Connecting the Windy City

Sunday, September 27, 2020

September 27, 1991 -- Fourth United States Army Place On Inactive Status

 

walmart.com

September 27, 1991 – In a ceremony at Fort Sheridan the Fourth United States Army is placed on inactive status.  Deactivating the Fourth Army is part of a five-year plan, conceived under the direction of U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, that will provide for “a gradual transition to a smaller, more capable military force.” [Chicago Tribune, September 27, 1991]  Only 119 active Army positions and 216 civilian positions are affected by the deactivation, and many of these individuals will be transferred to other positions.  The Fourth Army was responsible for Army Reserve units in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa.  That command will now fall to the First U.S. Army, based in Fort Meade, Maryland. This move has no effect on the decision to close Fort Sheridan, scheduled to shut down in 1994; it will ultimately close as a military installation on May 28, 1993.

September 27, 1991 – The largest public works deal in the history of the city is awarded to a team of firms led by real estate developer Richard Stein as a $675 million contract for the design and construction of an exhibition hall and galleria west of the current McCormick Place.  The contract is signed just two days after Illinois Governor Jim Edgar signs into law a $987 million expansion program that the General Assembly had approved in July.  Edgar says, “This expansion will allow shows to stay in Chicago and allow millions of dollars to come into our economy.  This legislation is a plus for all the people of Illinois.” [Chicago Tribune, September 28, 1991] Work on the new complex is expected to begin in February of 1993 with completion by August of 1996. Stein’s group, known as Mc3D, is the only one of the three proposals submitted that puts all the exhibition space in the new building on one floor. The group also will be responsible for constructing an 80-foot galleria that will connect the new south building with the north building and the original east building.  The whole package of nearly a billion dollars of work also includes a modest $60 million-dollar plan that will dramatically enhance the lakefront – the rerouting of the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive to the west of Soldier Field, creating a beautiful swath of green space and a campus for the three great cultural attractions on the lakefront, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of Natural History and the Adler Planetarium.

September 27, 1911 –The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that Chicagoan George J. Lawton has bought the Auditorium office building, hotel and theater for $48,680 at a county tax sale. Lawton says, “I am going to make a test case and see if I can get possession of this property.  I can get a deed, and as soon as I get that I’m going to try to get a title. If I can get that, I will begin legal proceedings to oust the present owners.  It will take two years to fight it out, but I think it’s worth trying.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 27, 1911] The owners of the property in question failed to pay taxes on May 1, and six weeks later the County Treasurer advertises the property for sale.  The property is sold at public auction on September 22, and Lawton wrests the valuable property away from a consortium made up of the Studebakers of South Bend, Ind.; Ambrose Cramer of Lake Forest; and the Peck estate of Chicago.  It is estimated that the property and the building together are worth close to $4,000,000.  Seven years earlier the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had left the building for new digs on Michigan Avenue.  The hotel had lost prestige as more modern buildings opened up, and the offices in the structure were left to compete with the new skyscrapers springing up in the Loop, most of them not looking out at the noisy elevated tracks.  It is probable that the building would have been torn down, had it not been for the fact that the razing of the structure would have cost more than the land on which it stood was worth.

September 27, 1910 – As 200,000 people look on, Walter L. Brookins circles his Wright biplane 2,500 feet above the city for a sustained flight of 20 minutes.  Taking off from Grant Park, which was “black with humanity,” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1910] the aviator thrills the crowd as he soars south to Twelfth Street, over the Loop to the Federal Building on Dearborn Street, and back over the lake.  “Chicago looks for all the world like the picture on a postal card when you are 2,000 feet above it,” Brookins says at the end of the flight.  “I could look down between my legs and see everything, but of course could recognize only a few of the buildings.  I knew the federal building as soon as I saw it and I stopped my westward flight as I looked directly beneath me.”  The next day Brookins would attempt a sustained trip from Chicago to Springfield in an attempt to outrun an Illinois Central passenger train.

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 12:30 AM 0 comments

Labels: 1991, Chicago Event, Fort Sheridan

Sunday, September 6, 2020

September 6, 1970 -- Chicago Beach Hotel Gone, But Not Forgotten

wikimedia.org

chuckmanchicagonostalgia

September 6, 1970 – The Chicago Tribune reports that construction crews have moved to a site at East Fiftieth Street and South Shore Drive where once stood the exclusive Chicago Beach Hotel, “a symbol of Gay Nineties and Roaring Twenties affluence.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 6, 1970]  Warren Leland, who came from a family of hoteliers and made his way to Chicago in the 1880’s, built the original Chicago Beach Hotel in 1892 to serve the huge crowds that came to the city to visit the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.  It had 450 rooms with 175 bathrooms with frontage on Lake Michigan. The beach was lost in the 1920’s when landfill moved the shoreline eastward to make room for the southern portion of what would become Lake Shore Drive.  In 1921 a 12-story addition was built on the eastern side of the property, and the original hotel was demolished.  Today the Algonquin Apartments, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, completed in 1950, stand on the site of the original hotel.  Like many other properties in the city, the hotel became a victim of the Depression, and in 1930 a receiver was appointed to oversee the payment of $615,000 in delinquent real estate taxes.  In 1942 a federal court turned the hotel over to the United States Army, and in just three months it was converted into Gardiner General Hospital, serving military personnel wounded during World War II.  After the war the Army converted the hospital to an office building and based Fifth Army Headquarters there until 1963 when the headquarters was moved to Fort Sheridan on the North Shore.  This is where my father, a career officer in the Army, went to work in the early 60's.  I still remember the tremendous holiday party thrown each year for those of us kids who were military dependents.  The original hotel, demolished in the early 1920's, is shown in the top photo.  Its replacement is shown in the second photo. 

September 6, 1939 – The fiftieth anniversary of Jane Addams’ founding of Hull House is celebrated as several thousand of the men and women who came to the settlement house as children fill Grant Park for a two-hour tribute to Addams who died four years earlier.  The principal speaker is Judge Florence E. Allen of the United States Court of Appeals who says, “And this should be her memorial, not that we repeat her name, but that we write upon our hearts her principles, that we carry them into concrete action.  For this woman opened to Americans new paths of spiritual life.  She lived her faith that all blessings must be made universal if they are to be made permanent.”

September 6, 1926 –The Chicago Real Estate Board submits its views on the air right development of the Illinois Central property north of Randolph street to the members of the City Council’s Railway Terminal Committee.  The report attempts to answer a series of aldermanic questions concerning the development of the extensive site between the Chicago River on the North, Randolph Street on the south, and Michigan Avenue on the west.  Looking at a portion of the questions and answers provides an interesting look at the foresight given to a project that would take another half-century to put into motion.

Q: How long in your opinion will it take to obtain a substantial air development in this territory?

A:  Not less than twenty years.

Q: Is the I. C. property as well located as the so-called Streeter district?

A:  Potentially better.

Q:  What, in your opinion, is the highest and best use of this I. C. property?

A:  Hotels and office buildings.

Q: Approximately how much frontage has this property on the Chicago river? On the yacht harbor? On Grant park?

A:  Frontage on the Chicago river, 2,800 feet; on the yacht harbor, 1,200 feet, and on Grant park, 1,750 feet.

Q:  Do you recommend one or two north and south boulevards through the Illinois Central property?

A:  One.

Q:  Should all of the east and west streets north of Randolph be extended eastward?

A:  Yes.

Q:  Is there a necessity for restricting the height of buildings on the I. C. property which obtains in the loop?

A:  Yes

The above photos show the area as it looked then and as it looks now.

September 6, 1918 – The first mail between New York and Chicago to be delivered by airplane arrives in Grant Park at 7:04 p.m. as Max Miller of the United States aerial mail service lands his plane at the end of a trip that took 23 hours and 55 minutes.  Thousands of people are in Grant Park attending the “France and Allies Day,” at a war exposition commemorating the anniversary of the first battle of the Marne.  Pilot Miller hands over the mail sacks to Captain B. B. Lipsner, the superintendent of the United States aerial mail service, and less than 90 minutes after the plane lands, the editor of the Chicago Daily Tribune receives a letter from Henry Woodhouse, a member of the board of governors of the Aero Club of America. It reads, “This epoch making first trip of the New York-Cleveland-Chicago aerial mail line affords us a splendid opportunity to express our hearty appreciation of the energetic and patriotic efforts that you and THE TRIBUNE have been making on behalf of national preparedness and to develop the aerial service.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 7, 1918] Pilot Miller has never landed in the city before but makes a “perfect descent” and is “cheered by the crowds lining the field and by the people who packed the Monroe street viaduct.”  Regular air mail service between New York and Chicago will begin in October with letters mailed in New York scheduled to reach Chicago ten hours later with relays of flyers stationed 150 miles apart ferrying the mail between the two cities.  In the above photo Superintendent of the Air Mail Service Benjamin Lipsner, with American flag in hand, passes it to airmail pilot Max Miller prior to an airmail flight in November 1918.

 

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 12:30 AM 1 comments

Labels: 1970, Chicago Development, Chicago History, Fort Sheridan, Lake Michigan, Lake Shore Drive

Friday, July 24, 2020

July 24, 1992 -- Fort Sheridan's Final Birthday Party

July 24, 1992 – More than a thousand people celebrate the final birthday party for the military garrison at Fort Sheridan.   The Chicago Tribune reports, “For Ft. Sheridan, Friday’s Organization Day was another in a series of lasts.  May saw the closing of the Ft. Sheridan Museum.  June saw the last Flag Day.  July was, of course, the last 4th of July celebration … sadness seemed to be the feeling of the day, even though some were playing softball, volleyball and golf, and kids competed in games and races.” [Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1992] The Post Commander, Colonel Robert Frizzo, says, “It’s depressing to most people knowing there’s not going to be anybody here next year.”  One attendee, John Lawler, who was born at the fort and “sneaked out for rides on officers’ horses,” said, “I’ve been here all my life.  I don’t want to see it close up.”  His wife, Millie, who worked at the base for 19 years, agreed with her husband, saying, “It’s beautiful grounds.  It’s a gorgeous coast.  And what are they going to do with it?  Nobody knows.”

July 24, 1940 – Armour Institute of Technology and Lewis Institute, which have operated as separate schools for more than 40 years, agree to join ranks, taking the Illinois Institute of Technology as the new name of the combined schools.  Action comes at the Chicago Club in the first meeting of the new school’s Board of Trustees.  The decision means that the city will have one of the largest technical institutions in the country with about 7,000 day and evening students, and to accommodate that number of students it is hoped that a completely new campus can be constructed in close proximity to the Loop.  Henry T. Heald, a 35-year-old who for the preceding two years has served as the head of Armour Institute, is elected as the president of I.I.T.  Heald is a graduate of the State College of Washington in 1923 and the University of Illinois in 1935. He joined the Armour faculty in 1927 as an Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering, also serving as a designer for the bridge department of the Illinois Central Railroad and as a structural engineer for the Chicago Board of Local Improvements.  The Armour Institute was founded in 1892 by Philip D. Armour who gave more than $2,650,000 to the school during his lifetime.  His son, J. Ogden Armour, gave several million dollars more.  Lewis Institute was the creation of realtor Allan C. Lewis who, upon his death in 1877, left $550,000 for the founding of a polytechnical school.

googleimages

July 24, 1933 – A parade of automobiles forms at One Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street, making its way to Indiana Avenue, heading south through Riverdale, Dolton, South Holland and Harvey.  The procession marks the opening of the new road on Indiana Avenue between One Hundred Thirtieth Street and One Hundred Thirty-Fourth Street.  This will be the main road by which visitors to the Century of Progress World’s Fair will be routed from the southern parts of the city and suburbs.  The new road will also be the main connection between Roseland and towns farther south.  The road highlighted in red to the left of the above Google map image is the new Indiana Avenue, opened on this day in 1933.  

La Verne W. Noyes

July 24, 1918 – La Verne W. Noyes, President and founder of the Aermotor Company, announces the gift of $2,500,000 to the University of Chicago “to express his gratitude to those who ventured the supreme sacrifice.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1918]  The gift will be used for the education of veterans of World War I and their children with 20 percent of the sum going toward the salaries of university staff teaching history.  The scholarships are still in effect today.  Noyes started out as a manufacturer of dictionary stands, but things changed in 1883 when he hired Thomas O. Perry, who had conducted over 5,000 experimental tests, searching for a modern and efficient windmill.  By 1892 the Aermotor Windmill Corporation was selling over 20,000 of the new windmills, and within ten years the company was selling the devices at one-sixth the price of previous competition. [www.gasenginemagazine.com] Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago, designed by Shepley, Routan, and Coolidge as a women's dining hall and natatorium, was another gift of Noyes three years earlier in 1915.  History is interesting.  Exactly one year after he announces the scholarship in 1918, La Verne Noyes dies at the Presbyterian Hospital.  With no immediate family the fortune of Noyes is distributed to 48 different colleges and universities as beneficiaries.   

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 0 comments

Labels: 1992, Chicago Event, Fort Sheridan

Friday, July 17, 2020

July 17, 1886 -- Fort Sheridan Defended against New York Attack

jwcdaily.com

July 17, 1886 – A Chicago Daily Tribune editorial reacts to an article published in the New York Sun in which that paper disparages the plan to locate a military base near Highwood, claiming that the base is being proposed because “competitive Chicago society women want a gold-laced spectacle to ride to at the afternoon hour of dress parade and the music from an army band …”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 17, 1886] The editorial also objects to the Sun’s claim that the base would be composed of “elegant brick barracks, officers’ residences, storehouses, hospital, magazine, and stable doubly sufficient for the twelve companies mentioned.” The Tribune proclaims, “Nothing of the kinds is contemplated.”  (Nothing of the kind may have been contemplated in 1886, but by the early 1890’s the premier Chicago architecture firm of Holabird and Roche had designed nearly a hundred noteworthy buildings on 230 acres, architecture so distinctive that the National Park Service has recognized the Town of Fort Sheridan as a National Historic Landmark District.). The Tribune declares that the only reason the fort is being built near Highwood is that the site sits on a railroad line of the Chicago and North Western and “Troops and supplies can be dispatched from here without delay in every direction and with much more facility than they can be handled in remote and widely separated places.”  Most probably, looking at the decision from today’s perspective, the fort was brought into being after the riot in Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886, an event that scared many of the city’s leading citizens witless.  It seems pretty clear that the Commercial Club of Chicago had a hand in obtaining the property with a pretty clear concept of why and when those troops would be “dispatched … without delay.”  

July 17, 1977 – Paul Gapp, the architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, evaluates the new Apparel Mart at 350 North Orleans Street, observing that once the Joseph P. Kennedy family bought the land where the new building stands on Wolf Point, family members “began a leisurely study of what to do with it.”  Gapp continues, “After all this high-powered cerebration, one might have expected an imposing structure to rise on a precious patch of 7.5 acres.  Instead, we got the Apparel Mart, a disappointing, $56 million architectural performance that succeeds mostly in saving money … The Mart, inside and out, has that hard-edged crowd control look that speaks of hustling retailers racing up in taxis and airline limos; sprinting from showroom to showroom to buy brassieres and bush jackets; having a late dinner, then flopping into bed for a few hours before arising to catch an early plane back to Cleveland, Omaha, or Sarasota, Fla.”  Gapp seems willing to forgive the buildings “windowlessness” because it “does not intrude into an elegant environment, and thus is not as blatantly offensive as [Water Tower Place] the marble monstrosity on North Michigan Avenue.”  In the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill design Gapp sees “a watch-every-nickel structure of little distinction and absolutely no elegance, done by a first-rate firm.”  Gapp ends his assessment with a remarkably accurate prediction, by way of Skidmore architect Bruce Graham, whose assertion that the Apparel Mart buildings are “’background buildings’ that someday may be dwarfed into nothingness.  “The Mart must stand on its own demerits, even if Graham is right when he says that a skyscraper approaching the size of the Standard Oil Building may be built on the very tip of Wolf Point,” writes Gapp.  A 48-story apartment building, Wolf Point West, a bKL architecture design, opened four years ago.  A second, taller building is nearing completion.  And the tallest building on Wolf Point will almost completely obscure the Apparel Mart when it rises in the next few years.  The conceptual photo of the completed Wolf Point development project, shown above, seems to validate Graham's belief that the Apparel Mart would one day become a "background building."

chicagotribune

July 17, 1941 – The executive director of the Chicago Plan Commission, T. T. McCrosky, designates three additional areas of the city as “blight districts” suitable for redevelopment by a private corporation.  The first area is on the North Side in an area bounded by Chicago Avenue, the alley between Rush Street and Michigan Avenue, Grand Avenue, and the alley west of Wells Street.  The second area is on the West Side in an area bounded by Congress Street, Racine Avenue, Roosevelt Road, Canal Street from Roosevelt north to Polk street, Polk Street west to a line with Union Avenue, and north to Congress Street.  The final area is on the South Side, an area bounded by Federal Street, Thirty-First Street, Lake Park Avenue, and Twenty-Sixth Street. McCrosky says, “All three of the districts I have designated would be suitable for apartment houses.  The one on the north side should be for the benefit of middle salaried white collar workers … The west side district which also would permit the worker to walk to the loop, would provide for the start of a general west side improvement.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 18, 1941]  McCrosky’s announcement comes a week after Illinois Governor Dwight H. Green signs the Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Act, which permits private corporations to condemn property for slum clearance … but only after the corporation has obtained 60 percent of the land needed for the project and has received approval from a municipal redevelopment commission. 

July 17, 1933 – A parade to honor General Italo Balbo and the aviators who accompanied him from Italy to Chicago begins at the Stevens Hotel on Michigan Avenue at 2:30 p.m. and proceeds north to the bridge across the Chicago River.  The Italians ride in United States Army cars and are escorted by cavalry troops from Camp Whistler on the grounds of the Century of Progress Exposition.  At the bridge the troops “present sabers and leave the flyers to an escort of army officers, who will take them to Fort Sheridan.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 17, 1933] At the fort the flyers review the troops at 3:30 p.m. and watch “an aerial demonstration by Army planes from Selfridge Field, Michigan, exhibition jumping by army riders and a polo game.” The afternoon ends with a reception at the Officer’s Club. This will be the last official act in honor of the Italian airmen.  On the following day, they will fire up their 24 Savola-Marcinetti seaplanes and head on the thousand-mile trip to New York City.  For more on the flight of Balbo and his men you can turn to Connecting the Windy City for this blog entry and this one.

July 17, 1881 – The Chicago Daily Tribune prints the report of William H. Genung, the chief tenement house inspector, who provides figures on the work of his department during the preceding week.  The report gives some idea of the size of the problem with which the city is faced as 180 houses are inspected, containing 2,086 rooms, inhabited by 559 families, consisting of 2,550 people.  Small pox will claim the lives of 1,181 people in the last months of this year, and the city is hard at work to eliminate the conditions that foster the disease.  In the Second Ward that today encompasses the east side of the Loop, part of the Gold Coast, and Streeterville, tenement houses such as the one Genung’s department inspected were places in which people lived in cramped circumstances in deplorable sanitary conditions.

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 5 comments

Labels: 1886, Chicago Events, Fort Sheridan

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

March 18, 1947 -- Fort Sheridan Processes Last of 454,132 Servicemen

gettlemanrealestate.com

March 18, 1947 – A Chicago mortician, Dominick V. Apollaro, is the last man to go through the Fort Sheridan separation center, which opened on July 24, 1944.  Apollaro entered the Army in 1942, serving as a surgical assistant in France.  He is the last of 454,132 enlisted men to move through the separation process at the North Shore base, which also handled 50,196 officers and 16,483 women of all ranks.  A total of 785 administrative personnel orchestrated the operation, for which deactivation is expected to be completed by March 31.

March 18, 2014 – Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Senator Dick Durbin announce that work will begin on an elevated lakefront path, stretching for 1,750 feet, near Navy Pier.  The $60 million, multi-year project will be called the Navy Pier Flyover, and it has been on the drawing board for over ten years.  The construction process will consist of three tricky phases in one of the most congested areas of the city.  In fact, part of the structure will run just nine inches to the west of Lake Point Tower, and engineers will have to remove part of the shoulder of Lake Shore Drive to  wedge the path into place. Phase One will begin on the lakefront trail just north of the Ohio Street Beach and move to the north bank of Ogden Slip with a spur for bicyclers and pedestrians leading toward Navy Pier.  Phase Two will carry the flyover across Ogden Slip.  Phase Three will bridge the Chicago River, alongside Lake Shore Drive before sloping down to DuSable Park.  The last phase was originally expected to finish up in the spring of 2018 (although that has now been changed to sometime beyond toward the end of 2020).  In most places the new trail will be 16 feet wide, a superior trek for bikers and walkers who have been forced to vie with one another on a dark, narrow sidewalk across the lower level of the Lake Shore Drive bridge.  

chicagology.com

hines.com

March 18, 1938 – Wreckers begin the razing of the Central Trust Company building at Monroe and La Salle Streets with the cleared site to be used as a parking lot.  The Central Trust Company, completed in 1900, housed a number of different financial institutions.  The Home Savings Bank and offices occupied the first floor.  On the second and third floors the Equitable Trust Company was located.  Offices of the Chicago National Bank, the Home Savings bank, the Equitable Trust Company and the Chicago Safe Deposit Company were scattered throughout the building.  There was a café for the use of employees and bank officers on the fourth floor.  The basement was “fitted with the largest, most complete, and most luxurious safe deposit vaults in the world.”  [chicagology.com]   It must have been a magnificent building with walls “made of the rarest and most beautiful marble that man has yet wrested from the bosom of the earth,” much of it Pavanazzo marble, imported from Carrara. The banking room on the first floor was also adorned with sixteen murals painted by Lawrence C. Earle, depicting scenes in the growth of the city from the winter quarters of Father Marquette in 1674 to the Chicago River at Lake Street in 1900.  A Skidmore, Owings and Merrill office tower rising 37 stories was completed on this site in 1974.  The former building and the new tower are shown in the photos above.

March 18, 1903 – The Chicago Daily Tribune editorializes favorably about a bill that will be discussed in Springfield allowing “the commissioners in charge of parks and boulevards bordering on public waters to extend them over and upon the bed of such public waters.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, March 8, 1903] One result of the bill, if approved, will be the ability of the south park commissioners to gain title to the submerged land several hundred yards off shore from Jackson Park north to the Lake-Front Park.  “There is no room for differences of opinion as to the wisdom of an enabling act of this kind,” the editorial writers state.  “It will save for public use and enjoyment what may otherwise be lost to the city.  Chicago has what few other great cities have, a frontage upon a large body of water.  That natural advantage has been utilized thus far for esthetic purposes in Lincoln and Jackson parks … There is no reason why there should not be in the future a lake front open to the people between Grant and Jackson parks.”   The editorial admits that the ability to take advantage of the city’s riparian rights will be hindered by a lack of financing to fund a project of this size.  Despite this the editorial concludes, “The bill to give the park commissioners title to the submerged lands should pass without opposition.  Then the lands will be preserved for the city to be utilized by it when it shall be in a position to do so.”  The above photo, taken in 1907, shows the ongoing project of creating made land in the area that is today Grant Park.

March 18, 1895 -- Twenty paintings by Claude Monet are placed on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. They are described by the Chicago Daily Tribune as "much more rational than those of his followers and imitators. They form an interesting showing of the rapid noting of illusive appearances in nature upon which the fame of the painter rests." Monet had been painting since 1856 and had completed his "Grain Stacks" series, a kind of visual manifesto for Impressionism in 1890. He had painted his series of Rouen Cathedral in 1892 through 1894. It would be interesting to know what 20 paintings went on display in the new building that the Art Institute had occupied for only two years when Monet's works went on display.

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 0 comments

Labels: 1947, Chicago Event, Chicago History, Fort Sheridan

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

February 5, 2009 -- Fort Sheridan Golf Course ... What to Do?

-->

lcfpd.org

February 5, 2009 --  The Chicago Tribune reports that controversy continues to surround the golf course at Fort Sheridan as Lake County Forest Preserve District officials are searching for cheaper ways to refurbish the course as residents of the Town of Fort Sheridan claim the District “has a legal and moral obligation to restore the 18-hole Army golf course that closed in 2003.”  [Chicago Tribune, February 5, 2009]  A third group, composed of opponents to the project, maintain that the golf course, running along the bluffs above Lake Michigan, should become a nature sanctuary.  When the military base closed in 1998, about 250 acres at the north end of the fort were given to Lake County.  It is estimated that a rebuilt golf course would take up about two-thirds of that space.  Estimates place the cost of the project at between $17 and $25 million, a sum that would require greens fees to range from $140 to $170 a round.  Seeing that figure, District commissioners asked planners to find ways to bring the cost of the project down.   With 39 golf courses in the immediate area, some feel that the course will not be economically viable, no matter what it costs.  Many residents of the town, however, feel that an agreement with the Army when the base was turned over to developers requires the redevelopment of the course.  Looking at Facebook on can see that the debate still goes on, but on June 5, 2012 in a letter to Highwood mayor Charlie Pecaro the Army formally stated that it “… does not have the authority to compel the Lake County Forest Preserve to develop and operate a golf course.”  Lake County got its walking trails and nature preserve as can be seen in the above photo.

February 5, 1998 -- The Canadian National Railroad Co. announces that it is in negotiations to acquire the Illinois Central Railroad, the "Main Line of Mid-America," a railroad that began in 1849 when Senator Stephen Douglas secured a federal land grant for the start-up, the first such grant ever awarded to a railroad. Douglas was also instrumental in a deal that allowed the I. C. to purchase a 200-foot right of way through the South Side for $21,310. Later, the line built a trestle in the lake opposite the center of the city that carried trains to a freight yard on the river. The fill that was over the years placed between that trestle and the edge of the city is now Grant Park. Mark Twain worked as a steamboat pilot on an Illinois Central boat that connected the railroad to the south. A young engineer named John Luther "Casey" Jones began his career operating trains that carried passengers form the Loop to the 1893 fair in Hyde Park. With Canadian National's announcement a love-hate relationship between Chicago and the Illinois Central that has lasted for close to 150 years is nearly at an end.

February 5, 1923 – Buck and Beauty gallop out of the fire station at 10 East Hubbard Street, on this day, responding to a false alarm at Chicago Avenue and State Street.  It turns out that the alarm has been pulled purposely as part of a celebration of the retirement of horse-drawn firefighting equipment in Chicago.  With the retirement of the Hubbard Street horses, the city becomes the first city in the country with more than 500,000 residents to claim a completely motorized fire department.  In April of 1921 there were still 350 horses pulling fire equipment in the city.  That was when the fire department’s business manager, John F. Cullerton, led a city council subcommittee through a dozen cities to see if motorized fire equipment was workable.  The answer was clear.  Cullerton estimated that the changeover would save the city a half-million dollars in maintenance fees alone since each horse cost the city an average of $3,621 a year to maintain while motorized vehicles cost $1,000. [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 17, 1983]  Buck and Beauty were sold to a country pastor.  No one knows what happened to Dan, but Teddy ended up pulling a milk wagon. While on that job he was hit by an auto at Forty-Seventh and Michigan, and was thrown to the ground with his hip and leg smashed.  As the Chicago Daily Tribune reported, “… Ted lay still as a police patrol wagon sped to the scene.  As the wagon approached – its bell clanging – Ted, conditioned to the fire bell, responded.  He rose to three legs, plunged ahead a few feet, and then toppled.  A veterinarian, tears in his eyes, ended Ted’s misery with a bullet.  In the above photographer a Tribune cameraman captures the last run for a horse-drawn rig as an era comes to an end.

February 5, 1921 – Formal action is taken on this date to obtain a state charter for the Chicago Zoological Society which plans to build a zoo and gardens on 300 acres of land that Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick has donated to the forest preserve.  The president of the county board and the head of the forest preserve commissioners, Peter Reinberg, who is also one of the incorporators of the society, writes, “Though only in its tentative stage, the prevalent idea is that the organization shall follow closely that which has brought the Art Institute of Chicago to its acknowledged high standard.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 6, 1921] Commissioners of the new society will include:  Frank J. Wilson; William Hector MacLean; George A. Miller; Charles L. Hutchinson, president of the Art Institute of Chicago; Charles H. Wacker, chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission; and Judson F. Stone, manager of the McCormick family realty interests.  The location of the anticipated zoo is between Thirty-First Street and Thirty-Fifth Streets and is bordered by the Des Plaines River and Salt Creek.  It is anticipated that Pershing Road will lead to the grounds and that the Chicago Plan Commission will “lend its aid toward beautifying the approach to the gardens.”  The story explains why the street that runs past the south lot of Brookfield Zoo is Rockefeller Avenue.

chicago.danjacobs.com

February 5, 1888 –The Chicago Daily Tribune publishes a letter from A. D. Field, in which he describes the hamlet of Chicago in 1836, the year that his family moved into a small one-room house on the northwest corner of Clark and Madison Streets.  Field notes that on the east side of Clark Street “there were buildings form Madison street to the river … scattered along on the separate lots.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 5, 1888] On the west side of the street there were woods with no building on the west side of Clark Street south of Madison Street.  Later that year the family moved to a one-room log house on what would become the corner of Kinzie and Canal Streets. Field writes, “As it was open prairie it is difficult to tell just where the house stood.”  His father was transporting brick from F. C. Sherman’s brick yard on the North Branch of the river to the town, and the move made for easier access to the business.  Field says that there were “a few scattered houses along West Lake street and down along the river as far as Washington street.”  In June, 1843 Field went to live with his brother, who built a house at Halsted and Madison Streets.  Field writes, “We began on the open prairie, where there was not a ditch or a furrow.” Between Washington and Randolph Streets there was “a small frame house.”  East of Halsted on Monroe Street “there were a few scattered dwellings and one or two on Desplaines street.”  Charles Cleaver’s soap factory was on Jefferson Street, east of Halsted.  West of the Field’s new house “there was no house for ten miles.”  In 1843 lots in the vicinity sold for $50 apiece.  A little over 20 years later, Field observes, his nephew sold a “bare lot” for $40,000.  In the whole summer of 1843, Field writes, “I do not remember seeing a single human being out our way.  We were too far out of town!”  In 1844 Field moved to the corner of Clark and Kinzie Streets.  The house stood on a lot on which “the stumps of the forest trees were so plenty it was difficult making a garden.”  There were buildings on the west side of Clark Street as far as Illinois Street.  Beyond that there was open country all the way to Lincoln Park.  Field recollects wandering along Rush Street in October of 1848 toward the water- works through land that was “nothing but wooded sand hills … It was so far out of town even the adventurous boy had never ventured so far.” Field remembers that the North Side had “one lone church in 1849, one grocery, not a hotel, perhaps a few liquor holes, Lill’s brewery, a slaughterhouse – and this was the sole business then of the North Side.  The South Side had won, and the North and West Sides were deserted by business.” It was a rough, rugged frontier town … Field concludes his letter, “There was not enough people of the sort needed in the whole city to keep up one stylish house.”

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 1 comments

Labels: 2009, Chicago Places, Fort Sheridan, Military