Connecting the Windy City

It's amazing the directions that I head when I sit down to think about some of these old buildings. I start one place, end up another, and the next thing you know I'm ordering a century-old hand colored print of Charles Tyson Yerkes's house from an archival joint in the hinterlands of Minnesota, an artifact that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject with which I began.

That's what happened couple nights ago when I started thinking about a photo I took a while back of the oldest public school building in Chicago. It's now an apartment building, all fixed up, looking good among the reclaimed homes on Magnolia just off Clybourn. It was called the Headley School -- that name still is on the façade.


It carried the name Nickersonville Primary School from its opening in 1875 until 1883, at which time it was named after Joel T. Headley, a respected author of several books on European history. As the memory of Headley faded, it was named the Mulligan Branch from 1918 to 1929 and the Thomas Branch from 1929-1933.

Somebody downtown must have gotten tired of answering questions about why the name of the school didn't match the name above the front door, because the school was named again after Headley in 1933 and carried the name until it closed in 1976, a little over a century after it opened.

We don't know the names of the original architects of the building. We can see, though, that the design is an attractive, yet efficient (and therefore economical) one. Thoughtful touches prevent it from being a three-story bore.

The center of the building is pulled away from the main mass, providing visual interest as well as an invitation to move through the front door. And look at the windows. How much different would this school be if the design had called for rectangular windows, rather than what we see here?

Notice that the curve of the windows becomes more dramatic on the third level, a small change that lifts our eyes toward the fine cast iron cornice that finishes the building. The cornice even includes a pediment over the central section, a nice classical touch that sets a tone -- this is a place for serious business. The pediment, as well as the cornice, would have cost a few extra bucks, but it makes a statement to the students and to the community.

The curved sandstone lintels, especially the large one over the front door that proclaims Public School, along with the carved name of the school a little higher and the date of its completion above that, help to break up the expanse of brick and windows while, again, focusing our attention on the front entrance.

Another nice touch is the string cornice that wraps around the building, an outward indication of the separation of functions within the school. Everything above the white cornice would have been classroom space; everything below it would have been for administrative and other specialized functions.

Headley looks like it would have been a good place to spend one's primary years. The windows are huge -- the classrooms would have been filled with natural light. If I had been a student here, I would have spent much of my time looking out those windows.

Now here's where one thing leads to another. A Google here -- a Google there -- the next thing you know you've been at the computer for three hours, your butt hurts, and you're still digging.

I found the 22nd Annual Report of the Chicago Board of Education for the Year Ending July 31, 1876 -- the first year of the school's operation. The Board put the school up for $27,153.82. The largest share of the cost, $9,924.25 was for masonry; carpentry came in second at $7,496.50. That iron cornice atop the building? It set the taxpayers back $1,339.50.

The school had 12 classrooms and eight teachers. $5,210.87 was the sum allotted for the teachers' salaries -- that's $651.86 a year for each teacher. The janitor was paid $700. But he had to keep the furnace running. That took 77 tons of hard coal at a cost $695. for that first year.

In 1985 the architectural firm of Bauhs and Dring designed a conversion that turned the old schoolhouse into upscale condominiums.

For just a shade under $800,000 you can grab a penthouse unit. A rooftop deck circles the entire roof, providing a 360-degree view of the city. Promotional photos for the unit clearly show how much light those old school windows allowed.




Pets are welcome, which is a change from the old days, another discovery I made.

On December 24, 1894 The Chicago Tribune reported that Justice Everett fined John Noonan, the janitor of the Headley School, ten bucks for violation of the humane statute. Apparently, sometime toward the end of November of that year Noonan threw a dog from a second floor window.

The teacher in the room probably couldn't have done much to stop him . . . he made more than she did.

Every time I look out my window I see him. Every time I walk to the bus stop I see him. And every time I head up the street to the grocery store or the drugstore I see him.

Alexander Hamilton.

Dressed in threadbare gold leaf and standing on a pedestal at the northernmost section of Lincoln Park in the triangle formed by Diversey, Sheridan and Stockton.

How the statue ended up in this place, 31 floors beneath our living room window, is a story that goes back over 80 years.

In 1928 Kate Sturges Buckingham put one million dollars into an Alexander Hamilton Trust Fund, the purpose of which was to mount a memorial to a man she felt was an underestimated American hero.

Of course, you recognize Buckingham’s name -- the most popular attraction in Chicago’s Grant Park is the Buckingham Fountain, a one million dollar gift to the city from Buckingham along with a $300,000 endowment to support the fountain’s continuing operation. Dedicated to the people of Chicago, the fountain was built to honor her brother, Clarence, who died suddenly at the relatively young age of 58.

Buckingham, who never married, was born to a family that was very much a part of Chicago history. The Fulton elevator, the city’s first grain elevator, was built by her grandfather, Solomon Sturges. Her father, Ebenezer Buckingham, was also responsible for the construction of grain elevators and elevated railroads in the city.

Buckingham eschewed the life of the wealthy. Instead, she turned to philanthropy. She was called “Godmother to opera” and was a generous patron of the arts. Whenever the subject of her generosity was raised, she responded, “I did no more than I ought to do as a good Chicagoan.” [Owens, Carole. Pittsfield—Gem City in the Gilded Age]

When she died in 1937, she left $500,000 to her friends and relatives and $126,000 to her maid and chauffeur, the children of her caretaker, her nurses, and the doormen and elevator men at her Chicago residence. In today’s dollars, that’s over $8.9 million. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is the former estate of Kate Buckingham.

Anyway, Buckingham pledged the million bucks to the Chicago Park District to honor Hamilton, who she felt had put the United States on a sound financial footing and had made “its glorious future possible.” [Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1993] Park District officials suggested a number of locations, but Buckingham, for one reason or another, found each one unsuitable.

Work began, however, on the statue and the architectural setting on which it was to be placed. John Angel, one of the most prolific and highly regarded sculptors of his day, was selected to create the figure of Hamilton. Angel’s work can be found at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. John the Divine in New York City, at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., and on the Cook County Courthouse right here in Chicago.

The architect chosen was Eliel Saarinen. His groundbreaking entry for the Tribune Tower competition of 1923 was widely viewed as the best entry even though the New York firm of Hood and Howells was awarded the commission.

Saarinen created an extraordinary monument with 115-foot columns, a tad oversized for the nine-foot statue John Angel had been hired to create. You can see Saarinen’s design. It hangs in Architecture and Design Gallery 285 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Well, you can imagine how the design tickled the fancy of a woman so understated that she had her name removed from the Social Register. To say the least, Ms. Buckingham was not pleased. “My statue would be lost,” she said, noting that the monument to Hamilton "shouldn’t look like a modern skyscraper.” [Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1993]

Then in December of 1937, after spending over $41,000 on the project, Kate Sturges Buckingham joined Alexander Hamilton in the Great Beyond. Her will directed the trustees of the Alexander Hamilton Trust Fund, two of whom were directors of the Art Institute of Chicago, to carry out the work that she had started. The will stated further that if contracts for the project were not completed within ten years, the one million big ones would go to the Art Institute. [The Milwaukee Sentinel, May 13, 1951]

Conflict of interest? What conflict of interest?

Within four years after Buckingham’s death, a larger 13-foot statue had been cast in bronze at the cost of $50,000. Still, no agreeable sight could be found after continuing meetings with the Chicago Park District, and Hamilton was carried off to a warehouse.

In 1943 came the inevitable lawsuit. The States Attorney for Cook County sued the Board of Trustees, accusing them of slowing the progress of the Hamilton project so that the lions of the Art Institute could wrap their paws around the million.

On April 16, 1943 Judge Benjamin P. Epstein decreed that the years of the war, however long it lasted, should be regarded as a moratorium with the terms of the will to be resumed at the war’s end.

Judge Epstein, by the way, once held an entire jury in contempt of court after the individual on trial, along with the sheriff in charge of the jury, took the panel on a day trip of local saloons which included “many a beer, dancing, attempted petty larceny of a radio and a bar stool.” [Time Magazine, May 3, 1937]

What’s not to love about Chicago?

On May 7 of 1947 the project received yet another setback when Park Board President, James H. Gately, announced that the trustees of the fund and the board could not come to agreement on placing Hamilton’s statue in Grant Park as part of a larger music court. [Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1947]

Then, finally, 24 years after Kate Buckingham made the offer, the statue was unveiled in its present location on July 6, 1952, just five months short of the deadline that Judge Epstein handed out years earlier.

Chauncey McCormick, chairman of the Alexander Hamilton Memorial Trust, acted as master of ceremonies. John Angel was on the dais along with the architects of the new memorial, Samuel A. Marx, Noel L. Flint, and Charles W. Schonne. Brigadier General Pierpont M. Hamilton, a descendant of Alexander Hamilton and holder of the Congressional Medal of Honor gave a speech along with Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen. [Chicago Tribune, July 5, 1952]

The Tribune described the architectural setting for the statue as a “modern fortress of limestone and granite.” A pylon of polished black granite rose 78 feet above the ground. It towered above a three-level plaza of Indiana limestone and polished black and red granite.

They had to surface poor Alex in 14-karat gold leaf so that someone would notice he was there.

In late 1993 the whole affair was dismantled. Neighbors had complained that it attracted a bad element. It was marred with graffiti. And it had deteriorated so badly that a half-million dollars was needed to make it structurally sound again.

Julia Sniderman, the Park District’s preservation planning supervisor at the time, said, “I’ve gotten a lot of calls from people in the neighborhood who have wondered what was going on. But when I tell them that the statue will be back on a smaller pedestal, they’re relieved. I keep waiting for someone to be really upset, but so far it’s been really positive.”

Erna Tranter, director of Friends of the Parks, said, "That thing was horrible."

Today Alexander Hamilton, as much bronze as he is gold, the man whose life prompted the philanthropic Kate Sturges Buckingham to pledge a million dollars to honor him, sits in the northwest corner of Lincoln Park atop a simple polished red granite base, dwarfed by the dark and menacing muscularity of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his eagle just to the north.

Just my opinion, of course, but looking out my window at Mr. Hamilton's coat tails, I don’t think old Kate got her money’s worth.

Took the car in for an oil change over on Clybourn this afternoon . . . great service, in and out in less than ten minutes. With time on my hands I drove south about a half-mile, parked by the Treasure Island and walked down to Courtland to visit a relic.

Crossing the Chicago River on Courtland Street is the oldest trunnion-bascule bridge in the country. Most of the bridges that cross the river in Chicago fall into this category, a type of bridge in which counterweights below the deck of the bridge lift the structure as it rotates around a large axle called a trunnion to raise.

Chicago is packed with them, and their strength and grace complement the strength and grace of the city’s architecture. Just imagine Chicago’s river being crossed countless times by monstrous, black and graceless bridges, and you will get an idea of how much the city owes the designers of the Courtland Street bridge.

The bridge, completed between 1901 and 1902, is 216.5 feet long and 36.1 feet wide with a vertical clearance of 15. 74 feet. Although it still retains its original mechanism, including the wooden bridge tender’s shanty on the east side, it no longer is raised or lowered.

The plaques on the bridge are not the simple square bronze plaques seen on other bridges in town with inscriptions that can only be read by passersby. These are nicely wrought decorative plaques that motorists can see as they enter the bridge. The ornate finials placed at the middle of the span also show the additional attention given to the aesthetic design of the bridge. [www.historicbridges.com]

This bridge's truss superstructure was built by the American Bridge Company, Lassig Plant. The steel didn’t have to travel far . . . the Lassig yard was just up Clybourn where Wrightwood meets the river.

The trusses probably cost a lot more than they would have, had the bridge been finished five years earlier. I ran across an article from the Aurora Daily Express of February 23, 1899 which announced the merger, on the previous day, of 11 separate bridge building companies with Andrew Carnegie’s operations, a combine which would control 90 per cent of the iron and steel used for bridges in the United States.

Things like that happened back in the day . . . before folks started to get fussy about an overbearing government trying to bust up loyal American business interests.

The construction of the bridge, originally called the West Clybourn Place bridge, was carried out under the supervision of Chief City Engineer John Ernst Ericson. He was one of those “can do” Chicagoans who made Chicago at the end of the 19th century into the engineering marvel of the world.

Ericson was born in Sweden in 1858 and came to the United States in 1881 after attending the Royal Polytechnic Institute in Stockholm and designing bridges in the Stockholm area. According to the 1908 History of the Swedes in Illinois, Part II “During his service as assistant city engineer Mr. Ericson was in charge of all tunnel and crib construction and made the plans and specifications for twelve miles of new tunnels, together with two new pumping stations . . . About 70 per cent of the Chicago water works system has been designed and constructed under Mr. Ericson’s supervision.”

Mayor Daley’s name is also up there among the trusses as the bridge was renovated in 1997. Located among brawny steel fabricating concerns, the Courtland Street bridge is a sleepy span that doesn’t see a lot of action these days.

If you're in the area, it’s worth a trip across the North Branch to say hello to this old timer.

Every time I do the research on a favorite picture from our recent trip to New York, I find another Chicago connection. It’s amazing. I know it’s tough to love two cities, especially two cities as proud and soaring as Chicago and New York. It’s kind of like trying to support the White Sox and the Cubbies at the same time.

But, for want of a better word, both New York and Chicago have guts. And the architectural connections between them are everywhere.

Here’s just one small example.

I fell in love with Bryant Park, just off Fifth Avenue between 41st and 40th streets, the first time I saw it. In the southwest corner of the park stands a lovely fountain, conceived by Charles A. Platt, executed in glazed granite and dedicated to Josephine Shaw Lowell.

Married to Charles Russell Lowell, a businessman, in 1863, Josephine Lowell followed him to Virginia, where Lowell died in a Civil War battle, less than a year after they were married and only one month before their daughter, Carlotta, was born.

Returning to Staten Island, the home of her parents, Josephine committed herself to social justice and reform. She once said, ”If the working people had all they ought to have, we should not have the paupers and criminals. It is better to save them before they go under, than to spend your life fishing them out afterward."

I wonder where her allegiance would have rested in the current brouhaha about health care.

In 1876 the Governor of New York appointed her as Commissioner of the New York Board of Charities. Fourteen years later she established the New York Consumers’ League, an organization that worked to improve the wages and the working conditions of women workers in New York City. [wikpedia.org]

The Fountain Terrace in Bryant Park is dedicated to her. The fountain is the city’s first public memorial dedicated to a woman. [wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Shaw_Lowell]

Charles Platt, the fountain’s designer, was born in New York in 1861. His artistic training was as a landscape artist. He studied at the National Academy of Design and later in Paris, where he exhibited his work at the Paris Salon of 1865, no small achievement considering this was the salon that brought Édouard Manet’s Olympia to fame.

A trip to Italy in 1892 turned the direction of Platt’s career and he turned his attention to landscape design and architecture, particularly for the well-heeled. One such project was Villa Turicum in Lake Forest, the country estate of Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick, one of the finest examples in America of the Italian treatment in landscape design. [www.joenisil.com]

Platt joined a group of artists that formed around Augusts Saint Gaudens (remember Standing Lincoln) in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he died in September of 1933. Platt, that is -- not Lincoln.

So how do we go from a lovely fountain, dedicated to a courageous humanitarian in midtown Manhattan, to Illinois?

It was Charles A. Platt who laid out the formal plan for the campus of the University of Illinois and designed nine of the buildings that occupy that space. Six of the most significant of those buildings are as follows . . .

Mumford Hall, the original agriculture buildings, was the first of the Platt buildings, its cornerstone being laid on November 8, 1922. It featured 86,000 square feet of space, housing 50 offices and 25 classrooms.


Platt’s second building, the Main Library, was begun in 1923. It was built in three sections, the last of which was finished in 1927. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.


On June 7, 1924 the cornerstone was laid for the Men’s New Gymnasium, what is today Huff Hall. The building cost $515,000 with a $225,000 addition coming two years later. Today it serves as host for four different Big Ten sports and seats 4,500.


Platt’s Dairy Manufactures Building was completed in 1925 at a cost of $183,000. Here a student could take a course on "Ice Cream Making,” which taught the " types of freezers; methods of freezing. Mixing and freezing ice cream, sherberts, puddings, and other frozen products. Study of flavoring extracts, fillers and binders. Ice cream standards." [UIHistories Project]


The Commerce Building, now David Kinley Hall, was constructed in 1925 for $506,000. This is one of the northernmost buildings on the South Quad, lying directly across Gregory Drive from the Main Library. The Commerce Building is where the College of Business developed at the university.


Construction on the Building for Architecture and Kindred Subjects was begun in November of 1926. The great sculptor Loredo Taft, who created the “Alma Mater” statue in front of Altgeld Hall, laid the cornerstone. The building’s 65,000 square feet cost $486,000.


From an inspiring fountain in New York City to a fountain of knowledge in the farm fields of central Illinois, by way of Paris and a 300-acre estate on a Lake Forest lakeside bluff, that’s the work of Charles Adams Platt. Not a bad set of accomplishments.

If these thoughts appear to ramble, it’s because we have just returned from New York City where we acted like two gawking Midwesterners. The trip came as a Christmas gift from our daughter and son-in-law, both fantastically talented and thoughtful, and the best part of it was that we got to spend much of our time with them.

I had not been in Gotham since the mid-80’s, a trip that I remember mostly as an intimidating experience of cab rides to unfamiliar places in an alarmingly large city where everyone knew where he or she was going but us.

This weekend I returned as a different visitor, older, a little more knowledgeable about architecture, better at figuring out where subways do and do not go.

I did a lot of wandering, both with the family and alone. I’ve learned that the architectural walks are best done by myself. It’s annoying to your strolling companions when you stop every half-minute to point out a cast iron façade or a terra cotta cornice.

I slipped out of the hotel early Sunday morning and walked down Fifth Avenue, past the Library to Bryant Park, where I found a stunning building on the south side of the park, the current home of the Bryant Park Hotel.

The building and I hit it off. It had character and a presence on the street that competed handsomely with the glassy angles of the Bank of America building diagonally across the park.
The Bryant Park Hotel is a relatively recent incarnation of this 1924 building, operating since Valentine’s Day of 2001. [http://new-york.meuk/radiator building.htm] Originally the building was the American Radiator Building, a transitional wonder that bridges the ages of Beaux Arts and Art Deco.

And here is the coolest part of all . . . it was the first building to be completed in Raymond Hood’s long career.

No wonder I liked the building so much. Raymond Hood, along with John Mead Howells, won the design competition for Chciago’s Tribune Tower, besting over 250 other proposals from architects all over the world and winning fifty thousand bucks in the bargain.

Until he joined Howells in the Tribune competition, Hood had been living with his wife and growing family over Mori’s Restaurant in Greenwich Village. He designed the renovation plan for Mori’s in 1920 and then, to make ends meet, went to work for the American Radiator Company, designing radiator covers.

Then came the big win in Chicago. When American Radiator decided to build a new showroom and office building on 40th Street just off Fifth Avenue, the company already had its man.

Concerned with the appraisal of some critics that Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen’s Tribune plan was the superior proposal for Tribune Tower, Hood combined elements of traditional and modern design in the American Radiator Building. The steelwork in the building was finished just seven months after the designs were submitted, and the building was occupied a year before Tribune Tower opened.

Hood designed the building to be free standing, a rarity in Manhattan where most buildings are built to the lot line, often sharing walls with adjoining buildings. Hood’s design meant that 90 percent of the interior space was within 25 feet of a window. It also meant, though, that elevators gobbled up a lot of interior space with the area of a typical floor coming in at about 5,600 square feet. [February 20, 1994 New York Times]

The architect disliked the typical office building’s façade of the time in which the dark shadows of the windows punctuated a cladding of light stone or brick. He therefore designed the building’s exterior of black brick, with gold terra cotta accents atop the 18-story structure and along the top of the four-story base.

Hood felt that this lessened “the visual contrast between the walls and the windows and [gave] the tower and effect of solidity and massiveness.” [http://www.aviewoncities.com/nyc/american radiatorbuilding.htm] It carries the same kind of tough street cred that the Burnham boys' Carbide and Carbon Building does in Chicago. Some critics looked at the building metaphorically, suggesting that the black brick symbolized the iron of a furnace and the gold accents the fire that it created.

The fussy top of the building is of another era, but the sleek brick façade of the tower itself is a clear indication that a new style was just over the horizon. It’s interesting to view the building from Bryant Park because one can see the Art Deco behemoth that is the Empire State Building, just a few blocks down Fifth Avenue, looking over the shoulders of Hood’s building.

In 1927 Georgia O’Keefe captured the skyscraper in her “Radiator Building at Night.” At the time O’Keefe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, lived in a suite on the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel on 49th Street and Lexington, just to the northeast of the building’s location. Her painting shows the American Radiator Building, lit by floodlights, a solid beauty in a city filled with remarkable buildings.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission of New York City designated the Radiator building a landmark in 1974.

If you’re zipping along on Lake Shore Drive, especially if you’re headed north, slow down just past Diversey Boulevard and look toward the lake. You may see a small monument of a Native American family – father, mother, baby and dog – staring back at you.

The sculpture is entitled “The Alarm” and most experts agree that it is the first sculpture in Chicago to portray Native Americans, having been unveiled in 1884. Like several other sculptures in the Lincoln Park and Lakeview area, the piece has been uprooted from its original placement, a more elaborate grouping, and now rests in an open area just off the bike path.

Cast in bronze in Philadelphia, the original statue included a surrounding low concrete wall with urns. The original display had bronze plaques on the four sides of the pedestal, but vandals reportedly stole them. New plaques of engraved stone were put in place depicting The Hunt, Forestry, The Corn Dance and The Peace Pipe. [www.waymarking.com]

The sculptor’s name was John J. Boyle and in a 1903 book on American sculpture Loredo Taft, a world renowned sculptor in his own right, said of him, “He feels things deeply; his likes and dislikes have in them something elemental . . . no languid interest his; no ‘primrose path of dalliance!’”

Born in 1852, Boyle was educated at the Franklin Academy and the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, continuing his professional education at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He was invited to participate in the largest artistic effort of the nineteenth century, sculpting pieces for the Transportation Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Three years later Boyle was chosen as one of the 23 sculptors to create works for the Congressional Library in Washington, D.C., where he created the statues of Plato and Sir Francis Bacon. Other notable Boyle works can be found in Philadelphia, including the sculpture of Benjamin Franklin in front of College Hall at the University of Pennsylvania.

As is the case with so much sculpture in the city, a wealthy Chicagoan, Martin L. Ryerson, donated the funds for “The Alarm” in 1884. Ryerson was another one of those early Chicagoans who began life with almost nothing and made a fortune from a combination of shrewdness, timing, and hard work.

A Chicago Tribune article about Ryerson, carried in the September 15, 1886 Muskegon Weekly Chronicle says this about Ryerson’s formative years, “At 16 years of age young Ryerson was an ambitious lad and made up his mind to seek his fortune in the Far West . . . He saw there a large profit in the business and saved his wages until he was able to start in for himself. Then with a stock of trinkets and gaudy notion such as the Indians most desired he began to tramp the State of Michigan from one end to the other . . . This extensive acquaintance with the geography of Michigan made him the best known among the Indians of any white man in the State, and fixed indelibly upon his mind the ultimate value of the pine lands.” [www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ ~mimuskeg/Ryerson.html]

In 1843 Ryerson began to produce lumber on his own, drawing from the immense stands of white pine in Michigan. By 1846 he had lumber interests in Muskegon, Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Chicago. Before moving on to real estate, Ryerson had made almost three million dollars in the lumber business.

In the right place at the right time, Ryerson began to develop property in what is now Chicago’s Loop just as the Illinois and Michigan Canal was being finished and the railroads were making Chicago into the fastest growing city in the country. One of his later projects can be found on the east side of Wabash, just south of Madison Street, where in 1882 Ryerson commissioned Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan to design a building for the S. A. Maxwell Company. [History of the Development of Building Construction in Chicago] Located at 15-19 South Wabash, you can lease space in the building for ten bucks a square foot.

Moving back to the sculpture that Ryerson commissioned in Lincoln Park, we can see that as he looked back on all that life had brought him, he thought fondly of those early days. The inscription on the base of “The Alarm” reads, “To the Ottawa Nation of Indians, my early friends."

Martin Ryerson is buried in Graceland Cemetery. In the second item of his will he gave the cemetery three thousand dollars to be held in trust “to keep the same perpetually as a fund the income from which shall be used for the purpose of ornamenting and keeping in good condition and repair all monuments and stones thereon.” [www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ ~mimuskeg/Ryerson.html]

His memorial was designed by Louis Sullivan.