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| 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?
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| r-barc.com |
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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