Connecting the Windy City

Thursday, May 14, 2020

May 14, 2011 -- Aon Center Unveils Sky Summit

timeout.com/chicago

May 14, 2018 – The owners of the Aon Center reveal plans for an observatory on top of the building which, if built, would make Chicago the only city in the United States, beside New York City, with three observation decks.  The $185 million plan will capitalize on the building’s location, directly to the north of Millennium Park, the Midwest’s most popular tourist attraction.  The developer, 601W, estimates that the plan will generate $220 million in municipal taxes over 20 years.  601W also estimates that the observatory will pull in $30 million to $40 million in annual revenue.  The plan, tentatively called the Sky Summit, will lift cars of visitors over the building’s edge for 30 to 40 seconds, allowing riders to look down on Millennium Park and Randolph Street, 1,136 feet below them.   Exterior steel columns and the granite cladding above the building’s eighty-second floor will be removed to open up uninterrupted views form the observatory.  Tentatively, 601W will partner with Legends, the New York firm that operates that city’s One World Observatory, to operate and jointly own the Aon project. Construction on the Sky Summit was expected to begin in the spring of 2019 with a completion date sometime in 2021.  That has been delayed – with work beginning in the fall of 2020 and completion sometime in 2022.  Who knows how the current pandemic will affect that schedule? 

r-barc.com

May 14, 2011 – The Chicago Tribune reports that the president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s board says that making the Chicago River safe enough for swimming would be a waste of money while increasing the chances of people drowning.  At a news conference Terrence O’Brien says, “In these difficult economic times when public agencies are facing budgetary shortfalls, people are losing their jobs and homes … it is important … that public funds are used wisely.”  [Chicago Tribune, May 14, 2011]  Earlier in the week the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency notified the District that it had failed to prove over the course of three years of hearings that cleaning up the river “would result in substantial and widespread social and economic impact.”  The E.P.A. ordered the District to implement more stringent standards for bacteria and other pollutants so that stretches of the Chicago River, the Cal-Sag Channel, and the Little Calumet River are made safe for recreation.  THAT was just eight short years ago – when virtually no one could have imagined the transformation of the river that has occurred during that time.  

May 14, 1938 –Workmen complete the razing of a three-story brick building at 601 West Sixty-Third Street, popularly known as the “Holmes murder castle.”  THIS is the building made famous 70 years later in Erik Larson’s popular book, The Devil and the White City.  It is where the owner of the building, Dr. H. H. Holmes, disposed of the bodies of six of his victims in the early 1890’s.  Holmes, who was hanged in 1896, allegedly murdered as many as 27 people before he was apprehended.  The United States government pays $61,000 for the building and lot, on which it proposes to build a post office.  The two buildings are pictured above.  The post office is still there. Note the elevated structure to the left of each building.  In the 1890’s that was the “Alley El,” the first elevated railroad in the city, one that carried passengers to and from the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Today it is part of the Green Line.

May 14, 1920 – The Michigan Avenue bridge is opened to traffic. It took 24 years and four city mayors to get the project completed, a project that began, according to Mayor William Hale Thompson, with a suggestion from the wife of the city controller in 1891, Mrs. Horatio N. May, who thought it might be just swell to have a link across the river at Michigan Avenue. Twenty years later the first plans for the bridge were drawn up, and in 1913 the first ordinance pertaining to the construction of the bridge was passed. Condemnation proceedings, authorization of bonds to finance the project, and the federal government’s objection to the use of steel for the bridge during wartime kept construction from beginning until April 15, 1918. Finally, at 4 p.m. on this day Mayor Thompson leads a motorcade from Congress Plaza up Michigan Avenue to the new bridge, where he cuts the ceremonial ribbon. Airplanes appear above and drop confetti. Four thousand cars follow the mayor’s automobile across the new bridge. A tiny dirt road on the north side of the river called Pine Street sits ready to become one of the city’s most impressive thoroughfares.

May 14, 1907 – At 2:40 p.m. Chicago White Sox officials begin the festivities that honor the team for the victory in six games of the “Hitless Wonder” in the 1906 World Series against cross-town rivals, the Chicago Cubs.  “For ten minutes,” the Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “a stream of autos charged intermittently through the gate and deposited city and baseball officials, ball players, and rooters all over the outfield.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 15, 1907] Mayor Fred Busse, Police Commissioner George Shippy, and Charles Comiskey unfurl the World Series pennant and carry it to home plate where William Hale Thompson asks for and receives “three cheers for Comiskey, three more for the White Sox, and still another three for the mayor.”  As the ovation continues, a “mounted delegation” from the stockyards gallops “into the field and rode pell mell around it to the accompaniment of vigorous applause.”  Then, the president of the National Baseball Commission, August Hermann, presents the award to the mayor and Comiskey.  Silence fills the stadium as “the ropes were being fastened by expert hands to the pennant.  The white stockinged players, who had fought for and won that emblem of supremacy, grasped the hoisting rope, forming themselves into a long line with Manager Jones in the place of honor, and began to haul away.”  And then … “Just as 15,000 throats were swelling with the first notes of the grand paean which was to have marked the climax of Chicago’s biggest baseball féte, just as the silken banner, emblematic of the highest honors of the diamond, had shaken out its folds over the White Sox park and started its upward climb in response to the tugs of the heroes of the day, Comiskey’s veteran flagstaff swayed, trembled in every fiber, then broke squarely off in the middle and toppled back to the earth which reared it.”  The pennant is temporarily draped over a liquor sign in right center field as the game begins in threatening weather and is quickly called as the field is “flooded beyond all possibility of further play” within five minutes.  Several cars have to be pulled out of the mud in the outfield with the last one pulled off the field just before dark by a team of horses.  “The pennant will be raised another day,” the paper concludes, “when President Comiskey is able to have erected a new pole strong enough to bear the strain.  But there will be no heroics.  Chicago had those yesterday.”  The presentation of the pennant at home plate is shown above.

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Labels: 2011, 2014, 2018, Chicago Architecture, Chicago Development, Millennium Park, Randolph Street

Tuesday, December 24, 2019

December 24, 1886 -- Chicago Federal Building Smells Trouble

chicagology.com

December 24, 1886 – More trouble at the Federal Building and Custom House, the Neo-Classical pile sitting in the block with Dearborn Street and Clark Street on the east and west and Adams Street and Jackson Boulevard on the north and south.  Maligned from the get-go, the James G. Gill design, completed in 1880, was beautifully proportioned and built of the finest materials, but “Its weight was too great for the soil, and there has always been an uneven settlement, destructive in character, and at time dangerous to the occupants.  To hold it together, heavy rods have been run through the upper walls.”  [chicagology.com]  In addition, the space allocated to the post office – at the time the city’s main post office – was inadequate for its rapidly expanding operations.  Estimates had over 3,500 people working inside the building with 50,000 folks passing through it each business day.  The problem in 1886 dealt with the plumbing and sewage systems of the building, systems that “proved on a thorough investigation to be much worse than was supposed ….”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 24, 1886]  In this respect buildings are like people ... you can be handsome as handsome can be, but no one will love you if you stink.  It seems that the main sewer line, running under the center of the building from Adams to Jackson, is more than three times two large – two feet in diameter – while the city sewers on Dearborn and Clark Streets are only one foot.  Every two weeks it is necessary “to use an engine and a great hose … to flush the sewer and keep things sweet.”  Collecting basins beneath the sidewalks on Adams and Jackson Streets “are said to be veritable cess-pools,” and “the condition of things beneath the building is said to be deplorable.”  Improvements are expected to take six months to complete at a cost of $16,000 (a little over $437,000 in today’s dollars).  In 1898 the government gave up trying to fix the old building and began construction on a new facility designed by architect Henry Ives Cobb.  It was completed in 1905.  That building was demolished in 1965, making way for the three federal buildings that surround today’s Federal Plaza.  The 1880 building is pictured above.

archive.is

December 24, 2015 –The Eastland Disaster Historical Society announces that the last survivor of the disaster on the Chicago River that claimed 844 lives on July 24, 1915 has died.  Marion Eichholz, 102 years old, was only a toddler of three years when her father jumped with her in his arms into the river to escape the sinking ship.  Eichholz’s testimony, recorded by her sister, Shirley Eichholz Clifford, provides a powerful look into the horror of that day on the river.  “People began to panic, and women were running and screaming. Dad picked me up in his arms, stood on the railing, and jumped into the river,” she said.  “I remember Dad swimming with me in one arm.  I was crying, and my strap slippers were dangling from my ankles.  We were picked up by a tugboat and brought to shore.”  Eichholz’s niece, Kathleen Kremholz, says, “What she always remembered is she had new shoes on … What she always talked about was seeing all the babies underneath the water who had drowned in baby buggies.”  Eichholz, on the left, is pictured in a childhood photo with her younger sister and her parents in the above photo.

December 24, 1887 – With the completion of an electricity generating plant at Washington Boulevard and Clinton Street, 100 “brilliant lights … blaze out on the Chicago River”. [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 24, 1887] It is hoped that the illuminated river will eliminate river traffic having “the necessity of keeping up constant whistling.” Ten miles of cable have been laid, covering all the bridges from Polk Street on the south to Indiana Avenue on the North Branch and out to the mouth of the river.  Four lights are placed on each bridge, two at each end, with a 2,000-candlepower capacity for each lamp.  The 150 lights will be the equivalent of 10,000 gas lamps.  The above photo shows the river in the 1880's ... imagine the traffic moving up and down the river at night, each boat whistling shrilly in the middle of the city to indicate its movement.

December 24, 1961 – The Chicago Daily Tribune tells the story of the first Christmas tree in Chicago, cut down somewhere near today's Division Street in 1804.  According to the paper’s account the commander of Fort Dearborn, Captain John Whistler, “decided his garrison should have a holiday tree to lift morale.  His men and their families were weary of the bitter cold and the ice on the lake to the horizon.”  The tree was dragged across the frozen river to the garrison that stood at what is now the corner of Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue.  “On Christmas day, with a few feeble candles glowing on the tree, the garrison sat down to its first Christmas dinner,” the article continues.  Guests included John Kinzie and his family and another trapper who lived across the river, Francis Ouilmette.  In the middle of the celebration a friendly group of Indians, led by Chief Black Partridge, made a visit and the group was invited to stay and “partake of the feast.”  Imagine those first inhabitants of what would become this great city, huddled together dozens and dozens of miles away from anything remotely resembling civilization, sharing a quiet communal moment in the darkness and cold of the wilderness night.  It’s enough to make us thankful for what we have.  

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Labels: 1886, 2014, Chicago Architecture, Clark Street, Dearborn Street, Jackson Boulevard

Thursday, December 13, 2018

December 13, 2014 -- Maggie Daley Park Officially Opens

landscapearchitecturemagazine.org

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

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

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

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Labels: 2014, Chicago Parks

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

December 4, 2014 -- Fort Sheridan Long-Range Plan Stirs Controversy

jwcdaily.com

December 4, 2014 –The Chicago Tribune reports on a developing controversy surrounding the draft plan of the Lake County Forest Preserve’s Planning, Building and Zoning Committee to return the grasslands at Fort Sheridan to woodlands.  The chairwoman of the planning committee, Bonnie Thomson Carter, a District 5 Lake County Board member, says, “The draft plan suggests returning the preserve to what it looked like historically 100 years ago.  That part of the plan is based on the prehistoric use of the land, the natural resources and the vision of the forest preserve.” [Chicago Tribune, December 4, 2014] Not everyone is happy.  Sonny Cohen, a Highland Park resident, who campaigned for a preserve in the area where the former army base’s airstrip and rifle range once was located, says, “The preserve – with grasslands – has evolved as this incredible place.  Wildlife has discovered it, and it has become a habitat for some very rare species.”  Others say that planting trees in the grassland will interfere with the monitoring of hawks, a watch that was begun in 2012.  Vic Berardi, a Gurnee resident and founder of the hawk watch at Illinois Beach State Park, says, “This could become the most important hawk migration sites in America.  But it has to be accessible if it’s used for educational purposes.”  Still others fault the lack of convenient parking in the new plan, which would restore the old parking area to a natural setting. In late fall of 2016 the Lake County Forest Preserve’s Board of Commissioners unanimously approves a master plan that entails $3.8 million in improvements, including 1.6 miles of mowed trails, 2.8 miles of asphalt trails, five boardwalks, three observation areas, a dozen interpretive exhibits and the restoration of 73 acres of woodland and savanna, returning these areas to habitats resembling those prior to settlement of the area.   

December 4, 1977 – Dr. Edith Brooks Farnsworth, aged 71, dies at her villa near Florence, Italy, a long distance from Passavant Memorial Hospital in Chicago where she spent 27 years on the staff.  Farnsworth, of course, was the client who commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design a house for her in Kendall County on land which she had purchased from Colonel Robert McCormick, the editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune.  Recognized throughout the world today as a gem of mid-century modern residential architecture, the project, finished in 1959, led to years of legal wrangling between Farnsworth and her architect.  Farnsworth was a graduate of the University of Chicago, from which she graduated with a degree in literature, going on to get a degree in medicine in 1939 from the Northwestern University Medical School. Farnsworth’s ashes were returned to Chicago, and she is buried at Graceland Cemetery, where her headstone is within sight of the grave of Mies van der Rohe. For more on the legal battle that raged between the two from 1951 to 1956, you can turn to this entry in Connecting the Windy City.  Information on the resolution of the suit can be found here.

December 4, 1902 – Fourteen men lose their lives in a fire at the Lincoln Hotel at 176 Madison Street, a converted business block that the city’s fire marshal calls the worst firetrap he has seen.  The building went up in 1873, just two years after the Great Fire, and despite its proximity to that tragic event, it was built with wooden partitions, a single wooden staircase, and windows less than a foot in width.  Six months before the fire two electric elevators were installed as the building was being converted into a hotel.  The shafts of those elevators, enclosed within wooden casings, formed flues that provided a draft for the fire once it began.  One of the newly installed elevators blocked all but 20 inches of the main stairway, stairs that should have been over twice as wide.  There was only one fire escape in the four-story building, and that was reached by way of a partitioned six-foot by eight-foot hotel room that contained two beds.  When the lights went out and the elevators failed early on in the catastrophe the residents found themselves in darkness and smoke, some with no way to escape.  The night clerk discovered the fire at 5:40 a.m. and alerted as many guests as he could.  125 people began frantically trying to find a way out of the burning building, some by jumping out of narrow windows to the roofs of lower business buildings to the east and west.  Firefighters initially could not make their way up the one stairway and were forced to fight the fire from a defensive position, trying to save those trapped in the building by placing ladders against the west side of the building.   Following the tragedy was a condemnation of the city’s inspection process with a special focus placed on Chief Building Inspector Kiolbassa, of whom Fireproof Magazine said, “At his door lies the record of more torture and death brought to suffering, helplessness, as the direct result of his incompetency, than has ever before been charged to a public officer in the history of civic government.”  [Fireproof Magazine, Volume 1; No. 5., p. 45.]

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Labels: 2014, Fort Sheridan

Sunday, November 4, 2018

November 4, 2014 -- Shake Shack Opens in River North

November 4, 2014 –The first Shake Shack in Chicago opens at 11 a.m. in the former Harley-Davidson gift store in River North.  A line stretches out the door with people waiting for an hour or more, the wait becoming longer as lunchtime nears.  The chain of burger restaurants war born in a summer hot dog cart in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park, just across the street from the Flatiron Building.  In a Chicago Tribunereview Kevin Pang writes, “… everything we tried was solid and serviceable, though nothing would justify waiting more than 20 minutes in line.” [Chicago Tribune, November 5, 2014]Today there are two Shake Shacks in the city in addition to the original restaurant at Rush and Ohio.  One is in the Chicago Athletic Association building at 12 South Michigan Avenue while the other is in the West Loop at 185 North Morgan.  There is also a Shake Shack in Skokie in the Old Orchard shopping center.

November 4, 2008 – Before a crowd of 240,000 people jamming Grant Park, newly elected President Barack Obama delivers his victory speech.  Before he steps onto the stage Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” fills the great park on the lakefront, followed by “Only in America” by Brooks and Dunn and “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” the Jackie Wilson standard.  Obama takes the stage with Joe Biden as the families of the two men join them.  When the networks placed Virginia in the Democratic column at 11:00 p.m., a crowd that waited all day erupted, and now here he was -- the new president, who did not disappoint the folks who had waited much of the day to witness history. He begins with this declaration, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer … it’s been a long time, coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.” Nearly 22 minutes later Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” ends the program after Chicago’s hometown hero finishes his victory speech with this thought, “This is our moment.  This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:  Yes We Can.  Thank you.  God bless you, and may God Bless the United States of America.”

November 4, 1929 – The Chicago Opera Company, eight years old, takes up residence in its new home on Wacker Drive.  On the bill for opening night is Aida with Rosa Raisa in the title role.  There is little fanfare involved in the dedication of the new house although the lights are brought up before the performance begins and the 3,471 people in attendance stand as The Star Spangled Banner is played.  The crowd begins to arrive over an hour before the opera begins, and in the foyer Samuel Insull greets each person.  He is “the man without whose planning and ciphering and propagandizing and dragooning and bludgeoning the dream of civic opera on a solid foundation of Bedford stone never would have come true.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, November 5, 1929]  Insull is undoubtedly smiling as subscription sales of seats in the opera’s new quarters have already exceeded sales of seats in its former home in the Auditorium Theater by more than a quarter million dollars.  The speedy construction of the building really is a marvel as old buildings stood, waiting to be razed, on the site in February of 1928, and in June of that year the Chicago Civic Opera Company gave a concert in the excavation that had been dug for the building.  It is a joyous evening, perhaps one of the last joyous evenings for many of those in attendance as just six days earlier panicked sellers traded nearly 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange, starting a string of bad news that would last for another 15 years.  But all was joyous on this night as the paper reported, “The memory of the night will abide.  It will linger upon many a radiant detail, but in the long recollection it will center upon that foyer where the leaders of a great commercial capital met to survey their task, and looking up at the columns of gray travertine and the grills of golden bronze and the panels of rose and gold, found that art for art’s sake was a master worth working for.”  The above photo shows the Civic Opera Building under construction in late spring of 1929.

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Labels: 2014, Chicago Events, Chicago Places

Sunday, March 18, 2018

March 18, 2014 -- Navy Pier Flyover Begins

March 18, 2014 – Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Senator Dick Durbin announce that work will begin on an elevated lakefront path, stretching for 1,750 feet, near Navy Pier.  The $60 million, multi-year project will be called the Navy Pier Flyover, and it has been on the drawing board for over ten years.  The construction process will consist of three tricky phases in one of the most congested areas of the city.  In fact, part of the structure will run just nine inches to the west of Lake Point Tower, and engineers will have to remove part of the shoulder of Lake Shore Drive to  wedge the path into place. Phase one will begin on the lakefront trail just north of the Ohio Street Beach and move to the north bank of Ogden Slip with a spur for bicyclers and pedestrians leading toward Navy Pier.  Phase two will carry the flyover across Ogden Slip.  Phase three will bridge the Chicago River, alongside Lake Shore Drive before sloping down to DuSable Park.  The last phase is expected to finish up in the spring of 2018 (although that has now been changed to mid-2019).  In most places the new trail will be 16 feet wide, a superior trek for bikers and walkers who have been forced to vie with one another on a dark, narrow sidewalk across the lower level of the Lake Shore Drive bridge.

March 18, 1903 – The Chicago Daily Tribune editorializes favorably about a bill that will be discussed in Springfield allowing “the commissioners in charge of parks and boulevards bordering on public waters to extend them over and upon the bed of such public waters.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, March 8, 1903] One result of the bill, if approved, will be the ability of the south park commissioners to gain title to the submerged land several hundred yards off shore from Jackson Park north to the Lake-Front Park.  “There is no room for differences of opinion as to the wisdom of an enabling act of this kind,” the editorial writers state.  “It will save for public use and enjoyment what may otherwise be lost to the city.  Chicago has what few other great cities have, a frontage upon a large body of water.  That natural advantage has been utilized thus far for esthetic purposes in Lincoln and Jackson parks … There is no reason why there should not be in the future a lake front open to the people between Grant and Jackson parks.”   The editorial admits that the ability to take advantage of the city’s riparian rights will be hindered by a lack of financing to fund a project of this size.  Despite this the editorial concludes, “The bill to give the park commissioners title to the submerged lands should pass without opposition.  Then the lands will be preserved for the city to be utilized by it when it shall be in a position to do so.”  The above photo, taken in 1907, shows the ongoing project of creating made land in the area that is today Grant Park.

March 18, 1895 -- Twenty paintings by Claude Monet are placed on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. They are described by the Chicago Daily Tribune as "much more rational than those of his followers and imitators. They form an interesting showing of the rapid noting of illusive appearances in nature upon which the fame of the painter rests." Monet had been painting since 1856 and had completed his "Grain Stacks" series, a kind of visual manifesto for Impressionism in 1890. He had painted his series of Rouen Cathedral in 1892 through 1894. It would be interesting to know what 20 paintings went on display in the new building that the Art Institute had occupied for only two years when Monet's works went on display.

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Labels: 2014, Chicago RIver, Navy Pier