Connecting the Windy City

Monday, January 14, 2019

January 14, 1969 -- Chicago Loop, Fifty Years Down the Road

jbartholomewphoto

January 14, 1969 – An interesting article in the Chicago Tribune fifty years ago makes predictions about what Chicago’s Loop will look like in the century that is to come.  Noting that “Confidence in the Loop’s future already has been expressed by public and private investors,” [Chicago Tribune, January 14, 1969] the article begins with a look at downtown transportation.  “A new subway system will speed and extend public transportation thruout the downtown area … Only historical markers will remain to mark the elevated structure that once defined the Loop and gave it its name,” the article states.  State Street will be “a curious combination of past and present,” with the Carson Pirie Scott building “proudly standing among newer, taller neighbors.”  The street will still be “the retail king,” but once the elevated structure is removed on Wabash Avenue that street will also become “a shopper’s delight.”  Shoppers will browse in “huge commercial concourses … along the two levels of the new subway system” which will feature “moving sidewalks, and, perhaps, electric trains.” The article gets this one right – “West Madison street, fortified by new skyscrapers, will shed its skid row past and become the western heart of the new Loop,” bolstering the claim with a statement from the president of the Mid-City National Bank, E. M. Bakwin, who says, “I can see Madison-Canal expanding north and south as a major complex. I can see it as a new Rockefeller center.”  The Tribune predicts accurately that development of the Illinois Center area will “extend over nearly 50 acres along the Chicago river between Michigan avenue and the lakefront.  It will provide working quarters for thousands and homes for 35,000 apartment dwellers.”  Not quite accurate is the prediction that in this area “Autos will be barred from the surface to underground levels where workers and residents will find transit service … As the Loop enters the 21^st Century and its complex public transit system of subways, moving sidewalks, and walk-ways is completed, the last private auto will leave the Loop and be banished forever.”  As the above photo shows the much in the Loop -- and beyond -- has changed, but the el is still rattling along.

January 14, 1924 – The commissioners of the South Park Board convene in a special session to accept the donation of a fountain for Grant Park from Miss Kate Buckingham, the fountain to be built in honor of her brother, Clarence Buckingham.  Miss Buckingham contributes $250,000 for the construction of the fountain with another $135,000 set aside in a trust fund for its maintenance.  The fund will be administered by the Art Institute of Chicago.  The fountain opened to the public on May 26, 1927.  The Chicago Park District’s description of the fountain, the centerpiece of Grant Park, the city’s “front yard,” includes the following: “An important Chicago art patron and philanthropist, Kate Sturges Buckingham (1858 – 1937) was the last member of the Buckingham family.  Originally from Zanesville, Ohio, the Buckingham family made its fortune in grain elevators, real estate and steel.  Kate and her brother Clarence Buckingham (1854 – 1913) were both avid art collectors and benefactors who donated valuable prints, paintings, sculptures, and objects to the Art Institute of Chicago… Architect Edward H. Bennett of the firm Bennett, Parsons and Frost, designed the fountain and French artist Marcel Loyau produced the sculptural elements.  Architects Jacques Lambert and Clarence W. Farrier served as associates on the project.  The fountain is composed of pink Georgia marble, with some granite elements, and bronze sculptures. During the planning phases, Kate Buckingham expressed a wish that the fountain’s lighting tshould emulate ‘soft moonlight.’ According to an early Chicago Park District brochure, ‘though advanced in years,’ Miss Buckingham ‘worked night after night with technicians, trying out various colors of glass and adjusting the control of electric current’ to produce ‘blends… that pleased her— and indeed, there is a mystical aura around the lighted fountain suggesting moonlight— in fairyland.’”  The above photo shows the fountain under construction in 1925.    

January 14, 1898 – Another chapter in the continuing story of Aron Montgomery Ward and the area we today know as Grant Park unfolds as Ward reacts strongly to a plan that would see a great exposition hall built in the park, a project that would receive city abatement of ground fees, taxes and assessments.  Ward minces no words, saying, “To erect a large building [in the park] would be doing an injustice to those who have spent millions in erecting fine buildings and halls throughout the city … They have paid their fair and full proportion of taxes and assessments for years, and their investments in assembly halls have not paid them 2 per cent.  Now they can see their way, with the increased population and the evident return of prosperity to the country, to make simply the interest on their investments … Why should this great octopus be given land with no ground rent to pay and free from taxes and assessment? … It is one of the biggest schemes ever sprung on the citizens and taxpayers of Chicago.  All others pale before it.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 15, 1898]  One day maybe someone will gather the funds to erect a statue to Ward in the park on the lakefront.  In his continuing battle to protect the property, he did more than anyone else to keep it open, clear and free so that we might enjoy its many benefits today.  The area under consideration for the new exposition hall is pictured above.

January 14, 1927 -- The report of George M. Wisner's testimony before Charles Evans Hughes, special master of the United States Supreme Court, is printed. Eisner, the consulting engineer for the Chicago sanitary district, attempted to answer the demands of Wisconsin and five other Great Lakes states seeking an injunction that stopped water diversion from Lake Michigan into the Chicago River. Eisner recounted what life in Chicago was like before the river was flushed with lake water. He said, "The Chicago river was a pest hole of typhoid and intestinal disease germs . . . It was a big septic tank festering on the bottom and sending upwards dangerous poisonous gases. The crust of filth sometimes became so thick that a chicken could walk across the river. At other times the crust caught fire." To avoid a return to those days, Wisner asserted that a maximum of 10,000 cubic feet of lake water per second was needed to cleanse the river. Chicago lost the battle when the Supreme Court decreed on April 21, 1930 that the diversion of lake water be gradually reduced to 1,500 cubic feet per second by December 31, 1938. The photo above pictures the river as it looked about the time Wisner offered his testimony.

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 1 comments

Labels: 1969, Madison Street, State Street, Transportation

Sunday, January 13, 2019

January 13, 1913 -- Montgomery Ward Sells Last Michigan Avenue Property

chcagology.com

realtor.com

January 13, 1913 –A “syndicate of State Street merchants” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 14, 1913] pays $1,300,000 for the Montgomery Ward headquarters building at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Madison Street, ending Ward’s presence on Michigan Avenue and his role as the “watchdog of the lake front.”  William C. Thorne, the company’s vice-president, says, “It was company property, not the property of Mr. Ward individually.  The sale should hardly be a surprise so far as it marks the passing of Mr. Ward as the ‘lake front watchdog,’ for he is in advancing years and is withdrawing from active affairs rapidly.”  The sale of the tower is the last of three property transfers by the company since August, covering property along Michigan Avenue from Madison to Washington.  In August property at 12-22 North Michigan Avenuee was sold for $1,295,000. A month later a group headed up by architect Jarvis Hunt purchased property at the southwest corner of Michigan Avenue and Washington Street for $1,100,000.  Designed by the architectural firm of Schmidt, Garden and Martin, the latest sale is of a tower that was the tallest building in the city when it opened in 1899. The 12-story building originally had a ten-story tower topped by a three-story pyramidal roof, a temple and a 22.5-foot statute, The Spirit of Progress, but the top section of the building was demolished in 1947.  Today it sits toward the north end of the city’s Historic Michigan Boulevard District and has been converted into a residential building.  The original tower at 6 North Michigan Avenue is shown in the black and white photo.  A truncated version of the tower is shown in the present-day condominium building below that.

January 13, 1961 – Chief Judge William J. Campbell of the Federal District Court and John W. Chapman, Jr., the head of the Chicago offices of the General Services Administration, pry a brick from the wall of the Great Northern Theater at 26 West Jackson Boulevard, signaling the beginning of demolition work that will clear the site for a new 30-story federal building.  The 30-story courthouse, with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the lead designer, directing a team of Chicago architecture firms that included Schmidt, Garden and Erickson, A. Epstein and Sons, and C. F. Murphy Associates, will be finished in 1964. It will the first of three federal buildings to sit on a two-block site east and west of Dearborn Street and between Jackson Boulevard and Adams Street on the north and south. The Great Northern Theater is shown in the black and white photo above.  The Great Northern Hotel on the left side of the photo was designed by Daniel Burnham and John Root and opened in 1892.  It was demolished in 1940.  The office building and theater on the right and was designed after John Root's death.  While they stood, the two buildings enclosed the largest interior court in the city.  The Dirksen Federal Courthouse, which stands on the site today, is shown in the second photo.

January 13, 1890 -- The Chicago Daily Tribune continues its crusade against the conditions on the Chicago River, especially the area we know today as Bubbly Creek.  The paper reports, “There is no perceptible current in it, and for fifteen years, it is claimed, the refuse from the packing houses has been accumulating in it.   In summertime silver coin in the pockets of tugmen turns black as the tugs plow through the mass of decaying matter…a novice who takes a tug ride to the South Fork for the fun of the thing never takes another.  If he recovers from the first trip in a week and can smell clean again he is extremely lucky.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 13, 1890]   Some aldermen propose doing nothing, saying that the area around the South Fork is mostly occupied by glue factories, rendering plants, and slaughterhouses.  Says one alderman, “Why not let the South Fork, with its awful filth, alone?  No one scarcely, except the people who are responsible for the filth, is near the South Fork.”  The problem, though, is that under the right conditions – a heavy rainstorm or rapid snow melt – the whole mess overflows into the river and is carried to the lake.  In July of the preceding summer, after a particularly violent storm, a steamship captain reported that he could trace the mess from the South Fork to the breakwater and from there to a half-mile beyond the intake crib that provided the city with fresh, clean water.  What to do?  One plan is to allow the packers to continue dumping their stinking brew into the South Fork if they agree to pay for pumping works to send the mess away from the city and into the I & M Canal.  The paper takes the simplicity of the plan to task for two reasons: (1) that this solution would mean “that the people of the Illinois River Valley must endure what Chicago gets rid of”; and (2) “if the packers are allowed to use the canal for this refuse the city will be crowded out from sending its legitimate sewage that way, and would be compelled to go to an extremely heavy expense in straightening out the Desplaines River and dredging the Ogden Ditch.”  Without parsing the difference between “legitimate sewage” and “illegitimate sewage”, It will be ten years before one of the great engineering projects in United States history sees the river reversed and sent westward away from the lake and the city’s drinking water. Not even that great project, though, will make a difference to the terrible toxic soup that was the South Fork.

January 13, 1941 -- In a meeting of 100 civic and industrial leaders at the Chicago Club, the inauguration of a $3 million development program by the Illinois Institute of Technology is announced. With an enrollment of 7,000 students, the largest engineering school in the country had been formed just six months earlier with the merger of Lewis Institute of Arts and Sciences with the Armour Institute. At the gathering Wilfred Sykes of Inland Steel makes it clear that the city's continuing development dependson its having a great engineering school, saying, "Over 20,000 engineers are employed in the Chicago industrial area. The increase in the rate of employment of engineers in Chicago exceeds that of any other city in the United States, and the number of engineers in Chicago in comparison to the total number of industrial workers exceeds that of any other city."

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 19 comments

Labels: 1913, Madison Street, Michigan Avenue, Washington Boulevard

Saturday, January 12, 2019

January 12, 1935 -- Commodore Vanderbilt on Display

1.bp.blogspot.com

January 12, 1935 –Officials estimate that 20,000 people at the La Salle Street Station view the Commodore Vanderbilt, a streamlined steam locomotive on the New York Central Railroad.  Members of the Chicago Association of Commerce and railroad officials are on hand to greet the locomotive as it arrives straight form the railroad’s shops at New Albany, New York.  It is scheduled to be on display for two days before leaving for Detroit and another two weeks of exhibitions.  The 4,075-horsepower passenger locomotive was re-manufactured in the New York Central shops, receiving “an outer streamline cowling of gun metal.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 13, 1935]  Officials report that in wind tunnel tests between 70 and 90 miles an hour the streamlined locomotive reduced wind resistance by 30 percent over conventional locomotives.  The Commodore Vanderbilt went into revenue service in February, 1935, pulling the prestigious Twentieth Century Limited between Chicago and Toledo.  After a tussle with a sand truck at an East Chicago crossing in 1945 the streamlining was removed, and the locomotive was scrapped during the 1950’s.

January 12, 1951 – Four Chicago firefighters lose their lives and seven other firefighters and two civilians are injured in a fire and subsequent explosion at a four-story warehouse and office building at 320 North La Salle Street.  The fire begins in the lower portion of the 75-year-old building with the first alarm turned in at 2:04 p.m. Ultimately 68 pieces of equipment are brought to the scene, and the La Salle Street bridge remains open for 54 hours to allow fireboats to operate on the river.  Within 30 minutes of the first alarm the fire spreads through the elevator shafts of the building, setting off an explosion that blows out a wall, toppling it onto firefighters using hose lines on fire escapes and ladders in an adjacent alley. Lieutenant John Schuberth of Engine 42, Firefighter John P. Gleason, also of Engine 42, Firefighter Henry T. Dyer of Engine 11 and Chicago Insurance Patrol Firefighter Patrick Milott lose their lives in battling a blaze that keeps fire crews on the scene for several days.  Today 300 North La Salle, a glitzy high-rise designed by Pickard-Chilton, occupies the site.  Note in the photo of the modern building the 1912 building designed by Gustav Hallberg still sits on the river to the west.

January 12, 1881 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that Mr. John D. Parker has been successful in “obtaining the signatures of all the property-owners on La Salle street as far north as Madison, and also of three or four between Madison and the river, to a petition to the City Council urging that body to declare vacant that portion of La Salle street between Jackson and Van Buren.”  Parker is a prime mover in the effort to re-locate the Board of Trade to the property that the petition concerns.  Three other sites are possibilities for the new headquarters – one on Wabash Avenue between Van Buren and Harrison; another at the corner of State Street and Van Buren; and the third on the block bounded by Jackson, Van Buren and Third and Fourth Streets.  How different any of these areas – especially the site Parker and his allies favored – would look today if the critics of the plan had found a sympathetic hearing at City Hall and the politicians had refused to go along with the plan.  In a little over four years the vacated section of La Salle Street would give rise to the 1885 Board of Trade building, the opening of which is heralded in the announcement pictured above.

January 12, 1924 -- D. C. Davies, director of the Field Museum of Natural History for ten years, announces that the museum's new building has been completed. The original four million dollar gift of Marshall Field had, with interest, grown to $6,300,000 which was somewhat less than the cost of the seven million dollar building south of Grant Park. The shortage was made up with donations from some of the wealthiest members of Chicago society -- Captain Marshall Field, Stanley Field, N. W. Harris, James Simpson, and Edward E. Ayer. The architectural firm that designed the beaux arts building on the lakefront, Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, also made a contribution. More than a quarter-century after it was first proposed, after years of political wrangling over its location, the museum was finally complete

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 1 comments

Labels: 1935, La Salle Street, Railroads, Transportation

Friday, January 11, 2019

January 11, 1970 -- Edward Durell Stone: Glass Buildings Have Run Their Course

flickr.com

January 11, 1970 – “Architecture is a permanent art and I do not personally associate permanence with the typical glass box so characteristic of office buildings today,” says architect Edward Durell Stone, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.  He predicts “Glass and aluminum buildings are destined to early obsolescence.  His remarks come as plans are close to being revealed about a new building for Chicago, designed by Stone in collaboration with Perkins and Will Partnership.  There is speculation that the office building for Standard Oil Company, on land purchased from the Illinois Central Railroad and overlooking Grant Park, may rise as high as 80 stories.  “The glass box design for office buildings has run its course,” says Stone.  “and I personally prophesy that in the decade of the 1970s we will see something different.”  Claiming that windows have lost the purpose for which they were originally designed, the architect says, “They were used for ventilation and light, but now offices burn their lights all day.  Now windows are just vision panels.”  He favors a design that is half glass and half masonry, a combination he calls more practical and economical.  Stone also speaks of the wasted space that is created by hallways in commercial buildings.  He prefers an open plan he calls “landscape planning,” in which people and divisions of a company are separated by screens and furniture, rather than permanent walls. These ideas are very much in evidence in the building that would ultimately rise on a site just east of the Prudential building and north of Randolph Street.  Today known as the Aon Center the tower rises 1,136 feet or 83 floors and is faced in Mount Airy granite although it was originally clad in Italian marble.  The photo shows the Standard Oil Company's new tower under construction with its Carrara marble cladding nearly complete.

January 11, 1910 – A laborer is killed and ten other people are injured when a sidewalk fronting the Boston Store on State Street collapses at noon.  The forty square feet section of sidewalk collapses in front of a building being demolished to make room for an addition to the Boston store.  James Da Costa, a laborer working in the basement below the sidewalk, is killed when the flagstone sidewalk collapses.  Individuals on the sidewalk at the time drop ten feet into that basement.

January 11, 1901 -- Colonel Mott Hooten (you HAVE to love the name), the commanding officer at Fort Sheridan, speaking of recent congressional action ordering all canteens on military bases closed, says: "The abolishment of the canteen will . . . open the way for the post trader again, I fear, and the repetition of an experience of the most unsatisfactory character." The profits of the post canteen, which served beer, had equipped a gymnasium, furnished a library, and provided billiard tables and athletic equipment for soldiers at the fort with the added benefit of keeping everyone using the canteen under the watchful eyes of military authorities. In the adjoining town of Highwood, eight saloonkeepers rejoiced at the news while the town's citizens waited nervously for what was to come. One resident, the wife of a retired officer, said, "Soldiers will drink, whether there is liquor sold at a garrison or not. If they can't get beer at the post they will walk miles to buy whisky if necessary."

January 11, 1891 – With the prospect for the great world’s fair just two years away, the Chicago Daily Tribune editorializes once again about the Illinois Central railroad tracks along the lakefront, stating,  “The proposition that the Illinois Central tracks between Twenty-Second and Adams streets be depressed, so that the lake view may be unobstructed and that there may be free and safe access to the water’s edge all along the Lake-Front Park, is an admirable one, and should be carried out irrespective of whatever bearing it may have on the World’s Fair.”   [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 11, 1891]   The editorial board proposes a tunnel east of the present railroad right-of-way, the top of which would be level with the grade of Michigan Avenue so that “if deemed desirable a broad park boulevard may be laid out immediately above the tunnel.”  The editorial admits that such an engineering project could not be finished in time for the fair, and that buildings for the exposition could therefore not be built in this section of the lakefront.  However, the editorial states, “. . . during all except the first month or two of the Exposition the Lake-Front would be freed from every visible sign of railroad occupancy and the Art Building would be as accessible from the east as from the west.”  The 1894 photo above pretty clearly shows that the editorial didn't make much of an impression.

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

Labels: 1970, Architects, Architecture, Chicago Architecture, Illinois Center, Michigan Avenue, Public Housing

Thursday, January 10, 2019

January 10, 1954 -- Chicago Mansions Disappearing as Suburbs Beckon

chuckmanchicago.wordpress.com

google.com

January 10, 1954 – The Chicago Daily Tribune features the ninth in a series of articles discussing “the origin, history, and significance of some of Chicago’s principal thorofares.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 9, 1945]  This feature covers some of the mansions that once graced the wealthiest areas of the city, residences that are disappearing, victims of “The automobile age, which has dispersed the very wealthy on country estates in the suburbs, the substitution of gadgets and self-service for costly or unobtainable domestic help, and a change in social values [that] have made the Lake Shore dr. that was a relic of the past.”  Just in the preceding year two of the most impressive mansions on Lake Shore Drive have been lost to the wrecking ball – the home of Edith Rockefeller McCormick at 1000 Lake Shore Drive and the Potter Palmer “castle” a few blocks to the north. Also notable vanished relics are the home which Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd, lived at 1234 Lake Shore Drive and another at 1020 built by a lawyer and mining engineer by the name of William Borden.  The article labels Astor Street, just to the west of Lake Shore Drive, as “the last fashionable residence street left within the city proper and singles out the residences at 1430 and 1365 as particularly noteworthy.  The home at 1430 Astor was the home of Joseph T. Bowen who built a mansion with 40 rooms in 1891. The home of James Charnley, a lumberman, at 1365 Astor “is now taken for an early specimen of the style made world famous by Frank Lloyd Wright” with plans drawn by Adler and Sullivan.  There also was a “millionaires’ row” on South Michigan Avenue, starting at about Twenty-Sixth Street.  Of the homes in this area the one designed for Ferdinand Wythe Peck by William LeBaron Jenney, was perhaps the most impressive.  Also notable were the Charles W. Brega house at 2816 South Michigan, the mansion of John W. Gates at 2944, and the brownstone mansion of John Cudahy, the meat packer, at 3254.  Ashland Avenue, named after the Lexington, Kentucky home of Henry Clay in 1859, also had its day as “the finest residence street of the west side.”  The Cudahy mansion on South Michigan Avenue is pictured in the black and white photo.  The corner as it appears today is shown in the second photo.

January 10, 1965 – Shareholders of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific approve a merger with the Union Pacific Railroad by a margin of 8 to 1. This end-to-end merger would give the Union Pacific entry into the Chicago market, but the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad led a number of railroads that objected to the deal to such an extent that the government took ten years to make a decision on whether or not to allow the merger.  During that crucial ten-year period the “Rock,” a railroad that began in 1851 on trackage between Chicago and Joliet, hemorrhaged money … 1965 would be the last year the railroad would show a profit.  Between 1965 and 1974, the road’s management, hoping for the merger to be approved sooner rather than later, conserved cash by scrimping on track maintenance and locomotive servicing.  Rolling stock began to look tired, and derailments occurred with increasing frequency.  By the time the merger was approved in 1974 the railroad had deteriorated so much that Union Pacific ended up walking away from the deal.  On January 24,1980, a federal judge announced his decision not to approve the railroad’s plan for reorganization, and the last train on the line tied up in Denver on March 31,1980.  In the above photo a "dead line" of Electro Motive Division E-8's waits for final disposition in 1981 after the shut-down of the railroad in the preceding year.

January 10, 1956 – Plans are announced for a $5,000,000 building program that will give the Armour Research Foundation at the Illinois Institute of Technology “one of the most complete industrial research centers in the world,” according to foundation vice-president Dr. Haldon A. Leedy.  The plans call for three new buildings on the I. I. T. campus with “extensive additions” made to two other buildings on the south side campus of the school.  The buildings will include a physics and engineering research building, a chemistry research building, an administration building at 10 West Thirty-Fifth Street, a mechanical engineering research building and a metal research building.  According to Leedy, “The building plans are based on the assumption that the foundation will have a research volume of $16,000,000 a year and a staff of 1,600 by 1961.  [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 11, 1956]  Leedy says that since the foundation was established in 1936, it has conducted 70 million dollars of research in more than 3,000 projects for industry and the government.  The Richard D. Irwin Publishing Company building at 3201 South Michigan Avenue, pictured above, was the original home of the electrical engineering research labs when the Armour Research Foundation opened in 1936.

January 10, 1951 -- Claiming that he had "important architect-engineer projects involving the national defense" and, with a year still remaining in his tenure as the chairman of Chicago's Plan Commission, Nathaniel A. Owings submits his letter of resignation. The decision came 48 hours before a city council committee was to deliberate over a resolution demanding that the principal in Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill be forced to step down because of contracts the firm had obtained for the design of the 100-acre, 1,870-unit public housing site that came to be known as Lake Meadows.

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

Labels: 1954, Chicago Neighborhoods, Lake Shore Drive, Michigan Avenue

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

January 9, 1978 -- Dubuffet or Manzu?

architectureviaggi.it

January 9, 1978 – The editorial board of the Chicago Tribune offers its opinion about an appropriate memorial sculpture in honor of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, introducing the subject with an assessment of Daley’s achievement in bringing about a civic consciousness concerning art --  “… during his administration, and with his support, Chicago has become a showplace for some of the best known – and some of the most controversial – artists of the modern world.” [Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1978] A committee has narrowed the possible choices to two men – Giacomo Manzu, an Italian, and Jean Dubuffet, A French abstractionist.  The Tribune opts for Manzu because “his work strikes us as more representative of the man it is intended to honor, and more fitting for the space which has generally been agreed on – the east lobby of the Daley Civic Center.  We also think that there will be more of Mr. Daley – or at least more that is recognizable – in a Manzu work than a Dubuffet.”  The board notes that Manzu’s talent in creating bas-reliefs would be perfect for the Daley Center’s interior walls, even suggesting that some of Daley’s quotations “the more grammatical ones, we suppose” could be engraved around the creative work.  Dubuffet’s work, the editorial asserts, is “better suited to big, outdoor spaces.  To put a Dubuffet in the Daley Center lobby, virtually in the shadow of the big Picasso outdoors, would be a waste of similar talents.”  Dubuffet’s “Monument with Standing Beast” was unveiled across the street from the Daley Center on November 28, 1984, one of 19 commissioned artworks in or around the James R. Thompson Center that was funded by the State of Illinois Art-in-Architecture program.   

January 9, 2005 – The American Institute of Architects announces that the Chicago architecture firm of Perkins + Will has won national honors for the Skybridge condominium building on the southeast corner of Washington Boulevard and Halsted Street.  The organization describes the new building as “much a work of urban design as it is a residential condominium tower.”  The citation goes on, “The building’s base-and-tower parti [big idea of organizing thought] is adjusted to accommodate the two extreme conditions on the site, the neighborhood and the expressway.  The tower parallels the expressway and is pushed to the eastern edge of the site, both reducing the canyon effect on Halsted Street and maximizing views of the skyline from the residential units … The mass of the residential tower has been manipulated to break up its bulk and read as two towers connected by transparent walkways that form an overscaled window through the building… The use of subtle shades heightens the layering of the planes of the façade and further breaks up the mass.  The towers are united at the top by a thin roof plane that becomes a cantilevered trellis above the north façade.”

January 9, 1910 – The Chicago Daily Tribune runs a feature on the history of Michigan Avenue from the time of Fort Dearborn to the time of the Chicago fire in 1871.  Today’s great boulevard began as an Indian trail, leading to the gates of Fort Dearborn at what is today Madison Street. An early resident recalled the early trail as “A brown path where the grass had been trodden out fed to the fort.”  It was this Indian trail that the evacuees from Fort Dearborn used as they headed toward their doom in 1812, getting as far as what is today’s Eighteenth Street before hostilities began.  By the time the little town on the river was incorporated in 1833 rude streets had already fixed its boundaries – Knizie Street on the north, Desplaines Avenue on the west, Madison Street on the south, and State Street completing the square.  Michigan Avenue remained a well-traveled trail with “canal lands” to the east – the anticipated canal would originate, of course, at the mouth of the river and at the time the mouth of the river entered the lake at what is today Madison Street.  There were some shenanigans that occurred in the 1830’s, not the least of which involved an early settler, General John B. Beaubien, purchasing the reservation at Fort Dearborn for $94.61, a deal that the courts later ruled as illegal.  Still, the fort’s property was platted, the river straightened so that it breached the sand bar and ran roughly in the direction it runs today, and streets laid out, running north and south, from Madison Street to the river.  Beaubien Street, today’s Michigan Avenue, was one of those new streets.  In 1852 when the Illinois Central built a trestle to carry its trains to the river along the lakefront, its right-of-way was fixed, using the west boundary of Michigan Avenue – 700 feet to the east of the west line of Michigan Avenue was to be the west line of the Illinois Central’s boundary.  Using this calculation Michigan was extended to the southern city limits.  At that point the road had little importance – in fact, as the article points out an early woodcut shows that what is today’s scenic boulevard was little more than a landing place for rowboats traversing the lagoon formed by the Illinois Central’s berm and trestle and the area where today’s Art Institute of Chicago stands.  Note in the 1835 map above the new town of Chicago with a population of 350 souls has State, Wabash, Dearborn, La Salle and Wells Streets all neatly in place.  Michigan Avenue is nowhere to be seen, aside from the old Indian trail leading to where the entrance to the original fort was located.

January 9, 1978 -- Harry Caray agrees to return to his post as the radio and television announcer for an eighth season with the Chicago White Sox after threatening to take a hike unless he was given a substantial pay raise. The Chicago Tribune quotes Caray as saying, "Let's face it -- until last season the Sox were a depressed product. They were in deep financial trouble. I went along without any raise primarily because of Bill Veeck. I was committed to helping him turn the club into a success. Now I think I should start making some money . . . If Brickhouse is making 150 grand, why should I make so much less?"

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

Labels: 1978, Chicago Architecture, Chicago Politics, Chicago Sculpture, Sculpture

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

January 8, 1934 -- State Street Fire Razes Warshawsky Headquarters

media.lib.umn.edu

google.com

January 8, 1934 – The night sky lights up as the automobile parts warehouse of Warshawsky and Co. at 1915 South State Street explodes in flames.  A 5-11 alarm fire brings a third of the city’s fire equipment to the scene as more than 400 fire fighters battle the blaze.  A store that is part of the operation was open at the time the blaze is discovered, and more than 35 employees and a number of customers are inside. Two of the employees are burned. One, a scrubwoman, is dragged unconscious from the structure after fire fighters burn away steel bars from an alley window with acetylene torches to get to her.  The first call comes in at 8:01 p.m., followed by a second alarm as soon as Company No. 8, only a block away, reaches the scene.  Subsequent alarms are sounded every two minutes until 64 pieces of equipment are on the scene 52 minutes after the first alarm is received.  Burning debris is carried on a west wind as far as Michigan Avenue, starting small fires in several places.  Several thousand people gather to watch the inferno while patrons evacuate the Wabash Theater at 1838 South Wabash Avenue as smoke fills the auditorium.  Damages are estimated to exceed a million dollars in a blaze that Fire Marshal Michael J. Corrigan categorizes as incendiary in origin.  The black and white photo shows the Warshawsky headquarters before the fire.  The photo below that is what this section of South State Street looks like today.

January 8, 1917 – The Chicago Police Chief, Charles C. Healey, is arrested at his home by representatives of Cook County State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne and accused of leading a ring of corruption that may have brought in “thousands of dollars yearly.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 8, 1917] Judge Sheridan E. Fry fixes Healey’s bond at $100,000 as Healey is charged with conspiracy, extortion and bribery.  Hoyne states, “We began with the reports that patrolmen were being advanced to sergeants for a fee.  We discovered that a patrolman who ‘came across with $500 would be promoted … The same rule applied to officers.  The price for the promotion of a sergeant to lieutenant was sometimes as high as $1,000.” The graft did not end there.  Every Monday four men, including Lieutenant Martin White, the commander of the Lake Street police station, would meet in room 1209 at 109 North Dearborn Street “to divide the collections … They didn’t trust each other, and it was decided to be safest for all to be on hand, so that the others might know how much had been collected and just what the division would be.”  When investigators raided the room, a notebook was found on White, the notebook containing “a complete list of all shady hotels, disorderly houses, and gambling resorts” and the amounts each joint paid for protection.  Healy is sitting down to dinner in the family’s third floor apartment when investigators break up the meal even though they have no warrants for his arrest.  Healy orders them out and calls the Woodlawn station to secure some protection, quickly obtaining several “big, powerful men” who eject the investigators “with more speed than dignity.”  Within 15 minutes the warrants are obtained, and the Chief of Police finds himself under arrest.  The Chief Is pictured above.

January 8, 1954 – Another big sale of real estate in the Loop occurs, this one the Cable Building, a ten-story Holabird and Roche design at 57 East Jackson.  B. B. Provus, the vice-president of American Glass Company is the trustee whose name is on the transaction, one made for the Provus estate.  Provus said that the estate plans to remodel the building into shops.  That worked for a time.  By 1962, though, a new mid-century modern skyscraper designed by C. F. Murphy replaces the building.  The Cable building was a beautiful piece of architecture.  Fotunately, the building that replaced it is an impressive design as well.

January 8, 1980 - It is reported that the Illinois Appellate Court in Chicago has upheld the city's acquisition of the Sherman House Hotel under eminent domain rights. Citing the argument that only eight percent of the building's commercial space was being utilized, the court found that the city's intent "to rid the Loop of a blighted area" was valid. The city had previously agreed to pay the Teamsters' Union Pension Fund $11.2 million for the property. Chicago subsequently gave the block on which the hotel stood to the state, and the James Thompson Center was competed on the site five years later. For a history of the Sherman House see http://www.connectingthewindycity.com/…/down-they-forgot-as…

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

Labels: 1934, Fires, Michigan Avenue, State Street, Wabash Avenue