-story skyscraper, designed by architect Alfred P. Shaw.   Dignitaries on hand include Mayor Richard J. Daley, O. T. Hogan, chairman of United Insurance Company of America, the building’s developer; Hogan’s son, Jack R. Hogan, the company’s president; and J. Donald Rollins, president of United States Steel Corporation’s American Bridge division, the company that fabricated and erected the 7,800 tons of steel that went into the building.  The elder Hogan founded the company in 1919 with an investment of $500.  At a luncheon following the ceremony the rental agent for the building, Leo J. Sheridan, says, “Chicago is experiencing a vast expansion of commercial facilities, which have far too long lagged behind the city’s amazing industrial growth, a growth that has been greater by a substantial margin than that of any other American city in the last decade.” [Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1961] When completed, today’s Kemper Building at 1 East Wacker Drive, was the tallest marble-clad tower in the world. That record was eclipsed when less than a mile to the northeast Water Tower Place was finished in 1975. The above photo shows the completed tower with the Marina City towers rising to the north.

April 5, 1937 – Mrs. Frieda Spyropoulos, known throughout the world as “Little Egypt,” as a result of the dance that she performed as part of the show at the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, dies in Cook County Hospital at the age of 65.  Spyrpopoulos’s maiden name was Fahred Mahzar, and there is some debate over the early years of her life, especially as to when she came to the United States. The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that she “came to this country early in 1893 with a troupe of Syrian performers who had been engaged for the World’s Fair.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, April 4, 1937] Whatever the timing of her arrival was, she made quite a stir once Sol Bloom, the entertainment director for the fair, booked her for “The Algerian Dancers of Monaco” attraction at a Midway attraction called “A Street in Cairo.”  Tame by today’s standards, her “shimmy and shake” packed ‘em in, provoking Anthony Comstock (who bragged that he had destroyed 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for producing “objectionable books”, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures while being responsible for 4,000 arrests and the suicides of 15 people) to demand that her show be shut down.  She later said of the fuss, “I did not have any vulgarity like they have today.  No nakedness.”  Although she did make several appearances at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933, Spyropoulos settled down to a quiet life on Fairfield Avenue on the southwest side, marrying Andrew Spyropoulos, the owner of a restaurant at 705 South Halsted Street in the heart of what is today the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus.  The above photo gives a peek at “A Street in Cairo.”  The caption that accompanied the picture reads in part, “No ordinary Western woman looked on these performances with anything but horror, and at one time it was a matter of serious debate in the councils of the Exposition whether the customs of Cairo should be faithfully reproduced, or the morals of the public faithfully protected.” 
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Saturday, March 21, 2020

March 21, 1969 -- Anti-War Demonstrator Sounds Off


March 21, 1969 – Rennie Davis, the coordinator of the National Mobilization Committee in Chicago, already under indictment for his role in disturbances at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, threatens to bring new protests to the city.  Speaking at a press conference with Lee Weiner, a Northwestern University research assistant also under indictment, Davis says, “I believe the demonstration leaders who were indicted will receive the support to show that the Nixon administration made a serious mistake and will be sorry for it.” [Chicago Tribune, March 22, 1969] Protest will come in the form of an anti-war march on April 5, to coincide with similar marches in a half-dozen other cities.  At the same time Davis is speaking, Superintendent of Police James Conlisk announces the suspensions of four of the eight policemen indicted by a grand jury for their actions during the convention.  Conlisk says he will recommend dismissal of the officers to the police disciplinary board.  Prior to this announcement, only one of the officers had received any disciplinary action.  Captain Raymond Clark, director of the police internal investigations division, says the investigation of the officers was “thorough, but apparently the government has avenues of investigation not open to the police department.”
Virgil E. Gunlockillinilambdachi.com
March 21, 1963 – The head of the Chicago Transit Authority, Virgil E. Gunlock, dies in Illinois Masonic Hospital at the age of 57 after suffering a heart attack on March 12.  Much of the city’s infrastructure that we take for granted today came about as a result of Gunlock’s leadership in a number of areas. Born on a farm near New Canton in Pike County in 1905, he attended the University of Illinois, graduating with a degree in civil engineering in 1927.  In 1938, when the city began its first subway on State Street, Gunlock was appointed resident engineer on the contract.  During construction he rose to the position of chief subway engineer.  In 1945 he was appointed the Commissioner of Subways and Superhighways just as the city was preparing for a monumental expressway building program.  In 1952 he was named as the city’s Commissioner of Public Works.  Two years later he was appointed to the CTA board.  As head of the CTA Gunlock realized that the system, which had shrunk by nearly 25% by the mid-1950’s, could not survive without some sort of government subsidy, and along with Daley he worked diligently to make politicians and the public realize the importance of that fact.  He also prepared a “wish list” of projects that the mayor lobbied local and state legislators to bring to completion.   This included rapid transit lines in the medians of the planned northwest and south (Kennedy and Ryan) expressways, a "first" in the United States.  A memorial column published in the Chi Zetagram, the newsletter of the Lambda Chi Alpha chapter at the U. of I., stated, “Had lesser men occupied the key posts held by Mr. Gunlock, many of the city’s most important public works projects would never have advanced as rapidly or as smoothly as they did.  Mr. Gunlock will be remembered as a highly-skilled, good-humored, but no-nonsense engineer-administrator who played a major role in the building of today’s Chicago.” 

March 21, 1894 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports on the remarks of Judge Lorin C. Collins, a respected jurist who served as the Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives and as a Chicago Circuit Court Judge before retiring to private practice in 1893.   He speaks of the great opportunity that lies before the city in potential park land along the lake, saying of the land that one day would become Grant Park, “Every one admits that the people have rights there, but so long as we go putting buildings there, which are not ornamental, and filling it up the same as the property west and south, they see no use in maintaining them.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, March 21, 1894]   The judge’s proposal, which he says would be trivial in comparison to the building of the World’s Fair of 1893, still is huge in its scope.  He says, “I would propose, as a general plan, to remove all the Illinois Central tracks north of the new depot, which are mainly used for freight purposes, and take away all the unsightly structures north nearly or quite to the river. Condemnation proceedings could be instituted, and I do not think a jury would fix the damages at excessive figures.  Any legislation necessary could be secured at Springfield for such a purpose with comparative ease, and I think the State would willingly cede what rights it now claims in the land in question.  I would pay for this improvement by a general park tax on all the city and the entire cost would not be as great as that of Jackson Park now.  Bonds might be issued allowing future generations to help pay for something of which they would get the benefit … One can hardly estimate the great benefit to the city from having a magnificent park on our Lake-Front.  Not only would it be of incalculable benefit to the residents of the city, but it would be a park such as no other city in the world has, and render us proportionately famous … I would wipe out everything there except the Art Institute and make one grand park of it.”  The above photo, taken in 1893, looks south in the area that would one day become Grant Park. 

March 21, 1867 -- Before a packed Coliseum crowd Professor R. D. Hamilton holds forth, providing instruction in the taming of horses. The venue is so crowded that the doors are ordered closed to prevent any more people from crowding in. At the end of the lecture a grocer, one Mr. Minogue, brings a bay horse "which proved to be a vicious brute" [Chicago Daily Tribune, March 22, 1867], apparently hoping that the good professor could perform his magic on the beast. Before anything could be accomplished, though, the horse "sprang wildly" into the packed crowd. "A scream of terror rose from every part of the house, and this had the effect of still further maddening the infuriated animal, who struggled and pranced form one circle of seats to another among the thickest of the spectators, till he reached nearly to the roof of the circus." At that point the flooring gave way above a series of lion's cages and horse and spectators disappeared.. Predictably, someone cried, "The lions are loose," and terror reigned. "There were a few women among the audience, and, of course, they all fainted . . . what became of the horse no one knew for a while; but it appears he had succeeded in chasing the buffalo loose . . ." Before long the doors were opened, and the members of the audience were free. Soon after that Professor Hamilton sought out the "irrepressible horse" and "in a brief space of time the wild horse was as tame and peaceful as a lamb." All in a day's work in pre-fire Chicago.
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Wednesday, December 25, 2019

December 25, 1969 -- Holy Name Cathedral Reopens after Nearly Two Years


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December 25, 1969 – Christmas Day begins joyfully as 1,500 people celebrate the birth of Christ at a midnight mass in Holy Name Cathedral, the first service to be held there since it was closed for renovation on April 15, 1968.  During his homily John Patrick Cardinal Cody tells the gathered parishioners that the reopening of the cathedral is a “rebirth of an age-old monument” that stands as “a bridge to our ancestors.”  [Chicago Tribune, December 25, 1969]  The service is not without controversy, and two different protests occur, despite the solemnity and joy of the service.  During the offertory 60 members of the Ad Hoc Committee for Peace on Earth walk out of the cathedral, protesting the “pompous spending of more than 5.5 million dollars to remodel the temple ... when people are hungry at home and starving abroad, when there is no room for many poor children in parochial schools, when there is no room for many poor Christians in the cathedral-palace, and when it is too expensive to have a fair employment requirement on church spending.”  The group marches in the midst of a three-inch snowfall to the water tower where an alternative service is conducted.  Protests are also heard from the more than 400 people who are turned away from the service to which more than 1,000 worshipers are admitted by special tickets.  The cathedral, which opened just four years after the Chicago Fire of 1871, was closed in 1968 for extensive foundation repairs.  In that renovation, overseen by the architectural firm C. F. Murphy, a chapel was added and a re-design of the interior was undertaken to bring the cathedral in line with changes in the mass that arose from the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, which, between 1962 and 1965, made sweeping changes in the church.
Carter H. Harrison, Jr.
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December 25, 1953 – Carter H. Harrison, the five-time mayor of Chicago, dies in his home at 2100 Lincoln Park West at the age of 93. Oscar Mayer, 94, one of the former mayor’s closest friends says, “I’ve lost my dearest friend.  He was a great and honest man.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 26, 1953]  Mayor Martin Kennelly says of Harrison, who with his father ran the city for 22 of its first 72 years, “He and his father have left an indelible mark on the history of the city’s progress.  His life and works and the principles he stood for will remain as an inspiration to all, and particularly to the young people of this city.”  Harrison and his father each served five terms as mayor. The senior Harrison lost his life to a deranged assassin as the World’s Columbian Exposition closed its run in 1893. The younger Harrison was born on April 23, 1860 at the corner of Clark and Harrison Streets.  At the age of 13 he began a period of study in Altenberg, now a part of Germany, returning in 1976 to enter St. Ignatius College, now Loyola University.  Later he received a law degree from Yale University and practiced law in Chicago until 1888, also working in real estate and as the editor of the Chicago Times after his father bought the paper in 1891.  He was first elected as mayor in 1899, serving that term as well as two-year terms in 1899, 1901 and 1903.  In 1911 he was again elected mayor and served out that four-year term until 1915. Perhaps his greatest battle was with the traction magnate, Charles Tyson Yerkes, against whom he led a fight to keep him from obtaining 50-year franchises for his companies, contracts which Harrison believed were unjust and harmful to the public.  In his autobiography, Harrison answered Yerkes, who had stated, “I cannot understand Mayor Harrison,” with the reply, “Of course Mr. Yerkes cannot understand me – I am an honest man.” 

December 25, 1892 – The Chicago Daily Tribune editorializes once again about the potential use of lakefront property south of Monroe Street and east of the Illinois Central tracks.  Pointing out that the United States government has established a “dock line” 1,300 feet east of the railroad tracks, the paper opines the feds are not “concerned with what is done west of that line.  It is a matter of no consequence to the United States whether the wharves are 1,300 feet from the tracks or 300 … Therefore, without fear of molestation from the United States, the city can proceed to construct wharves or levees in the manner which suits it.”  Since the city has the power to determine the use of the area east and west of the Illinois Central tracks to 1,300 feet into the lake, it can use that space for whatever purposes it chooses, according to the editorial.  Therefore, “… it can fill out solid to navigable water, and use the ground between the landing and the west line of the filling for park purposes.  That portion of the land not needed for harbor purposes necessarily must be used as a park, subject of the same limitations which apply to the strip west of the tracks.”  The editorial cautions against pushing forward without a plan, given the expense of creating parkland out of open water, but the writers assert that there is still a way to put the project into motion … “There is no reason why the shore line should not be pushed forward by the steady dumping of ashes and other harmless refuse, which it is often difficult to dispose of.  All that would be needed would be means of reaching the shore.”  The above photo shows what would one day become Grant Park in 1890.


 December 25, 1934 – What a Christmas for Chicago – peace on earth, good will toward men, and, courtesy of the Chicago Park District, bathroom facilities at Oak Street.  Lake Shore Drive residents approve the plan to construct subway comfort stations beneath Lake Shore Drive and resident Frank G. Logan says, “We believe that this construction will provide a solution of both congestion and sanitation problems at Oak Street.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 26, 1934]  Seems reasonable – congestion and sanitary problems as a one-two combo seem like they should have a high priority.  This is an interesting piece of real estate; in 1884 the property owners along the Lake Shore Drive, at that time a residential street, gave up their riparian rights to the commissioners of Lincoln Park and agreed to pay for part of a landfill extension, including a breakwater to protect the lakeshore (and their street).  In exchange the commissioners agreed that no buildings would be constructed along the lakeshore in this area, which is probably why you see the Oak Street dining facility being assembled and disassembled each year. A proposal for the pedestrian subways was made in July of 1922, but it wasn’t until the fall of 1934 that the Illinois highway commission indicated it was willing to provide $100,000 for the pedestrian tunnels and comfort stations if the Chicago Park District was able to come up with an appropriate plan.  With no bathhouse and as many as 55,000 people flocking to the beach area on a hot summer’s day, the facilities were clearly needed.  The above photo shows Oak Street beach in the summer of 1930.
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