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. 

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.”

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 12:30 AM 57 comments

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

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

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

Monday, June 29, 2020

June 29, 1965 -- Civil Rights Protests Continue over School Superintendent Willis

images.chicagohistory.org

June 29, 1965 – Twelve civil rights demonstrators are arrested after they lay down in Michigan Avenue near Madison Street during a march from Buckingham Fountain to City Hall.  The remaining 60 or 70 marchers continue their walk, using the sidewalks, to City Hall where they form a single file and march around the building.  The march begins in late afternoon after civil rights leaders emerge from a meeting with the members of the Board of Education.  The march follows a demonstration two days earlier in which 75 people were arrested after they sat down at La Salle and Randolph Streets near City Hall.  The protests are a continuation of dissatisfaction with the tenure of Chicago School Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis, who has held his position for a dozen years.  For three years, beginning in 1963, civil rights leaders and Black students have angrily demonstrated, accusing Willis of actively fostering segregation in the city’s schools.  The most visible symbol of that was the collection of 625 mobile classrooms Willis placed on the city’s South Side to alleviate overcrowding at mostly Black schools.  In the heated opposition to Willis, they came to be known as “Willis Wagons”.  Willis continued in his position into 1966 when he retired four months before his contract was up.  The above photo shows a protest that was held against Willis on June 10, 1965.  At that time a boycott of schools was ongoing with some schools reporting as much as fifty percent of the student body absent from class.  This was nearly a half-century ago ... not hard to figure out why people are just a little bit impatient.

pintarest.com

June 29, 1981 -- Marshall Field and Company announces the sale of its annex building on the southwest corner of Washington Street and Wabash Avenue to Bond Industries of New York. The Store for Men housed in the annex as well as corporate offices will move into the company’s flagship store on State street.  A month earlier the company’s president, Angelo R. Arena, said that the firm was looking toward “strategies for using our real estate to potentially reduce our short-term debt and interest levels.”  [Chicago Tribune, June 30, 1981]. It is estimated that the sale of the annex building will yield $10 million which will be used to reduce $50.61 million in short-term debt.   The chairman of Fields’ Chicago operation, George P. Kelly, looks at the movement of the Store for Men to the main building as a positive act, saying, “Our studies show that women do most of the shopping for men.  When we move those departments into State Street we’ll get more women in here and more business.”

June 29, 1954 -- Field Enterprises, Inc., the publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, completes the purchase of a six-story building on the southwest corner of Rush Street and East North Water Street for $300,000, adding the property to a site already owned by the company.  The building will be razed as soon as practical, and the 15,000 square foot lot added to the 45,000 square feet that the company already owns, a site that extends westward to Wabash Avenue on the north side of the river.  The Chicago firm of Naess and Murphy is already drawing architectural plans for a multi-level building that will cover the entire site and provide offices and printing facilities for the Sun-Times.  The building got built, stood for forty years and then gave way to today’s Trump International Hotel and Tower.  Additional information about the Sun Times building can be found in this entry in Connecting the WindyCity.  The new home for the Sun Times is shown under construction in the photo above.

June 29, 1926 –The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that William J. Lynch, the city’s Harbor Master, has reported the statistics for the opening and closing of bridges in 1925.  “The bridge operating section functioned without interruption during the year,” the report observes. “Forty-eight bridges were operated twenty-four hours daily … Three hundred and thirty-nine bridge tenders were employed, which includes forty men used during the three summer months on vacation related work.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 29, 1926] The total number of openings for 1925 was 94,684 with the average time for each opening estimated at 3.5 minutes.  All told, bridges were closed to street traffic for 5,689 hours during the year.  The report finds the movement of most excursion boats to the Municipal Pier helpful in the bridge opening problem, but the Tribune reports, “… the opening of bridges for sand scows, tug boats, dredges, and commercial craft of all kinds … will continue until the city adopts a permanent bridge policy.”

June 29, 1891 – Chicago’s Health Department files six suits against the establishment of Benzo and Pieper, a livestock fattening concern located at the intersection of Addison Street and the north branch of the river.  Benzo and Pieper, situated on nine acres, is typical of many such enterprises located all along the river.  The Chicago Daily Tribune describes the grounds, “In a long, low shambling shed there are now kept eighty head of steers, though as many as 250 are at times fattened in this one building . . . rows of fattening bullocks, standing ankle deep in filth, bloated through overeating until they can hardly stand, and chained to one spot for five months without being able to take exercise.”  One thing that made this particular company noteworthy was that it held a contract for removing the garbage from “all the principal hotels” in the city with six teamed wagons collecting refuse from the alleys of those establishments.  In front of the cattle shed described earlier stood a building with nine tanks, each holding 45 barrels.  Again from the Tribune’s copy, “The garbage wagons drive alongside these tanks and empty their contents into them.  Water from the river is pumped into the tanks until the mass reaches the required consistency when fires are started underneath and the swill is kept boiling for some ten hours . . . And this is the stuff which goes to put flesh on the lean bones of scraggy steers . .  “  The article points out the incredible fattening qualities of this concoction by describing one of those scraggy steers, “ . . . so fat, in fact, that its legs could not support its body for any length of time, and in consequence it lay down nearly the whole time, this proving no interference to its eating, as the troughs are so low that they can be reached by the cattle without getting up.”  Such a bull would gain 100 pounds a month during the time it was confined.  August Benzo, one of the owners, “a good-natured German who owns a saloon at Clybourn place and Elston avenue” says that he will fight the cases in court.  The photo above shows the same area as it appears today.

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

Labels: 1965, Chicago Event, Chicago Politics, La Salle Street, Madison Street, Michigan Avenue, Protests, Randolph Street

Friday, May 1, 2020

May 1, 1894 -- March on Washington Begins

richlandsource.com

May 1, 1894 – Economic disaster overtook the United States just months before the glories of Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition wound down.  A four-year depression that began in January of 1893 with the failure of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad led to a panic that saw 500 banks shut their doors, 15,000 businesses close, and hundreds of farmers lose their land.  In Pennsylvania the unemployment rate rose to 25%.  It stood at 35% in New York and a staggering 43% in Michigan.   On March 25, 1894 an Ohio businessman by the name of Jacob S. Coxey led a group of 100 men out of Massillon, Ohio, and, on foot, headed for Washington, D. C.  It was Coxey’s intent to gather members as the contingent passed through towns and cities along the way in an effort to persuade Congress to authorize a public works bill that would provide jobs for the unemployed.  Other groups from around the country joined in, but they lost members along the way, rather than gaining them.  One such group left Chicago that year on this date with 433 men following Dr. J. H. Randall.  They left from the North Side and made it to Hyde Park this first day where they camped on the grounds of the closed World’s Fair.  The march to Washington, D. C. was not an easy trip.  Spring rains made progress miserable, and some towns along the way were even less forgiving than the Spring rains.  The police met the group on the outskirts of La Porte, Indiana, and Randall was thrown in jail.  Towns were naturally suspicious of the ragged band, and rumors that preceded it carried alarming warnings that the group was infested with smallpox.  After 30 days on the road, the group reached Mansfield, Ohio.  The city did not open its arms to the ragged band.  Instead of allowing the men to camp at the fairgrounds, the marchers were directed to the local stockyard.  In the evening Randall went to the town square to deliver a speech, something that he had done at many other towns along the way.  Thousands of people had congregated in anticipation.  The sheriff ordered him off the courthouse steps and, after he had made a second attempt to speak from the bandstand, the sheriff blocked his way.  A local defense committee was organized to defend Randall.  Some of the working men of the town formed a bodyguard to protect the leader of the ragtag army.  The town council relented, and on a Saturday night Randall was allowed to speak.  In a town of 14,473, seven thousand people stood in the town square.  The Commonweal Army, as it was called, still had 411 miles to go before it reached Washington, D. C., which the men entered on July 16.  [https://richlandsource.com/area history.com]  The Chicago contingent was just one of several such groups headed toward the nation’s capital.  Ultimately, the men did not get the results on which they had set their sights.  It was, however, the first such mass march on the nation’s capital … kind of cool that Chicago was a part of it!  The above photo shows the marchers' entrance into Mansfield, Ohio.

images.chicagohistory.org

May 1, 1970 -- Chicago rolls out the red carpet for the astronauts of Apollo 13, and a half-million people come to cheer James A. Lovell, Jr. and John L. Swigert, despite 25 m.p.h. winds that gust to 47 m.p.h. Astronaut Fred W. Haise, Jr. is unable to attend because of a kidney ailment. The celebration starts at Michigan and Ohio where the parade kicks off. At the Michigan Avenue bridge a Chicago fire boat sends up a display of water and fireworks are sent skyward. There is a half-hour ceremony at the Daley Center at which Governor Ogilvie, Senator Charles Percy, and Senator Ralph Tyler Smith speak. Following the public reception, an official luncheon is held at the Palmer House, attended by 800 city officials. From there Lovell and Swigert report to Orchestra Hall for a question-and-answer session with 2,500 high school students. As they leave for O'Hare, Lovell observes, "Chicago has always been a very friendly, warm, open city, and the welcome we received today was typical. Today really typified Chicago -- a big, friendly, windy city."

dnainfo.com

May 1, 1918 – This isn’t particularly surprising news these days, but back in the early part of the twentieth century a newspaper going out of business was a big deal.  It was on this date in 1918 that the Chicago Herald printed its last edition after a run of only four years.  It began publication in 1914 when two different newspapers, the Record-Herald and the Inter Ocean were consolidated.  William Randolph Hearst is the new owner of the paper, which will be combined with the Chicago Examiner, a paper he already owns, to create the Chicago Herald-Examiner.  The Herald actually dates back to 1881 when it started up as an independent newspaper.  In 1895 it was combined with the Chicago Times to form the Times-Herald.  Then in 1901 another merger took place and the Record-Herald was created.  Its merger with the Inter Ocean in 1914 was underwritten by some substantial city benefactors.  John G. Shedd, the president of Marshall Field and Company; Julius Rosenwald, the head of Sears, Roebuck and Company; Samuel Insull, the president of Commonwealth Edison; James Patten, a wealthy grain dealer; and LaVerne W. Noyes, the leading manufacturer of windmills in the United States all pitched in to bring solvency to a paper that had been a losing proposition.

May 1, 1893 – The World’s Columbian Exposition is opened a few minutes after noon when the President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, activates a switch that sends electricity to every powered object at the fair. Before the President brings the fair to life, the blind Chaplain of the United States, Rev. Dr. W. H. Milburn, is led to the dais by his adopted daughter. He begins a lengthy prayer thusly, “All glory be to Thee, Lord God of Hosts, that Thou has moved the hearts of all kindred tongues, people and nations to keep a feast of tabernacles in this place, in commemoration of the most momentous of all voyages, by which Columbus lifted the veil that hid the new world from the old and opened the gateway of the future for mankind!  Thy servants have builded these more than imperial palaces, many chambered and many galleried, in which to store and show man’s victories over air, earth, fire and flood, engines of use, treasures of beauty and promise of the years that are to be, in illustration of the world’s advance within these four hundred years.  Woman, too, the shackles falling from her hands and estate, throbbing with the pulse of the new time, joyously treading the paths of larger freedom, responsibility and self-help opening before her; woman, nearer to God by the intuitions of the heart and the grandeur of her self-sacrifice, brings the inspiration of her genius, the product of her hand, brain and sensibility to shed a grace and loveliness upon the place, thus making the house beautiful.”  W. A. Croffut, a Washington, D. C. journalist, follows, reading a poem, entitled “The Prophecy.”    As the orchestra plays a Wagner overture, the Director of the fair, George R. Davis, rises to speak.  He concludes his remarks with these words, “And now this central city of this great Republic on the continent discovered by Columbus, whose distinguished descendants are present as the guests of the Nation, it only remains for you, Mr. President, if in your opinion the Exposition here presented is commensurate in dignity with what the world should expect of our great country, to direct that it shall be opened to the public, and when you touch this magic key the ponderous machinery will start in its revolutions and the activities of the Exposition will begin.”  At this point President Cleveland delivers the shortest remarks of the afternoon, concluding with his wish that as the fair comes to life it will help “our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the integrity, the freedom of mankind.” With that he moves to the table to his left, where he finds a golden telegraph key, sitting atop a pedestal upholstered in navy blue and golden plush, on the side of which are two dates, 1492 and 1893.  He depresses the key and “the electric pulsation which by that simple act was sent around the World’s Fair, setting in motion its mighty engine, causing the mammoth fountains to flow, and constituting the signal for the unveiling of the typical statue and the unfurling of many hundreds of flags to the breeze, was announced, immediately afterwards by the beating of drums and the blowing of steam whistles, this being quickly responded to by a salvo of distant artillery.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1893]  

May 1, 1893 – What a day this must have been!  The President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, pushes one button at a few minutes after noon at the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition, “setting in motion its mighty engines, causing the mammoth fountains to flow, and constituting the signal for the unveiling of the typical statue and the unfurling of many hundreds of flags to the breeze.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 2, 1893] Drums beat, distant cannons fires, and a band begins to play “America,” the second verse of which the Director-General of the fair, Colonel George R. Davis, invites the assembled masses to sing.  The paper reaches to the classical age of Greece for its superlatives, reporting, “That one little movement by President Cleveland actualized more than the wildest day dreams of old time thinkers in all the ages.  It called into activity and animated, as with the breath of life, a greater mass and variety of organization than was ever supposed to be affected by a fiat from Olympus or controlled by the decrees of Fate thought to be worked out by the three sisters.  Compare the most important products form the forge of Vulcan with the mammoth engines in Machinery Hall… Contrast the electric incandescence there with the fire fabled to have been brought down from heaven by Prometheus … Measure the products of human brain power and muscular energy there displayed against the reported results of the twelve labors of the far-famed Hercules, the magnificence of the array at Jackson Park with the splendor of the palace built by the genii for Aladdin, and the feasts of the swift-winged messenger of the gods with what was accomplished yesterday by the mere tapping of a telegraph key … Nor could the sculptors and painters of classic times around the shores of the Mediterranean avoid turning green with envy if allowed to revisit the pale glimpses of the moon and see the wealth of art production that is grouped on a few acres of land near the head of Lake Michigan.”  The Tribune concludes its glowing assessment with the prediction that the opening of the great fair will be a special day for the citizens of Chicago, people who “are intimately identified with its progress from the nothingness of little more than half a century ago to the position of second city in the greatest country of the New World, the discovery of which is celebrated by the holding of the Fair in our midst.”  The Machinery Hall that rivaled the wonders of ancient Greece is pictured above.

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:00 AM 3 comments

Labels: 1894, Chicago Event, Politics, Protests, World's Columbian Exposition