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

Saturday, October 10, 2020

October 10, 1977 -- Walter Mondale Cheered in Columbus Day Parade


October 10, 1977 – Thousands of Chicagoans stand in the sunshine along a ten-block parade route as Vice-President Walter Mondale marches down State Street with Mayor Michael Bilandic and other officials in the city’s annual Columbus Day parade.  Clearly, the Vice-President has an eye toward moving one office higher as “Three times during the parade he distressed his Secret Service contingent by plunging into crowds to shake hands, trade pleasantries, and pat children on the head.”  [Chicago Tribune, October 11, 1977]  Before the parade Mondale attends a mass celebrated by John Cardinal Cody in Our Lady of Pompeii at 1224 West Lexington Avenue.  After a reception at the church, Mondale and other officials walk two blocks west on Lexington to place a wreath at the statue of Christopher Columbus.  Most importantly, Mondale announces on his arrival in the city that a bill signed earlier in the week by President Jimmy Carter will increase federal money for community development in the city from $69 million to $134 million. 

Chicago Tribune photo
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October 10, 1975 – The Chicago Tribune editorializes favorably about a proposal, unveiled four days earlier, for a “Lakefront Gardens for the Arts” to be established where Millennium Park stands today.  On October 6, 1975 four civic organizations – the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, Friends of the Parks, the Open Lands Project, and the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects – propose a 20-acre park that would replace a surface parking lot just east of Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Monroe Streets.  A portion of the park would be built over the Illinois Central Railroad’s commuter line while another section would bridge the extension of Columbus Drive, which was still under construction at the time.  Included in the project would be a 10,000-seat outdoor music bowl that would be surrounded by a grassy area that could seat an additional 20,000 people.  The plan is an alternative to a much more modest Chicago Park District plan that involves rehabilitating the dilapidated band shell in Butler Field east of the Art Institute.  The Tribune editorial clearly states the choice:  “A comparatively small but safe investment in the Butler Field band shell, which would put the Grant Park concerts on a stronger footing; or a bold attempt to make this orchestra a key to greater things, energizing Chicago’s cultural life, giving new life to the downtown area, turning an eyesore into a park, and giving the city the most sophisticated outdoor music facility of any urban area in the nation.”  [Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1975]  Despite the scale of the project the Tribune concludes, “… the dazzling opportunities offered by the Lakefront Gardens plan should be examined and exploited to the full.”  The plan clearly did not get a full examination.  Three days after the editorial is published the Chicago Plan Commission votes, 5-1, to approve the Butler Field band shell with bids to be submitted by November 15.  It would be 25 years before talk once again turned to the site proposed for the Gardens, but it was probably worth the wait as Millennium Park, when it opened in 2004, is as fine a plot of civic green space as one will find anywhere in the world.  The two photos show the way the area looked at the time of the 1975 proposal and the way it looks today.


October 10, 1975 –The federal office building at 230 North Dearborn Street is formally dedicated in a ceremony held in the Federal Center plaza at Dearborn and Adams Streets.  The building is named after John C. Kluczinski, who represented the Fifth District in the United States House of Representatives from 1951 until his death from a heart attack in 1975.  Four premier architecture firms in the city joined forces in the Federal Center design – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as chief designer; Schmidt, Garden and Erikson; C. F. Murphy Associates; and A. Epstein and Sons.  The 42-story office building is part of a complex of three buildings which are exquisitely unified.  According to the General Services Administration description of the plan, “The entire complex is organized on a 28-foot grid pattern subdivided into six 4-foot, 8-inch modules.  This pattern extends from the granite-paved plaza into the ground floor lobbies of the two towers, where the floors and elevator lobby walls are also granite.  The lines of the grid continue vertically up the buildings, integrating each component of the complex” [https://www.gsa.gov/historic-buildings/john-c-kluczynski-federal-building-chicago-il]


October 10, 1909 – Former United States Assistant Secretary of State John Callan O’Laughlin, a Chicago Daily Tribune reporter, writes of the vice he finds in the heart of the city.  “I have been through the red light districts of Chicago,” O’Laughlin begins, “and I am filled with a great loathing.  I have seen your dance halls, where temptation to sin is offered in the form of lights, and music, and drink.  I have seen saloons which are but the ante-rooms to iniquity.  I have visited your vice quarters, and have been astounded at the open traffic that exists therein.  I have learned of how ‘white slavery’ is conducted in Chicago.  I have been told of women imprisoned behind bars and forced to do the will of their keepers.  I have learned of police service to prevent the escape of unfortunates.  The condition that exists is at once heart-rending and disgusting.  It is a blot upon the fair name of Chicago.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 10, 1909] O’Laughlin urges the new police chief to get to work, saying, “It is about time for action.”  He rails at the courts for the dollar or five-dollar fines they dole out, calling the fines “a small commission received by the city from the earnings of vice.”  He suggests that the city take a lesson from Japan, saying, “It can forbid dance halls to sell liquor and to be a rendezvous at all hours for young men and girls.  It can forbid the sale of liquor in any house where women are allowed.  It can forbid the sale of liquor in houses of ill repute.  It can punish as a vagrant or otherwise every man who runs such a house or who has any connection with it or with inducing women to become inmates.  It can stop the youth of the city, including messenger boys, from entering the districts.”
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Friday, October 2, 2020

October 2, 2009 -- Olympics Turn-Down Shocks Chicago

 

October 2, 2009 – Expecting to revel in the news that the city had been awarded the 2016 Summer Olympics, thousands of Chicagoans pack the Daley Center plaza.  It is not to be.  After a three-year effort in which thousands of volunteers participated and into which 72 million dollars in donations had been poured, the news that Chicago is out of the running is delivered by 10:15 a.m.  Chicago does not even make it to the second round of voting despite a last-minute plea from President Barack Obama and lobbying of the members of the International Olympic Committee by Oprah Winfrey.  Mayor Richard M. Daley, who had worked as hard as anyone to make Chicago the Olympic city, said, “We’ve come on a long journey, but the city is better for it . . . Sure, you have tears, you get disappointed – you’re human like anyone else.”  So . . . it was on to Rio in 2016.  Rio without tears.

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October 2, 1939 – At the Arts Club of Chicago “Guernica,” the large mural by Pablo Picasso, is placed on public view.  Eleanor Jewett, in a review for the Chicago Daily Tribune, writes of the large piece, “The ‘Guernica’ came to us as a distinct disappointment.  It is like a huge, unfinished cartoon, the product of a juvenile brain sick from an overdose of fairy stories in which ogres and dragons have played too conspicuous a part.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 3, 1939]  The oil painting, measuring over 11 feet high and 25 feet wide, depicts the bombing of Guernica, a town in northern Spain by Nazi Germany on April 26, 1937.  Because the majority of the Basque town’s male population was away fighting in the resistance movement, most of the victims of the two-hour bombing were women and children.  Estimates placed the number of dead between 200 and 1,700 with 900 more injured.  Jewett observes that “Out of that overwhelming disaster he [Picasso] has salvaged in his fantasy nothing that suggests sheer horror, nothing that conveys terror, death, or anguish.  His picture has as much relation to tragedy as would the action of a man, who, stepping out to lead a throng of weeping survivors of an earthquake in prayer, suddenly squatted and spun a penny.  This penny spinning of Picasso’s may have dignity in your eyes; if it has I do not know whether to envy you or sympathize with you.”  The painting first went on display at the Paris International Exposition of 1937, for which Picasso received the commission from the Spanish Republic.  Following the close of the Paris Expo, the painting was taken on a tour of Europe in an effort to raise funds for Spanish refugees who had fled the country after the Republic collapsed and Francisco Franco took power.  Then, between 1939 and 1952 the painting traveled to art institutions in the United States, Chicago being one of those stops.  It ended up in New York in 1958 and remained there until 1981, when it was returned to Spain, where it can be found today at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.  Over the years its stature has increased as it has come to symbolize the horror of all wars, a reputation far from Jewett’s assessment back in 1939.



October 2, 1938 – A squad of police rescues Cubs manager Gabby Hartnett as he tries to find his family at the Illinois Central station as the team returns from St. Louis where it wrapped up the National League championship.  The police take Hartnett to a fire department car and spirit him away from the crowd. In the meantime, Cubs pitcher Dizzy Dean finds himself surrounded in a parking lot as he looks for friends who had promised to pick him up. The fire department again comes to the rescue, rushing Diz and his wife away in car.  The Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “Other Cubs got similar treatment.  But the scene was fresh out of rescuing fire marshals, so they had to fight their way to cabs which had been pushed back far from the loading pavement.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 3, 1938]  Railroad platforms are crowded all the way home from St. Louis, but the players are unprepared for the huge reception near midnight when they return to the city. The Tribune reports, “Most of the Cubs are small town boys and know that small town folks like to go down to the station on any pretext.  They never dreamed that Chicagoans would go down to a station to look at ball players they can see any one of seventy-seven days in the regular home season.  They really were surprised when they faced that mob last night.”  Perhaps there was a bit too much celebrating … the New York Yankees swept the Cubs in the World Series that followed.


October 2, 1906 – As a result of city council action regarding the regulation of cold storage companies adopted shortly before, 20,000 pounds of canned chicken at the North American Cold Storage company are condemned because they were “utterly bad.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 2, 1906] The company claims there is nothing wrong with the frozen birds, but city officials from the health department disagree, so “seven big policemen are now on guard to see to it that nothing goes in or out of the warehouse.”  As part of the tussle the warehouse’s manager, A. F. Denham, is taken to the Des Plaines Avenue police station in a patrol wagon.  The conflict begins a week earlier when the health department labels 50,000 pounds of canned chicken at the North American company and the A. Booth and Co. as suspicious.  The health commissioner does not take long to arrive at a conclusion, noting that when samples were thawed out the smell “was so nauseating it was necessary to drench them with formalin before they could be handled.”  A rendering company was called, and the Booth plant handed over 30,000 pounds of poultry without protest.  Things proved different at the North American warehouse on Canal Street.  From 10:30 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. Denham confers with health department officials and his lawyer, finally notifying the city that the lawyer has advised him to stand his ground.  Police are summoned and warehouse employees tell them to take the elevator to the top floor where the questionable poultry is stored. Someone apparently tampers with the elevator and it stops on the sixth floor, leaving the officers in the dark of the freezing warehouse.  They are forced to climb down six floors of ladders in order to make their way outside where “their feelings were ruffled.”  They find Manager Denham in his office beside a menacing bulldog.  Denham is arrested and booked on charges of resisting arrest.  All afternoon wagons arrive with goods to be stored in the warehouse, but the officers are resolute, “a trifle overzealous in the matter on account of the experience … on the sixth floor.”  The addition to the North American Cold Storage Warehouse, completed in 1908, is shown above in the 1910 photo.
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Tuesday, September 22, 2020

September 22, 1959 -- Chicago River Properties Given Warning ... Clean It Up

Chicago Tribune Photo


September 22, 1959 – Chicago port officials and Mayor Richard J. Daley announce that they are sending letters of warning to 67 property owners, including the Illinois Central Railroad, in an effort to clean up and repair property along the Chicago River.  If owners ignore the letters, Daley says, the city will take them to court.  The mayor huffs, “I must add that the property owned by the Illinois Central that extends 1,900 feet east of Michigan Avenue, on the south side of the river bank, certainly cannot be called an encouraging sight.  I notice this area every time I walk across the Michigan Avenue bridge, and it is definitely not pleasing.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 23, 1959].  Illinois Central officials maintain that they have no responsibility to maintain the area in question since the company granted the city an easement for connecting Michigan Avenue to the Outer Drive, today’s Lake Shore Drive, in 1919.   Illinois Central president Wayne A. Johnson says, “The railroad’s position on this matter has not changed.  Our attorneys tell us that when we offered the easement the obligation became that of the city of Chicago, with reference to the shore upkeep.  The above photo shows the area in question seven years later when 19 honey locust trees are finally planted east of the Michigan Avenue bridge on July 26, 1966.  



September 22, 1981 – Two firefighters die and six others are injured while fighting an extra-alarm fire in the Willoughby Tower office building at 8 South Michigan Avenue.  Fire Commissioner William Blair says, “There was no chance … there was no way out for them.”  The two firefighters, Joseph Hitz, a snorkel truck driver with Hook and Ladder 1 and Craig McShane, a rookie with Engine 42, fall to their deaths down an open elevator shaft from the twenty-fifth floor to the roof of an elevator stopped at the ninth floor.  The fire on the floor from which they fell started in materials a cleaning crew had left in the elevator, and as a result the car fell until its brakes activated and stopped it on the ninth floor.  Six firefighters exit an elevator on the twenty-fifth floor to find the hallway filled with smoke.  Breathing through air masks, they find an open office through which they are able to reach a fire escape at which point they discover that one of their number, Hitz, is missing.  McShane, the only firefighter who still has air in his self-contained breathing apparatus, crawls back to check, and he falls through the same open elevator shaft into which Hitz had fallen earlier.  Mayor Jane Byrne, standing at the scene as the search for the two men is being conducted, says, “I am deeply sorrowed by the loss of the lives of these two brave firemen …I have conferred with Commissioner Blair and directed him to immediately procure, by the end of the week at the latest, two-way hand radios for every Chicago firemen in hopes that this would prevent a recurrence of such tragic accidents.”  Hitz and McShane are the first Chicago firemen killed on duty since 1978 and the first multiple deaths of Chicago firefighters since 1973. The plaque, pictured above, memorializing the two firefighters, can be seen at the firehouse at 419 South Wells Street, about a mile away from the tragic fire of 1981.


September 22, 1974 – The Chicago Tribune reports that Harry Weese and Associates has won the highest award of the Chicago Chapter of the American Institute of Architects for an apartment building at the southwest corner of South Lake Park Avenue at East Forty-Seventh Street.  A.I.A jurors call the design a “good design at the highest level within the narrow constraints of publicly financed housing.”  The 26-story tower, Lake Shore East, features 38 angled, vertical planes of glass and brick which “give the building’s shape and its interplay of elements many different appearances as they are viewed from various perspectives.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 22, 1974]

 

September 22, 1935 – In the six hours that the Chicago Tribune opens the doors of the new home of its radio station, 4,368 people tour the facilities.  Over 500 visitors fill out forms for a chance to gain admission to the auditorium when performances begin.  The paper describes the new digs in this way, “The lighting effects, the sharp slant of the auditorium for purposes of better vision, the richly covered, deep cushioned seats and the sound proofed walls attracted appreciative comments.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 23, 1935]  The building just to the north of Tribune Tower is laid out or “squared off” with Polaris, the north star, as a sighting point, an innovative approach that allows a variance of about an eighth-inch along the building’s frontage on Michigan Avenue.  On October 5 the auditorium opens with two orchestras entertaining all of the workers who had labored on the building, along with their families.  Colonel Robert R. McCormick, editor and publisher of the paper, tells them, “This victory of peace has a sadness for me, for it means I must part from the men I have watched at this building for the last year and a half . . . You have piled stone on stone, color on color, and joined wire to wire.  You have built here, forever, something that your children will thank you for.  You leave me with emotion.  God bless you and be with you always.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 2, 1935]. Well, not quite forever ... the facility is undergoing significant alteration as it transitions into a new life as part of the Tribune Tower conversion from a commercial skyscraper to a residential tower.
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Wednesday, September 9, 2020

September 9, 1968 -- Mayor Daley Blasts Protestors on National Television

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September 9, 1968 – The National Broadcasting Company carries a special report that airs the full televised news conference, held earlier in the day, in which Mayor Richard J. Daley speaks out “with vigorous, compelling words in a coast-to-coast newscast in support of tough action his administration and Chicago police took against the rioters who tried to tear the city apart during the Democratic national convention.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 10, 1968].  A reporter asks His Honor if he is satisfied with the conduct of the police department.  At first, Daley says no one is ever fully satisfied with any branch of government and that accounts of overzealous police work are being investigated.  But he is just getting warmed up as he continues, “If someone is throwing excrement in your faces, you newspapermen, and you were being called names …. I’d like to ask you what would you do under those circumstances, whether you’d be the calm, collected men you think you are … The confrontation was created by the people who charged the police.”  Another reporter asks if Daley is satisfied with the job police commanders did in commanding officers.  “Were you ever in one of these things,” Daley asks.  “Were you ever a policeman.  What IS effective control if someone hits one of the men alongside of you, knocks him down with a rock or a brick, and hits his eye and throws oven cleaner into his face and blinds him?  What would you do?”  A reporter asks the mayor about the future of the kinds of demonstrations such as the one that took place in Chicago.  Daley says he supports the right of peaceful protesters, continuing “The police department in this country should not have to be subjected to this kind of abuse and this kind of action.  What are we coming to as a society?  What are we coming to as a country if policemen are treated the way they have been treated, not only in Chicago but all over the country?” 

azahner.com
September 9. 2003 – Architect Frank Gehry visits Chicago, appraising the bandshell that he designed in Millennium Park, as both the bandshell and the park are still taking shape.  He leads a tour of the bandshell for “a well-dressed, well-heeled group of Millennium Park donors.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 11, 2003]  Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin describes the upbeat mood of the event, led by Gehry “with stand-up comic skill.”  Gehry pays particular attention to the bridge he designed that will weave sinuously across Columbus Drive, linking Millennium Park with the Daley Bicentennial Plaza, which today is Maggie Daley Park. He says that he sold Mayor Richard M. Daley on the idea for the bridge through the use of a dinner knife, saying that he didn’t threaten the mayor with it … rather, he turned it on an angle to show how the bridge with its sloping sides would look smaller than the mayor thought. Looking at the “trellis” of steel pipes that will rise above the 300 foot wide by 600 foot long great lawn in front of the bandshell, he quips that he told Cindy Pritzker, who contributed $15 million toward the $63 million bandshell that if it rains, “… you can always pull a shmata over the top and cover it,” using a Yiddish word that is sometimes used in reference to clothing.  Toward the end of the talk, someone in the audience asks the architect about the noise from Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street and how it would affect concerts in the new pavilion.  Gehry answers, “You ask the mayor to turn it off.”  The above photo shows the pavilion under construction, close to the time when the architect visited the site.


September 9, 1975 – The trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago announce that no new students will be admitted to the Goodman School of Drama and the final class will graduate in the spring of 1978.  The chairman of the Goodman Theater committee, Stanley M. Freehling, says that it costs the Art Institute $200,000 a year to maintain a school of 25 faculty members for students who pay an average annual tuition of $1,950.  It is stated that the decision concerning the school will not affect the professional theater at the Goodman or future seasons on its main stage.  The school moved to DePaul University in 1977, and the following year the Goodman Theater separated officially from the Art Institute and now functions as the nonprofit Chicago Theatre Group, Inc.


September 9, 1935 – A proposal to extend Wacker Drive from where it ends at Michigan Avenue by building a road east to the point where it is expected to join the new outer drive bridge is brought up in the City Council.  The estimated cost of the project, which will allow traffic from the west side of the Loop to reach the outer drive, is $1,700,000.  When the ordinance is read, Twenty-Fifth Ward Alderman James B. Bowler asks that consideration also be given to the extension of Wacker Drive along the south branch of the river from its present end at Madison Street to Roosevelt or Cermak Roads “in order to provide a connecting link with whatever superhighways might be constructed in the future to serve the west side.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 10, 1935] As it turned out, the extension of Wacker Drive to Lake Shore Drive was not completed until 1975, 40 years after the city council considered the resolution in 1935.  Even in the City that Works change can take a long, long time.  The above photo shows the completion of work on the Wacker Drive extension in 1975.  At that time it linked up with the old "S" curve south of the Lake Shore Drive bridge across the river.


September 9, 1917 – The cornerstone of the Church of St. Clement at Deming Place and Orchard Street takes place at 3:30 p.m. in a ceremony at which Cardinal George Mundelein presides.  The Reverend John Webster Melody of St. Jariath’s church delivers the principal address of the afternoon, which stresses that in the national crisis brought on by the war in Europe “liberty and democracy mean greater national opportunity and are best served by spiritual means.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 10, 1917]  After the service a parade of 2,000 men and boys moves past a crowd of over 8,000 people, most of them members of the congregation. The church was designed by architect George D. Barnett in the Byzantine-Italian Romanesque Revival style, influenced by the architect’s design of the Cathedral Basilica in St. Louis and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.  [openhousechicago.org]  In 2018 a SMNG A project to develop a new entrance to the church and parish center rectory buildings was awarded a Chicago Small Project Award by the American Association of Architects.




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Thursday, September 3, 2020

September 3, 1982 -- Governor Dan Walker Loses Staff Members to Federal Indictments



September 3, 1982 – Three members of former Governor Daniel Walker’s administration and a top campaign contributor are indicted on charges of exchanging state contracts for campaign contributions. This will be the second time the group has been indicted in the scheme that involved state contracts in excess of a million dollars.  The original indictment was rejected by Judge Susan Getzendanner in the U. S. District Court in Chicago because it failed to define specifically the details of the alleged crime. The original indictment alleged that $1.3 million in state contracts went to Millicent Systems and Universal Design Systems at 201 North Wells Street in Chicago in exchange for $80,000 in campaign contributions.  Competitive bids were not required for the contracts because they were for professional services.  In the late 1980's the ex-governor, himself, would serve 18 months of a seven-year prison sentence for bank fraud and perjury.


September 3, 1950 – The Chicago Tribune reports that a 500-unit addition to Altgeld Gardens at 130th Street is soon to get under way.  It will be one of 13 sites that the City Council has approved as subsidized housing for low-income families.  The land for the project was purchased in 1946 and covers 32 acres.  Architects for the huge project will be Naess & Murphy, the same firm that will design the Prudential Building on Randolph Street before the middle of the decade.  The average monthly rental is projected to be $43, and the project will include its own shopping center and “an abundance of parking space.”  The Beaubein Forest Preserve is nearby, and the park district has acquired an additional 15 acres of green space adjoining the development.  It all sounds wonderful – an urban paradise – but as The Chicago Reader later observed, “Altgeld’s proximity to the southeast side’s slew of factories, landfills, dumps, and polluted waterways . . . left its residents exposed and vulnerable.”  [The Chicago Reader, September 4, 2015]
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September 3, 1923 – The Deputy Coroner holds an inquest into the death of Mrs. Nancy Green, an 83-year-old woman who dies when an automobile collided with a laundry truck, overturning on the sidewalk, where Green is standing under the elevated structure at 3100 South State Street.  Green was born on March 4, 1834, as a slave in Montgomery County, Kentucky.  She came to Chicago to serve as a nurse and household servant for the wealthy Walker family, and Charles M. Walker, the chief justice of the Municipal Court and his brother, Dr. Samuel Walker, raved to their friends about the pancakes that she made. [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 4, 1923].  At the age of 56 she was selected by the R. T. Davis Milling Company to serve as the living symbol for its pancake mix.  Nancy Green became Aunt Jemima, and in 1893 the company made the decision to begin a huge promotion of its product at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. According to the African American Registry, “Green was a hit, friendly, a good storyteller … Her exhibition booth drew so many people that special policemen were assigned to keep the crowds moving.”  [aaregistry.org]  The Davis Milling Company received more than 50,000 orders at the fair.  Green signed a lifetime contract and traveled all over the country, promoting the pancake mix.  By 1910 more than 120 million Aunt Jemima pancake meals were being served annually, roughly equivalent to the population of the United States.  [medium.com]. Green was more than a spokesperson for a flour company, though.  She was also an organizer of the Olivet Baptist Church, one of the largest African-American churches in Chicago.  She raised her voice consistently in her late years to advocate for anti-poverty programs and equal rights. She is buried in Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery.  In June of 2020 Quaker Oats announced that it will retire the nearly 130-year-old Aunt Jemima brand and logo, acknowledging that the origins of the brand are based on a racial stereotype.

Burnett M. Chiperfield
September 3, 1909 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports on an investigation by the Chiperfield land investigating committee, authorized by the state legislature to look into abuses related to “made land” along Illinois lakes and rivers.  The current brouhaha relates to land in Edgewater where “a few years ago a broad sandy beach stretched along the shore of that part of the city” and where now residents are not pleased “to have Sheridan road, which used to skirt along the edge of the lake between Bryn Mawr and Foster avenues, shoved back 200 to 500 feet, and to have their beloved beach turned into building lots by the dumping of refuse upon the sand.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 3, 1909] It is alleged that the Lincoln Park board has given two real estate agencies, Cochran and McClure and Corbett and Connery, the right to make new land in the area and sell the property.  One resident says, “When we bought our property last August we supposed that we were within two blocks of the lake, but instead of that we find a real estate sign offering lots for sale at the foot of the street.”  Burnett M. Chiperfield of Canton, Illinois, the head of the Submerged and Shore Lands Legislative Investigating Committee, says, “We have decided that in all cases where we have found individuals or corporations occupying land which we think belongs to the state we shall subpoena them to appear before us and bring with them any proofs which they may have to offer showing their alleged title to the land … We want to get a bird’s eye view of the whole shore line, and a general idea where the towns are located and of the water front streets and that sort of thing, so that when we take testimony regarding certain alleged land grabs, we will have some knowledge of the location … We found some things in East St. Louis and along the Illinois River that look like big steals, and I believe that conditions are as bad all along the water fronts of this state.”


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Tuesday, August 4, 2020

August 4, 1902 -- Subway Needed in Chicago



August 4, 1902 – Aldermanic members of the City Council’s Local Transportation Committee return from an East Coast visit to three cities where they inspected subways and streetcar lines.  They all agree that a Chicago subway is a necessity as is an operating agreement between the different traction lines that carry passengers into the city.  The men speak glowingly of Boston’s unified management of streetcars.  Alderman Charles Werno says, “The service of New York and Boston is so much superior to that of Chicago that comparison is impossible.  The companies in these cities do not allow any passengers to stand on the front platform of a car; neither do they allow anyone to stand on the footboard.  Cars are run during the rush hours at intervals of twenty seconds.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 5, 1902].  Alderman Foreman adds, “The surface cars should handle the short haul, or local, traffic.  They should be a business auxiliary, a means of communication between business houses and offices downtown.  They should serve the same purpose as an elevator in a large building.  People who are through with their business downtown and ready to go home should be furnished with means of going without interfering with people who need the district for business purposes.”   Alderman Bennett is optimistic about the city building a subway with relative ease, “In New York the excavation had to be made through miles of solid rock.  I believe that a subway can be constructed in Chicago much cheaper, because the soil here can be more easily worked.  The work can be done more quickly.  Chicago can have a fine subway at a relatively small cost.  It is only a question of money.”  Bennett’s optimism must have faded as year piled upon year.  The city’s first subway would not open until October 17, 1943.

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August 4, 1946 – The Auditorium Hotel and Theater are sold to Roosevelt College for $400,000 and a promise that the school would pay back taxes amounting to $1,300,000.  Edwin R. Embree, president of the Rosenwald Fund and chairman of the college board of trustees, and Edward J. Sparling, president of the college, say that the purchase will provide additional space for an increasing student population, boosted by the number of ex-service personnel returning to school.    Sparling says, “We had an enrollment of 2,500 last spring, and we’ll have that many in addition this fall.  Our quarters on Wells Street are inadequate, and we’re building now not only for this immediate present but for the future.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 4, 1946]. Sparling vows that the college will return the theater to its glory days.  He says, “The college will put the Auditorium theater, one of the great acoustical wonders of the world, into condition for public service.  Undoubtedly the school will use it, but the theater will be used for great theatrical and operatic productions and for rallies and meetings by the community.”  Roosevelt College, only a year in existence, was formed when a group of educators split from the Central Y.M.C.A. college with help from the Rosenwald fund and the Marshall Field Foundation.  Its plan is to turn the Auditorium Hotel into an instructional facility, combining rooms and suites to create classrooms and lecture halls.  With an optimistic budget of $500,000 to renovate the building, the college still has to deal with issues surrounding the land on which it is built.  Half the hotel and the area on which the Auditorium’s stage, orchestra pit, lobby and seats are located fall under the ownership of a group of investors who purchased the property in 1945, along with the Fine Arts Building to the north, for $750,000.  




August 4, 1928 – Plans for the 47-story One North La Salle Street are announced, a building in the art deco style to be built at the northeast corner of La Salle and Madison Streets.  It will replace the Tacoma building.  Work is expected to begin on May 1, according to K. M. Vitzhum and Co., the architects of the building.  Speculation is that the building will be seven feet shorter than the Pittsfield building on Washington Boulevard and six feet shorter than the First United Methodist Church of Chicago building on Washington and Clark, the two tallest buildings in the city.  The first eight floors of the building will be “artificially ventilated” to “reduce the ear strain caused by wailing taxicab brakes and the miscellaneous street uproar which supposedly blends into a soothing medley of sounds by the time it reaches the ninth floor.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 5, 1928] The Tacoma building, which will be razed, was completed in 1887, following the plans of Holabird and Roche, a tower that some claim to be the first metal-framed skeleton building in the world.  Below One North La Salle above is a photo of the Tacoma Building as it stood at the corner of La Salle and Madison.



August 4, 1903 -- President Foreman of the South Park Board receives a letter from Marshall Field in which the merchant and real estate baron shares his desire to move forward with his offer to pay for the Field Columbian Museum as soon as the lakefront ground is ready for the site.  In the letter Field writes, “I am ready to go forward with the building whenever materials and labor are at reasonable figures, which probably will be as soon as the ground is ready for building.  Regarding the exact location, I think that can be safely left to your board.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 5, 1903]  The site the park board ultimately chooses for the museum is exactly the location of today’s Buckingham Fountain, east of the railroad tracks and at the foot of Congress Street, extending north and south from Van Buren to Harrison.  Foreman responds to the offer, saying, “The Field museum will be the central gem in the greater Grant Park.  It will stand on a slight elevation, will be visible from all directions, and will present an especially imposing view.  The building, I am sure, will be the finest of its kind in the world.  Mr. Field is not in the habit of doing things half way or half-heartedly.”  Field would die in 1906, and it would be another 15 years after his death before his namesake museum would be opened after a decade of acrimony and lawsuits contesting the choice of the original site in Grant Park.   







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