Sunday, September 6, 2020

September 6, 1970 -- Chicago Beach Hotel Gone, But Not Forgotten

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chuckmanchicagonostalgia
September 6, 1970 – The Chicago Tribune reports that construction crews have moved to a site at East Fiftieth Street and South Shore Drive where once stood the exclusive Chicago Beach Hotel, “a symbol of Gay Nineties and Roaring Twenties affluence.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 6, 1970]  Warren Leland, who came from a family of hoteliers and made his way to Chicago in the 1880’s, built the original Chicago Beach Hotel in 1892 to serve the huge crowds that came to the city to visit the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.  It had 450 rooms with 175 bathrooms with frontage on Lake Michigan. The beach was lost in the 1920’s when landfill moved the shoreline eastward to make room for the southern portion of what would become Lake Shore Drive.  In 1921 a 12-story addition was built on the eastern side of the property, and the original hotel was demolished.  Today the Algonquin Apartments, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, completed in 1950, stand on the site of the original hotel.  Like many other properties in the city, the hotel became a victim of the Depression, and in 1930 a receiver was appointed to oversee the payment of $615,000 in delinquent real estate taxes.  In 1942 a federal court turned the hotel over to the United States Army, and in just three months it was converted into Gardiner General Hospital, serving military personnel wounded during World War II.  After the war the Army converted the hospital to an office building and based Fifth Army Headquarters there until 1963 when the headquarters was moved to Fort Sheridan on the North Shore.  This is where my father, a career officer in the Army, went to work in the early 60's.  I still remember the tremendous holiday party thrown each year for those of us kids who were military dependents.  The original hotel, demolished in the early 1920's, is shown in the top photo.  Its replacement is shown in the second photo. 


September 6, 1939 – The fiftieth anniversary of Jane Addams’ founding of Hull House is celebrated as several thousand of the men and women who came to the settlement house as children fill Grant Park for a two-hour tribute to Addams who died four years earlier.  The principal speaker is Judge Florence E. Allen of the United States Court of Appeals who says, “And this should be her memorial, not that we repeat her name, but that we write upon our hearts her principles, that we carry them into concrete action.  For this woman opened to Americans new paths of spiritual life.  She lived her faith that all blessings must be made universal if they are to be made permanent.”



September 6, 1926 –The Chicago Real Estate Board submits its views on the air right development of the Illinois Central property north of Randolph street to the members of the City Council’s Railway Terminal Committee.  The report attempts to answer a series of aldermanic questions concerning the development of the extensive site between the Chicago River on the North, Randolph Street on the south, and Michigan Avenue on the west.  Looking at a portion of the questions and answers provides an interesting look at the foresight given to a project that would take another half-century to put into motion.

Q: How long in your opinion will it take to obtain a substantial air development in this territory?
A:  Not less than twenty years.

Q: Is the I. C. property as well located as the so-called Streeter district?
A:  Potentially better.

Q:  What, in your opinion, is the highest and best use of this I. C. property?
A:  Hotels and office buildings.

Q: Approximately how much frontage has this property on the Chicago river? On the yacht harbor? On Grant park?
A:  Frontage on the Chicago river, 2,800 feet; on the yacht harbor, 1,200 feet, and on Grant park, 1,750 feet.

Q:  Do you recommend one or two north and south boulevards through the Illinois Central property?
A:  One.

Q:  Should all of the east and west streets north of Randolph be extended eastward?
A:  Yes.

Q:  Is there a necessity for restricting the height of buildings on the I. C. property which obtains in the loop?
A:  Yes

The above photos show the area as it looked then and as it looks now.


September 6, 1918 – The first mail between New York and Chicago to be delivered by airplane arrives in Grant Park at 7:04 p.m. as Max Miller of the United States aerial mail service lands his plane at the end of a trip that took 23 hours and 55 minutes.  Thousands of people are in Grant Park attending the “France and Allies Day,” at a war exposition commemorating the anniversary of the first battle of the Marne.  Pilot Miller hands over the mail sacks to Captain B. B. Lipsner, the superintendent of the United States aerial mail service, and less than 90 minutes after the plane lands, the editor of the Chicago Daily Tribune receives a letter from Henry Woodhouse, a member of the board of governors of the Aero Club of America. It reads, “This epoch making first trip of the New York-Cleveland-Chicago aerial mail line affords us a splendid opportunity to express our hearty appreciation of the energetic and patriotic efforts that you and THE TRIBUNE have been making on behalf of national preparedness and to develop the aerial service.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 7, 1918] Pilot Miller has never landed in the city before but makes a “perfect descent” and is “cheered by the crowds lining the field and by the people who packed the Monroe street viaduct.”  Regular air mail service between New York and Chicago will begin in October with letters mailed in New York scheduled to reach Chicago ten hours later with relays of flyers stationed 150 miles apart ferrying the mail between the two cities.  In the above photo Superintendent of the Air Mail Service Benjamin Lipsner, with American flag in hand, passes it to airmail pilot Max Miller prior to an airmail flight in November 1918.


 

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Saturday, September 5, 2020

September 5, 1990 --- Crate and Barrel Opens on Michigan Avenue

Crains Chicago Business
curbedchicago.com
September 5, 1990 – Gordon Segal opens the new North Michigan Avenue Crate and Barrel store, a three-level housewares emporium, as 1,100 guests, including Mayor Richard M. Daley, ogle the goods, “sliding garlic shrimp off toothpicks, or swirling red pepper steak in an ominous sauce … rubbing palms over Shaker tables, bouncing fists on mattresses and turning over price tags.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 6, 1990]. Soon after graduating from Northwestern University, Segal and his wife, Carole, open the first Crate and Barrel in 1962 in an old warehouse on North Wells Street in Old Town with merchandise displayed on packing crates and barrels.  In 1968 the Segals opened their second store in the Plaza del Lago shopping center in Wilmette.  The first store outside Illinois opened in Massachusetts in 1977, and in 2008 Crate and Barrel opened its first store outside the United States in Toronto.  There are over a hundred stores today.  Unquestionably, though, the great success of the brand began with the decision to purchase an old terra cotta-clad medical building at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Erie Street and use the site for a new store.  In a break with the design of most stores at the time, the Segals commissioned architect John Buenz of Solomon, Cordwell and Buenz to create a store that “with its sweeping white lines, glass façade and open escalators … broke with the street’s [Michigan Avenue] traditions.”  [Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2018]. The plants and flowers that were placed outside the store served as inspiration for the planters that now line the street.  In 2018 the Segals, who had sold a majority interest in the company to the Otto Group in 1998, said good-bye to the Michigan Avenue store.  It is today a 43,000 square-foot Starbucks Reserve Roastery, the third Roastery to open in the United States. 


September 5, 1982 -- The Chicago Tribune reports that Chicago transit officials have selected the Forty-Ninth Street corridor as the route that a 9.1-mile rapid transit line will use to move people from the Loop to Midway Airport.  According to the plan, the route could be in operation by the end of the 1980’s with costs kept to a minimum through the use of railroad rights-of-way for much of the distance.  It is expected that the federal government will provide 80 percent of the funding for the $453 million project.  The hope is that 18,000 to 35,000 residents of the Southwest Side will use the line, relieving the area’s population of the burden of depending on bus service in the only section of the city without rapid transit service.  Nine stations will be built along the new line, including a stop at Midway along Cicero Avenue, at Pulaski Road and Fifty-First Street, Kedzie Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street, California avenue at Forty-Ninth, Western at Archer, Ashland Avenue just north of the Stevenson and Halsted Street at Archer.  The line will connect with the Loop elevated with a proposed link between the Ryan line (today’s Red Line) and the State Street subway to get Ryan line trains off the Loop elevated structure.  Before any of this can happen, though, the Urban Mass Transportation Administration must approve an environmental impact statement.  This is another one of the projects that took decades to bring to completion.  A high-speed subway line between the Loop and Sixty-Third Street was first proposed in the 1940’s.  In 1987 the project finally kicked off, and the new line was opened on October 31, 1993.


September 5, 1931 – The general manager of the Union Station Company, O. H. Frick, announces that work will soon begin on a $2,000,000 powerhouse that will supply heat to the new post office building, Union Station, and other railroad property along the river.   The new structure will sit midway between Taylor Street and Roosevelt Road on the west bank of the river.  The new building is necessary because the present Union Station heating plant sits on the site of the new post office, currently under construction.  Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, the same architectural firm that designed Union Station and the new post office, will also design the power house.  The specifications for the new structure are impressive, according to Frick.  He says, “The first unit will have four 1,600 horse power boilers, normal rating, with a maximum rating of 4,000 horse power each.  Its capacity will be 16,000 horse power.  The maximum length of the distributing system will be about one mile and will use both overhead and underground pipe systems, thoroughly insulated to reduce condensation losses.”  The Union Station Company, jointly owned by the Pennsylvania, Burlington, and Milwaukee railroads, projects the cost of the powerhouse at $2,000,000.


September 5, 1880 – A Chicago Daily Tribune editorial issues praise for an expanding lakefront “as a beautiful breathing-spot for the people” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 5, 1880] after which it issues a warning.  The paper first observes, “The debris from the great fires of ’71-‘74 furnished the material to fill up the basin between the Illinois Central Railway and the old breakwater, and, after various vicissitudes, the space has been leveled off, with walks and grass plots it affords an inviting retreat on sultry evenings for all classes, the working people especially finding there much needed rest and recreation.  It is hoped in the not distant future that stately maples and elms will replace the starveling poles that now disgrace it, and make it one of the most beautiful, as it is the most inviting, resort that can be found in any city in the country.”  Disrupting the process of beautification, though, is a proposal to make the area a parade ground for the military. “No one will accuse THE TRIBUNE of opposing anything that can contribute to the comfort and efficiency of our military organizations,” the editorial ends, “but the use of the park for this purpose is entirely unnecessary … by common consent base-ball has usurped a part of this north end of the park (the organization that eventually would become the Chicago Cubs began its life, playing in an area that is now occupied by the peristyle on the southeast corner of Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue) … A strong remonstrance has been prepared, and it is hoped the Council will adopt it.  Let the park be kept forever for the people.  They need it, and it is their right that they should have it.”  The photo above shows the park, looking south, about ten years after the editorial appeared.


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Friday, September 4, 2020

September 4, 1983 -- Chicago Jazz Festival Draws Record Crowd to Hear Ray Charles

jazzchicago.org


September 4, 1983 – A record that stood for all of 24 hours is broken as 93,000 people flock to Grant Park to hear Ray Charles at the Chicago Jazz Festival after 82,000 had attended the festival on the preceding evening.  Backing up the virtuoso performer is a group billed as the Ray Charles Reunion Band, musicians who had key roles in the early days of Ray Charles’s career … horn players Marcus Belgrave and Phil Guilbeau, and reedmen Hank Crawford, David Newman and Leroy Cooper.  Guitarist Phil Upchurch and drummer Bernard Purdie complete the band.  Music critic Larry Kart’s review in the Chicago Tribune makes reference to the energy that Charles exhibited as a result of the reunion, writing “… one had only to look at the ecstatic way Charles slid along the piano bench to know that this was one of his nights for serious playing and singing.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 5, 1983].  Songs on the set list included “I Got a Woman,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “Hot Rod,” and “Drown in My Own Tears”.  Attendance for the five-night run of the festival, the fifth annual jazz festival held at the Petrillo Band Shell, totaled 257,000.

September 4, 1973 – The City Council subcommittee on finance approves an ordinance calling for the construction of the Columbus Drive bridge over the Chicago River.  It is expected that the ordinance will move on to the full finance committee within the week and from there move to the City Council for final approval.  It passes despite the objections of the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association which predicts that a bridge at Columbus Drive will cause gridlock north of the river.  The ordinance includes a proposal for the city to spend $180,000 to complete plans for the bridge, along with $580,000 for engineering and property acquisition costs.  Four blocks of land approximately 110 feet wide along Fairbanks Court between the river and Ohio Street must be purchased in order to connect Columbus Drive south of the river to Ohio Street to the north.  The State of Illinois is expected to underwrite the cost of the bridge, expected to cost about $10 million. The executive director of the North Michigan Avenue Association says that the organization will demand a state and federal environmental impact statement concerning the bridge before it is built.

consumergrouch.com
chicago.gov
September 4, 1968 – Wreckers begin to raze a collection of shops and apartments on the southeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Ontario Street known as the Italian Court, a development that was built in the 1920's when two brothers, Chester and Raymond Cook, hired architect Robert S. DeGolyer, to come up with a plan to unite several small existing buildings. The apartments in Italian Court appealed to artists and writers.  Marianne Monroe, the editor of Poetry Magazine, orchestrated poetry readings that saw the likes of Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters  and Marion Strobel holding forth at Le Petit Gourmet, the restaurant which the apartments surrounded on three sides.  [Chicago Tribune, September 23, 1990].  Today the 625 North Michigan Avenue building stands on the site, a 28-floor building constructed in 1970 according to a design by architectural firm Meister and Volpe.  The restaurant of the original building is shown in the top photo.  625 North Michigan, the building that replaced Italian Court, is shown in the second photo.


September 4, 1967 – It is a day that ends another season at Riverview Park, a final Labor Day fling at a park that has delighted visitors for 64 seasons, ever since auto dealer George Schmidt started the amusement park in order to attract visitors to his dealership on the east side of Western Avenue.  There is the Star Time Frolics Parade with its floats, elephants, marching bands, and dancers to ring down the curtain on another year at the gritty carnival that sits on the Chicago River just south of Belmont Avenue.  This weekend is a time for end-of-summer fun, but this will be it for Riverview.  Less than a month later, the property will be gone for good, sold to the La Salle Street Investment Group for an estimated 6.5 million dollars.


September 4, 1918 – Four people are killed and more than 30 are injured when a bomb explodes in the Adams Street entrance of the Federal building at 3:11 p.m.  The Chicago police and the United States Secret Service theorize that the explosion was the work of sympathizers with the International Workers of the World in an attempt to avenge the conviction of 93 of the group’s members in the courthouse. Hundreds of people are in the long corridor that leads away from Adams Street and toward the great rotunda beneath the dome eight floors above it. Dozens are thrown to the ground when the explosions occur.  Afterward they walk around dazed and blackened, covered with dust and debris. Officials find evidence that the bomb was actually planned to explode two days earlier as the Labor Day parade passed the reviewing stand on the Jackson Boulevard side of the building.  Nearly every window in the lower five stories of the Edison and Marquette buildings across Adams Street is blown in.  Buildings as far away as State Street also report damage.  Hundreds of customers rush from the Fair Store in a panic only to enter a torrent of broken glass falling from windows above them.  A horse hitched to a delivery wagon on Adams Street dies in the street as a result of the shower of glass shards.  William D. Haywood, the head of the I.W.W. is in the Federal Building at the time of the blast and denies that the group had anything to do with the explosion.  Police take him to the county jail, fearing that the crowd might attack him.  Members of the American Protective League, 2,500 strong, fan out to scour the city for suspects.  Fifty sailors from the Municipal Pier surround the Federal Building with fixed bayonets, and former Chicago alderman John Scully says, “It was evidently close against the back wall and spent its force backward and downward.  Had it been against one of the main walls it would have torn it out. The terrific power in the bomb is shown by the windows in the office buildings opposite.  They were not merely broken but were shattered into fine bits, right down to the sashes.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 4, 1918] Subsequently, the police round up almost 100 members of the I.W.W. with all but a few released within a few days.  No convictions are ever secured, and no final determination is ever made as to the perpetrator of or the motive for the crime.  As a footnote one of the many postal workers in the building at the time of the explosion was a substitute letter carrier by the name of Walt Disney. [postalmuseum.si.edu] 



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Thursday, September 3, 2020

September 3, 1982 -- Governor Dan Walker Loses Staff Members to Federal Indictments



September 3, 1982 – Three members of former Governor Daniel Walker’s administration and a top campaign contributor are indicted on charges of exchanging state contracts for campaign contributions. This will be the second time the group has been indicted in the scheme that involved state contracts in excess of a million dollars.  The original indictment was rejected by Judge Susan Getzendanner in the U. S. District Court in Chicago because it failed to define specifically the details of the alleged crime. The original indictment alleged that $1.3 million in state contracts went to Millicent Systems and Universal Design Systems at 201 North Wells Street in Chicago in exchange for $80,000 in campaign contributions.  Competitive bids were not required for the contracts because they were for professional services.  In the late 1980's the ex-governor, himself, would serve 18 months of a seven-year prison sentence for bank fraud and perjury.


September 3, 1950 – The Chicago Tribune reports that a 500-unit addition to Altgeld Gardens at 130th Street is soon to get under way.  It will be one of 13 sites that the City Council has approved as subsidized housing for low-income families.  The land for the project was purchased in 1946 and covers 32 acres.  Architects for the huge project will be Naess & Murphy, the same firm that will design the Prudential Building on Randolph Street before the middle of the decade.  The average monthly rental is projected to be $43, and the project will include its own shopping center and “an abundance of parking space.”  The Beaubein Forest Preserve is nearby, and the park district has acquired an additional 15 acres of green space adjoining the development.  It all sounds wonderful – an urban paradise – but as The Chicago Reader later observed, “Altgeld’s proximity to the southeast side’s slew of factories, landfills, dumps, and polluted waterways . . . left its residents exposed and vulnerable.”  [The Chicago Reader, September 4, 2015]
medium.com
September 3, 1923 – The Deputy Coroner holds an inquest into the death of Mrs. Nancy Green, an 83-year-old woman who dies when an automobile collided with a laundry truck, overturning on the sidewalk, where Green is standing under the elevated structure at 3100 South State Street.  Green was born on March 4, 1834, as a slave in Montgomery County, Kentucky.  She came to Chicago to serve as a nurse and household servant for the wealthy Walker family, and Charles M. Walker, the chief justice of the Municipal Court and his brother, Dr. Samuel Walker, raved to their friends about the pancakes that she made. [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 4, 1923].  At the age of 56 she was selected by the R. T. Davis Milling Company to serve as the living symbol for its pancake mix.  Nancy Green became Aunt Jemima, and in 1893 the company made the decision to begin a huge promotion of its product at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. According to the African American Registry, “Green was a hit, friendly, a good storyteller … Her exhibition booth drew so many people that special policemen were assigned to keep the crowds moving.”  [aaregistry.org]  The Davis Milling Company received more than 50,000 orders at the fair.  Green signed a lifetime contract and traveled all over the country, promoting the pancake mix.  By 1910 more than 120 million Aunt Jemima pancake meals were being served annually, roughly equivalent to the population of the United States.  [medium.com]. Green was more than a spokesperson for a flour company, though.  She was also an organizer of the Olivet Baptist Church, one of the largest African-American churches in Chicago.  She raised her voice consistently in her late years to advocate for anti-poverty programs and equal rights. She is buried in Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery.  In June of 2020 Quaker Oats announced that it will retire the nearly 130-year-old Aunt Jemima brand and logo, acknowledging that the origins of the brand are based on a racial stereotype.

Burnett M. Chiperfield
September 3, 1909 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports on an investigation by the Chiperfield land investigating committee, authorized by the state legislature to look into abuses related to “made land” along Illinois lakes and rivers.  The current brouhaha relates to land in Edgewater where “a few years ago a broad sandy beach stretched along the shore of that part of the city” and where now residents are not pleased “to have Sheridan road, which used to skirt along the edge of the lake between Bryn Mawr and Foster avenues, shoved back 200 to 500 feet, and to have their beloved beach turned into building lots by the dumping of refuse upon the sand.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 3, 1909] It is alleged that the Lincoln Park board has given two real estate agencies, Cochran and McClure and Corbett and Connery, the right to make new land in the area and sell the property.  One resident says, “When we bought our property last August we supposed that we were within two blocks of the lake, but instead of that we find a real estate sign offering lots for sale at the foot of the street.”  Burnett M. Chiperfield of Canton, Illinois, the head of the Submerged and Shore Lands Legislative Investigating Committee, says, “We have decided that in all cases where we have found individuals or corporations occupying land which we think belongs to the state we shall subpoena them to appear before us and bring with them any proofs which they may have to offer showing their alleged title to the land … We want to get a bird’s eye view of the whole shore line, and a general idea where the towns are located and of the water front streets and that sort of thing, so that when we take testimony regarding certain alleged land grabs, we will have some knowledge of the location … We found some things in East St. Louis and along the Illinois River that look like big steals, and I believe that conditions are as bad all along the water fronts of this state.”


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Wednesday, September 2, 2020

September 2, 1973 -- Marquette and Joliet Tricentennial Voyageurs Visit Chicago

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September 2, 1973 – Eight explorers in birchbark canoes paddle down the Chicago River, beaching their canoes at the mouth of the river where they are greeted by a lone Native American, White Beaver, of the Winnebago tribe.  The eight Illinoisans set out in the spring from St. Ignace, Michigan to commemorate the tricentennial of the voyage of Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, who embarked in 1673 on a 3,000-mile trip in search of a route to the Pacific Ocean.  The Reverend Charles J. McEnery plays the part of Father Marquette, leading the other seven from St. Ignace, across Lake Michigan to Green Bay, Wisconsin, following the Fox and Wisconsin River system to the Mississippi River.  The group paddled down the Mississippi to the Arkansas River, at which point they began their return, entering Illinois through the Illinois River and from there following the Des Plaines River, which led to the Chicago River.  At this point in the trek the group still has 500 miles left before the end of its journey.  All along the way the group has been welcomed into people’s homes, according to McEnery, where they have been housed and fed.  He says, “After this trip we really realize what courage it took for these men, who were terribly superstitious anyway, to make a 3,000-mile trip into an unknown land.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 3, 1973].  The group of voyagers is kept busy on this day.  Along with the greeting ceremony Cardinal Cody conducts a special outdoor mass in Pioneer Plaza close to where the seventeenth century voyageurs would have beached their canoes.  He urges a crowd of 300 people, including Mayor Richard J. Daley, to “admire the deeds of brave men while seeking to do equally brave and good deeds in the time that is ours.”  While all of the hoopla is taking place, four canoeists who had joined the eight voyagers for the day are kept busy with two river rescues.  A nine-year-old girl is pulled from the river, apparently after falling in while watching the ceremonies.  She is given artificial respiration and taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital where she is reported to be in good condition.  Minutes later screams are heard from the Michigan Avenue bridge as a 54-year-old woman hurtles into the river.  The canoeists pull her out, and she is taken to Henrotin Hospital where she is treated before being returned to Chicago State Hospital. 



September 2, 1981– Mayor Jane Byrne unveils a $3.3 billion, five-year public works plan that, if implemented, will bring major changes to the city.  In the plan’s 142 pages a half-billion dollars are allocated for projects in the Loop and at O‘Hare International Airport with $2 billion allocated to the rest of the city.  Byrne says, “This capital improvements program is indeed ambitious, but in that respect it is typical of Chicago.  It embodies not only the best hopes of Chicago citizens and my administration, but also our shared commitment to a better city in the years ahead.” [Chicago Tribune, September 3, 1981] Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of the plan is the $64.8 million proposal to eliminate the S-curve on Lake Shore Drive.  The plan also includes: the construction of the Columbus Drive bridge; the reconstruction of Lake Shore Drive from the Chicago River north to Huron Street; construction of a central public library in the block bounded by State and  Van Buren Streets, Plymouth Court and Congress Parkway;  and redevelopment of the six-square block area bounded by Washington, LaSalle, and State Streets and Wacker Drive.  Close to a half-billion dollars is allocated for improvements at O-Hare, including renovating and expanding terminals, upgrading parking facilities and the possible construction of a monorail system.  Midway is scheduled to see $50 million in improvements as well.  Elimination of the S-curve where Lake Shore Drive crossed the river, shown above, was one of the major projects outlined in the $3.3 billion plan.  


September 2, 1954 – Ten thousand people watch as the captured German submarine U-505 is hauled across Lake Shore Drive at Fifty-Seventh Street on its way to a permanent place at the Science Museum. The drive is closed to traffic at 7:00 p.m. and opened again at 7:00 a.m. the following day as the submarine is moved on rails for a distance of 300 feet across the highway  Directing the move is Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery who commanded the task force that captured the vessel off the coast of West French Africa in 1944, taking control of the first submarine ever commandeered in naval combat.  Workmen of the La Plant-Adair Company, a house moving company from Indianapolis, are in charge of jacking up the submarine and transporting it safely to its final resting place at the museum.  The above photo shows the U-505 sitting on the beach at Jackson Park after being rolled off the floating dry dock preparatory to being hauled across Lake Shore Drive to the Science Museum, today's Museum of Science and Industry. 

ww.2db.com
September 2, 1945 – Over 20,000 people visit the LST-412, a 328-foot tank landing ship tied up in the Chicago River west of the Michigan Avenue bridge on the first day that the ship is open to the public.  In the afternoon a unit of U. S. Marines stage a demonstration of invasion tactics at the Foster Avenue Beach with 40 Navy planes leading the “invasion” in a mock 20-minute bombardment of the beach.  The LST, or “Landing Ship, Tank” was developed after the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk in the early stages of World War II.  One of the lessons learned in the evacuation was that there was no vessel capable of loading or unloading artillery or vehicles from a beachhead.  By November of 1942 the United States had developed the LST, a vessel capable of reasonable stability in the open sea with a bottom flat enough to make a beach landing practical. By the end of World War II more than 1,000 of these vessels would be built.  The LST-142 was one of 113 ships delivered to the Royal Navy under the Lend-Lease Act.  She was laid down in September 1942 at the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore, Maryland and launched just seven weeks later.  Sailing with a British crew, In September 1943 she saw her first action, supporting the Allied landings at Salerno and Anzio.  In June 1944 LST-142 supported the Allied invasion at Normandy, making seven trips to the beach, carrying tanks, trucks and artillery in one direction and evacuating wounded troops in the other.  At the end of the war the United States reclaimed the ship, and she barely made it to the Azores “with her welds cracking and the whole ship threatening to break up.”  [ww2db.com]   Not one of the LST-412’s 10 officers and 60 crewmen were lost in some of the heaviest fighting of the war.  After a tour of the Great Lakes, LST-412 was struck from the Navy list of ships on March 20, 1946, and on December 19, 1946 she was sold to the Northern Metals Company and scrapped.  LST-412 is pictured above offloading material in Sierra Leone in 1943.



September 2, 1914 – Federal officials begin an investigation to determine the cause of a fire that rips through the passenger ship City of Chicago, which lies beached at the life saving station at the entrance to the Chicago River.  The one big question about the wreck is how a fire could have gained such force if all members of the crew were on duty.  The boat sits with its hull resting on the bottom of the lake in about twelve feet of water with a load of Michigan grapes, cantaloupes and peaches still aboard.  The official report of the Coast Guard describes the event, “When within 5 miles of the end of her run in the early morning of September 1, 1914, the 1,439-ton passenger steamer City of Chicago, bound from St. Joseph, Mich., to Chicago, with 94 passengers, a crew of 56, and a full cargo of fruit, was discovered by her master to be on fire amidships.  To avoid panic no alarm was sounded, and the presence of the fire was kept secret on board until the master was able to lay his vessel, head-on, upon the breakwater protecting Chicago Harbor.  As the steamer rested upon the barrier referred to she lay within a few feet of the old Chicago Coast Guard Station.  The station lookout had observed smoke rising from her before she struck, and keeper and crew lost no time in beginning the work of extinguishing the fire.  The women and children on board were carried down ladders set against the steamer’s side.  With everybody safely landed, the Coast Guard crew devoted their entire attention to subduing the fire, and succeeded, with the help of a fire tug, in putting it out after three hours’ effort.”  The captain of the City of Chicago, Oscar Bjork, says, “There isn’t much to say about it.  You can see where the boat is, and you can bet I didn’t put her there for nothing.  I don’t think it would have been possible to save her anyhow – but I wasn’t figuring on saving her.  It was the passengers I was worried about.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 2, 1914]
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Tuesday, September 1, 2020

September 1, 1924 -- Loop Draws 1,252,096 Daily

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September 1, 1924 – The city issues a report that estimate an average of over 1,252,096 people enter the business district every twenty-four hours.  More than 182,000 are pedestrians, 233,309 enter in passenger vehicles, and 34,184 are carried in commercial vehicles while 700,000 enter the business district on surface and elevated lines, steam railroads, and bus lines.  The figures come from an extensive survey conducted during the first six months of 1924.  Of all the ways into the Loop the Madison Street bridge seems to be the leader with 25,539 pedestrians crossing the bridge each day.  South State Street saw 22,511 pedestrians enter the Loop while 13,402 individuals entered by way of South Wabash Avenue.  A large number of passenger vehicles – 16,822 – drove into the Loop over the new Michigan Avenue bridge while 24,124 vehicles came by way of South Michigan Avenue.  The lower level of the Michigan Avenue bridge was used by 2,513 commercial vehicles, followed by the bridges at Lake Street and Franklin Street.  An average of 103,693 passenger vehicles entered the Loop each day while 31,077 commercial vehicles entered.  Each passenger vehicle carried an average of 2.25 passengers.  The above photo, taken in November of 1924, shows traffic heading north on Michigan Avenue ... 360 North Michigan, today's London House Hotel, is on the left.  At the time it was a year old.



September 1, 1977 – Employees at the Oriental Theatre, the second largest theater in the Loop, are told that the venue will close its doors at the end of the month unless a new tenant is found. Mickey Gold, the theater’s manager, says, “There is no panic.  Different people have lost leases on this and other theaters in the past, and we hope it will stay open.”  The Oriental opened in 1926 with an ornate design by the firm of Rapp and Rapp. It was built on the same site on which the Iroquois Theater stood, the theater in which over 600 people lost their lives in a 1903 fire.  In its best days, the most famous performers in the country graced the Oriental's stage, but in the 1970’s the theater mirrored the general decline of the Loop.  A 1971 experiment to bring live entertainment to the Oriental with such acts as Gladys Knight and the Pips and Stevie Wonder lost promoters $115,000.  The story ends happily as on January 10, 1996 a Canadian theatrical company purchased the property with a promise to renovate it, a plan that would be helped along with a $13.5 million grant from the city.  Although the company declared bankruptcy in 1998, the project was completed and on October 18, 1998 the theater reopened with a seating capacity of 2,253. In the restoration, architect Daniel P. Coffey came up with a plan that increased the theater’s backstage area by expanding into the adjacent Oliver Building.  Today the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre is one of the downtown palaces that hosts touring Broadway shows. 


September 1, 1949 – At the end of August the Chicago Daily Tribune carried a report on the death of noted landscape architect, Jens Jensen.  Oops.  Wrong guy.  It turns out that a 65-year-old Door Country, Wisconsin resident with a similar name was the guy who rode the Great Skyway and not Mr. Jensen, who is alive and well in his home in Ellison Bay.  Taking advantage of the error, the paper publishes a flattering piece on the contributions of Jensen, who came to the United States from Denmark in the early 1890’s and began work as a laborer in the west parks system of Chicago, going on to become one of the premier landscape architects of the twentieth century.  “Jens Jensen had a simple set of precepts,” the paper observes, “which he clung to stubbornly in the face of both politicians and millionaire clients, and defended with the rage of an inspired Viking when aroused.  He believed in the beauty of nature.  He detested formal gardens.  He taught the middle west the value of its native trees and plants in landscaping.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 1, 1949] The article continued, “To him, parks were placed where city people should find the comfort of natural beauty.  They were not for batting baseballs.  Neither were they automobile speedways.  In his judgment, 15 miles an hour was fast enough for people entering the parks to enjoy the lawns, the crab apple blooms, and the hawthorns.  In a day when efforts are made to encroach on the parks for almost every other public use, a revival of the Jensen principles would be a healthy thing for Chicago.”  Perhaps Jens Jensen's greatest work in Chicago is Columbus Park, shown in the photo above.



September 1, 1925 – Two days after the South Water Street market closes for business, the Chicago Daily Tribune rails against the street that will replace it, specifically the fact that the new road along the river will be named after Charles H. Wacker, the head of the Chicago Plan Commission.  “It is small town stuff at its worst,” the paper proclaims, “to rename South Water street because it is double decked and remade . . . We certainly acknowledge Mr. Charles Wacker’s civic spirit and his useful service in the protection and realization of the city plan . . . But to give his name to the chief thoroughfare of the city, after Michigan boulevard, is not only crude vandalism, but without fitness of proportion.  Mr. Wacker has been a useful citizen, but his service in the city does not tower above that of all other citizens . . . what of Daniel Burnham, who was the creator of the city plan, one of the most famous and gifted of our citizens? If we give Mr. Wacker’s name to our second greatest street, how are we going to honor Burnham with any respect for proportion?
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 12:30 AM 1 comments
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