Monday, January 7, 2019

January 7, 1980 -- Art Institute Selects James N. Wood as Director

James N. Wood (nytimes.com)
January 7, 1980 –The Board of Trustees of the Art Institute of Chicago announces the appointment of James N. Wood as the museum’s new director.  For the preceding five years Wood has served as director of the St. Louis Art Museum. Along with the decision concerning the position of director comes a change in the organizational structure of the institution as Wood and the museum’s president, E. Laurence Chalmers, will share equal positions, both reporting to the trustees.   During his tenure in Chicago Wood “oversaw the renovations of every single department, as well as the massive restoration of the museum's original beaux-arts building.” [Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2010]  He also founded the museum’s Department of Architecture.  His biggest achievement, though, was bringing about the long-heralded construction of the institution’s Modern Wing.  Upon his death in 2010, James Cuno, who served as president and director of the Art Institute at the time and had worked with Wood for more than 20 years, said, “I think we, all of us who work at the Art Institute today, feel that we are working to advance his legacy at the museum.  It’s a legacy that all of us who work at the Art Institute are proud to serve, and I think most of us think of it as carrying on his legacy.  I certainly feel that that’s my job, and I think we all feel it’s an honor to do so.”


January 7, 1952 – Dedication services are held at Temple Emanuel at Thorndale Avenue and Sheridan Road.  Dr. Felix Levy, Rabbi of the congregation since 1908 and his wife, Celia, are honored at the ceremony as the sanctuary is dedicated to them.  The Emanuel Congregation was founded in 1880 by 14 Jewish and Czechoslovakian families with its first meeting place on the second floor of a dry-goods store at 338 North Sedgwick Street.  In 1886 thirty families contributed $10,000 to buy a Swedish church at 280 North Franklin Street.  As Jewish families joined the general movement of folks to the north side of the city, it became clear that a more suitable place of worship was needed, and a new synagogue was dedicated on June 23, 1907 on Buckingham Street near Halsted.  The synagogue had grown so much by the 1920’s that congregants had to use the People’s Church-Uptown Temple for High Holy Days.  Land was purchased for a new synagogue at Surf Street and Sheridan Road in 1944, but demographic trends again saw Jewish families moving northward, so that lot was sold and a new lot was selected at 5959 North Sheridan Road, the site of the present Temple Emanuel.  Today Rabbi Craig Marantz leads the congregation and Cantor Michelle D. Friedman leads music at services.  The religious school of the synagogue has 160 students.


January 7, 1955 – The Art Institute of Chicago goes to Circuit Court seeking to change the definition of a word – monument.  In 1905 a wealthy Chicago lumber man, Benjamin Ferguson died, with his will providing for a million-dollar trust fund to be used to beautify the city’s parks with monuments.  In the ensuing fifty years the original trust fund has generated a million dollars in interest income, and the institute wants to use the money to construct an addition that would stand just north of the original 1893 building, fronting on Monroe Street.  The Art Institute has already filed a suit similar to this one back in 1933, but because the plans for the building have changed as well as its location, it’s back to court again for the art folks and their legal representatives.  The suit that the Art Institute files names the attorney general of Illinois, Latham Castle, as the defendant.  Castle is the member of the fund’s trustees representing the public.


January 7, 1929 -- With the application for the necessary construction permits pending in the war department, the U. S. Senate and the House of Representatives pass identical bills granting consent to the Lincoln and South Park Boards to build an outer drive link bridge at the mouth of the Chicago RIver. It would be close to a decade before the Lake Shore Drive bridge would be completed, but the process had begun. Look just to the left of the west end of Navy Pier in the above photo and you can see what the shoreline at the mouth of the river looked like before the Lake Shore Drive Bridge was completed in 1938.


Sunday, January 6, 2019

January 6, 1952 -- Clarke House finds a Savior

chicagology.com
chicago.com
January 6, 1952 –The Chicago Daily Tribune reports on a ten-room white frame house at 4526 South Wabash Street, believed to be the oldest house in the city, used as a parsonage by the congregation of St. Paul’s Church of God in Christ.  The home was chosen in 1932 as one of three Chicago homes to have its blueprints permanently recorded in the Library of Congress.  The congregation purchased the home nine years later and, under the direction of Reverend Louis H. Ford (the man for whom the Bishop Ford Expressway is named), contributed nearly $5,000 to make basic exterior repairs on the property and is in the process of raising another $5,000 to begin repairs on the interior of the home.   The congregation resisted offers over the years from developers to purchase the place and raze it for development. In so doing it preserved a structure that easily could have been lost.  Known as the Widow Clarke house, the home is named after the wife of Henry B. Clarke, a hardware merchant who came to the city in 1833 and built the residence on a 20-acre plot on a trail next to the lake.  Clarke lived there until he died of cholera in 1849. His wife occupied the home until she died in 1860 at which point a man by the name of John Chrimes moved it sometime after 1871 to a location nearly six miles to the south.  His descendants occupied the home until it was bought by the church.  In 1977 the City of Chicago purchased it and moved it to a site in the Prairie Avenue Historic District, several blocks from its original location.  The Clarke House, owned by the City of Chicago and operated by the Glessner House Museum just down the street, opened as a museum in 1982.  The black and white photo depicts the house after it was moved in 1873.  The photo below that shows the Clarke House Museum today.


January 6, 1902 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that the troopers at Fort Sheridan are awash in whisky as “The officers at Fort Sheridan discovered … where the soldiers found large supplies of whisky without leaving the reservation.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 6, 1902]  It seems that after the saloon of Dennis Murphy in Highland Park is shuttered, “soon after several barrels of whisky disappeared from the stock.” The men of Company E at Fort Sheridan had a pretty good idea where the whisky was … it was hidden in the woods adjoining the base, and “They all filled their canteens and then told members of other companies. Many soldiers were walking about with canteens full of whisky, and others with empty canteens could not walk.” Before officers at the base could determine what was going on, “the supply was practically exhausted.” Happy New Year!


January 6, 1925 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that during the year of 1924, according to the city’s Smoke Abatement Commission, Chicago’s economic loss from “dense, foul smoke” is placed at $42,500,000.  Sighting an earlier investigation by the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research at the University of Pittsburgh, the paper observes that Chicago’s laundry bills are higher than those of any other large industrialized city.  “The average cost per person for laundry in Chicago at the time the Mellon Institute analyzed the census figures was $3.25 per year, while in Philadelphia it was only $2.01 … Chicago even surpasses Pittsburgh which had the reputation of living up to its name of ‘Smoky City.’” the article states.  


January 6, 1972 -- George Vavoulis, the regional commissioner for the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, tells Mayor Richard Daley that Chicago will lose $20 million in federal urban renewal funds because of the city's failure to provide more low-income-housing. This sum came on top of $26 million that had been frozen three months earlier because the City Council had failed to approve enough public housing sites in white neighborhoods.

Saturday, January 5, 2019

January 5, 1902 -- Chicago and North Western Station Receive a Reprieve

chicagology.com
January 5, 1981 – The Chicago and North Western railroad station gets a reprieve from demolition as preservationists in a packed meeting room cheer a unanimous vote by the Commission on Chicago Historical Landmarks to proceed with landmark designation over the objections of the City Planning Commissioner, Martin Murphy.  Murphy says that the preservation of the station, completed in 1911 according to plans drawn by Frost and Granger, will complicate the development of a proposed apartment project, Presidential Towers, to the south and west of the station.  When it opened, the terminal was the second largest in the nation.  In the year following its June 4, 1911 opening the great complex handled 19,797,500 passengers, an average of 51,000 each day.  In May of 1912, a total of 47,215 people were served in the station’s dining rooms with 585,200 people sitting down to a meal during the year.  The United States Post Office moved 150 tons of mail a day through the station in that same year.  The preservationists lost their battle, and the great complex was torn down in 1984. [chicagology.com]  The station is pictured above on October 11, 1911.



January 5, 1884 – The Beaurivage, “one of the largest and handsomest apartment buildings in Chicago,” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 6, 1884], standing on the northwest corner of Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street, is heavily damaged in a three-alarm fire that starts in the building’s basement and climbs rapidly through the elevator shaft to the roof.  The Beaurivage, a six-story brick building, was divided into two wings, separated by a court, holding 15 apartment suites.  The fire breaks out around 4:00 a.m. as “women screamed, the children cried, and the men yelled themselves hoarse, almost drowning the crackling of the flames gathering about them.” Residents routed by the fire found shelter in the Leland Hotel just north of the Beaurivage.  The top photo shows the Beaurivage in 1880.   The photo below that shows the corner of Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street as it appears today.


January 5, 1954 – Bad news comes today for motorists north of Chicago.  After watching a demonstration of radar designed to track speeding motorists in Springfield, state officials announce that the device will be placed into operation on the new Edens expressway, completed three years earlier, a modern roadway plagued with a number of accidents for which the contributing factor is speed.  The device has been tested for six months in Moline and has been successful in convicting motorists who defy the speed limit, justifying its $700 cost.  Things will never be the same again.


January 5, 1910 -- Basing its action on an Illinois legislative act of 1903 that gave park boards the right to condemn easements as a matter of public necessity, the South Park Board decides to file a petition to condemn the easement of A. Montgomery Ward and permit the erection of the $8,000,000 Field Museum at the foot of Congress Street along with the Crear Library. This would be the last battle in the long fight between Ward and the city. Grant Park would survive unsullied; Ward would be dead less than three years later. The photo below shows the land over which the battle was being waged at the time.

Friday, January 4, 2019

January 4, 1898 -- Lakefront Exposition Center Proposed


January 4, 1898 –A committee of the Chicago Commercial Association and three members of the South Park Board of Commissioners spend two hours at the Union League Club, discussing the possibility of building a permanent exposition building on the Lake Front Park (today’s Grant Park) east of the Illinois Central right-of-way.   The bulk of the time was spent debating whether the South Park Board has the power to acquire title to the submerged land necessary for the structure.  One commissioner asserts that a contractor has already been lined up to do the work of filling in the necessary segment of the lake from the south side of Jackson Boulevard to Congress Street and eastward to the breakwater, a total area of 900 feet by 1,300 feet.  Another commissioner says, “I expect to see the permanent exposition building completed in the Lake Front Park before the end of 1899 and in time to enable Chicago to secure the big political conventions of the following year.  I believe such an enterprise could be made to pay a profit of $250,000 a year.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 5, 1898]  The idea, of course, never got beyond the discussion phase. It was doomed as soon as Montgomery Ward heard about it.  His response comes less than two weeks later as can be seen in this entry in Connecting the Windy City.  Yet, it is one more reminder of how close the city came to having a lakefront crowded with structures of all descriptions in what is now arguably the city’s largest attraction.  The site of the proposed exposition center is pictured above.


January 4, 1967 –A fire is discovered in the south end of the International Amphitheater at Forty-Third and Halsted Streets at 9:00 p.m. with the initial alarm quickly upgraded to a 5-11 alarm fire with two specials.  It takes two hours to bring the blaze under control as 2,000 people stand on the east side of Halsted Street, watching the flames that shoot out of the building’s second story windows. The main section of the building is saved, but the 12-year-old addition known as Donovan Hall is extensively damaged.  Chief Investigator for the Fire Department arson unit, Edmund Voliquet, says the fire is “definitely an arson job.” [Chicago Tribune, January 5, 1967] The International Amphitheater opened at the end of 1934 after its predecessor burned to the ground in May of that year in one of the largest fires in the city’s history, a blaze that spread over eight city blocks and caused eight million dollars in damage.  The 1934 fire is pictured above.


January 4, 1946 – Brigadier General John T. Pierce, commanding general at Fort Sheridan, announces that the north shore army post has processed 217,707 men and women during 1945, handling the transition from military to civilian life for individuals at the rate of 1,400 a day.  The post has handled 196,633 enlisted men, 21,756 officers and 9,328 members of the Women’s Army Corps.  The busiest month was October, during which 43,001 men and women were processed.  With a maximum amount of time for the handling of paperwork approaching no more than 48 hours the base expects to work at this rate seven days a week for at least several more months.


January 4, 1913 -- Two big events that would have major consequences in the way Chicago moved through the twentieth century. First, U. S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson approves the double-deck bridge on Michigan Avenue that would furnish a boulevard link between the north and south sides of the city. (See Photo for what the area looked like in 1915, five years before the bridge was completed.) AND Circuit Court Judge Lockwood Honoré enters an order confirming agreements that would give the city the riparian property between 53rd Street and 55th Street, leaving only two small tracts between Grant Park and Jackson Park to which the public had no clear title. Ride along this route on a bright, sunny summer's day and think about how huge this was.

Thursday, January 3, 2019

January 3, 1890 -- Chicago River's South Branch Hosts Official Inquiry


January 3, 1890 –Mayor Dewitt Clinton Cregier, members of the City Council’s Finance Committee, two newly-elected Drainage Board commissioners, and the Secretary of the State Board of Health take a trip down the South Branch of the river.  Starting at 11:00 a.m. at La Salle Street, they head for the South Fork where they find “water … so thick that the tug had hard work to push through it.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 3, 1890]  “From glue factories and slaughter houses filth was coming out in great streams [with] a stench that was revolting.”  The tug lands its passengers at the Bridgeport pumping works “… after the party had stood it as long as it could.”  At the pumping works an impromptu conference is held in which it is agreed that something must be done about the condition of the South Branch of the river – that “with the river in its present state every time it rains three inches in twenty-four hours you are going to have this mass of awful filth swept out into the lake to pollute your water supply.”  One solution to which the officials turn is pumping water directly from the West Fork of the South Branch into the DesPlaines River through the Ogden Ditch, which in some places is only two feet deep.  This plan would require extensive dredging.  Eagerness at finding a solution is tempered when an official from Joliet enters the conversation, saying, “The people of this valley have a grievance against Chicago.  At times the whole valley is filled with the stench of your sewage.  People cannot raise the window of their homes at night because of the smell.  Can Chicago afford to continue this affliction if a way can be found to avert it?”  The day ends back at La Salle Street with little agreement – “… no two had the same scheme in mind to meet the protest of the State Board of Health.”  Mayor Cregier did little to tip his hand.  “I haven’t anything to say.  I am here as a listener,” he said.


January 3, 1945 – The Chicago Daily Tribune, noting the renewed effort of Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly to save the Auditorium Theatre, editorializes in favor of the effort.  “Its proportions are noble,” the paper writes. “Its acoustics are incomparably good.  Its loss would mean the loss to Chicago and the world of an authentic masterpiece of architecture.  [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 3, 1945] Opened in 1889 as a combination hotel, office building and performance space, back taxes threatened the complex although it was believed sale of the hotel and office building could at least pay off the debt.  The theater itself had no hope of doing that.  The Tribune gets behind a plan to have a not-for-profit entity assume control over the theater, giving it “the same kind of tax exemption that goes to the Art Institute, and the various universities and museums.” In 1946 Roosevelt University stepped up and assumed responsibility for the building.  The theater would remain shuttered for nearly two decades, though, until in 1963 Mrs. Beatrice Spachner founded the Auditorium Theatre Council which raised three million dollars to renovate the structure. Under the renovation genius of architect Harry Weese, the gem on Congress opened on October 31, 1967 with the New York City Ballet’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  The above photo shows the Auditorium in 1945, with its front rows and stage converted into a bowling alley as part of a Servicemen’s Center that provided a welcoming place for over 2.2 million servicemen during the war years.


January 3, 1928 --  Samuel Insull comes closer to his dream of helping the city build a new home for the Chicago Civic Opera, completing a transaction that gives him control of an entire block of the Loop, bounded by Madison Street on the south, the river on the west, Wacker Drive (Market Street at the time) on the east and Washington Boulevard on the north.  On this date the purchase of the southeast corner of the property, the piece necessary to complete the plan, is filed with the recorder of deeds.  Plans are to create an opera house that has about the same amount of space as the 1889 Auditorium Theater’s performance space with a modern office tower rising above it.  The Chicago Daily Tribune reports, “Plans for the building are being somewhat hampered … because of the difficulty of harmonizing the office building and the opera house into one beautiful building.  However, Architect Ernest R. Graham said he is confident of planning a structure at once sightly and with profitable renting space.”  Just 22 months later the new Civic Opera Building would open with Rosa Raisa playing the title role in Aida.  For more information on opening night, please follow this link.  The above photo shows the Civic Opera Building rising quickly in February of 1929.

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

January 2, 1873 -- Chicago Water Tower (the First One)



architecture.org
January 2, 1873 –The Water Tower on Michigan Avenue, completed in 1869, is today an enduring symbol of the “I Will” spirit of Chicago.  Before this facility was built, though, another water tower stood on what would become LaSalle Street “in the centre of a long block, stretching from Clark to Wells street …” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 2, 1873]  Clark Street at the time was “a street of quiet and cosy homes, with neatly-kept front yards, and all the village aspects.” Phillip F. W. Peck, a man who had moved to the rural hamlet of Chicago from Rhode Island in the 1830’s, owned the entire block that is today circumscribed by LaSalle, Adams, Clark and Jackson Streets.  The city’s engineer, C. J. McAlpine, brought plans to Peck for a water tower to stand on part of his property, a piece of engineering that “was to be a marvel of construction … the local editors of the day went into ecstacies over its merits.” Peck sold the property to the city, and “Mr. McAlpine was as busy as a bee in a bonnet, for public structures of such a class were a novelty in our city.”  And then came the day for the dedication.  The Mayor was there and the Aldermen … “Adams street was a mass of people … the square surrounding the tower was a sea of human heads.”  The pumps were turned on, and the great tank, built to hold a million gallons of water, more or less, began to fill.  Then someone noticed water erupting from the cornice of the tower and “The spurt increased to a stream.  The cornice parted.  The brick work eroded, and the dismal flow began.  Then there was a rush … A shabby man in a sad hat, who had evidently been abstaining from water that morning, in order that there might be enough to fill the tank, proffered this advice to the crestfallen McAlpine: “Turn the durned thing over; put yer building onto the tank … Then she’ll stand, bet yor a dollar.” The life of the new water tower ended before it began.  Property in the vicinity fell by $1.50 a front-foot as workers went about bricking up the tower’s walls and bracing it so that it could hold less than half of the load it was built to carry.  When La Salle Street was opened up to Van Buren in order to meet the Michigan Southern Railroad, the neighborhood surrounding the tower came to hold “The coarsest life of a growing city … the haunt of the low and the vile, the shame-lost woman and the shameless vagabond, and among these the enforced homes of the poor … filling each block from street to street.”  When the fire came on October 8, 1871 the mass of wooden buildings exploded in flame.  But the water tower “stood on its shabby pedestal of brick on the morning after the Fire, as if avenged for all the snares put upon it …”  Today one of the great early skyscrapers of the city, the Rookery, stands where the old, ill-fated, water tower once stood.  The Rookery is pictured above.


January 2, 1927 – As smoke continues to drift from the  hundreds of chimneys all across the city, and the steam engines continue to work their way up and down the lakefront, the Chicago Daily Tribune reports on the problems that smoke causes for the city’s premier cultural attraction, the Art Institute of Chicago.  During 1926, the paper reports, thirteen tons of soot and cinders were removed from the roofs of the institution.  Unfortunately, the problem didn’t stop at the roofline, and “Some of the year’s accumulation could not be removed from the roofs because it had seeped into the galleries to the defacing of priceless fabrics, paintings, and statues.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 2, 1927] The director of the Art Institute, Robert Harshe, says, “We ... are the dirtiest museum in the world.”  The photo above shows a fairly smoky city just about the time the Art Institute was sweeping its roof in 1927.


January 2, 1932 – The work on the long-awaited bridge across the Chicago River on the lakefront drive is off once again.  Edward J. Kelly, president of the South Park board, calls a meeting with the heads of the South Park and LincolnPark boards, along with members of the Chicago Plan Commission and the contractors involved in the link bridge project. It is decided that until the park boards receive the necessary revenue, the work is off.  Mr. Kelly says, “We must conserve our cash in the present tangled financial situation.  All construction programs … excluding only the island for the world’s fair, must be dropped if we are to live within revenue and meet obligations.”  Work on the approaches to the bridge had begun in 1929, and work on the bridge itself was started on June 6 of 1932.  The city has cried out for this connection between north and south, a project that was proposed as early as 1909. The bridge would finally be dedicated in October of 1937.  The photo above shows where the project stood at the time.

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

January 1, 1900 -- Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal Waits for Permit

thisdayinwaterhistory.wordpress.com
January 1, 1900 –With the beginning of a new year and a new century, a new era begins in the city as at 10:00 p.m. “a big steam dredge began clawing into the narrow dam of earth which held back the water in Mud Lake from flowing into the main channel of the drainage canal.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 2, 1900]  Sluice gates prevent the water from the river from flowing into the new canal, eight years in the making, with the hope that the water would be contained until permission was received from the Governor of Illinois.  The dredge is positioned just west of the bridge at Kedzie Avenue at a point where the new drainage canal is about 3,000 feet to the south of Mud Lake, the obstacle that historically separated the Chicago River from the interior waters of the state.  The dredge would have to claw away about 15 feet of an earthen barrier that was 25 feet wide before the water from the river could be released.  With no permission from the state on hand and with the workers on the dredge keeping up steam for the operation, Chief Sanitary District Engineer Isham Randolph orders earth cut way in order to create a channel “as wide as two shovels of the dredge.”  In a give-and-take between city and state, the city is asking permission to open a section of the canal from the Chicago River to Lockport, saying that it will seek permission to open the section from Lockport to Joliet at a later date.  The state, however, is willing only to issue a permit for the complete 28-mile project. A Sanitary District trustee says, “We went to Joliet in the hope that the permit to open the canal would be ready and we could let the water in tonight.  The State commission decided [that it] must confine itself to one final statement covering the whole canal.  That it was not ready to make, and so we came away without the permit we wanted.”  So in a Meigs Field maneuver the officials at the site set the dredge to work, hoping that the sluice gates would keep the waters in check until, one way or another, permission came from the state to open the canal.  The photo above shows the operation to remove the earthen dam as it continues on January 2, 1900.


January 1, 1954 – Today’s headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune reads, “Girls Take ‘Em Off for Last Time at Rialto” as Minsky’s Rialto Theater at 336 South State Street, a “strip tease center in Chicago for 35 years” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 1, 1954] closes its doors after the last show ends at 1;30 a.m.  The building will be demolished and a group of one-story “taxpayers” will be erected in its place.  The theater opened in 1917 and was designed by Marshall and Fox, the same architects that designed the Blackstone Hotel and the Drake on North Michigan Avenue.  It could seat 1,500 when it opened for vaudeville shows, but it turned to burlesque shows in the 1930’s.  Today it is long gone, along with the one-story shops that took its place.  The site is now the home of Pritzker Park on the northwest corner of State Street and Van Buren, a bit of green space facing the elevated tracks and the Harold Washington Library just to the south.


January 1, 1913 -- The Chicago Daily Tribune begins 1913 with this headline, “Murders Spread as Police Fail.”  The city coroner reports that through December 1, 1912 there were 287 homicides in Cook County for the year, all but 14 of them inside the city.  London, according to the paper, “with a population three times that of Chicago, reported only thirty-three in 1910.”  There were more murders in November than in any November in the preceding eight years.  The coroner’s jury determined that 168 of the 297 homicides could be classified as murder.  Of that number only 32 people had been convicted.  The article states, “For years the public and the police have been talking about curbing the use of revolvers and the carrying of concealed weapons.”  In fact, an ordinance was passed several years earlier that required dealers to report the sale of firearms and owners to register weapons that they purchased, but the ordinance was never seriously enforced and was repealed during 1912.  Pessimistically, the paper observes, “If history repeats itself, it is a safe guess that the police will have the murderer and the evidence to convict him in about 20 per cent of the cases.”