Showing posts with label Chicago Neighborhoods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago Neighborhoods. Show all posts

Saturday, October 3, 2020

October 3, 1949 -- David Adler ... Spontaneity, Grace and Elegance




October 3, 1949 –The Chicago Daily Tribune praises the life and work of David Adler, who died on September 27.  Adler was born in Milwaukee in 1882, studied at Princeton University, and, after a time in Europe, joined the office of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw in 1911. He failed the architect’s exam in 1918, and it wasn’t until 1928 that he was awarded an honorary license.  At that point he had over 30 commissions to his name, all of them authenticated by architects who had a background in structural engineering.  During the 1920’s, though, Adler designed some stunning residential homes, many of them on the North
Shore.  The Tribune observes, “Somebody once said that Adler’s houses had the quality of Mozart’s music and, indeed, they have Mozartean spontaneity, grace, and elegance in line and decoration.  They are always fresh but never eccentric or startling.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 3, 1949]  The paper points out a set of row houses near the Elks’ memorial in Lincoln Park as a particular achievement, pointing out that they “display his genius for dealing freshly with established styles and conventional forms.”  The row houses are landmarked and have a fascinating history as can be seen in Chicago’s historic preservation report that can be found at the city site here.  Adler designed them with a partner, Henry Corwith Dangler. In the past couple of years they have seen an impressive renovation effort, resulting in two city homes at Adler on the Park.  According to the @properties website one unit, at 2700 North Lakeview, is listed at $6,600,000. The three photos above show the row houses as they looked in 1922 when they were completed, a few years back when they were serving as what appeared to be a halfway house, and as Adler on the Park.

Chicago Tribune photo

October 3, 1933 – The Illinois Commission to A Century of Progress and the Dante Alighieri Society host a luncheon to honor the Marchese and Marchessa Guglielmo Marconi.  After the luncheon and a visit to the Hall of Science, today’s Museum of Science and Industry, the Marconis are given a reception in the Italian pavilion at the World’s Fair site, which is closed to the public where Marconi, Italian Consul Castruccio and David Sarnoff, all make speeches that are broadcast to Italy.  In the evening the president of the Century of Progress, Rufus C. Dawes, and his wife entertain 125 people at a dinner held in honor of the Marconi’s at the Federal building.  President Walter Dill Scott of Northwestern University presents the Italian inventor with an honorary Doctor of Science degree.  Although everyone in the entourage is exhausted, Marconi insists on traveling back to the fair grounds to visit the amateur radio station, W9USA.  In the darkened Travel and Transport Building of the closed fair, he finds two operators on duty who do not seem to know their visitor, complimenting the men on their transmitting equipment.  One responds, “But it was only built by an amateur,” to which the inventor replies, “Ah, but I am only an amateur myself.”  [rfcafe,com], quite a modest reply, considering he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 and is credited today as being the inventor of radio.  In the above Tribune photo Marconi and his wife meet with Cardinal George William Mundelein after attending services at Holy Name Cathedral during their stay in Chicago.


October 3, 1906 – The Chicago Daily Tribune decrees in its lead on this date, “Chicago is the baseball center of the earth.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 4, 1906] “Since last night a combination pennant pole, marking the site of Chicago has served as the earth’s axis, and around it something less than 2,000,000 maddened baseball fans are dancing a carmagnole of victory, while in every other city in the American and National leagues there is woe.”  After the New York Yankees lose to the Philadelphia Athletics, the city realizes that the magic number has been reached, and the White Sox have clinched the American League pennant.  In one week the team will meet its crosstown rival, the Chicago Cubs, in the World Series.  At the end of July the White Sox were mired in sixth place.   The paper observes that, despite the hopelessness of the situation, “People who cannot understand how the White Sox can win pennants should have visited the American league park and seen Comiskey and Jones working with their bunch of mediocre material, trying to make them into a pennant winning team.  Now Comiskey has a theory that team play will beat individual ability.  He was teaching his team the points.”  After finishing the season with a team batting average of .230, the worst in the American League, the White Sox defeat the Cubs in the World Series in six games.


October 3, 1885 – On this date the Chicago Daily Tribune reports on a letter that the Chief Librarian of the city has sent to the Chairman of the Council Committee on Buildings.  The letter provides detail about the location of the city’s first library, housed in a converted water tank on Dearborn Street, just east of today's Rookery Building.  Mr. Poole, the librarian, urges the temporary removal of the library to the new City Hall, just up the street on Washington Boulevard, citing the grave risk of the city’s entire collection of books being destroyed by fire.  The present location of the library is "overcrowded already, many valuable books being in consequence stored in out-of-the-way corners for want of a place to put them.”  The library has four floors and no elevator.  On the fourth floor is a newspaper reading room of 3,292 square feet, a periodical reading room with 2,307 square feet, and a room for patent books and documents continuing 2,503 square feet.  The floor below contains the main collection in 16,324 square feet of space.  Since the collection of the library is increasing by 10,000 volumes a year and the threat of fire can not be ignored in a city that burned to the ground just 14 years earlier, Librarian Poole is a bit distressed that he has not received an answer from Alderman Mahony, to whom he had directed the letter.  The book room of the "water tank library" can be seen in the engraving above.
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Wednesday, August 12, 2020

August 12, 1942 -- Blackout in Chicago As City Holds First Drill of the War

Chicago Tribune Photo


August 12, 1942 – A spokesman for Commonwealth Edison Company discloses that consumption of electricity drops 54 percent below normal during the evening as Chicagoans participate in a “black-out drill,” conducted between 10:00 p.m. and 10:35 p.m., during which lights are extinguished and windows are covered with screens and curtains.  On a normal evening, the spokesman says, at 10:00 p.m. the company would see a flow of 1,300,000 kilowatts.  During this evening that figure drops to 600,000.  Usage begins to increase when the “all clear” signal is sounded, and by 10:35 p.m. the flow is up to 935,000 again.  By 11:00 p.m. meters register at 1,100,000 kilowatts.   During the five minute black-out armed guards are doubled at generating stations and switching centers of Commonwealth Edison as an extra precaution against sabotage.  This is the city’s first black-out simulation with volunteers standing watch over the city’s neighborhoods, looking for any residents who leave their windows uncovered.  The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that in Albany Park on the Northwest Side there are a dozen air raid wardens and four messengers with another 28 wardens in training.  In the above photo air raid warden Genevieve Hennings perches on a ladder during a simulated drill in the 5000 block of West Newport Avenue.



August 12, 1999 – A power failure leaves the city’s Greek Town neighborhood and 30 square blocks of the Loop from the center of downtown southward in the dark, sends workers tumbling from high rise office buildings and busses packed with people trying to get home moving slowly through intersections where the traffic lights are not working.  Mayor Richard M. Daley says, “I firmly believe this company better get down to ground zero.  Someone should tell [utility executives] about that infrastructure.  Infrastructure is the key.  They’ve neglected it for too long and it’s come home to roost.”  [CNN.com, August 13, 1999] The Board of Trade stops trading because of the service disruption.  Banks in the heart of the city lose power, and the downtown police headquarters operates on emergency generators.  Weather is not involved in the blackout.  Three of four transformers at a downtown substation go offline.  One had been undergoing repairs in the preceding week, and another two shut down while, at the same time, two high voltage cables also fail.  This problem comes less than two weeks after a power failure on July 30 that left 100,000 people in the city without power on the hottest day of the year as temperatures climbed to 104 degrees.  Commonwealth Edison spokesman Keith Bromery engages in an epic feat of understatement when he says, “Basically, we know that we have a reliability problem.” [Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1999] The substation at 868 South Jefferson, shown above, is the area in the south Loop at which three out of four transformers failed.

August 12, 1952 – Ground is broken for the 35-million dollar Prudential building on Randolph Street, east of Michigan Avenue.  Mayor Martin Kennelly and Valentine Howell, the executive vice-president of the Prudential Insurance Company of America scoop up the first shovels of earth for one of the 260 caissons that will support the 41-story building as Holman D. Pettibone, president of the Chicago Title and Trust Company, officiates at the ceremonies.  For an in-depth look at the origins of the Prudential building and what it took to get the thing built, you can turn to this blog entry from 2012.  The above photo shows the area east of Michigan Avenue before Prudential was begun.  It would stand just about where the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign is located.


August 12, 1900 – A few carriages are seen making the entire circuit of Chicago’s boulevard system after the bridge on Diversey Boulevard is completed and the boulevard project is finished.  There are only two breaks in the 30-mile “ring of parks” that runs around the city on three sides – one between Humboldt Boulevard and Humboldt Park and the other south of Douglas Park leading to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.  The latter is particularly notable … “a drive of more than a mile over rough cedar pavements, car tracks, through unpaved streets filled with mudholes and through a big ditch near the drainage channel would almost dispel the favorable impressions gained.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 13, 1900] Lake Shore Drive in Lincoln Park is the least impressive part of the completed system, a route on which “A carriage lurches along through holes that are half a foot deep, wheelmen dodge in and out to avoid them.  Water from sprinkling collects in the holes and splashes carriages and riders.”  There are only ten railroad crossings in the entire 30-mile system.  Although there are rough patches along the way, the Tribune concludes, “A trip over the system now that it is made possible serves to show most of all at what a comparatively slight expenditure the whole thing might be put in shape … When it is finished Chicago will have the longest boulevard drive in the world.”

drioihjournal.blogspot.com
August 12, 1863 – Two years before the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company opens the Union Stockyards on 375 acres of marshland in an area bounded by Halsted Street on the east, South Racine Avenue on the west, Thirty-Ninth Street on the north and Forty-Seventh Street on the south, the Chicago Tribune is already editorializing about the conditions in the area around what is today Bridgeport.  The paper observes, “It is said that the stench that is now complained of as arising from Bridgeport, or in that direction, is from several slaughterhouses which continue to spread their putrescent matter broadcast, inflicting the nauseating and unhealthy atmosphere upon the inhabitants.”  [Chicago Tribune, August 12, 1863].  The piece concludes, “No man should be considered a good citizen who will thus outrage the feelings and endanger the health of others.”  For good measure the editorial states in full the law governing businesses such as the ones creating the nuisance:  No person shall hereafter, throw, place or conduct, or suffer his or her servant, child or family to throw, place or conduct into any street, alley or lot, any putrid or unsound beef, pork, fish, hides or skins, of any kind, or any filth, offal, dung, dead animal, vegetables, oyster shells, or other unsound or offensive matter whatever or anything like to become offensive.  Nor shall any person allow such filth, offal, dung, or other offensive matter as aforesaid, to be or remain upon any premises, or in any out-house, stable, privy or other place owned or occupied by them, or in any alley or street in front of such premises, in such manner as to be offensive to the neighborhood.  And every person who shall violate any of the provisions of this section, shall be fined in a sum not exceeding twenty-five dollars.”  The conditions against which the writers protest would get much, much worse as the Union Stock Yards would eventually hold 2,300 separate livestock pens with enough room, at a single time, to hold 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle, and 22,000 sheep.




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Wednesday, August 5, 2020

August 5, 1966 -- Cr. King Felled by Rock in Chicago March

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August 5, 1966 – The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King leads a large number of people in an open housing march on a real estate office on Sixty-Third Street as “a hail of rocks, bottles, and curses and jeers” [Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1966] greets the group.  Forty-one people protesting the march are arrested and still more are arrested afterward when an attempt is made by whites shouting racial slurs to block Kedzie Avenue from Marquette Road to Sixty-Third Street.  Projectiles hurled at Dr. King’s marchers, including bricks and bottles and at least one knife, injure at least 30 people as well as four police officers.  Dr. King himself is struck by a rock as he gets out of a car on Sacramento Avenue in Marquette Park to join 700 demonstrators.  He is knocked to one knee and stays there as he attempts to clear his head.  He says, “I have to do this – to expose myself – to bring this hate into the open.  I have seen many demonstrations in the south but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”  An estimated 1,200 policemen are on hand to provide protection for the marchers.  At Sixty-Fourth Street and California Avenue, the marchers are stopped when 300 white teenagers sit down in the street.  Police disburse them, only to have the group run a half-block north and block the road again.  Police charge the youths again, and the march continues to the F. H. Halvorsen Co., Inc., real estate office at 3145 West Sixty-Third Street, which is closed.  Re-tracing their steps in relative calm, the marchers return to Marquette Park where an estimated 4,000 people jeer, heckle and throw rocks and firecrackers at them.  The assistant deputy superintendent of police, Captain James Hartnett, calls the violence the worst of the summer.


August 5, 1970:  With 200 police officers gathered from seven other suburbs on hand, Highland Park’s Ravinia Park gives its stage to Janis Joplin and the Full Tilt Boogie Band.  The Chicago Tribune describes the scene as a mob consisting of “20,000 clapping screaming youths listening to the Full Tilt Boogie band . . . Highland Park Police Chief Michael Bonamarte waiting for a riot.”  [Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1970]  “In her satin hooker clothes,” Tribune music critic Linda Winer writes, “no less than a full fall of purple feathers sitting atop her tangled hair, foot stamping, bottom waving, Southern Comfort swigging Miss Joplin could almost convince you to just watch her sing all night.”  Eight days after the concert at Ravinia Joplin gives her final public concert at Harvard Stadium.  On October 4, in the middle of recording her album Pearl, she fails to show up at the studio, and at the age of 27 she is found, dead of an overdose at Hollywood’s Landmark Hotel.

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August 5, 1967 – A thief nabs an Andrew Wyeth painting, “Artist’s Studio,” from the Sears-Vincent Price Gallery at 140 East Ontario Street and vanishes.  Although a dozen patrons are inside the gallery when the painting disappears, no one sees the thief, who escapes with the 50-pound painting and its driftwood frame at 2:00 p.m.   At least ten galleries are located within the general area and the director of the gallery, Harold Patton, says, “People are always walking around with paintings in this area.”  The painting was completed in 1966 and had hung in the gallery since Sears opened the showroom. In the Fall of 2000 the painting, depicting the artists’ studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, turned up at Christie’s Auction House in New York.  Its value had grown from $30,000 at the time of the theft to more than $500,000 by the time it re-surfaced.   

Leo Noble Burnett
August 5, 1935 –The announcement is made that a new advertising agency, known as the Burnett Company, Inc. with offices at 360 North Michigan Avenue, has been formed.  The founder, Leo Noble Burnett, was born in St. Johns, Michigan where he resided until his graduation from the University of Michigan in 1914. He came to Illinois, working briefly as a reporter for the Peoria Journal before moving on to edit the company magazine for the Cadillac Motor Car Company.  Burnett served a stint in the United States Navy during World War I before becoming vice-president of the Lafayette Motor Company and later, vice-president of the Homer McKee Advertising Agency in Indianapolis.  In 1930 he joined Erwin, Wasey and Company where he oversaw the account of the Minnesota Canning Company, a marketer of Niblets and Green Giant canned vegetables.  On August 1, 1935 Burnett resigned and four days later began the new firm with three accounts: Minnesota Canning, Hoover, and Realsilk Hosiery.  The motto of the new agency became “Reach for the Stars.”  AdAge said of the man, “Although a short, somewhat stout man with little physical charisma or pretense, Burnett became a central figure in the Chicago advertising scene as his agency grew competitive with the major New York shops. In 1953, the Leo Burnett Company moved onto the list of the top 10 American agencies with billings of $46.4 million.  The following year it won Philip Morris Cos.’ Marlboro account; Burnett took a personal role in repositioning the brand from a women’s cigarette to a men’s with the introduction of the ‘Marlboro Man’ campaign.”  Burnett died at his home in Lake Zurich on June 7, 1971 after putting in a full day at the office.  In 1999 Advertising Age named him as the third most important advertising person of the century.  The same publication named the agency’s Marlboro Man, Jolly Green Giant, Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger among the top ten advertising icons of the century.  No other agency in the country had more than one in the list.


August 5, 1912 – As the new National Progressive Party with Theodore Roosevelt at its head is at the beginning of its rise, suffragettes parade through Chicago in recognition of the fact that the new party will carry a plank in its platform that advocates giving women the right to vote.  According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, “A crowd of many hundreds, flaunting banners and headed by a band, formed in front of the Art Institute and marched to the Coliseum.  It included women of every age and many stations in life.  There were gray haired grandmothers and young girls still with their schooling unfinished; mothers of families and old maids.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 5, 1912] So many women showed up for the parade that it was difficult to get the march organized.  At one point the main group of marchers was asked to move back about six feet.  Mrs. Catherine Waugh McCulloch, responding to the request, said, “What!  Retreat?  We never retreat!”  A squad of mounted police leads the procession, followed by a marching band, the band followed by a group of young women from the University of Chicago. The lead automobile carries Miss Jane Addams, Mrs. H. M. Wilmarth and Mrs. Isabella Blaney, a delegate from California.  Other cars follow, but the most impressive portion of the procession is made up of the ranks of women, many of whom have never been in a public march before.  One Methodist deaconess, Miss Estella Manley, says, “We are progressives and believe in suffrage because we see the necessity of a progressive movement in our work against the traffic in women.  No one realizes how ineffective a law can be and how much a community is in need of progressive lawmakers until one has done some uplift work in a community.”


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Friday, June 26, 2020

June 26, 1961 -- Ogden Slip Real Estate to Be Developed ... Sometime


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June 26, 1961 – Officials of the Chicago Dock and Canal Company announce that the firm will be conducting a study to assess the potential of a 45-acre plot along the north bank of the Chicago River, surrounding the Ogden Slip and the adjoining area east of Lake Shore Drive.  The firm, founded by the first mayor of Chicago, William B. Ogden, has owned the property since 1857.  All good things take time.  It will be 25 years before the company seals a joint agreement with the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States to pool the 45-acre site of Chicago Dock and Canal with 50 acres to the west that is owned by Equitable.  In June of 1986 it is viewed as a $3-billion development deal, involving 20 to 25 million feet of space running along the north of the Chicago River in close proximity to Lake Michigan.  The three pictures above show the change over time.  The first one, taken in the 1950’s shows the shaded area controlled by Chicago Dock and Canal with the Ogden Slip shown in blue.  The second photo shows Lake Point Tower as it nears completion on the east side of Lake Shore Drive.  The final photo shows the area as it exists today. 


 June 26, 1919 – The steamer Lake Granby with Captain John Klang in command casts off her lines in the Chicago River and starts her run to Liverpool with a cargo of meat products.  This will be the first shipment of goods from Chicago directly to a foreign port. The Lake Granby carries a Chicago crew and was built in the Chicago area.  Before departure, lunch is served on the steamship for a group of businessmen and a bottle of champagne is broken over the ship’s bow.  The Vice-President of meat-packing company Morris and Co., Charles M. MacFarlane, explains the purpose of the trip, saying, “The advantages of this mode of sending shipments to Europe are great, as it eliminates rail shipment to New York.  It relieves the congestion at the seaboard and does away with all the reloading, demurrage, and other charges usually incident to shipment to the seaboard.  Shippers from points west of Chicago, on the Missouri river and the other points in that direction are all interested in the development of this branch of the service because it means their own commodities can be handled to much greater advantage through Chicago than by having them shipped to New York.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 27, 1919] The through-freight rate from Chicago to Liverpool by the all-water route is $1.25 per 100 pounds for the meat products the Lake Granby is carrying.  The rate would be $1.45 per 100 pounds for the same cargo, using the railroads to New York and a ship to Liverpool.  Notice how high the Lake Granby rides in the water in the above photo.  Because the maximum depth in the Welland Canal locks permits only 14 feet of draft and the Lake Granby draws 25 feet when loaded to the water line, the ship will stop in Montreal to take on additional cargo.

June 26, 1893 –On the occasion of its sixtieth anniversary, the Chicago Daily Tribune provides a history of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago.  The church, located in 1893 at Indiana and Twenty-First Street, was formed on June 26,1838 inside the walls of Fort Dearborn.  Twenty-six members made up the first congregation, 16 of whom were soldiers stationed at the garrison. The first real meeting place for the new congregation was situated “on a lonely spot at the southwest corner of Lake and Clark Streets.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 26, 1893] People approached that first church “across a large slough, bridged with benches from the meeting-house.”  It was here that “North-Siders came, not as you come to church now in carriages, but braving the angry flood in a canoe and climbing along the fences to escape the unknown depths of prairie mud.”  Classes in the first public school in Chicago were also held in the 40- x 25-foot building. The church has moved several times over the years.  For a number of years services were held in a substantial stone building at Twenty-First Street and Indiana Avenue.  The present Gothic-Revival building at 6400 South Kimbark Avenue was dedicated on October 24, 1928 and came about as a result of a merger of the First Presbyterian congregation and the Woodlawn Park Presbyterian Church which was formed in January of 1885.  Today the congregation is known as the Woodlawn Collaborative First Presbyterian Church. The congregation's church building at Twenty-First and Indiana Avenues is shown in the above photo.
chicagology.com
June 26, 1886 – An accident at Dearborn Street on the Main Stem of the Chicago River sets the river on fire.  While a ship is being unloaded at the Chicago and North Western Railroad dock at Dearborn Street, a barrel of kerosene is accidentally dropped, the contents of which spread across the surface of the river.  After the ship departs, a dock worker throws a lighted match into the river “just to see if the stuff would burn.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 26, 1886]. It did.  A sheet of flame shoots across the river toward the Clark and State Street bridges and surrounds the excursion boat Albert J. Wright.  An alarm is sent in from the corner of Clark and South Water Streets, but before the engines can arrive, the fire burns itself out, leaving only a blackened set of pilings along the edge of the river., The State Street bridge and the Dearborn Street bridge beyond are shown in this photo taken a few years earlier.
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June 26, 1862 – The Chicago Tribune begins yet another editorial about the Chicago River in this way, “It is conceded by all men that something must be done immediately to improve the sanitary condition of the Chicago River.  The good name of our city, the lives of thousands of our citizens, and, its commerce, growth and prosperity imperatively demand immediate and energetic action . . . In its present condition, a week of hot weather will render a block or two on each side of the river uninhabitable.  And, besides what is to become of our vast shipping interest—the men who navigate our tugs and attend to the bridges, and virtually are forced to live during the season amid the intolerable pestilence-breeding stench of the river, and the crews of our propellers, canal boats, and vessels that are obliged to live upon the river from one to three days at a time?  A week of hot weather will drive them from the river, and no man is so stupid as not to know that Chicago is nothing without her commerce.”  The paper has solutions.  Pumps at Bridgeport “can clear it out and, aired by the process and mingled with the water of the Des Plaines it will pass South without inconvenience or offence to any body.”  But the North Branch, with virtually no current, is a different story, and the Tribune has a solution for that as well:  “Place one or half a dozen pumps, if necessary, driven by wind mills on the Lake shore, at or near the north end of the old cemetery, and let the water be discharged in a ditch running due west into the North Branch.  Let the pumps be of the largest size, and such are now used upon our railroads.”   How different North Avenue would be today if instead of its popular beach and nautical-themed boathouse it was the site of a half-dozen windmills, churning away in the Windy City, pumping lake water west to the river.

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Wednesday, June 10, 2020

June 10, 1962 -- University of Illinois, a Connection to the Chicago Plan of 1909

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June 10, 1962 – The Chicago Daily Tribune publishes an article on development that is beginning in an area where Congress Street intersects Halsted Street, making the point that this area is the same one that was featured over a half-century earlier in the Chicago Plan of 1909, the space that would relate to the city, according to the plan as “the Acropolis was to Athens, or the Forum to Rome, and what St. Mark’s Square is to Venice – the very embodiment of city life.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 10, 1962].  It was to be a “center of gravity, so to speak, of all radial arteries entering Chicago.”  There would be no great civic center at this location, no great civic building with a dome that could be “seen and felt by the people.”  Instead, beginning in the fall of 1962, construction would begin on the $60-million University of Illinois campus with a prediction that 20,000 students would be attending classes on the campus by 1969.  It was a site that had been chosen after a seven-year search, and according to the city’s planning commissioner, Ira Bach, “It was not until the Congress-Halsted site had finally been chosen for the campus that anyone realized that Burnham and Bennett were the original proponents of using this area for a great public purpose.” 

J. Bartholomew Photo
June 10, 1958 – The park board reaches a decision on a request from the Civil War Round Table that the 3,500-ton statue of General Ulysses M. Grant be moved from Lincoln Park to Grant Park.  Noting that it would cost $230,000 at a minimum to move the statue, the park board decides to take no action.  When the statue was placed in its current location in 1891 Grant Park did not exist, in name or in fact.  It was noted architect William Le Baron Jenney who suggested that “a monumental, Romanesque arched structure” [www.chicagoparkdistrict.com] carry the statue of Grant.  The massive base of rusticated stone was the work of a Cincinnati artist, Louis T. Rebisso, who also created the 18-foot tall equestrian statue of the great general and U. S. president.  Over 200,000 people attended the dedication ceremonies for the work in 1891.

June 10, 1949 – John T. McCutcheon, 79, a cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune, dies at his home at 1272 Green Bay Road in Lake Forest. McCutcheon began his career as a newspaper artist at the Chicago Record, later the Chicago Morning News, in 1889.  He worked in various iterations of that paper until he moved to the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1903.  The Online Comics Journal summarizes the jobs of newspaper artists such as McCutcheon at the turn of the century in this way, “Newspaper artists furnished all the illustrative material for the papers of the day.  The halftone engraving process for reproducing photographs had been perfected in 1886, but it was not adapted successfully to the big rotary presses until the New York Tribune did it in 1897.  Until the turn of the century, newspaper sketch artists were graphic reporters, covering all the events that photographers were to cover later.  McCutcheon drew pictures of everything.  He illustrated major news events, often working from sketches made on-the-spot. A typical day might include a trial in the morning, a sporting event or crime scene or a local catastrophe in the afternoon, and an art show opening or a flood or fire in the evening … he was more illustrator than cartoonist, and he also wrote occasional feature pieces and newsstories [sic].”  Without a doubt the most famous of the thousands and thousands of illustrations and cartoons that McCutcheon produced is “Injun Summer,” first published on September 20, 1907, in which a small boy and an older gentleman look over an Indiana corn field as shocks of corn turn into an Indian campground.



June 10, 1946 – A monument to Louis Pasteur, originally dedicated in a 1928 Grant Park ceremony, is rededicated at a new site in a park near Cook County Hospital at 1800 West Harrison Street.  Dr. R. B. Allen, the Dean of the University of Illinois Chicago colleges in the medical district, makes the presentation with the principal address given by Dr. Edwin P. Jordan, the Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The monument is officially handed over to Cook County during the ceremony, and the president of the Cook County Board, Clayton F. Smith, makes the acceptance speech.  The monument was originally erected as a result of a collaboration of civic leaders in 1926, led by Dr. Frank Billings, who had studied under Pasteur.  The park just to the north of the old Cook County Hospital is an appropriate setting for the county’s monument; its creator, Leon Hermant, who was awarded the French Légion d’honneur for the work, was also responsible for much of the architectural sculpture on the Cook County building on Clark Street between Washington Boulevard and Randolph Street.  On the rear of the sculpture’s base, a bronze plaque reads, “One doesn’t ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says, You suffer. This is enough for me. You belong to me and I shall help you. – Louis Pasteur”  When the sculpture was dedicated on October 27, 1928 the ceremony was so important that United States Vice-President Charles Dawes and the French Ambassador to the United States Paul Claudel. were present.  You would not guess that today, as the monument sits largely ignored and deteriorating in a small plot of green space, surrounded by expressway noise and sirens, with a helicopter landing pad between it and the old hospital. The top photo shows the statue at its dedication just west of the Field Museum in 1926.  The photo below that shows the monument as it exists today.

June 10, 1923 – The Chicago Tribune prints the following announcement, “On this June morning, which brings its diamond jubilee day, The Chicago Tribune takes the first step toward the creation of a monument which shall commemorate three-quarters of a century of achievement and shall be to this community and this newspaper an inspiration for the future.”  [Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1943]  With prizes totaling $100,000 the paper opens “to the architects of all countries" an opportunity to design “the most beautiful building in the modern world” to be constructed on North Michigan Avenue just west of the paper’s existing printing plant.  For a reasonably concise explanation of the competition and how it came out, you can head to this entry in Connecting the Windy City. 

The goals of the contest are four in number.  They include:

1.  The erection of a structure of enduring beauty which shall be at once a glory to journalism and to the city, and a model of practicality.  The Tribune seeks, in short, artistic nobility and business effectiveness.

2.  The providing of new quarters for the rapidly extending demands of a newspaper which, though it looks back this morning on 75 fruitful years, lives in an unparalleled present.

3.  The offering of financial encouragement so emphatic and so prompt that it will give fresh impetus to the great cause of commercial architecture in America.  Whether this encouragement will discover and develop new talent, or give added recognition to men whose fame is already established, the result of this competition will show.

4.  The addition to the assured architectural splendors of the new North Michigan boulevard of a building which will give the tone and tendency to a thoroughfare that soon will be the most impressive street in the western world.
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