Thursday, August 2, 2012

Chicago Boosterism--1908

Doing the River Tour (JWB, 2011)

A few days ago I asked the crowd on my River Cruise to raise their hands if they were from Chicago.  About a dozen folks out of the 120 or so people on the boat raised their hands. 

That made me think.

Sometimes, after I finish leading an architectural tour, I question myself.  Obviously, the tours I lead for the Chicago Architecture Foundation focus on Chicago architecture, some of the best in the world.  (There I go again.)   But I am enthralled with the short history of this amazing city, and I wonder sometimes if I’m too much of a booster.

I know, I know . . . the unexamined life is not worth living and all that.  And I guess I’ll just keep on yapping about the glories of the Windy City.

Although . . .

The boosting that I do can’t come close to what was being done years ago as the city’s papers crowed about this amazing place on the lake, a place where printing presses cranked out the news of the glory and the horror of a city that displayed the dazzle the Art Institute and Symphony Hall a mile-and-a-half away from the Union Stockyards where 400 million head of livestock were butchered every year.

 

I found one such article by William Hinshaw in The Chicago Tribune, running on February 16, 1908.  Two days after Valentine’s Day, this was a love letter to the city, and it contained some fascinating facts.

The article began talking about size . . . in 1908 the city had a population greater than the combined populations of Boston, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Denver and Des Moines.  Folks made their way along 4,200 miles of streets, lined with 1,500 miles of sewers.  In the neighborhoods there were eight large parks and 45 smaller ones.

Berry's Candy Factory (Chicago Daily News Photo)
In the 1908 city there were 22,000 manufacturing plants with $700,000,000 of invested capital, paying $240,000,000 in wages and turning out products valued at $1,100,000,000 annually.  The stockyards and meat packing plants occupied 600 acres of land and shipped 12,000,000,000 pounds of processed meat.

But the paper wasn’t done.  Not by a long shot.  Grain?  You want grain?  Chicago had the largest grain market in the world with 90 grain elevators, holding 75,000,000 bushels of grain.   The paper proclaimed, “Chicago’s commerce by water surpasses that of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore combined.”

The city must have been constantly in motion, as the paper observed, "By actual count the number of drays, delivery wagons, and street cars that cross the corner at Fifth Avenue (now Wells Street) and Lake Street during business hours is 31 per minute.”

Stand at Wells and Lake today, and I’m guessing you will NOT see that amount of traffic in a minute’s time.

Milk Delivery in a Snowstorm (Chicago Daily News Photo)
There were 40 milk companies distributing milk to the people of Chicago in 1908.  One of those companies ran 1,100 wagons along its routes.

That largest office building in the world was the Monadnock, 17 stories tall, with 1,264 offices and 28 stores.  The largest department store in the city, Marshall Field’s emporium (although the name of the store is not mentioned in the article), employed 8,000 people and had a daily postage bill of $6,000.  In one room of the great department store 300 women were employed, and their sole job was to open and sort letters.

There were 32 railroad and 28 steamboat lines in Chicago in 1908.  1,260 trains came to Chicago every day, 980 of them suburban trains.  That meant 280 through trains moved in and out of the city every working day.  Twenty-four surface trains and seven elevated lines ran into the city, carrying a half million people daily into the half-mile business district.

In 1908 Chicago had the largest railroad car factory in the world, the largest manufacturer of telephones, a harbor traffic greater than any city in the world, the largest railroad center n the world, the largest manufacturer of agricultural equipment, and “the grandest park and boulevard system in the world.”

The spoken word in Chicago was used in more languages than “any other city on earth,” and there were more newspapers than any other place on the planet.  Chicago in 1908 had 35 newspapers, a dozen of which were published daily, 36 scientific journals, and 33 literary magazines.  All told, 600 publications were published in Chicago.

Washington Square Park with Newberry Library in Background
(Chicago Daily News Photo)
Within the city limits there were 308 public school buildings, educating 300,000 pupils, in front of which 7,000 teachers held forth.  There were 65 professional schools in the city.  Four great libraries graced the city.  The main library loaned 1,414,292 volumes in 1908.  The University of Chicago library held 400,000 volumes.  The John Crear Library, just across the street from the main library, held 150,000 technical volumes.  And the Newberry Library up on Clark Street held 280,000 volumes, free to the public. 

The Tribune also mentioned the spirit of generosity in the city.  The Chicago Y.M.C.A., as one example, cared for 1,200 men and women each night in six hotels that provided rooms, free of charge.  The same organization provided 200,000 articles of clothing and furniture to the poor in 1907.  It also provided coal for 25,000 people, along with 8,000 Christmas baskets of food.  Within the city limits there were 1,500 churches.

The Tribune concluded its jingoistic shout with these lines, “Chicago has the reputation of being a wicked place . . . But it must be admitted that if circumstances are favorable to the prevalence of evil there is a corresponding influence being exerted by the good, law abiding citizens of Chicago which keeps its moral and religious standard up to that of the average large city . . . Considering the resources of the great west, the geographical position of Chicago with regard to commanding these resources, her progress in the past, her close proximity to raw materials of all kinds, and that she is on the great thoroughfare between the east and the west, it is not unreasonable to predict that, so far as facts and figures can forecast the future, there are persons now living who will see this already great city become the metropolis of the world.”

I liked reading this article. After I finished, I didn’t feel so bad about how much time I spend boosting the city on the boat.  We may not be the metropolis of the world, but we still have a whole lot to boast about.
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 9:08 PM 3 comments

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Remembering the Eastland--July 24, 1915


Eleanor Froelich, standing on the porch of her home at
2453 Thomas Street in West Town, the only 
member of her family to survive the Eastland disaster
(Chicago Daily News archive)
EASTLAND
By Carl Sandburg

The Eastland
Let's be honest now
For a couple of minutes
Even though we're in Chicago.

Since you ask me about it,
I let you have it straight;
My guts ain't ticklish about the Eastland.

It was a hell of a job, of course
To dump 2,500 people in their clean picnic clothes
All ready for a whole lot of real fun
Down into the dirty Chicago river without any warning.

Women and kids, wet hair and scared faces,
The coroner hauling truckloads of the dripping dead
To the Second Regiment armory where doctors waited
With useless pulmotors and the eight hundred motionless stiff
Lay ready for their relatives to pick them out on the floor
And take them home and call up the undertaker...

Well I was saying
My guts ain't ticklish about it.
I got imagination: I see a pile of three thousand dead people
Killed by the con, tuberculosis, too much work
                             and not enough fresh air and green groceries

A lot of cheap roughnecks and the women and children of wops,
    and hardly any bankers and corporation lawyers or their kids,
    die from the con-three thousand a year in Chicago and a
    hundred and fifty thousand a year in the United States-all
    from the con and not enough fresh air and green groceries...

If you want to see excitement, more noise and crying than you ever
    heard in one of these big disasters the newsboys clean up on,
Go and stack in a high pile all the babies that die in Christian
    Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago in one year
    before aforesaid babies haven't had enough good milk;
On top of that pile put all the little early babies pulled from mothers
    willing to be torn with abortions rather than bring more
    children into the world-
Jesus, that would make a front page picture for the Sunday papers

And you could write under it:
Morning glories
Born from the soil of love,
Yet now perished.

Have you ever stood and watched the kids going to work of a
   morning?  White faces, skinny legs and arms, slouching along
   rubbing the sleep out of their eyes on the go to hold their jobs?

Can you imagine a procession of all the whores of a big town,
   marching and marching with painted faces and mocking struts,
   all the women who sleep in faded hotels and furnished rooms
   with any man coming along with a dollar or five dollars?

Or all the structual iron workers, railroad men and factory hands
   in mass formation with stubs of arms and stumps of legs, bodies
   broken and hacked while bosses yelled, "Speed-no slack-
   go to it!"?

Or two by two all the girls and women who go to the hind doors of
   restaurants and through the alleys and on the market street
   digging into the garbage barrels to get scraps of stuff to eat?

By the living Christ, these would make disaster pictures to paste on
   the front pages of the newspapers.

Yes, the Eastland was a dirty bloody job-bah!
                                 I see a dozen Eastlands
                                 Every morning on my way to work
                                 And a dozen more going home at night.
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 8:29 AM 1 comments

Monday, July 23, 2012

Telstar and Chicago--July 23, 1962


On October 27 of 1962 an obscure British musical group called The Tornadoes entered the WLS Silver Dollar Survey in Chicago with a catchy instrumental that was named after a communications satellite that had been launched in early July.  The title of the song was Telstar, and the song made it to the top spot by November 24, where it remained for three weeks.  It was still in the second spot when the year ended.

I remember that song vividly because it gained popularity exactly at a time when we were driving across the country from upstate New York to San Francisco in the family’s 1959 Chevrolet.  As we moved from state to state the song probably played twice an hour for six continuous days.


The satellite from which the song took its name was launched on July 10, 1962.  Belonging to AT&T, Telstar was the first satellite to relay television pictures, telephone calls, and the first television feed across the Atlantic. 

Telstar ceased to function long ago, but it’s still up there, somewhere between 500 and 3,700 miles above the earth, depending on where it is in its orbit.

Unlike today’s communications satellites, Telstar was placed in a non-geosynchronous orbit, which meant that it was available for transatlantic signals for only 20 minutes in each two-and-a-half hour circuit of the earth.

On this date in 1962, July 23, the satellite had been tested and found ready for the first transatlantic signal available for public viewing.  The first broadcast, aside from still pictures, was to have consisted of a short speech from President John F. Kennedy.

And HERE IS THE PART I LOVE.

And if you’re a Chicagoan, you should, too.  

The signal from the satellite was acquired earlier than expected, and the President was not ready to go on the air.  So to fill time the feed was transferred for a short time to Wrigley Field where the Chicago Cubs were playing the Philadelphia Phillies.

The feed lasted for exactly one-third of an inning.  Tony Taylor of the Phillies hoisted a fly ball from Cubs pitcher to right field, where George Altman caught it for the out.

Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor, who actually started his major league career with the Cubs in 1958, was into his seventh season in the bigs in 1962.  He played for Philadelphia in all but two games that year, driving in 43 runs and banging out 162 hits.  According to Wikipedia he was involved in one of the strangest plays in Major League history.  According to the online source on June 30, 1959 the St. Louis Cardinals were playing the Cubs.  Stan Musial was at the plate with a count of 3-1 when Cubs pitcher Bob Anderson threw a pitch that Sammy Taylor couldn't corral behind the plate.  It rolled all the way to the backstop with the umpire calling ball four, a ruling that immediately prompted Anderson and Taylor to protest, claiming that Musial had hit a foul tip.  The argument continued with a live ball resting against the backstop, prompting Musial to try for second base.  Alvin Dark, the Cubs third baseman, ran all the way to the backstop to get the ball, which at that point had somehow ended up in the hands of Pat Piper, the Cubs' field announcer.  Dark got it back, but by the time he did the umpire had handed a new ball to Taylor, who, noticing that Musial was headed for second, promptly threw the new ball over Tony Taylor's head and into the outfield.  Dark, in the meantime, threw the original ball to shortstop Ernie Banks, who tagged Musial on his way to third, where he was headed after seeing the umpire-issued ball sail over Taylor's head into the outfield.  The out stood.

George Altman
Poor George Lee Altman, except for one-year stints with the New York Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals, played his entire major league career with the Cubbies, a team that compiled an ugly record of 475 and 634 in the years that Altman suited up at Wrigley.  He was an All-Star in 1961 and 1962 and hit a pinch homer in the 1961 All-Star game.  He led the National League in triples in 1961 with 12 and on August 4 of that year became the first player to hit two home runs off Sandy Koufax.     

Cal Koonce
Cal Koonce was drafted by the Cubs in 1961 out of Campbell University in North Carolina.  In 1962, his first season, pitching for a team that finished with a record of 59 and 103, Koonce had a 10-10 record and a 3.97 E.R.A.  He was soon converted to a reliever and never won more than seven games again although he did burn the Cubs after they traded him to the New York Mets in 1967.  In the fateful 1969 season Koonce was the senior member of a relief corps that consisted of Ron Taylor and Tug McGraw, who backed up as fearsome a line-up of young starting pitches as has played the game.

We were just beginning the 60’s back then.  There were no Beatles, at least not that we knew about, no assassinations, and Vietnam was still a country that had a name we couldn’t pronounce, much less pick out on a map. 

I remember that song by The Tornadoes, I remember that satellite, and I remember that awful team that played in a park in which they didn’t even bother to open the upper deck on game days. 

But . . . in that historic transmission across the Atlantic back on this date in 1962, at least the Cubbies got the out.
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 6:28 PM 2 comments

Monday, July 9, 2012

Pinkerton Agents Return to Chicago after Homestead


Found in The Chicago Tribune, this event occurred on July 9 of 1892 . . .

Lake Shore Depot (Wikipedia Photo)
At 2:45 in the afternoon on this date in 1892 a special train of five coaches pulled into Chicago’s Lake Shore depot on Van Buren Street.  A dozen men emerged from one of the coaches and headed south.  One man had his arm in a sling, another had welts and scars on his face, a third was missing his coat.  They did not stop to chat.

The train was secured by the Pinkerton Agency, and it carried 85 men returning from New York City after the horrific confrontation at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill just three days earlier.

The trouble at Homestead had been brewing for awhile, but tension began to increase in May of 1892 as Andrew Carnegie headed off for a summer in Scotland, leaving operation of the Carnegie Steel Company in the hands of his partner, Henry Clay Frick. 

Henry Clay Frick (Wikipedia Photo)
The nation’s largest union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, had been negotiating for better working conditions and higher pay throughout the spring, but on June 29 Frick closed the mill and locked out 3,800 steel workers.  The union reacted by taking over the plant and encircling the town to block strike-breakers from entering.

It was then that Frick summoned 300 Pinkerton Detectives from Chicago, many of them brand new to this line of work, in an effort to protect the new hires that he planned to recruit in order to break the strike on July 6. The plan was to assemble the Pinkerton agents on two barges that would float down the Ohio River to the point where it joins the Monongahela River, at which point the agents would re-take the heavily-guarded mill from the river.

No plan ever totally works out the way it is drawn up, and this one went to pieces in a hurry.  Strikers had gotten news of the plan, and a company of strikers aboard a steamboat met the barges, verified their intent, and alerted the strikers at Homestead.  At 2:30 in the morning the mill’s whistle was sounded, and thousands of individuals made their way to the bluffs along the waterfront to meet the planned invasion.

The Pinkertons attempt to land (Google Image)
The Pinkerton men attempted to land at about 4:00 a.m.  It will probably never be known who fired the first shot, but once the firing started two strikers and two Pinkerton agents were killed within ten minutes, and another 11 strikers and 12 agents were wounded.  More than 5,000 strikers and their families occupied the high ground.

The agents attempted to make another landing at about 8:00 a.m.  Four more strikers were killed in the attempt even though the Pinkerton men did not make it ashore. 

“The noise that they made on shore was awful, and it made us shake in our boots,” one agent said.  “We were pinned in like rats and we went at the fighting like desperate wild men . . . All of our men were under the beds and bunks, crying and trembling.”  [www.pbs.org]

By the evening 5,000 additional men had arrived from steel mills in the vicinity.  At 5:00 the Pinkerton agents raised the white flag, the fourth time they had tried to surrender during that long day.  They were in a terrible position.  They were being picked off, one by one, on the barges and on shore there were thousands of angry steel workers who had watched as the agents killed and wounded their fellow laborers. 

On shore, but hardly safe
(Wikipedia Photo)
But the Pinkerton men did come ashore, were stripped of their weapons, and then walked a savage gauntlet on their way to the Opera House, the temporary jail, in Homestead.  Men were spat on, had rocks thrown at them, and were beaten. 

Finally, at 12:30 a.m. on July 7 a special train arrived and carried the defeated agents to Pittsburgh.  It wasn’t until 10:00 a.m. on July 7 that the train began its trip to New York City and from there its trip back to Chicago.

One of the crewmen on the train that rolled into Chicago on July 9 described the men in The Tribune’s coverage of the story.  He observed, “They were a badly scared set of fellows—the worst scared lot I ever saw, in fact; and as they claim they had gone to Homestead not fully understanding what their duties were to be I felt rather sorry for them.”

He continued, “So far as I noticed there wasn’t a sound man in the lot.  Every one of them appeared to have been caught in the shuffle and hurt in some way or other.  Blackened eyes were most popular in the party, with broken or bruised heads a close second.  Some of the poor fellows limped, while others were unable to use their arms and hands on account of cuts and bruises.  A number of the men had lost their coats and hats during the assault made on them.”

Many of the men were fearful that a mob would be waiting for them in Chicago, and the closer the train got to the city the more uneasy they became.  Men got off the train from South Chicago all the way to Twenty-second street, any place where the platforms were empty.  If they saw a crowd on a train platform, they crouched down in their seats.

Homestead Steel on the Monongahela (Google Image)
The biggest casualty of the events at the Homestead Works was the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.  From a membership of 24,000 in 1891 the union lost over 14,000 workers by 1894.  And the Carnegie Steel Works remained a non-union shop for another four decades.  
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 7:13 PM 2 comments
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