Connecting the Windy City

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. 

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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.”

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 12:30 AM 64 comments

Labels: 1969, Chicago Event, Crime, Criminal Acts, Jackson Boulevard, La Salle Street, Madison Street, Politics, Protests, State Street

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

September 15, 1971 -- Apollo Astronauts Spend Two Days as Chicago Celebrates

Chicago Tribune photo

September 15, 1971 – Chicago fetes the Apollo 15 astronauts as 200,000 people turn out to greet David R. Scott, Alfred M. Worden, Jr. and James B. Irwin at a noon parade through the Loop.  Irwin, who was the lunar module pilot on the 12-day mission that took place from July 26 to August 7, was appreciative of the greeting, telling a packed City Council meeting, “I would like to thank all of Chicago for giving us such a warm welcome.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 15, 1971]. This is the city’s eighth astronaut welcome, and Colonel Scott says, “In all honesty I am not surprised.  I’ve traveled quite a little lately, and, believe me, the word is out … everybody knows about Chicago.  I can assure you the three of us will tell the rest of the country about this city.”  The parade, which travels down State Street to Adams Street and then north on La Salle, ends at the entrance to City Hall, where at a special meeting of the City Council the men are presented with honorary citizenship medals.  After the applause dies down, the honors continue at the Bismarck Hotel, where a civic luncheon is held.  As Air Force violinists serenade the throng, the astronauts present Daley with a large color photograph of the moon and an American flag they carried with them on the longest lunar mission of the Apollo program.  Then the three astronauts move over to the Sherman House where they conduct a briefing for Chicago and suburban high school students.  Their stay in Chicago ends on the following day when they visit Children’s Memorial Hospital.  The Apollo XV mission was the fourth mission to land on the moon.  It was the first to use a lunar roving vehicle, and is memorable for Commander Scott’s use of a hammer and feather to illustrate Galileo’s theory that without air resistance, objects drop at the same rate due to gravity.  In the above photo the three astronauts receive medals making them honorary citizens of Chicago as Mayor Richard J. Daley applauds.

 

September 15, 1976 – Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Walter Mondale, speaking to reporters at Midway Airport, says that President Gerald Ford’s record “belies and puts a falsehood to everything he says he’s now for.” [Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1976] Using notes that he had jotted down during his flight to Chicago, Mondale attacks Ford on four fronts.  In the area of health care, Mondale says that the President has made no proposal for a health-care program affordable for most Americans.  In education he asserts that the federal oversight of education under Ford “is the worst in 40 years.” Mondale finds that “The record is absolutely miserable,” showing that 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs since Ford took office. He also finds that the Ford administration is responsible for high interest rates that make affordable housing difficult to find.  “Their record couldn’t be worse on all of their objectives,” the Democratic candidate states.  “I think it’s clear that on the issues he has raised, he has a miserable performance record. And if trust must be earned, he doesn’t deserve the trust of the American people.” The election went down to the wire, but the Carter-Mondale ticket pulled out a narrow victory.  If 3,687 votes  in Hawaii and 5,559 votes in Ohio had been switched from Carter to Ford, the incumbent would have been victorious.

September 15, 1966 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reveals a plan to target downtown stores in Chicago in an effort to create jobs for African Americans in the city.  Speaking to a rally of 500 in the Greater Mount Hope Baptist Church at 6034 Princeton Avenue, Dr. King says, “I’m going to march straight up Michigan avenue and straight up State street and organize every store in the city.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1966] The next day, he reveals, pickets will demonstrate in front of the Saks Fifth Avenue store on Michigan Avenue.  In his address Dr. King also criticizes Senator Everett Dirksen for his opposition to the civil rights bill.

September 15, 1961 – Three carpenters fall 43 stories to their deaths as a scaffold on which they are being lifted separates from the hoisting hook inside the core of the east tower of Marina City, under construction north of the river on State Street.  Mike Einsele, a worker inside the core, says, "We were raising forms inside the core and I was about five feet above them.  They were standing on the scaffolding, and I guess a cable slipped.  I heard a loud noise and I turned around to look.  The bodies bounced crazily, hitting one obstruction after another, until they hit the bottom.  I heard the thuds when they hit and I got sick.  I got out of there then.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1961]  Another worker, Will Bridges, who was working ten stories below the scaffold and who had just stepped out of the way to get a drink of water, says “Everyone inside the core heard them fall.”  Speculation about the cause suggests that the heavy forms on the scaffold that were being hoisted for the next phase of concrete work jammed against the wall of the core and twisted the hoisting hook enough so that the scaffold fell away.

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 12:30 AM 2 comments

Labels: 1971, Adams Street, Chicago Event, Hotels, La Salle Street, State Street

Monday, August 10, 2020

August 10, 1945 -- La Salle Street Tunnel Closed

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August 10, 1945 – City workers complete the pouring of 150 feet of concrete on La Salle Street north of Randolph Street, a job which effectively closes the streetcar tunnel under the river, removing a traffic obstacle from one of the main north-south streets in the central city.  The tunnel, with a design by W. W. Boyington, opened on July 4, 1871 with one lane for pedestrians and two lanes for horse-drawn traffic.  In 1888 the North Chicago Street Railroad leased the tunnel for a nominal fee with the promise to make other local improvements.  Cable cars ran through the tunnel until 1906 when it was closed so that it could be lowered … the federal government had labeled it as a hazard to navigation in 1904.  The deeper tunnel was opened to streetcars in 1912 and was used until 1939 when it was closed for the construction of a subway station to service the new Milwuakee-Dearborn-Congress subway. One can still get an idea of how it impeded La Salle Street traffic on both sides of the river by finding what remains of the north portal a half-block or so north of the river on La Salle.  The above photo shows the entrance to the tunnel at Randolph Street on March 25, 1939.

August 10, 1940 –The land beneath the First Regiment Armory at the northwest corner of Michigan Avenue and East Sixteenth Street is sold by the Estate of Marshall Field to the Standard Realty and Mortgage Company for an estimated $40,000. The sale is subject to a 99-year lease that Marshall Field made in 1890 with the First Infantry Armory Association at an annual ground rental of $4,000.  The first armory was built on the property in 1893, but it burned down less than a year after it opened.  It was replaced in 1894 at a cost of a half-million dollars, raised by popular subscription.  After two decades of labor unrest, culminating with the Haymarket affair on May 4, 1886 in which seven people were killed when a bomb was thrown into the crowd, the wealthy residents of Chicago, many of whom lived south of Sixteenth Street on Indiana, Prairie and Calumet Avenues, began to take matters into their own hands.  They opened their pocketbooks and forked over the cash to protect their homes.  In 1886, just months after the Haymarket riot, land convenient to a direct rail line into the city on the North Shore was purchased, and Fort Sheridan was begun.  It is interesting to note that the First Regiment Armory with its thick stone walls, rounded turrets, and rifle embrasures, stood as a massive sentinel north of those wealthy homes. It is even more interesting to note that Marshall Field, himself, held a 99-year lease on the property.  And you can bet with a fair amount of assurance on some of the names that were on the majority of those subscriptions to build the armory.  The subscriptions probably sold pretty darned quickly … the Pullman strike that idled 250,000 workers in 27 states and brought violence to Chicago had just concluded.

August 10, 1918 --  It is difficult to believe today, but for years – for nearly two decades – a swimming race was held that had athletes navigating a course in the lake before heading west up the river to Wells Street.  On this day in 1918 Perry McGillivray of the Great Lakes training station wins the tenth annual river swim of the Illinois Athletic Club, establishing a new record for the two-mile course of 33:44.  Miss Rebecca Wells of the Walton Athletic Club is allowed to participate, but she is not eligible for any of prizes because women are officially barred from the event.  In the 1912 Olympics McGillivray was a member of the American 4 X 200 meter freestyle relay team that won a silver medal.  In 1920 he earned a gold medal as a member of the United States 4 X 200 meter relay team, also participating in the country’s water polo team that earned a fourth-place finish.  The old Chicago Daily News photo above shows the crowds lining the river as the 1909 race approaches Wells Street.  

August 10, 1882:  The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that the city’s Health Office has reported 53 deaths during the preceding day, 30 of those being children under the age of five, 24 of that number being infants less than a year old.  Of the two dozen babies who died, 16 of them succumbed to a disease known at the time as cholera infantum, a particularly pernicious disease that attacked infants primarily during the warm weather months, especially in large urban areas.  Beginning around 1893 infant mortality, thankfully, began a sharp downward trend, most probably brought about by two important initiatives.  First, the four-mile crib off Monroe Harbor was opened in 1891 and shoreline water intake was permanently ended.  Research shows that the act of safeguarding the city’s drinking water lowered the city’s mortality rate between 1870 and 1925 somewhere between 35 and 56 percent.  Secondly, the responsibility for monitoring milk distribution in the city was transferred from an independent body to the health department. Also in 1880 the Chicago City Council approved an ordinance that granted the city’s Health Department the right to inspect and regulate sanitary conditions in the work place and in tenement dwellings, an initiative that began to eliminate the unsanitary and unhealthful conditions in poorer areas of the city.

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Labels: 1945, Chicago RIver, La Salle Street, Public Transportation

Thursday, August 6, 2020

August 6, 1911 -- La Salle Street Tunnel Creating Havoc

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August 6, 1911 -- With the work of deepening the La Salle Street streetcar tunnel ongoing, the Chicago Daily Tribune discloses that at least a dozen buildings near the tunnel have settled from four to eighteen inches.  Two of those structures have cracked from wall to wall, and on both sides of the river La Salle Street sidewalks and streets have sunk four inches.  The Oakley building, a seven-story structure at the southwest corner of La Salle Street and Michigan Street is held together by 380 jackscrews, six iron braces and tons of wooden scaffolding.  It has settled 16 inches, and in the northeast corner a crack, in some places more than an inch wide, runs from the ground to the roof of the building.  The Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “Wooden braces are keeping the windows from collapsing.  Plastering is dropping from the inside walls, and, except for the careful reinforcements which have gone on, the warehouse long since would have collapsed.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 6, 1911]. The headquarters of the Armour Steamship Line is close to collapsing into the river after settling four inches in a 24-hour period a week earlier.  Five hundred jackscrews have barely kept it upright.  Its outer walls have been torn open in at least a half-dozen places.  Nearly all of the streets that intersect La Salle Street on both sides of the river have settled a minimum of two inches and “sidewalks have erupted in peaks and angles or slipped half way into the excavation for the tunnel approach.”  The president of the company that is building the tunnel, Michael H. McGovern, says, “We are not responsible for damage done to nearby buildings.  Property owners were notified before the work started to take the necessary precautions, and as long as our excavations do not go outside the curb line we are immune from suit.  It is my understanding that the company will assume the cost for the repair of street damages.”  The above photo shows the location of the north portal of the tunnel, used today as the entrance to parking garages at 300 North La Salle Street and the Reid Murdoch Building.

chuckmanchicagonostalgia

architecture.org

August 6, 1978 – The Chicago Tribune reports that even though developers promised to landscape the shore line of Wolf Point in the original deal for special zoning status made with the city to build the Apparel Center, the area “remains a tangle of high weeds and unpruned trees several years after owners promised to landscape the area.”  [Chicago Tribune, August 6, 1978].  Architectural renderings show a 25-foot wide park with a paved pathway winding around the quarter-mile of riverfront property to the south of the Apparel Center, which was completed in 1976.  James Bidwill, the spokesman for the developers, the descendants of the late Joseph P. Kennedy, says, “There are several alternative aspects of planning that will result in beautification of the park in the near future.”  There is good news along much of the river, though.  The 1974 “Riverside Plan of Chicago” is beginning to reap benefits as four small parks with a row of linden trees and park benches have been established on the south side of the Main Stem.  Two of these small parks, between Wabash and Dearborn, have been created with $139 million that the IBM Corporation gave the city for trees, lighting, granite paving, and concrete walls to block out the noise of lower Wacker Drive from the firm's 1971 headquarters building across the river.  Still to come is a long strip of green space between Michigan Avenue and the lake, a strip of land which the developers of Illinois Center gave to the city.  Development there must wait until the Columbus Drive bridge is completed and infrastructure work for the Deep Tunnel project is wrapped up.  The top photo shows the area around Lake Street -- note the elevated train crossing the river -- in the 1970's.  The second photo shows the same area, looking at it from the opposite direction.  Things have changed ... for the better ... although it's hard not to miss the Wild Turkey signboard.

August 6, 1974:  The Queen of Andersonville, a tour boat operated by Wendella Sightseeing Boats, sinks just south of the Coast Guard station at the Chicago lock where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.  Hero of the Day is Bob Agra, the captain of a Mercury sightseeing boat, who maneuvers his boat, loaded with about 70 people, alongside the stricken Wendella craft and helps evacuate all 23 passengers, many of them wearing life jackets.  “Some of the rescued people were a little shook up,” Agra states.  “But they weren’t hysterical.”  [Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1974]  Agra attaches the foundering boat to his own with three lines and tows it to an area behind the breakwater, southwest of the lock.  All three lines eventually break, and the Queen of Andersonville sinks before the hoist at the Coast Guard station can be lowered to secure the vessel.  Agra's son, Bob, who was on board that day as a deck hand, is shown above.  Today he is head of Chicago's First Lady, partners with the Chicago Architecture Center's premier architectural tour on the Chicago River.

August 6, 1971 – The largest crowd in the history of Ravinia Park comes to the outdoor venue on the North Shore to see Jesus Christ Superstar.  The crowd of 18,718 people breaks the previous record, set by Judy Collins, of 18,491, a week earlier.  More than 150 police officers are on duty, dispatched from five suburbs to patrol a mellow crowd.  “Despite the religious theme of last night’s event,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “The thousands of young listeners looked and acted little differently than at more mundane outdoor rock concerts.  Botttles of wine were passed freely, along with the ever-present marijuana cigarets.” [Chicago Tribune, August 7, 1971] The performance company that provided the show had previously performed in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Toronto.  The Ravinia show attracted at least 5,000 more people than any of the troupe’s previous performances.

August 6, 1946 – Edward J. Sparling, the president of Roosevelt College, tells of the school’s plans to restore the newly purchased Auditorium building to its original beauty.  Sparling says that “old paintings will be restored, remodeling of the hotel into classrooms and offices will follow the original structure as nearly as possible, and the theater will be operated by the college or leased to someone who wants to bring back music and theatrical productions to the 57 year old stage.”  Mrs. Julius Weil, the daughter of architect Dankmar Adler, the architect of the Auditorium building along with Louis Sullivan, says that General Sherman’s march to the sea in the Civil War was instrumental in her father’s plans for the auditorium.  “In every house that was looted,” says Mrs. Weil, “my father eagerly searched for books on architecture.  When he returned to Chicago he cooperated with Theodore Thomas in working out arches and types of construction for better acoustics.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 7, 1946] Sparling says that the renovated building will allow the college to serve 2,000 more veterans. The $400,000 purchase price of the building, he reveals, is the result of “loans by friends, gifts, efficient administration, and profit from the sale of the building at 231 South Wells Street.”

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Labels: 1911, Chicago History, Chicago RIver, Jackson Boulevard, La Salle Street, Public Transportation

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

July 29, 1966 -- Mayor Daley Meets with Activist Women

July 29, 1966 – Mayor Richard J. Daley hosts an hour-long meeting with 30 members of the Women Mobilized for Change while 250 other members wait on the sidewalk at the La Salle Street entrance to City Hall.  Pledging support to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, the women urge Daley to abandon the use of tall public housing in favor of low-level housing.  The group’s spokeswoman, McHenry County resident Mrs. Kay Holper, says that the group was formed shortly after riots on the west side of the city and includes both Chicago and suburban women.  The group asks Daley to bring together civil rights leaders and city officials in order “to develop a cooperative coordinated approach to problems of Chicago.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1966].  The group also speaks out in favor of the recent open occupancy executive order issued by Illinois governor Otto Kerner.

July 29, 1936:  The motor ship Material Service sinks early in the morning a mile north of the lighthouse at Eighty-Sixth Street as she is caught in an open-water gale for which she was not designed.  Although seven members of the crew are rescued, Captain C. D. Brown and 15 other crew members die.  First Mate John M. Johnson says upon his rescue, “We were going along as usual when suddenly the vessel listed to port.  Then it came back on an even keel, but immediately began to sink.  We had the usual complement of lifeboats, but the sinking was so sudden that there was no chance to launch them.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 29, 1936]  The ship had hauled a load of gravel from Lockport to Chicago, and had left the mouth of the Chicago River around midnight, headed south for a dock in the Calumet Harbor area when disaster struck.

July 29, 1934 – The Dymaxion, a three-wheeled automobile, arrives at the Century of Progress World’s Fair with Buckminster Fuller, its designer, driving the vehicle onto the fairgrounds where it will be exhibited at the Crystal House on Northerly Island.  Nineteen feet long with front wheel drive and a single wheel at the rear, the car is capable of traveling at 120 miles per hour.  The photo above shows the Dymaxion beside architect George F. Keck's "Crystal House" on Northerly Island.

chicagology.com

July 29, 1918 – Stink bombs “which distributed a most pungent and overmastering odor” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 30, 1918] are thrown “with great liberality” on Wells, Madison, La Salle, and Randolph Streets, with the final detonation occurring in the Celtic barroom in the Hotel Sherman.  The last bomb sends guests in the hotel “into the open air with tremendous alacrity.”  It is believed that the attacks are the result of a feud between warring taxicab organizations, the Checker Cab Company and the Yellow Cab Company. This was just the tip of the iceberg in a battle that would last throughout most of the Roaring Twenties. Checker, the smaller firm, made up of owner-operators operating, like Uber or Lyft, under a single name, battled it out with the much larger Yellow Cab Company.  When Checker began using Loop taxi stands, previously exclusive Yellow Cab turf, the fight was on.  Things got so bad by June, 1921 that two aldermen introduced a resolution in the City Council, calling on the police chief to keep cabs from both companies off the streets until cabmen stopped killing each other.  Things got even more heated when Yellow Cab divided into two factions, one composed of union drivers and the other of non-union chauffeurs.  The whole thing finally calmed down by the end of the 1920’s when the owner of Yellow Cab, John Hertz, sold his stock in the company and got out of the business.  Ultimately, Yellow Cab and Checker merged, and the city found a way to damp down violent competition and make money at the same time by selling taxi cab medallions that limited the number of cabs on the street.  A terrific explanation of the whole mess can be found here. 

July 29, 1914:  Destruction begins on the swing bridge at Canal Street to make way for the new vertical lift bridge for the Pennsylvania Railroad as the new bridge stands, nearly complete, above it.  The new bridge will be the heaviest lift span in the country.  Today it is the only bridge of its type on the Chicago River system.  When it is raised, the bridge provides 130 feet of clearance for traffic on the river below.  According to historicbridges.com “The lift truss span was constructed outward from the towers with the use of special falsework that angled back into the tower so that it would not be in the river obstructing boats … As built the bridge contained 6,941,000 pounds of structural steel and machinery. An interesting design feature of the bridge was that the northern piers of the bridge were built overly wide, so that half of these piers could support half of a second vertical lift bridge, should the railroad have wished to add more trackage to the line.”  The top photo shows the new bridge towering above the original swing bridge in 1914.  The color photo shows the bridge today in its lowered position.

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Labels: 1966, Chicago Politics, La Salle Street

Saturday, July 25, 2020

July 25, 1919 -- Wingfoot Express Tragedy Unfolds at Inquest

July 25, 1919 – In Room 1123 of the county building Coroner Peter M. Hoffman conducts an investigation into the cause of the fire that sent the dirigible Wingfoot Express into a fatal plummet through the skylight of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank on La Salle Street, setting off a gasoline-fueled conflagration that kills a crew member, two passengers, and ten employees of the bank.  Dramatic testimony comes in the person of the airship’s pilot, John A. Boettner, who testifies that there were no sparks or flames thrown from the engine and that the engines were running when the fire was spotted.  “I discovered the flames near the front of the bag and up above the equator,” Boettner says, “I rose to my feet and holding the wheel with one hand turned and by motions and shouts told the others to jump.  I saw them go over and then the bag buckled.  As the gondola shot forward I took a long dive toward the ground.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 26, 1919]  The above photo shows the skylight  of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank through which the dirigible fell to the banking floor.   

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July 25, 1913 – Dr. J. R. Pennington, one of the few surgeons in the city who has operated on a patient who has been administered anesthesia, explains how anesthesia rightfully is “one of the greatest discoveries of the age.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1913]. “I have seen a patient lying apparently asleep during a serious abdominal operation,” Pennington says.  “His color was natural and when he awoke he felt no pain. He did not suffer during the operation and showed little of the usual unfortunate reaction. The local anesthetic blocks off the wound from the brain centers.”  It had been just a year before that the first medical textbook on the subject was published by anesthesiologist Dr. James Taylor Gwathmey and the chemist Dr. Charles Baskerville.

July 25, 1890 – Choosing two industries that the general populace associates with good times, a Chicago Daily Tribune editorial then puts the candy makers and the soap manufacturers squarely in the spotlight in order to once again rail against the smoke that chokes the city.  “Almost the entire output of a candy factory,” the editorial observes, “is for outside consumption … The furnaces refuse utterly to eat the smoke for which they are directly responsible, and insist on giving it in large and unpalatable doses to the public at large.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1890] Of the “cakes” of soap manufactured in the city, the paper writes, “They smell so delicious that the little Indian maids under the care of Christian missionary ladies insist on eating them and going dirty.  If the smoke that comes daily from the chimney of a big soap factory jutting on the river near Rush street bridge should get a fair shake at the delicately perfumed packages the young aborigines would get over a bad habit with dispatch.” The smoke that the city’s industries produce is so bad that “Over towards the Adams street bridge a dog in a leading string is necessary for guidance.”  No one is exempt from the critical eye.  Bookbinders and printers “whose chimneys belch out stuff as black as the ink imprints that Guttenberg’s genius made possible.”  Merchants “turn out a tremendous stock every hour of the day, and foist it on their neighbors without money and without price – a practice conducive to mining life and wages in the coal regions.”  The editorial ends with a warning of government’s newfound seriousness concerning the smoke-choked city, “The city authorities will prosecute offending smokers hereafter without the preliminary of a warning.  Warnings in the past have failed of effect, and now the service of summons will be the first intimation received by owners and occupants of buildings that their presence is desirable in court.” 

July 25, 1877 – The Battle of the Viaduct takes place as a mob of over 10,000 people do battle with the police and federal troops at the Halsted Street viaduct over the Chicago River north of Bridgeport. On July 14, a strike begins in Martinsburg, West Virginia when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cuts workers’ wages for the third time in a year. The strike quickly spreads, bringing violence to cities as far apart as St. Louis and San Francisco.  On this day, it is Chicago’s turn as thousands of men, women and children march on a route that takes them through rail yards and the stockyards and north up Halsted Street to the viaduct that crosses the Chicago River.  On the north side of the bridge the police meet the angry mob and force them back south, firing at the protestors as they flee.  Tempers run high as the rioters, angered at being fired upon while retreating, stop street cars attempting to cross the viaduct.  One car is overturned, and cars that follow “were stopped, the conductors rifled of the contents of their pockets, and the passengers compelled to ‘get up and act’ under various threats.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1877] Farther up Halsted the gun store of M. J. Pribyl is cleaned out. Reinforcements swell the ranks of the police who are joined by the Second Regiment of the United States Army, and the confrontation turns even more deadly as the police fire at the mob for a half-hour.  Ultimately at least 18 rioters – some estimates place the deaths at 30 -- are killed, over 100 are wounded, and 13 police officers are injured, one fatally. Relative calm returns on the following day, but the event begins a period in the city’s history that will lead to the confrontation at the Haymarket in 1886 and the violence that will come with the Pullman Strike in 1894. 

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Labels: 1919, Chicago Event, Chicago History, La Salle Street

Friday, July 10, 2020

July 10, 1966 -- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Delivers Soldier Field Address

Chicago Tribune Photo

July 10, 1966 – The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. heads up a rally at Soldier Field, beginning a summer-long Chicago campaign against segregation in education, housing and employment.  It was a brutally hot day with the temperature standing at 98 degrees … the city’s beaches were crowded with over 100,000 people.  Before a crowd of 30,000 people, King declares, “This day we must declare our own Emancipation Proclamation.  This day we must commit ourselves to make any sacrifice necessary to change Chicago.  This day we must decide to fill up the jails of Chicago, if necessary in order to end slums.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1966].  “We are here,” he continues, “because we’re tired of living in rat-infested slums.  We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97 a month in Lawndale for four rooms while whites in South Deering pay $73 a month for five rooms … We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.”  Following the Soldier Field rally, King leads a crowd of tens of thousands to the La Salle Street entrance of City Hall where he uses adhesive tape to affix a series of demands, calling for an end to police brutality and discriminatory real-estate practices, increased Black employment and a civilian review board for the police department.  The next day he presents the demands to Mayor Richard J. Daley in person.  As tactful as he has ever been in his political career, Daley observes, “Dr. King is very sincere in what he is trying to do.  Maybe, at times, he doesn’t have all the facts on the local situation.  After all, he is a resident of another city.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 10, 2016).  Operating from an apartment at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in Lawndale, Dr. King directs a campaign that lasts throughout the summer, culminating in an open-housing agreement between Daley and him that was signed on August 28, an agreement that many consider a template for the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

chicagology.com

July 10, 1941 – Members of the German consulate in Chicago leave the city, one day ahead of the U. S. State Department’s deadline.  The chancellor of the consulate, Dr. Wilhelm Freidel, turns over the keys to the consulate offices to the manager of the 333 North Michigan Avenue building, the site of the German consulate for the previous decade.  Office furniture and equipment is placed in storage.  The diplomatic contingent will sail from New York on July 17, bound for Lisbon, Portugal on the S. S. George Washington. From there the individual members of the group will return to their homes in Germany.

July 10, 1929 –The Clark Street bridge is dedicated in a program arranged by the North Clark Street Committee of the North Central Association.  A parade starts on North Avenue and Clark Street with marchers and floats and several members of the Sac and Fox tribes in native dress, an acknowledgement that Clark Street began its life as a trail for Native Americans.  After the ribbon for the new bridge is cut, participating dignitaries adjourn to a luncheon at the Sherman Hotel.

J. Bartholomew Photo

July 10, 1925 – Building Commissioner Frank Doherty gives approval for the proposed 40-story Jewelers’ Building, today’s 35 East Wacker, recommending that Corporation Counsel F. X. Busch issue the necessary building permits as quickly as possible.  There is one major hang-up in getting the construction started – Fire Commissioner Joseph Connery wants a delay in construction until considerable modification is made in a scheme that would see 572 cars parking in the lower levels of the structure.  Connery believes that nothing will eliminate the hazards attendant to a huge parking garage in a skyscraper.  The Corporation Counsel seems ready to take the chance, saying, “Recent surveys indicate that an average of 3,000 automobiles are parked daily in loop streets.  Five or six other such buildings with equal facilities would nearly solve the parking problem and certainly relieve street congestion.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 11, 1925]  

July 10, 1893 -- Halfway through the greatest event in the city’s history, tragedy occurs on this day.  A day later the lead in the Chicago Daily Tribune captures the depth of the tragedy as the paper reports, “The World’s Fair received a baptism of fire and blood yesterday afternoon, the Cold-Storage Building proving a funeral pyre for twelve firemen, twenty-four persons receiving serious injuries.”  The cold storage building, the location of the tragedy, was erected by the directors of the Hercules Iron Works and sat on the east side of Stony Island Avenue just south of the Sixty-Fourth Street entrance to the fairgrounds.  The building, designed to resemble a Moorish palace, was five stories high and included a skating rink on the top floor.  There were four towers on each corner with a central tower, encasing the boiler flue, the central tower rising 191 feet above street level.  A promenade encircled the central tower about 70 feet below its inaccessible top.  The flue that ran up this central tower had been a subject of considerable debate since it veered so dangerously away from original specifications and had been subject to minor fires that had flared up in June, causing the cancellation of most of the insurance policies on the building.  At 1:30 p.m. an alarm went out when a small fire was spotted at the top of the flue stack in the tower’s crowning cupola, an area that was supposed to have been made of wrought iron instead of wood and lined with asbestos.  About a dozen firemen climbed to the gallery around the tower, nailing boards to the structure to get closer to the fire.  As they climbed, a puff of white smoke at the roof level of the warehouse preceded flames that cut off the escape of the fourteen firefighters trapped on the narrow ledge surrounding the tower.   As 50,000 fair-goers watched, the trapped men began to jump, one by one, leaping 60 feet onto the burning main roof.  The paper described the horrific scene, “Strong men turned their heads away and women fainted by the score.  The crowd was so dense that escape was impossible.  Down on his knees in the center of the plot surrounding the Pennsylvania railroad exhibit went a well-dressed man, and with hands uplifted he prayed to the Almighty to avert the awful calamity that seemed imminent.  As he prayed tears streamed from his eyes and his words were lost in the sobs and groans of those around him.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 11, 1893]  Twelve brave firefighters lost their lives on that July day, along with three civilians.   

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Labels: 1966, Black Lives Matter, Chicago Event, Chicago Politics, La Salle Street, Protests, Soldier Field