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| Flair House at 214 West Erie (JWB, 2010) |
One day last summer
she who is wiser than I and meself were strolling down Erie Street toward the
Erie Café and Montgomery Ward Park when I spotted a most peculiar and lovely
building on the north side of the street between Wells and Franklin. Settled gently into a bed of flowers
with the sculpture of a maiden in the window above the front door, backlit by a
glimmering chandelier, this, I found out, was 214 West Erie. Better known as Flair House, the
“house” is actually the headquarters for the Flair Communications Agency.
The advertising
agency was started by Lee Flaherty, a Renaissance man if ever there were
one. After three years in the Army
as a paratrooper with the 11th Airborne Division, Mr. Flaherty
entered the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with a degree in
Marketing in 1957. He worked in San Francisco for seven years before coming to
Chicago. In the mid-sixties he borrowed
$8,500 from his mother, who mortgaged her California home to come up with the
loan, and started his own company in the 1883 building on Erie Street.
In addition to
building a multi-million dollar company with an international reputation, Mr.
Flaherty also was the founder of the Chicago Marathon, providing a $50,000
infusion of sorely needed cash for the first modern Chicago Marathon in
1977. He also funded the second
marathon a year later. Mr. Flaherty
also was the founder of the World’s Largest Block Party at Old St. Pat’s at
Desplaines and Madison. Guys like
Mr. Flaherty make this city the place that it is, and his civic consciousness
has brought him any number of awards over the years.
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| (JWB, 2010) |
His selection of
the old three-story house on Erie Street as the place where he would start his
business, though, ranks right up there with the greatest of his
achievements. There was no “River
North” back in 1964; the area north of the river was a hodge-podge of old
warehouses and manufacturing buildings.
The work that began at 214 West Erie spread across the decades until the
few blocks just north of the river have become the hot spot that we turn to
today when we’re looking for a linen tablecloth and a nice glass of Russian
River zinfandel.
When Mr. Flaherty
moved into the house, it had no plumbing or electricity, and he paid $85 a
month to rent the place. Within a
year he purchased it for $20,000, paying his mom back at the same time. The main conference center in Flair
House is named “The Frances Room” in her honor. It took 20 years to restore the place, an ambitious effort
complicated by the fact that half the structure had been destroyed in a 1929
fire.
According to the
plaque that hangs on the front of Flair House, Marcus Devine, an Irish
immigrant who became a milk merchant, had the house built for his wife, Eliza,
and the couple’s six sons and daughters.
His generous contribution of dairy products was just one of the many
acts of generosity that the citizens of Chicago witnessed after the Great Fire
of October, 1871.
The delivery of
milk was an important occupation back in the days when the water couldn’t be
trusted and not everyone wanted to start pounding back ale at 7:00 in the
morning. By 1892 The Chicago
Tribune estimated that it
required 150,000 cows to supply the city’s need for milk. Lined up single-file, those cows would
form a 227-mile long parade that would take six days to pass a single point.
Before raw milk
could be put in cans and shipped to the city, it had to be cooled to at least
60°. Many farms lay some distance
from the nearest railroad station, so everyone on the farm was involved in a
grinding existence. Most farm boys
between the age of 12 and 16 never saw more than five hours of sleep in a
night; milking could begin as early as 3:00 in the morning.
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| (JWB, 2010) |
Most of Chicago’s
the 337,500 gallons of milk that made up the city’s daily supply came to the
city over the Chicago and Northwestern railroad, the only railroad having
regular milk trains into Chicago.
The “Milk Express” was made of 19 yellow-painted baggage cars and brought
4,000 eight-gallon cans of pure milk into Chicago every morning over the Fox
River branch. The train arrived at
the Clinton Street station at 10:15 in the morning where hundreds of milkmen
were waiting with their horse-drawn wagons. As late as the 1890’s there were 2,700 milk dealers in the
city, all in competition with each other.
That competition
forced down prices, so that it was almost impossible to make a profit. Often the milk wagons carried three
grades of “milk.” One grade had
four quarts of unfiltered lake water added to eight gallons of milk. The higher grade had two quarts of lake
water added to the eight gallons of milk.
The third can consisted of pure milk. It was the milkman who decided who got what.
Dr. C. E. Peck,
Vice-President of the Bowman Dairy company with offices on North State Street,
said, “Prices are cut so that pure milk cannot be sold. There is no sophistication. But reputable dealers make no practice
of carrying more than one grade of milk.
Among the best dealers who sell the purest goods to the wealthy families
there is little competition.”
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| (JWB, 2010) |
And that brings us
back to Flair House because it was good old Marcus Devine, the man who built
the house on Erie Street, who sold his company to the Bowman Dairy company of
St. Louis on February 6, 1885. Dr.
Peck, who spoke in the above article, was the son-in-law of J. R. Bowman, who
founded the St. Louis milk company in 1874 with a horse he borrowed from his
father’s farm and a rented wagon.
And old Marcus
Devine, the original owner of the beautifully restored 214 West Erie, has
another claim to fame, it seems.
For it was Mr. Devine, way back in 1876, who challenged the Board of
Commissioners of Cook County in a case that went all the way to the Illinois
Supreme Court.
It seems that the
commissioners had passed a resolution authorizing the preparation of bonds up
to a total of $1,000,000, payable at six per cent interest per annum for a
period of 20 years. The bond issue
was for the erection of “necessary public buildings, for funding floating
indebtedness, and for other purposed specified.”
Mr. Devine’s
argument was three-fold. First, he
argued that the resolution contravened the clause in the Illinois constitution
that forbade the passage of local or special laws. Secondly, if there ever was a clause that allowed the Cook
County Board’s action, it had been contravened in a later law. And, finally, that “before the board of
commissioners can have any rightful authority to issue bonds for any purpose
named in the resolution they must submit the question of issuing such bonds to
the legal voters of the county, at a general election.”
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| (JWB, 2011) |
What was the result
of the suit? Marcus Devine, the
milk merchant, won! Early in 1877
the Illinois Supreme Court declared, “It follows, from the reasoning of the
propositions stated, the board of commissioners of Cook county have no power,
under the law, to issue bonds for any purpose named in the resolution adopted,
unless authorized by a vote of the legal voters of the county, to whom the
question of issuing such bonds shall have been submitted at a general election,
after the amount and object for which it was proposed to issue bonds had been
first ascertained. That has not
been done, and hence there is a total want of authority to issue the proposed
bonds, and any one whose property will be affected by a tax tied to pay the
interest or principal may enjoin the issuing of such bonds.”
So it’s quite a
place there on Erie Street. It was
quite a place back in the nineteenth century, and Mr. Flaherty has paid the
legacy forward. The ultimate
payoff . . . if you keep walking, you end up at Montgomery Ward Park and the
Erie Café. There could be a lot worse
ways to spend two or three hours on a warm Chicago day.
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