Showing posts with label Criminal Acts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Criminal Acts. Show all posts

Sunday, October 11, 2020

October 11, 1969 -- S.D.S. March through Loop, 105 Arrested


October 11, 1969 – A march through the Loop by 300 members of the Students for a Democratic Society breaks bad as police face off against “demonstrators, using tire chains, clubs, railroad flares, and their fists smashed windows and fought a running battle … in the three-block area from La Salle street to State street.” [Chicago Tribune, October 12, 1969] When things finally wind down 105 demonstrators are under arrest, 27 police officers have been injured and two corporation counsels are hurt with one of them, Richard Elrod, suffering permanent paralysis when he attempts to tackle a demonstrator fleeing police. The march is supposed to proceed down La Salle Street to Jackson Boulevard, but it breaks apart a half-mile north at Madison Street and marchers head east, smashing windows in 15 buildings as they run.  After the Loop is cleared, Governor Richard Ogilvie calls 300 Illinois national guardsmen into the area, but by 7:00 p.m., concluding that the trouble is at an end, he releases all 2,600 guardsmen on alert in the city since they had been summoned earlier in the week. 

pubs.usgs.gov
October 11, 1954 – The rain finally stops.  On October 9, 1954 rain begins to move into the Chicagoland area, and from that Saturday afternoon until Monday morning, the storms continue, bringing 6.21 inches of rain, surpassing a record that has stood for nearly 70 years.  The Chicago Sanitary District orders the locks at the mouth of the river opened at 6:25 p.m. on October 10 and “A gigantic swell of water roared into the lake as the river for a time returned to the original direction of its flow before it had been reversed by canals to the Illinois waterway." [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 12, 1954] Water flows into the counterweight pits of most of the downtown bridges, immobilizing them, and traffic on the river is halted.  The new Edens Highway is closed, and the Racine Avenue pumping station is put out of commission with four feet of water on its main floor.  Before the locks are opened, the Chicago River rises five feet, overflowing in several locations, including the area around Union Station where stormwater pours into the basement of the main post office, where it short-circuits pumps that could have helped keep the water level lower.  Flowing through drains, the floods enter two sub-basements of the Chicago Daily News building, today’s Two Riverside Plaza, where 42 feet of water eventually collects, destroying paper stock valued at a quarter million dollars and shorting out electrical circuits to the paper’s pressroom.  The Chicago Tribune prints seven editions of the Chicago Daily News while fire boats and several fire engines pump the water out of the basements.  the above photo shows the railroad yard near Van Buren Street under water that has also flooded the counterweight pits of the bridge.


October 11, 1926 – Machine guns spread a wave of death across the street from Holy Name Cathedral as two mobsters are killed and three others are wounded.  The sniper targets his victims from the front room of a second-floor apartment at 740 North State Street, a building next door to William F. Schofield’s florist shop, about which you can find more information in this entry at Connecting the Windy City.  One of the men killed is Earl “Hymie” Weiss, a member of the North Side Gang that controlled bootlegging and other illegal activity on the north side of the city, a rival to a gang controlled by Al Capone.  Also killed is Patrick Murray, a known bootlegger.  Weiss holds in his pocket a list of all the men called for jury duty in the trial of Joe Sallis, a south side gang leader who is charged with the murder of another mob captain.  Weiss also has $5,300 in walking-around money on his person.  This is the fifth in a series of gang-related murders in the space of two years, beginning with the murder of mob boss Dean O’Banion in the florist shop on Sate Street.  Police search the rented room from which the shots were fired and find 35 empty .45 caliber shells near the window and “a hundred or more” cigarette butts, “indicating a long period of watchful waiting.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 13, 1926] The Chicago Chief of Police says, “We knew it was coming sooner or later.  And it isn’t over.  I fully expect that there will be a reprisal, then a counter reprisal and so on. These beer feuds go in an eternal vicious cycle. I don’t want to encourage the business, but if somebody has to be killed, it’s a good thing the gangsters are murdering themselves off.  It saves trouble for the police.”


October 11, 1918 – A city commission passes a resolution that all public dancing must be stopped in order to check the influenza-pneumonia epidemic.  Dr. C. St. Clair Drake, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, says, “The order will take effect at once.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 12, 1913]  The commission also adopts a resolution that “attendance at all funerals, contagious disease or otherwise, shall be restricted to the immediate relatives, close friends and necessary attendants.”  In the 24 hours before the commission adopts its resolutions 124 people in the city have died of influenza and 89 from pneumonia.   The commission orders the cancelling of all dances as a necessary step “because of the close contact of the dancers, the exercise of the dance and the frequent chilling of the body that is apt to follow.”  The 1918 pandemic, believed to have begun in a French hospital processing soldiers wounded in the war, led to the deaths of between 50 and 100 million worldwide.  According to the digital encyclopedia at http://www.influenzaarchive.org  “Between the start of Chicago’s epidemic on September 21 and the removal of restrictions on November 16, the Windy City experienced a staggering 38,000 cases of influenza and 13,000 cases of pneumonia . . . Yet, despite these numbers, Chicago actually did fairly well for a city of its size.  In fact, with a population of 2.7 million, Chicago’s epidemic death rate for the period was only 373 out of 100,000, not much worse than its long-time rival St. Louis.”
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Thursday, October 1, 2020

October 1, 1919 -- World Series of 1919 Begins

chicagotribune.com


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 8, 2020

September 8, 1969 -- Reverend Jesse Jackson Jailed on Trespassing Charge

religionnews.com


September 8, 1969 – The Reverend Jesse Jackson, leading a group of 600 protestors, is arrested on charges of criminal trespass at a construction site at the University of Illinois Circle campus after refusing to leave the site.  Jackson, along with two other men arrested for the same offense, refuses to make bond of $250 and is held in custody.  The demonstration is the result of Jackson’s effort to fight racial segregation in the city’s trade unions, an effort that was born of the belief that public construction contracts should include Black workers.  In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, Jackson says, “It’s not understood.  The same people who call us lazy lock us out of trade unions.  We’ve had to fight to get the right skills ot work … In the fight to rebuild where we live, there are countless jobs.  There are probably more jobs than people.  People ask how can you police poverty.  You can’t police poverty.  But you can develop people where you live so there’s less need for police.”  [New York Times, September 23, 1969].  In marching to the site at Halsted Street and Newberry Avenue where an $18 million science and engineering building is being constructed, the protestors defy an injunction issued on August 14, limiting the number of pickets at a construction site to six.  The injunction had been dutifully observed, but on the previous day, according to coalition leaders, union leaders walked out of talks scheduled between them and Black leaders.  It is a day of contrasts for Reverend Jackson as earlier in the day he had been honored as one of Chicago’s 10 outstanding young men at a luncheon at the Palmer House.  This evening he would spend the night in jail.  In the above photo Reverend Jackson uses a police microphone in the back of a police squadrol in an attempt to quiet demonstrators at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus.


September 8, 1973 – Led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, more than 8,000 people march through the Loop from a starting point at State Street and Wacker Drive, headed for a rally in Grant Park.  A spokesman for the Coalition for Jobs and Economic Justice, the sponsor of the march, says, “We are facing a crisis of everyday living.  It is the story of the jobless at the employment gate. It’s 40 million school children facing the loss of milk.  It’s the crisis of the welfare mother trying to fend off malnutrition at supermarket prices, the closed down factory, the bus line that died.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1973] Jack Edward, the Vice-President of the United Auto Workers says at the Grant Park rally, “In 1963 we had a friendly wind at our backs—John F. Kennedy. Now we have adversity at our faces—Richard M. Nixon, whose interest in economic and social justice was clearly demonstrated by his veto this week of a bill that would have raised the minimum wage in steps to $2.20 an hour and extended the protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act to about 7 million workers.”  Organizers had predicted a turn-out of 50,000 protestors, an estimate that was clearly optimistic.  As the above photo shows Reverend Jackson is still at it in 1975 as he leads a rally in favor of the Humphrey-Hawkins act that advocated using government-paid positions to combat the ravages of inflation and unemployment. 

September 8, 1929 – Gompers Park at the corner of Foster and Pulaski Avenues, a 39-acre expanse of green space that is divided by the Chicago River, is dedicated.  Originally a part of the Park District of Albany Park, one of 22 independent park districts that were brought into the Chicago Park District in 1934, the park’s plan was the work of landscape architect Henry J. Stockman. Clarence Hatzfield, a Chicago architect and member of the Albany Park board, designed the park’s fieldhouse.  The park was originally named after Samuel Matson, who had been the Superintendent of Albany Park’s Park District.  According to the Chicago Park District’s website, “Albany Park District President Henry A. Schwartz, an official of the shoemakers’ union, soon convinced the park board that it was inappropriate to name the park for a living person.” Therefore, on this day in 1929 the district renamed the park in honor of Samuel Gompers, who had served as the president of the American Federation of Labor from 1886 until his death in 1924.  A major donation from the Edward M. Marx Foundation led to the dedication of a life-sized statue of the labor leader on Labor Day of 2007.

September 8, 1860 – The schooner Augusta sails into Chicago, reporting that sometime during the night she had collided with the Lady Elgin on the lake.  The Lady Elgin, with somewhere between 400 and 700 passengers aboard, most of them members of Milwaukee’s Irish Union Guard, is holed below the waterline when the Augusta strikes her amidships in the midst of a lake squall, and within 20 minutes she sinks.  No one will ever know how many drown in the lake off Winnetka or die on the rocks just off shore.  Bodies continue to wash ashore well into December, some of them almost 80 miles from the wreck. Many of those aboard the Lady Elgin are never found.  Those who could be identified are returned to Milwaukee for burial, but a number of the unfortunate souls onboard the ship are buried in a mass grave In Highwood, not far from the Port Clinton lighthouse, a place that has since been lost to time.




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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]
medium.com
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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Monday, August 31, 2020

August 31, 1902 -- Lake Michigan Melee


August 31, 1902 – It is a wild night aboard the City of Milwaukee, sailing from St. Joseph, Michigan to Chicago as a spat between Clarence Bloss and his wife, both passengers on the paddlewheel steamer, turns into a near-riot.  Midway between Michigan and Chicago the couple begin to quarrel, and Mr. Bloss tries to get his wife down to their stateroom, a move which she resists.  The fracas draws the attention of the ship’s assistant purser, Sinclair Bastar, who attempts to separate the two, only to have Mrs. Bloss bite him in the arm.  It takes a number of crew members to take Mrs. Bloss to her cabin where she is held for the remainder of the trip.  In Chicago members of the Bloss family call the police, and seven crew members are arrested and taken to the central district station.  Mr. Bloss levels a charge of assault against Bastar, saying that Bastar attacked him and his wife, “striking him in the face and after disabling him [keeping] his wife in a stateroom contrary to her wishes.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 1, 1902] The other six crew members are released, and the return trip of the City of Milwaukee is delayed by a half-hour.  Mrs. Bloss, in the meantime, is taken to the West Side Hospital. 



August 31, 1994 – After 137 years Continental Bank at 231 South La Salle Street, the oldest financial institution in the city to operate as an independent bank, becomes part of BankAmerica Corp., the holding company for Bank of America.  With $187 billion in assets Bank of America scoops up Continental and its $22 billion in assets for a reputed $2 billion. Continental Bank was formed in 1857 as Merchants’ Savings, Loan and Trust Co. with founders such as Cyrus McCormick, George Armour and the city’s first mayor, William Butler Ogden.  In 1924 the bank moved into an impressive new building on the southeast corner of Jackson Boulevard and La Salle Street.  Standing across the street from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago the impressive headquarters had a spacious Grand Banking Hall and a second-floor chairman’s office paneled in oak taken from a sixteenth-century English mansion. [Chicago Tribune, August 31, 1994] In the 1960’s and 1970’s the bank pulled ahead of its chief local rival, the First National Bank of Chicago, and was the first local bank to open a branch in a foreign country.  By 1981 it was the nation’s sixth largest bank.  Things soured in the 1980’s, however.  In 1982 the failure of Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City forced Continental to write off $326 million in Penn Square loans. Two years later rumors that the bank would be sold started a world-wide run on the bank that caused the United States government to step in with a restructuring plan that included a $4.5 billion commitment by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.


August 31, 1925 – The first one-eighth mile of the new Wacker Drive, running east and west along the south side of the river is opened, a project that is expected “to take 41 per cent of the traffic congestion out of the loop.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 31, 1925] All day motorists are attracted “into that broad one-eighth of double decked esplanade like bees to a posy.” The “smooth upper level roadbed” is 72 feet wide and is bordered on one side by a 24-foot sidewalk and on the other by an 18-foot sidewalk which overlooks the Chicago River, 15 feet below.  The paper reports that United States Vice-President Charles G. Dawes has recently conducted a tour of the project for General Geroge Goethals, the chief engineer of the Panama Canal, finished 11 years earlier.  Goethals reportedly remarked, “There isn’t anything equal to this at home or abroad.” Reports the Tribune, “From the finished one-eighth he could visualize the finished stretch of concrete quays, lower level street, upper level street, circling stairways, balustrades, pylons, lamps, pilasters, pedestals and arches which will sweep gracefully along the river’s south bank for three-quarters of a mile from North Michigan boulevard to the junction of Lake and Market streets”. In the above photo the east end of Wacker Drive begins to take shape where the barges are docked across the river from the Wrigley Building.


August 31, 1891 – The Chicago Daily Tribune greets news that a new art museum will be built on the lakefront with an editorial in its favor.  “The most important feature of the scheme, however, is the securing of a permanent art gallery for the city of sufficient dimensions to meet all demands for long years to come . . . It may be anticipated that the new structure will be as perfect as money and skill can make it, and as beautiful as artistic taste can suggest . . . something which will more clearly reflect the growth of enterprise, skill, and artistic taste in the World’s Fair City.”  The paper, and the city along with it, got its wish.

 
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Saturday, August 22, 2020

August 22, 1982 -- Wabash Avenue Strip Joint Busted

 

August 22, 1982 – Police raid the Candy Store at 874 North Wabash Avenue at about 1:30 a.m., arresting 13 people on prostitution charges. A 63-year-old woman is charged with being a keeper of a house of prostitution, and 11 other women are charged with being inmates of the house.  Things change, right?  Today the Sofitel Chicago Magnificent Mile stands on the site.  The hotel, which opened in 2002 with a design by French architect Jean-Paul Viguier, is on the American Institute of Architects America’s Favorite Architecture list.


August 22, 1969 – The City Council Buildings and Zoning Committee unanimously approves the guidelines for the development of the Illinois Central land and air rights south of the Chicago River and east of Michigan Avenue, asking for a change so that advertising signs will be banned in the area.  Louis Hill, the Commissioner of Development and Planning, says that developers will provide streets, utilities, a fire station, a dock wall along the river, a six-acre park, a school, and a subway station to serve the area.  The approval follows four days after the Chicago Plan Commission approves the same plan.   The area approved for the new development is shown in the photo above.

Chicago Tribune photo
August 22, 1961 – Ted Erikson, a rocket fuels research engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, sets a world’s record for open water long distance swimming by becoming the first person to swim the nearly 37 miles between Chicago and Michigan City, Indiana.  The waves are over six-feet high when Erickson and five other swimmers set out from Burnham Harbor at 8:00 a.m. on a Monday morning.  Winds continue to build until they are cresting at 16 feet by 9:00 p.m.  At that point there are just two swimmers remaining – Erikson and Elmer Korbai, a Hungarian refugee.  Shortly before midnight, Korbai, too, drops out.  When officials accompanying him in a boat ask if he wants to call it quits, Korbai shouts, “Put the boat in front of me, and I’ll follow it.”  [Chicago Tribune, August 23, 1961]. By that time he is far off course, a fact he learns later when it is disclosed that he actually swam 43 miles, close to seven more miles than he had originally planned on negotiating.  As he draws closer to Michigan City, a squadron of small boats comes out to meet him, and someone in the flotilla informs him that he has just two miles to go, and “he took 54 strokes a minute for more than an hour before it was discovered that the beach was really six miles away.”  As if that was not enough, a squall line moves into the area and between 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. Erickson only manages to progress a half-block.  Finally, at about 3:00 p.m. he sights a crowd of people gathered on Washington Park Beach, and he tells the sponsor of the effort, auto dealer Jim Moran, that he is going to finish with the butterfly stroke.  (If you have ever tried doing the butterfly for 50 or 100 yards, imagine doing it after 37 hours of continuous swimming!).  That’s what he does.  An estimated 10,000 people are on the beach to greet him, and he is pulled from the lake as waves pound him against the pier just short of the beach. He is placed on a stretcher and given oxygen as he protests, “I don’t want to go to the hospital.  I want to go home.”  In the above photo Erikson is seen shaking the hand of Jim "the Courtesy Man" Moran at the completion of the marathon swim


August 22, 1942 – At 3:00 p.m. the United States Navy formally commissions the aircraft carrier Wolverine off Madison Street.  The ship is the country’s only paddlewheel aircraft carrier and will be used to train pilots operating out of the Naval air station in Glenview as they practice carrier landings and take-offs.  Captain E. A. Lofquist, Chief of Staff of the Ninth Naval District, makes the dedication address, after which the Navy’s commission pennant, displaying one red stripe, one white stripe, and seven stars set in a field of blue, is raised from the Wolverine’s masthead.  Two fighter planes, one of which is piloted by Commander Edward J. O’Neill, a pilot who flew in the Battle of Midway and the officer in charge of operational training once the ship is commissioned, circle overhead during the ceremony.  The city fireboat Fred Busse and two tugs carry several hundred young men who have signed up to take the naval aviation course. For more on the Wolverine and her sister carrier, the Sable, you may turn to entrees in Connecting the Windy City here and here.  Information about Navy Pier and its service during World War II can be found here. 



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Monday, August 17, 2020

August 17, 1978 -- Michigan Avenue German Consulate Under Siege


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August 17, 1978 – The Vice-Consul at the West German Consulate office at 104 South Michigan Avenue is held hostage for ten hours before he is freed by two Croatian terrorists.  The ordeal begins innocently enough when Werner Ickstadt receives a call from the switchboard operator that a Croatian desires an appointment.  Ickstadt leaves his desk to greet the visitor, but instead finds two men one of whom “entered, pushed me aside and pulled a pistol out.”  [Chicago Tribune, August 18, 1978].  Some staff members are able to leave as Ickstadt shouts a warning.  A second man enters with what he says is a bomb in his right hand, saying that he only has to touch two wires together and the building will blow up.  The two intruders assure Ickstadt that nothing will happen to him … they just want him to call the West German government and see that a Croatian nationalist imprisoned in Germany is set free.  At this point there are seven hostages in Ickstadt’s office, but he is able to convince his captors to release an 82-year-old Chicago lawyer and the 17-year-old daughter of the German Consul General.  The two men allow their captives to call family members, pass out cigarettes, order coffee, and even shell out ten bucks for food.  Throughout the ordeal negotiations are conducted which pay off toward evening when the brother of the German prisoner, who happens to be in Chicago, convinces the two men to surrender.  Icstadt sums up the day’s events by saying, “It makes you feel good when you have people from the country where you are a guest try to do everything to assist you.  Makes you feel very good.”  Hero of the day is Deputy Police Superintendent Victor Vrdolyak, who finds himself chief negotiator when officials learn that he speaks Croatian.  He says, “Since he wouldn’t let me near the office, I sat in a chair and had a lot of small talk with him in Croatian.  I asked about his family, where he was from – anything I could think of.  I kept my hands visible at all times.”  [Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1978].  On August 25 a federal grand jury indicts Bozo Kelava, 35, and Mile Dodzman, 31, charging that they “seized, confined, kidnaped, and held for ransom” [Chicago Tribune, august 26, 1978] four people in a 10-hour, 20-minute takeover.  Bond is set at one million dollars for each man.  The Holabird and Roche- designed Monroe Building, pictured above, is where the tense day's events took place.

August 17, 1982 – Preliminary plans for transforming Goldblatt’s closed store on State Street into the Chicago Public Library are unveiled at the Library Board of Director’s meeting.  City architect Joseph Casserly declares that a plaza at the Jackson Street entrance to the building is part of “a design that will give a new, highly imaginative identity to the building.” [Chicago Tribune, August 18, 1982] The plan also has the city demolishing the Kee Department Store on the corner of Jackson Boulevard and State Street, thereby making a Jackson Boulevard entrance to the library feasible.  It is anticipated that the main library will begin moving its collection into the renovated department store sometime in January of 1984.  The top photo shows an artist's rendering of what the converted department store would look like once it becomes the new main library.  The photo below that shows how close the new library on State Street south of Van Buren is to the proposed Goldblatt's conversion.

August 17, 1976 – A sniper opens fire on a crowd in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, wounding two people.  Witnesses say that as many as five shots may have been fired from an elevated sidewalk across the street in Grant Park.  William Charnota, an elevator starter at the hotel at 720 South Michigan Avenue, is grazed in the back of the leg by a bullet, and a minister from San Diego, in town for the Convention of the International Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, is wounded in the hip.  The minister’s wife says, “I wasn’t too keen on coming here in the first place.  I’ve heard all about Chicago and unfortunately it all came true, too true for me.”  Charnota says, “Everybody was falling down, hitting the sidewalk.  When you see all that, you know it’s not just firecrackers. It was pretty crowded.  I guess he figured he had a good target.  It happened in seconds.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 18, 1976] Although a witness describes the assailant to police, darkness and confusion allow the gunman to escape.  In the above Chicago Tribune photo, police search the area in Grant Park across the street from the Conrad Hilton Hotel.

August 17, 1950 – A homeless Navy veteran, James Wagster, 45, leaps into the Chicago River from the Lake Shore Drive Bridge, setting in motion a remarkable series of events that ultimately saves him from death.  Birdell Grant, 28, comes upon Wagster as he stands on the bridge, looking down at the water.  Grant, just released from the prison at Statesville and having been rejected for jobs at 25 places, asks Wagster for directions to an office where he can apply for work as a stevedore.  Wagster’s answer is a question . . . he asks Grant if he has a drink on him.  When Grant replies that he does not, Wagster announces that he is going to get one and jumps from the bridge.  Grant, who suffers from a bone ailment for which he has undergone five operations, makes his way down the bridge stairs to the water’s edge, removing his shirt and shoes on the way, and jumps into the water, suffering cramps just as he reaches Wagster.  Two passing motorists hear the commotion and they, too, jump in the water and swim 60 yards to the two men.  By that time the two bridge tenders, Jack Northrup and Leo Loughran, toss life preservers to the men and a Coast Guard boat arrives to help all four men ashore.  In his efforts Grant loses his last 15 cents;  one of the bridge tenders gives him money for his transportation back home.  Wearing only shorts and wrapped in a police blanket, Wagster, when asked in South State Street Court why he had jumped, tells the judge, “Judge, I must be crazy.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 17, 1950]



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