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| The Greyhound Bus Terminal, Clark and Randolph -- 1953-1990 (www.chuckmanchicaonostalgia.files.wordpress.com) |
I didn’t know much
about the real Chicago back in the 60’s and early 70’s. Not only was I a suburban kid, but I was a
r-e-c-e-n-t suburban kid, having spent most of my young life banging about the
world as the son of a career officer in the U. S. Army.
One thing I did get
to know fairly well was the old Greyhound bus station on Randolph Street,
located on the lot where the Chicago Title and Trust building stands
today. I got off the bus from Dekalb
there when I took it in from Northern Illinois University on my way to Union
Station to pick up the gal of my dreams – my wife today – who took the
Burlington Zephyr in from Macomb.
In fact, I spent
the morning of our wedding at the Greyhound station in January of 1972 where I was dispatched to
pick up my cousin on her way in from Rochester, New York to attend the wedding.
It’s gone now – the
bus station, not the cousin – but I remember with fondness the escalators
leading down from street level, the busy shops, and the crowded waiting room
filled with folks headed to places all over the country. It was quite a place on an impressive piece
of real estate, with the City-County Building, the brand new Civic Center and
the First United Methodist Church of Chicago within view to the south.
The lot on which
the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design was sited had quite a history of its
own. It was at this location that nine
Chicagoans met above the hardware store owned by Jabez Botsford on May 31, 1850
to found a university that would “serve the northwest.” [Chicago
Tribune, December 26, 1951] On that May day at the corner of Clark and Randolph Northwestern University began its life.
A decade later the
site held Colonel John H. Wood’s Museum, which held as its greatest attraction
a 96-foot prehistoric fossil called a zeuglodon, unearthed somewhere in Alabama
in 1848. You could see the zeuglodon for
25 cents, a reasonable price, it seems to me, to have the privilege of viewing a zeuglodon.
[Chicago Tribune, July 8, 1951] The museum drew 10,000 visitors in its first
six weeks of operation. Of course.
That kind of crowd
led to the conversion of some sections of the building into a 1,500 person theater,
which opened in 1864. The play Divorce was scheduled for the night of
October 8, 1871 but the show never went on.
By the next morning Mr. Wood’s museum and theater complex was a pile
of ash.
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| www.patsabin.com |
The theater was
rebuilt and went through a dozen names over the years, the last of which was
The Apollo, the lobby of which ran through the Ashland block, a 16-story
skyscraper designed by Burnham and Root and finished in 1892, a building that
Joseph Korom in The American Skyscraper 1850-1940: A Celebration of Height has called, “an
absolutely delightful early skyscraper . . . a robust structure, a building
that reveled in its own height and plasticity.” [Korom, Joseph. The American Skyscraper 1850-1940: A Celebration of Height. P. 177]
Down the Ashland
block came in 1949, replaced by what Mr. Korom calls an “architecturally
mediocre bus station.” The original
plans were far more ambitious, and had they been carried out we might very well
be looking at the project today with the same admiration and awe that we view
the Inland Steel Building a couple of blocks to the southeast. Initial renderings for what would have been
the first tall building in the Loop since World War II (finished five years before Inland Steel and two years before the Prudential Building) a 20-story office
tower above the bus station that has that sleek mid-century modern feel for
which the architects, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, would become known.
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| Rendering of what might have been Chicago Tribune, February 19, 1949 |
Although the
Greyhound folks had acquired the property in 1941, the war and post-war
material restrictions held the project up for nearly a decade. Construction began in 1949 and was not
without its challenges.
One challenge was
to keep the 300 or more buses (500 during busy holiday travel periods) that
were planned for the terminal away from the busiest streets in Chicago. In order for that to happen a 225-foot
private tunnel had to be constructed, connecting the bus terminal’s loading
area with the lower level of Wacker Drive.
Then at the
beginning of June in 1950 the excavation caused the west wall of a four-story
building at 63 West Lake Street to sag dangerously. With a giant crack opening up in the
brickwork next to the sidewalk and more cracks rising up the side of the
building, the city ordered the building
demolished because of its danger to the
Lake Street elevated line as well as the nearby Harris and Selwyn
Theaters. The owners of S. Stein & Co., an office
furniture concern, were not allowed into the structure and in the five-hour
demolition process “furniture tumbled down with the walls amid a shower of
plaster and brick dust.” [Chicago
Tribune, June 5, 1950]
On March 19 – 61
years ago today – the terminal opened in ceremonies attended by “several
thousand” Chicagoans and Mayor Kennelly, the president and executive
vice-president of the Greyhound corporation and the chairman of the Illinois
commerce commission, George Perrine.
The first bus to
enter the terminal came from St. Louis and arrived at 2:40 a.m. on March 20,
1953. Three hours later at 5:15 a.m. the
first departing bus left for Des Moines and Omaha. In 1990 the station was demolished and
the operations were buried under the Eisenhower Expressway on Harrison Street,
a place remote enough so that no one in the Loop would have to deal with the
sight of bus folks waiting for their rides.
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