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

Wednesday, October 7, 2020

October 7, 2007 -- Chicago Marathon Cut Short Amid Record Temperatures

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October 7, 2007 – The La Salle Bank Chicago Marathon, for the first time in its history, is cut short as hundreds of runners melt in the unseasonably warm weather, requiring treatment for heat-related illnesses.  It isn’t until three-and-a-half hours after the start of the race that the marathon is ended, a decision that comes after numerous complaints from runners that there is not enough water on the course, and a 35-year-old Michigan police officer dies around the 19-mile mark.  A fire department spokesman says that about 315 runners out of the 35,000 who started the race were transported by paramedics to hospitals with five people still in serious or critical condition in the evening.  Of the 35,867 runners who begin the race, 24,933 make it to the finish line.  With temperatures approaching 90 degrees the decision to cut the race short comes about 11: 30 a.m.  Runners who had not reached the halfway point at that time are diverted toward Grant Park. Police and firefighters tell those farther ahead in the pack that they should begin walking. Although each of the 15 aid stations along the route is stocked with 50,000 to 70,000 servings of water and 37,000 servings of Gatorade, it just isn’t enough to make up for the extreme heat as volunteers can not keep up with the demand.

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October 7, 2012 – The Chicago Tribune reports that funds left over from the city’s hosting of the NATO summit will “drive a $7 million city investment in parks, building boathouses along the Chicago River and other recreational projects.” [Chicago Tribune, October 7, 2012]  The cost of sponsoring the NATO summit on May 20 and 21 came in under budget and close to six million dollars of private and federal funds remain.  The Chicago Park District will use capital funds to fill out the last million in the improvement projects.  Mayor Rahm Emanuel says that Riis Park in the Belmont Central neighborhood will be renovated, along with the Jackie Robinson, Cornell Square, Pleasant Point and Bronzeville-Buckthorn Parks.  Two million dollars will go toward construction of four boathouses along the banks of the Chicago River – at River and Clark Parks on the North Side, at the South Side’s Ping Tom Park and near the 2800 block of South Eleanor Street.  A proposed 2.65-mile elevated trail through the Northwest Side, today’s “606,” will get $2 million, and a half-million dollars will go to expanding the Chicago Shakespeare in the Parks program.  The WMS Boathouse at Clark Park, designed by Studio Gang, is pictured above.


October 7, 1984 – “Paradise Lost,” screams the headline of the Chicago Tribune the day after the Chicago Cubs lose 6-3 to the San Diego Padres in the fifth game of the National League Championship series.  “I’ve never been a good loser,” says General Manager Dallas Green. “I really feel bad for our guys and all the Chicago fans.  We had them by the throat but we just didn’t go for the jugular.  It all came down to one ballgame and we just didn’t get the job done.  We played good until the last three games of the season.” [Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1984] The Cubs are ahead by a run until the disastrous seventh inning.  Carmelo Martinez leads off with a walk, and Garry Templeton sacrifices him to second.  Tim Flannery, a pinch-hitter, then hits a ground ball to first for a sure out, but first baseman Leon Durham cannot field the nine-hopper and Martinez scores to tie the game.  Three more runs cross the plate before the Cubs retire the side, and the damage is done.  The loss is particularly painful because in the first two games of the series, played in Chicago, the Cubs outscored the Padres 17-2.  Then the trip out west saw the Padres come back to win three games in a row and clinch the championship.  It was nearly dark in a Chicago suburb when I wordlessly turned off the television and left my wife and two daughters, aged 7 and 5.  A mist was falling outside as I left the house at dusk and walked in the cold rain, one more walk to shake off the bitter disappointment that being a Cubs fan had brought through the years and would continue to bring until 2016.  If you can bear to look, the Game Five boot can be found here.


October 7, 1947 -- The Chicago Tribune uses its editorial page to support a movement afoot in the city to change the name of Balbo Avenue, the former Seventh Street.  “It is disgraceful,” the paper observes, “to have a Chicago street named for a man who represented and helped found a system of government that Americans despise.”  The city council fails to take action on a petition requesting a name change for the street because that petition did not have a sufficient number of signatures from actual property owners on the street, many of whom were members of trusts and estates scattered throughout the country.  The paper ignores this technicality, telling the city’s aldermen to “change the name of Balbo Drive immediately,” also suggesting that the street might be renamed after Lieutenant Commander John Waldron who died at the command of Torpedo Squadron 8 in the battle of Midway.  Seventh Street had been renamed in honor of Italo Balbo, the commander of a squadron of 24 seaplanes that flew from Rome to Chicago in 1933 to appear at the Century of Progress World’s Fair that summer.  More information about the Balbo mission can be found here.  The renamed Seventh Street is not the only reminder of the Italian fascist aviator.  The Balbo Column, pictured above, was a gift from Balbo in 1934.  It stands not far from Soldier Field.
 
jbartholomew photo
October 7, 1891 – The equestrian statue of General Ulysses S. Grant is unveiled in Lincoln Park as a quarter of a million people come together for the ceremony to honor the commander of the Union Army who brought the Civil War to a close.  A late morning rain falls throughout the first part of the day, but, just as 20,000 veterans of the Civil War begin their parade to Lincoln Park, “the sun burst forth and the clouds rolled toward the horizon.  Then the gray and the blue blended in the skies even as at the close of the war they blended forever in the heaven of Grant’s heart.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 8, 1891]  Soon after Grant died on July 23, 1885 the decision was made to erect a fitting memorial to him.  People from all over the nation, 100,000 strong, responded to the call, contributing “dimes, quarters, and dollars to commission a monument in his honor.”  [chicagoparkdistrict.com]  Chicago architect William Le Baron Jenney recommended that the statue be placed atop an impressive Romanesque arched base, a structure on which the 18-foot equestrian sculpture of Louis T. Rebisso stands, wrapped in a shroud of two large American flags on Dedication Day.  The day of the dedication is chosen to coincide with the annual reunion of the veterans of the Army of the Tennessee, the troops that made up Grant’s first major command in late 1861, and on this day “Wherever there was any public place there were gatherings of men whose names are part of history.”  Mrs. Julia Grant, staying at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer, comes down to the Palmer House before the ceremony to meet the survivors of her husband’s first regiment, the Twenty-First Illinois Infantry.  The veterans gather around her “and she took each one by the hand, and each one gave his name.  It was not a meeting for any sort of effect.  It was more of a communion.”  Somewhere near 4:00 p.m. the parade of 20,000 men that had started near the Auditorium Theater reaches the southern boundary of the park.  Offshore, boats of all descriptions – lake steamers of the Goodrich and Lehigh Valley lines, private yachts, and government cutters – toss on an unsettled lake.  The ceremony is brief, consisting of an opening prayer and the presentation of the monument to the Lincoln Park Commissioners, followed by the unveiling.  Chicago Mayor Hempstead Washburne accepts the statue on behalf of the people of the city, and Judge W. Q. Gresham, former United States Postmaster General and Secretary of the Treasury, delivers an oration before calling Rebisso, the sculptor, to the dais.  Mrs. Grant is also called to the speaker’s platform, but she is overcome with emotion and “She wept before the old soldiers who had called her out and they bowed their heads, while not a few were visibly affected.”  Long before the last contingents of the long parade reach the park, the ceremony ends and 200,000 or more people head home.
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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.

britannica.com

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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Thursday, October 1, 2020

October 1, 1919 -- World Series of 1919 Begins

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October 1, 1919 – The first game of the 1919 “Black Sox” World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds takes place in Cincinnati’s Redland Field with 30,511 fans in the stands.  In the bottom of the first inning White Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte hits the Reds’ leadoff hitter, Morrie Rath, in the back with his second pitch in what we know now as a prearranged signal to mobster Arnold Rothstein that the fix is on.  [en.wikipedia.org]. Until the fourth inning the game remained close, but in the bottom of that inning Cicotte allows five runs, giving up a triple to the opposing pitcher, Walter Ruether.  Cincinnati ends up winning the game, 9-1.  In the series, which was played in a best-of-nine format, the Reds went on to win in eight games.  In August 1921 eight White Sox players were banned from organized baseball for life although they were acquitted of criminal charges.  An interesting feature of the series in Chicago was an effort by the Chicago Daily Tribune to “broadcast,” in the days before radio or television, the play-by-play of the game through electric scoreboards and a large group of women answering phones.  1,968 people paid 55 cents apiece to watch the scoreboard at Orchestra Hall while another 3,000 watched an open-air scoreboard on the roof of the Colonnade building at 724 South Michigan Avenue.  Seven operators at the offices of the Tribune handled 20,000 calls for updates on the first game.  


skyandtelescope.com
October 1, 2018 – The Yerkes Observatory closes after 121 years of operation.  The observatory, operated by the University of Chicago and located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, was named for Charles Tyson Yerkes, a storied Chicago traction magnate who subsidized the 20-ton telescope and the observatory which houses it.  Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape architect, designed the grounds on which the observatory is located.  The question of what will eventually happen to the site is complicated by a stipulation that Yerkes included in his original agreement with the university, a clause stating that the university would receive the gift “To have and to hold unto the said Trustees and their successors so long as they use the same for the purpose of astronomical investigation, but upon their failure to do so, the property hereby conveyed shall revert to the said Charles T. Yerkes or his heirs at law, the same as if the conveyance had never been made.” [chicagomaroon.com]  The story of how a observatory affiliated with the University of Chicago ended up in Williams Bay, Wisconsin is a fascinating one.  It can be found here in Connecting the Windy City.  


October 1, 1994 – Several days after United States District Court Judge Stanley Harris issues a ruling against the city in its effort to curtail the raising of bridges to permit pleasure boaters to pass freely up and down the river, the Chicago Tribune responds with an editorial.  “Shed no tears for the pleasure-seekers,” the piece argues.  “It is the city’s convenience that matters and that of the thousands of pedestrians, cars, buses and emergency vehicles that daily move through the downtown and suffer frustrating, costly delay when the bridges are up . . . If eventually the city must work out new rules with the boaters and marina owners, they should remember that they are part of the city too, and bringing it to a halt for their convenience is no small privilege.” 


October 1, 1968 –The Chicago City College Board approves a proposal to buy property west of its Loop campus at 64 East Lake Street in order to build a new high-rise campus.  The school’s chancellor, Oscar Shabat, says that the school envisions a campus that will rise 25 to 30 stories. The property between 62 and 54 East Lake Street will provide 10,000 square feet of land with a frontage on Lake Street.  A key to getting the project started is still to come as the Illinois Junior College Board must approve the new building, and that body is waiting on $170 million that the Illinois Board of Education has recommended.  Nothing happens for years, and by the summer of 1974 a report prepared by the office of Mies van der Rohe states that the plan does not appear to be feasible for all kinds of reasons, the most of important of which is the “… deficiency of current plans to integrate the Loop College into the life of the Loop. The site does not offer any special potential to either act as a catalyst for area redevelopment and improvement or to become integrated into the city.” [Chicago Tribune, August 21, 1974] In 1975 a new site is selected for the college in a two-block area between Jackson Boulevard and Congress Street on the west side of State Street, the site on which the Harold Washington Library stands today.  The Chicago City Colleges board began buying land at that location, spending $494,750 for four parcels in the 400 block of South State Street.  Two months later Governor James Thompson vetoes a $7.5 million appropriation to buy any additional land for the college.  Things drag along until March, 1979 when the trustees of Chicago City Colleges approve a plan to buy an existing 25-story office building across the alley from the original location of the college at 64 East Lake Street. In July of that year Chicago City Colleges begins to move forward with the conversion of the office building at 65 East South Water Street.  In that same month the Public Building Commission approves a $14 million renovation of the South Water Street building.  The Chicago Tribune editorializes, “After years of frustration and of nursing plans too ambitious and too expensive to be realized, Loop College can at last expect to have soon a suitable physical plant.”[Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1979]  Not so fast.  Unable to agree on a price for the building on South Water Street, Chicago City Colleges turns to a condemnation proceeding which pegs the cost of the property at $4,454,818, a figure Shabat, still the head of the college, calls a little too rich for the college’s blood.  Finally, on June 13, 1980 ground is broken for an 11-story, $19.3 million college building at the original site that was purchased in 1968 with completion scheduled in 1982.  Shabat says, “I’ve waited 19 years for this day.  Now we can go forward.” [Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1980] Mayor Jane Byrne dedicates the new campus on November 13, 1982.  On December 1, 1987 the college, with 8,217 students, is renamed Harold Washington College in honor of the Chicago mayor who died in office a month earlier. 


October 1, 1930 – A thousand people listen to Frank Lloyd Wright discuss architectural trends in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago.  According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, “Mr. Wright discussed the use of new materials, including glass and steel in the building of skyscraper homes,” emphasizing “that a home is not made up solely of roof and walls, but is toned and dominated by its interior.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 1, 1930] Wright brings an exhibit with him, “a model of a skyscraper built of glass and steel and dwellings of the same materials.”  As part of his remarks Wright says, “There must be no conflict between architecture and nature.  A building should conform to the contour of its surrounding.”  The Johnson Wax Company's headquarters tower in Racine, Wisconsin, shown above, was completed nine years after Wright gave his lecture on glass and steel skyscrapers.


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Tuesday, September 29, 2020

September 29, 2004 -- Cubs Fade in the Stretch

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September 29, 2004 – Still in the hunt in the National League wild-card race, the Chicago Cubs are drooping like end-of-summer marigolds.  There is still hope despite the team’s losing four out of five games to the New York Mets and the Cincinnati Reds, teams with losing records that, when combined, place them 55 games out of first place.  The team has scored only 11 runs in 44 innings, but still is only a half-game out of the lead for the wild-card position.  Manager Dusty Baker says, “We have no choice.  We either keep fighting or roll over and die.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 30, 2004].  On this day, riding on a strong effort by starting pitcher Glendon Rusch, who leaves the game in the seventh inning with a 1-1 tie, the Cubs take the lead in the bottom of that frame when Moise Alou’s sacrifice fly gives them a 2-1 edge.  LaTroy Hawkins is impressive in the ninth as he gets Cincinnati’s first two batters, and goes 0-2 on D’Angelo Jiminez, before surrendering a triple, followed by a game-tying double by Austin Kearns. The score is still tied as the Reds come to bat in the twelfth when relief pitcher Jon Leicester walks Jiminez and Kearns hits a home run.  Catcher Michael Barrett says, after the Cubs are unable to score in the bottom of the inning, “I can’t imagine a more frustrating loss than this one.”  With only four games left in the season, things look bleak for the team, which has played 26 games in 24 days.  On September 25 the Cubs had led San Francisco by 1.5 games in the Wild Card race with only nine games left in the season, but the weary warriors lost six of the final eight games, and the Houston Astros won the Wild Card.  In the last game of the season slugger Sammy Sosa requested that Baker allow him to sit the game out, and when Baker refused, Sosa left the locker room in the early stages of the game.  It was the last time he would wear a Cubs uniform.



September 29, 2003 – The new Soldier Field opens to a national audience as the Chicago Bears take on the Green Bay Packers. The renovated stadium is the product of years of wrangling about what an appropriate venue would be for the Monsters of the Midway and exactly how much taxpayers should be expected to pay for it. As the stadium welcomes its first fans, reviews are mixed.  Joe Antunovich, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Council, says, “We’re stuck with what we have, which I believe is much less than we could have had. It’s an eyesore of the Nth degree. It’s just awful.” [Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2003]  Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic for the New York Times, disagrees, writing, “If your commitment is to classicism, you will find a more authentically classical urbanism in the recast stadium than was present when the concrete colonnades stood alone.  And if your commitment is to conflict, as a city lover’s ought always to be, the field’s controversial reception will not let you down.” [New York Times, September 30, 2003]  The new Soldier Field will hold 61,500 fans, 3,500 fewer than the old stadium, and in the second largest market in the National Football League, it will be the second smallest stadium.  However, 60 percent of the new venue’s seats will be on the sidelines; in the old stadium that number was just 40 percent.  A unique feature of the stadium is that all of the suites and club seats are on one side while all the general-admission seats are on the other. As a result, the west grandstand is 20 feet higher than the east side, which will have four levels of $300,000-a-year luxury suites.  The renovated stadium will also have twice the number of concession stands as its predecessor and more than twice as many bathrooms.  On this night a crowd of 60,257 watches as the Green Bay Packers, with Brett Favre at quarterback, score 17 unanswered points in the first quarter, ultimately defeating the Bears, 38-23.


September 29, 1915 --The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that the Municipal Art Commission has accepted a design for a colonnade or peristyle that will be built on the southeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street.  In the middle of the colonnade will be a fountain, the entire design provided by architect Edward H. Bennett.  The peristyle, finished in 1917, lasted until August 20, 1953 when the Speedway Wrecking Company quickly razed it with the debris used as fill in a northerly extension of Lake Shore Drive.  For more on the original peristyle and its modern replacement, you can turn to Connecting the Windy City and check this entry out.

 

September 29, 1906 – On a “rainy, chilly, and generally disagreeable” day [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 30, 1906] the South Shore Country Club opens its doors for the first time with 92 cases of champagne on hand to warm the 600 people in attendance.  Everyone is on edge as there are intimations that Arthur Burrage Farwell and the Hyde Park Protective Association might try to storm the festivities in an effort to stop the serving of alcohol, but at 4:30 p.m. the club’s president, William Thorne, the president of Montgomery Ward and Company, opens the first bottle of champagne on the club’s wind-swept veranda and calls one of the 200 waiters on hand to serve his guests.  “Here’s defiance to Farwell,” is the toast that follows.  Mr. Farwell’s organization is dedicated to removing the perils of alcohol from the area. “Their arguments – the sanctity of the family, the selling of liquor to minors, the perceived threat to land values and suspicions of gambling and prostitution – were used to garner community support for closing of the taverns.”  [Hyde Park Herald, February 20, 2014]  The association didn’t stop the festivities on this evening.  As the Tribune reported, “Outside the angry surf beat against the shore and the wind moaned above the strains of the orchestra, but in the dining room, where 600 were served, in the reception hall, and the spacious parlor, where the dark green furniture appeared in pleasing contrast against the white woodwork, the scene was of good cheer.” 

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Sunday, March 15, 2020

March 15, 1984 -- Billy Williams Opens Up on the Cubs

baseballhall.org
March 15, 1984 – Oakland A’s batting coach Billy Williams, speaking in Phoenix before the Cubs play an exhibition game against the A's, talks candidly of his years with the Chicago National League ball club.  “It seems to me,” says Williams, “that the Cubs’ organization, through the years, has had more bona-fide players slip through their hands than any other organization I know of.” [Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1984]  All black players on the Cubs, Williams says, were expected to act like Ernie Banks.  “There were times when they wanted me to be like Ernie,” Williams says.  “When I made $100,000 a year for the first time, they said, ‘Now, you know, Ernie never made that much money.’ I said, ‘Hey, I’m not Ernie.’”  Starting pitcher Scott Sanderson gives up six runs in the second inning, including a 450-foot home run to Dave Kingman.  After the game, when asked what pitch he threw to Kingman, Sanderson answers, “It was a real long pitch.”  The Cubs went on to finish first in the National League East division with a record of 96-65.  Jim Frey was named the Associated Press Manager of the Year.  Ryne Sandberg was the National League’s Most Valuable Player. Rick Sutcliffe won the National League Cy Young award.  In a heart-breaking National League Championship series, the Chicago club walloped the San Diego Padres in the first two games of a best-of-five series, going on to lose the next three at Jack Murphy Stadium.  My take on that final game of the series can be found here.


March 15, 1957 – Flames are visible for miles against the night sky as a fire destroys the Illinois Central Railroad outbound freight house at 211 East South Water Street.  The fire gains headway as a stiff wind out of the south fans the blaze as early in the battle a switch engine pulling more than a dozen freight cars, some of them ablaze, from the burning warehouse runs over the first six hose lines stretched across the railroad tracks.  A 4-11 alarm is sounded as two fire boats – the Medill and the Busse – come to the scene to assist.  The freight house has historic significance.  It was at this location that Chicagoans trying to escape the flames of the great fire of 1871, took shelter, close to the lake and the river.

March 15, 1937 – The last street car to run over the lake shore tracks between Chicago Avenue and Ohio Street reaches the entrance of Navy Pier at 1:23 a.m.  A few hours later workers begin to tear up the tracks.  Discontinuation of the service comes as a result of an order of the Illinois Commerce Commission, an order that the transit lines do not appeal.  As soon as the tracks are removed construction will begin on the new approaches to the outer drive bridge across the river, according to the president of the park district, Robert J. Dunham.  The 1921 photo above shows the convenience of public transportation to Navy Pier that the lake shore line provided.


March 15, 1954 -- The Chicago Sanitary District announces that it will build a four-story office building on the site of the former Cyrus Hall McCormick mansion on the northeast corner of Rush and Erie Streets. The property, for which the district pays $212,000, is the site of an 1870's mansion that the "reaper king," Cyrus Hall McCormick, built and which was later occupied by his son, Harold McCormick, who served as the head of International Harvester until his death.

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Wednesday, February 26, 2020

February 26, 1998 -- Harry Caray Fans Line Up to Say Good-Bye

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February 26, 1998 – Fans queue up outside Holy Name Cathedral to say good-bye to Harry Caray, who died on February 18.  Some wait for as long as seven hours to walk down the aisle of the cathedral and stand before the casket of the former play-by-play announcer of both the White Sox and Cubs.  When the door to Holy Name opens at 6:00 p.m. the line of waiting fans winds around the cathedral, north up State Street, east on Chicago Avenue, and south on Wabash all the way to Superior.  Near the casket stands a photograph of Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch.  Caray’s son, Skip, who will take over for his dad in the Cubs broadcast booth, says, “I’ll bet my father is looking down at this and laughing his butt off.  He would love it … Oh my God, I just want to walk around here shaking hands.  I don’t know what to say about all the people.  Not just the people of Chicago, but all over the country – and all the cards.  What a great tribute to him.”  [Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1998] 

February 26, 1954 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that two of the city’s oldest buildings will soon fall to the wrecking ball.  Plans are to replace the first, the 62-year-old Wilkinson Building at the southeast corner of Washington and Wells Streets, with a three-story parking facility for 500 cars.  Known as the Teutonic Building when it was constructed, it was renamed for Theodore Roosevelt before the new owner, John C. Wilkinson, gave the family name to the structure after purchasing it for $175,000 in 1946.  The second building, a five-story structure at the northwest corner of Washington and Dearborn Streets, will have its three top floors demolished and the remaining two floors rebuilt into a “modern two-story shop and office building.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 27, 1954] The building was purchased in October of 1953 for $400,000 with the rebuilding of the structure estimated to cost $135,000. You won’t find anything left of the building there today … the location is approximately where the flagpoles stand on Daley Plaza.  Pretty good job of peeking into the future for the 100 North Dearborn Corporation, the owners of the property – it picks up a corner lot a block away from the seat of city and county government for a half million bucks that ten years later the city would have to acquire in order to build its slick mid-century modern civic center.  The original Teutonic Building is shown in the Rand McNally drawing in the top photo.  The second photo shows that the parking facility that took its place in the mid-1950's is still parking cars just east of the Wells Street elevated tracks.

J. Bartholomew Photo
February 26, 1912 -- Ebenezer Buckingham dies at his residence, 2036 Prairie Avenue.  A graduate of Yale University, Buckingham came to Chicago in 1850, and in 1865 took over management of the grain elevators located at the Illinois Central depot at the mouth of the Chicago River.  By 1873 he and his brother, John, had increased the capacity of the elevators from 700,000 bushels to 2.9 million bushels.  Investing wisely as the city exploded both in population and in industry, Buckingham became the president of the Northwestern National Bank in 1890.  In 1853 Buckingham married Lucy Sturges, and a son, Clarence, and two daughters, Kate and Lucy, were born to the couple.  It was the death of Clarence Buckingham that led Kate Buckingham to provide the generous gift of the fountain dedicated to the memory of her brother that sits today at the head of Congress Avenue. 

February 26, 1903 -- With the payment of $100,000 (close to $3 million in 2020 dollars), the Studebaker brothers become absolute owners of the Fine Arts Building and the ground beneath it. The ground on which the building stood had been held in a 99-year lease that began in May of 1885 with an annual ground rent of $2,000. The building, designed by Solon Spencer Beman, opened in 1886 with a four-story annex added for use by the Art Institute in 1898. On July 7, 1978 the building was declared a Chicago City Landmark. The photo below shows the building as it looked in 1900.
encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org
February 26, 1880 – The Chicago Daily Tribune offers a lengthy dissertation on “the legislation affecting and defining the rights of the Illinois Central Railroad to a location on the Lake-Front …” [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 26, 1880]  In the winter of 1851 the Illinois legislature granted the Illinois Central Railway Company a charter to build a railroad from the terminus of the Illinois and Michigan canal to Cairo with a branch line extending to Chicago and another to Galena.  A section of the charter stated, “The said corporation shall have the right of way upon, and may appropriate to its sole use and control for the purposes contemplated herein, land not exceeding 200 feet in width through its entire length … All such lands, waters, materials, and privileges belonging to the State are hereby granted to said corporation for said purposes.” There was a limitation contained in the charter, though, an important one for Chicago – “Nothing in the act contained shall authorize said corporation to make a location of their track within any city without the consent of the Common Council of said city.”  An amendment to the charter gave Chicago the “power of exercising a police supervision over the harbor for the distance of one mile from the shore line.”  In 1852 the Illinois Central asked for a right-of-way into Chicago and the Common Council passed an ordinance granting it on June 14. The ordinance granted the railroad the right to enter the city at a point that would eventually become Thirty-First Street and, following the boundary of Lake Michigan, north “to such grounds as the said Company may acquire between the north line of Randolph street and the Chicago River … upon which grounds shall be located the depot of said railroad within the city, and such other buildings, slips, or apparatus as may be necessary and convenient for the business of the company.”  The charter also granted the railroad the right to “use in perpetuity” a width of 300 feet from Twelfth Street to the northern line of Randolph Street, ground that had to be not less than 400 feet west of Michigan Avenue and parallel to it.  By 1856 the company had created land from the lake according to the distance specified in the charter.  On September 15, 1856 the Common Council gave the company permission to create additional land east of its right-of-way.  Thirteen years later the Illinois legislature, in what came to be known as the “Lake-Front Bill,” gave the city control, formerly exercised by the state, of the lakefront between Monroe Street and Park Row, today’s Twelfth Street. The bill also gave “all the right and title of the State of Illinois in and to the submerged lands constituting the bed of Lake Michigan and lying east of the tracks and breakwater of the Illinois Central Railroad Company for the distance of one mile” to the Illinois Central from today’s Roosevelt Road to the river, provided the railroad continue to pay to the state seven percent of its gross earnings, an amount specified in the railroad’s original charter.  Under this law the three railroads running along the lakefront – the Illinois Central, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, and the Michigan Central – were directed to pay the city $800,000 at intervals within a year of the passage of the act. On April 15, 1873 the legislature repealed this act.  Despite the repeal, however, in 1880, the year this article appeared in the Tribune, the company maintains that its riparian rights are still intact, holding that “it is a well-established principle in law that the land under navigable waters, to which no private owner has any claim by virtue of his land abutting the water’s edge, belongs to the State, and not to the Federal Government, with the limitation, however, that nothing shall be done to it to interfere with navigation.” The Illinois Central asserts that it has followed all of the stipulations of the 1869 act “and no subsequent action of the Legislature of a repealing character can be of any avail.” The city maintains, though, that a quid pro quo was established at the time of the 1856 agreement in which the city ceded an extra 100-foot strip of land from Randolph Street to what is now Roosevelt Road and, in return, the railroad agreed to erect a breakwater along that stretch of shoreline to prevent erosion that was threatening to wash Michigan Avenue into the lake.  City lawyers also state that the city never accepted the $800,000 specified in the 1869 law, further noting that when the 1869 law was passed, there were “Several property-owners on Michigan avenue, in the immediate vicinity, who had an easement in that portion of the property north of Madison street, and believed that the erection of a depot thereon would seriously damage their lands fronting Michigan avenue”.  A judge granted them an injunction, writing that “in view of the original dedication of the property in question as public ground to be forever free from buildings, it was not in the power of the State or the city to alienate it for another purpose.” Therein lies the issue in 1880 – the railroad was forbidden to put up any buildings between Randolph and Monroe “but there was no prohibition … against filling in or laying tracks.”  The issue of riparian rights and the struggle between the city and the railroads over the lakefront would not stop here.  It would continue for another century.  The photo shows the lakefront sometime around the time of the Tribune article.
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 5 comments
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