Showing posts with label 1982. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1982. Show all posts

Sunday, October 4, 2020

October 4, 1982 -- Sears Recommended for Landmark Status


October 4, 1982 – For the second time in four years, city planners recommend landmark status for the original Sears State Street store, finding that the structure, “adds to the State Street mall’s inviting pedestrian circulation.” [Chicago Tribune, October 5, 1982] The store, originally built for Levi Z. Leiter, an early Chicago merchant, was originally recommended for landmark status in 1979, but attorneys for Sears opposed the landmark designation for the building.  It is unknown how Sears will greet the new recommendation for the 1891 building.  William McClenahan, the director of the city’s Landmarks Commission, says that the building is “an important landmark in the city and an effort to have it so designated is worth another try.”  On January 14,1997 the store finally received landmark status and rightfully so.  As the city’s website on landmarks states, “Renowned as one of the nation’s most important early examples of skeletal-frame commercial architecture, this building is discussed in every major history of American architecture.”


October 4, 1969 – At the conclusion of a march sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society from Grant Park to the Federal Building and back in which 350 protestors demand the immediate withdrawal of all troops in Vietnam, two protestors, armed with guns, knives, and swords, are arrested in Old Town.  The cache is discovered in a camper from which the two men from California apparently are selling weapons to be used between October 8 and 11 at protests planned by the Weatherman faction of the S.D.S.  The occupants of the truck, Dennis Sleeth and Daniel Brucher, both from California, are arrested after police find a 20-gauge shotgun, 25 rounds of ammunition, a 22-caliber pistol with 58 rounds, five Samurai swords and 13 knives in sheaths.  At the same time the subversive unit of the police department raids the S.D.S. national headquarters at 1608 Madison Street and arrests Caroline Tanner of Pennsylvania for her involvement in the beating of four policemen in front of the Federal Building on September 24. 

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October 4, 1918 – The Chicago Health Commissioner announces that any church building that is found to be poorly ventilated during Sunday services on the following day will be closed.  The action is taken “to put all Chicago on active guard against the epidemic of influenza and pneumonia.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 5, 1918]  Similar prohibitions have been issued to schools, theaters, restaurants, streetcar and elevated lines.  Police officials have been issued an order to “instruct all members of their command to visit all public places … where people congregate and request the proprietors to urge their patrons to aid in the work of mutual protection … also instruct your officers that when they see a person on the street or any other place sneezing or coughing without placing a handkerchief to his mouth, to ask him in a courteous manner to do so, explaining why the use of the handkerchief for that purpose is imperative.”  Although the epidemic has not yet impacted the city as much as it has downstate, there are still 916 cases reported in the preceding 24 hours with 81 deaths.  The entire Chicagoland area is on alert.  In Highland Park, for example, 56 women make a house-to-house search in automobiles to locate cases that have not received attention, finding 667 cases during their rounds.  Wilmette orders all schools, churches and theaters to be closed as town officials suggest that it may be necessary to call out the Illinois National Guard to patrol streets for a day or two “to aid in keeping the children on their own premises and prevent  the running about of those with colds and coughs.”  In the world-wide influenza outbreak of 1918 and 1919 more than one fifth of the world’s population contracted what was known as the “Spanish flu.”  More than 21,000,000 people died, including 600,000 in the United States with 8,500 Chicago residents losing their lives to the illness.  Between the start of Chicago’s epidemic on September 21 and the removal of restrictions on November 16, the city experienced 38,000 cases of influenza and 13,000 cases of pneumonia.  


October 4, 1909 – A good night’s sleep is a difficult thing to come by if you’re staying in a hotel along the lakefront, according to a report in the Chicago Daily Tribune on this date.  An investigation by the paper finds “engines puffing, wheezing, snorting, exhausting, and making every other kind of noise that a locomotive is capable of” just across Michigan Avenue. “Whistles were tooting, bells were ringing, and cars were bumping together with a crash that would awaken the soundest sleeper.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 4, 1909]  A reporter, who is keeping an eye on the railroad action along the lakefront from the Art Institute at Monroe Street to a point near where Congress Street runs today, encounters a clerk at one of the Michigan Avenue hotels, who says, “Many a night has some guest of the house who couldn’t sleep come down to the office and kept me company.  Guests who come here for the first time make a loud kick against the engines, and I don’t blame them … It is almost impossible for a nervous person to get any sleep between 2 and 7 o’clock.  Between those hours the engines are constantly pushing back and forth, and there isn’t one person in twenty who can sleep through the noises that come from the yard.”  The above photo shows the railroad tracks east of Michigan Avenue at Monroe Street.   


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Friday, September 18, 2020

September 18, 1982 -- Chicago Tribune Prints Last Paper at Michigan Avenue Plant

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September 18, 1982 – The Chicago Tribune prints its last letterpress newspaper at its plant off Michigan Avenue.  After more than 60 years of newspaper production just to the west of Tribune Tower, the newspaper will be printed and distributed from Freedom Center, the new printing facility between Ohio Street and Chicago Avenue on the North Branch of the Chicago River.  In the new 700,000-square-foot facility ten Goss Metroliner presses will “utilize a Muirhead Ltd. Laser film system in conjunction with Western platemaking equipment to insure quality plates for the offset presses.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 18, 1982]  Today it appears that the future of the state-of-the-art printing facility on the North Branch is also looking at the end of its life as Tribune Real Estate Holdings is looking to transform the area on the west shore of the river from Ohio Street to Chicago Avenue into the River District, where office towers for a projected 19,500 workers will rise in the coming years.  The top photo shows the area as it appears today.  The second photo is a rendering of what may be found there within the next decade ... if all the pieces fall into place.


September 18, 1934 – Mayor Edward Kelly is on hand to dedicate the $2,500,000 Steinmetz High School.  In his address he calls upon the state legislature to find a way to increase funding for the school system in the upcoming year.  “The need of more school revenue has been repeatedly demonstrated,” he says.  “At present real estate carries too much of the load, and it is impossible to suppose that additional burdens can be placed on such property. The schools need added revenues and the legislature should provide a plan to secure them.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1934]  Thousands of parents watch 2,800 Steinmetz students pass a reviewing stand to enter the building as the school opens.  The new school is one of five new schools commissioned by the Board of Education that will open in 1934.  Lane Technical High School opens on this day as well.  An addition to Senn High School will open in the next week, and two other schools, Wells and Phillips, will be completed by December 15. The school is named for German-American mathematician and electrical engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz.



September 18, 1925 – Alonzo C. Mather pays $500,000 or $7,692 a square foot for 65 feet of frontage on Wacker Drive, adding this property, owned by the Chicago Title and Trust Company, to Michigan Avenue property he already owns east of the Wacker Drive lot.  Born in Fairfield, New York in 1848, Mather came to Chicago in 1875, where he started a wholesale business.  At some point he found a way to wealth – by developing a new kind of railroad stock car that reduced the loss of livestock while in transit through the provision of feed and water.  The Herbert Hugh Riddle design for Mather Tower at 75 East Wacker Drive provided the headquarters for the Mather Stock Car Company when it opened in 1929.  The existing piece of property that Mather owned on Michigan Avenue was meant for another similar tower that would connect its partner on Wacker Drive by a ground floor arcade.  The economic catastrophe of the Great Depression ended the plan for the Michigan Avenue tower.


September 18, 1924 – The president of the Illinois Society of Architects, Charles E. Fox, proposes in the monthly bulletin of the society “a half-mile long, permanent stone bridge, 160 feet high, over the mouth of the Chicago river”.  [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1924] The massive bridge would take the place of a lift bridge or tunnel, plans that are under consideration as ways to connect Grant Park and the south side of the city with the north side of the river and Lake Shore Drive.  Says Fox, “It’s a reasonably safe bet that if the proposed tunnel is ever constructed, it’ll stand for a generation or two as a monument to bad judgment and then’ll be filled up … The war department already has shown its hand by refusing to have a lift bridge east of Michigan avenue … On the north a design of approach could be incorporated into the architectural treatment of the Municipal pier.  The bridge itself would be the monumental hub of the city.  A view from the crown of the arch would give to the passing stranger, as well as to the citizen of Chicago a magnificent birdseye view of Grant park and the lake shore both north and south.”  Imagine today what a difference it would make to have a massive stone bridge straight out of New York City plunked down at the entrance to the river … things would look a lot different. 
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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]
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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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Friday, August 21, 2020

August 21, 1982 -- East Delaware Place Hotel Conversion

 

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August 21, 1982 – The Chicago Tribune reports that the 350-room Maryland Hotel at 40 East Delaware Place is being converted into a 75-unit condominium building.  The hotel, which began receiving guests in 1928, was also the home of the Cloisters Inn, a jazz club just off Rush Street that saw performers such as Duke Ellington, Ramsey Lewis, Della Reese, even a young George Carlin, perform in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  Milton N. Zic, a partner in the firm that is renovating the building, says, “With a location in the heart of the Gold Coast, solid construction and neighbors such as the Hancock buildings and Water Tower Place, the hotel was ideal for our purposes.  We wanted to create a private and elegant condominium residence that is distinctive, yet understated.  Because the building has no strong design features, we were able to accomplish our goal.”  [Chicago Tribune, August 21, 1982].  Seven floor plans are available, including studios, one-, two-, and three-bedroom units, and two penthouse suites.  A studio will go for $82,500, with a monthly assessment of $149.  A one-bedroom unit will sell for $96,000, and a two-bedroom apartment will go for $217,000.  The two penthouse units will sell for $490,000 with a monthly assessment of $753.  Perhaps the most memorable moment in the life of the old Maryland Hotel, came in 1975 when Bobbie Arnstein, an executive assistant to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, booked a room on the top floor of the hotel and took her life.  Facing a potential 15-year prison term for alleged participation in a cocaine distribution scheme and heavy pressure from then State’s Attorney James R. Thompson to flip on the Playboy organization, Arnstein wrote several suicide notes and ended it all.  That two-bedroom unit that cost $217,000 in 1982?  It is worth well over twice that amount today.


August 21, 1976 – The Chicago Tribune reports of a demonstration by nearly 100 cab drivers at the Civic Center, protesting a ruling by the city commissioner of consumer affairs, Jane Byrne, that they must wear uniforms.  The ruling, due to take effect on September 7, causes anger among the cabbies who say that over the preceding year three drivers have been killed, seven shot, one had his throat cut, and another suffered amputation of a leg as a result of a robbery.  Uniforms will just make them a more recognizable target when they are away from their cabs, the drivers say.  One driver says that he has to drive 16 to 18 hours a day to make a living, and that there is not enough money to buy and maintain a uniform.  Jane Guthrie, a driver for three years, says, “How can the city tell self-employed persons to wear uniforms . . . If your cab breaks down in a bad neighborhood it’s bad enough getting out without having to wear a uniform which advertises that you’re stranded and have money on you from driving.”  [Chicago Tribune, August 21, 1976]


August 21, 1933 – More than 1,000 teachers and other school employees in the city come to the offices of the Board of Education in the Builders’ Building at La Salle Street and Wacker Drive in order to receive their share of $1,250,000 in 1931 tax anticipation warrants.  They exchange the scrip issued two years earlier for the warrants that can be turned into cash.  When the exchange begins in the morning, over 100 people are waiting in line.  Between January of 1931 and May of 1933 teachers were paid their monthly salaries only three times. By 1933 Chicago school district employees were owed $22.8 million. In place of their regular salaries the teachers received “scrip” that could then be redeemed at businesses and banks, most of which did not honor the full value of the paper. Earlier in 1933, on April 24, five thousand teachers moved on five of Chicago’s largest banks, “confronting bankers, trashing offices, smashing windows, and throwing ink on the walls.” [https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/8/2/1116048/-The-Chicago-Teacher-Revolt-of-1933] Other demonstrations followed, prompting one teacher to observe, “Few of us are the sweet complacent, non-thinking 100 percenters that we used to be. Our eyes have been opened … After four years of learning that bankers are our worst enemies, that politicians are interested in our votes and power only and use our children merely as pawns in their selfish games, that we can depend on no one but ourselves, we cannot be restored to our previous complacency.”  It would not be until 1934 that an infusion of federal money would allow the teachers of Chicago to receive actual paychecks again as well as the back pay owed to them.  The original Builder's Building is pictured above.  It is considerably larger today as the result of a 1986 addition.


August 21, 1886 –bThe trustees of the Grant Monument Fund place 14 models on display at the Art Institute in a competition for the best proposal.  Awards in the amount of $500 for first place, $300 for second and $200 for third are being offered for the designs.  The models have been prepared on a scale of two inches to the foot. Two are from Florence, Italy, one is from Cincinnati, one from New York, one from St. Louis and four are from Chicago.  The remaining five proposals come from various places in New England. As part of the design competition specifications and estimates of cost were required, and the average expenditure comes in at about $20,000.  The first prize ended up going to a Cincinnati artist, Louis T. Rebisso, who emigrated from Italy in 1857.  Francis M. Whitehouse, a Chicago architect, was responsible for the base and plinth on which the equestrian statue sits.  Despite its being a Lincoln Park fixture today, at the time Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft, called the monument “a nondescript pile of masonry” topped by a sculpture with “a complete lack of artistic distinction.” [chicagopublicart.blogspot.com]  The cost of the memorial was underwritten by nearly 100,000 individuals and was dedicated in 1891.


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Thursday, January 30, 2020

January 30, 1982 -- Lake Shore Drive Bridge Renamed in Honor of Roosevelt

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January 30, 1982 – Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne rededicates the Lake Shore Drive Bridge in honor of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth.  As more than a hundred city officials and spectators watch, Byrne and Roosevelt’s grandson, James Roosevelt, Jr. unveil a plaque proclaiming the bridge as the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Bridge.  F.D.R. came to Chicago on October 5, 1937 to dedicate the bridge, an occasion that he used to deliver his famous “Quarantine” speech, in which he called for an international quarantine against the “epidemic of world lawlessness” by aggressive nations.  The above photo shows the President leaving the ceremony on that momentous day in 1937.
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January 30, 2017 – It is announced that Garrett Brands, the owner of Garrett Popcorn Shops, will buy the Frango chocolate brand from Cincinnati-based Macy’s.  Andrea Schwartz, a spokeswoman for Macy’s, says, “Frango is very popular among both our local shoppers and visitors at our Chicago stores.  It’s great to see such an iconic Chicago brand staying in Chicago.” [Chicago Tribune, January 31, 2017]  Although the popular brand will not be sold in Garrett stores, the owner of Garrett Brands, Lance Chody, says, “Frango is a perfect fit for our company’s portfolio, aligning well with our strategy to preserve and grow iconic brands that have historic franchise value with a unique and storied past.”  Although long associated with Chicago, Frango actually began in Seattle as a product of the Frederick and Nelson Company … the original name of the candy was Franco, a shortening of the original company’s name. Marshall Field and Co. acquired the brand in 1929 and for nearly 70 years the candy was made on the thirteenth floor of Field’s State Street store.  When Dayton-Hudson bought Field’s in 1990, the production of the candy was transferred to a Pennsylvania company although some production was returned to Chicago in 2007 after Federated Department Stores converted the Chicago-area Field’s stores to Macy’s.  Unloading Frango returns the brand to Chicago production even as the action is yet another sign that Macy’s is working hard to stay afloat, having announced the closure of 68 stores earlier in the month.

January 30, 1962 – Officials of the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company announce that the institution will provide nearly $20 million in financing for the first phase of the Carl Sandburg Village urban renewal project.  Because of the area involved – east of La Salle Street and south of North Avenue, near the city’s Gold Coast – interest runs high in the potential for the $42 million project.  Projections call for 1,875 units, ranging from efficiency apartments to two- and three-bedroom townhomes located on 15.63 acres between North Avenue and Division Street.  Although Continental’s financing plan is subject to the rezoning of the site by the Chicago city council and a commitment from the Federal Housing administration, the chairman of Continental bank, David M. Kennedy, says that “the project gives the bank another opportunity to contribute to the development of Chicago.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 31, 1962] It is difficult today to think about what a risky venture this was at the time.  As the Chicago Tribune reported early in 2018, “Security concerns were high at the development … A block away was Wells Street, lined with raucous bars … The new construction was a $40 million-plus gamble to save the Near North Side and, in turn, to stave off the blight threatening Chicago’s business core to the south and the Lincoln Park neighborhood to the north.” [Chicago Tribune, January 29, 2018] Sandburg Village brought about the gentrification of nearby Old Town, South Lincoln Park and sections of the city west of the Gold Coast.  Indirectly, the success of the development led to two other developments in the city that worked in similar ways, Presidential Towers in the southwest Loop and Dearborn Park.

January 30, 1953 – Final arguments are heard before Master in Chancery Jerome Nelson at the Kendall County circuit court in architect Mies van der Rohe’s mechanic’s lien suit against Dr. Edith B. Farnsworth.  The suit was filed in July of 1951, claiming that Dr. Farnsworth owed the architect $28,173 in unpaid fees for a weekend home he designed for her on the Fox River.  The doctor’s attorneys argue that Farnsworth asked for a home to cost approximately $40,000 and ended up with one that cost $73,872.  They say further that the house has a leaky roof and defects in its mechanical systems and that the travertine floor has buckled.  Attorney Randolph Bohrer asserts that Van der Rohe is not properly qualified as an architect and that exceeding the original cost estimate “is attributable either to gross incompetence or stupidity of the plaintiff,” a man he labels “an ordinary charlatan and an egoist of the Bauhaus school which has committed more frauds upon this country than any other organization.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 31, 1953] 

January 30, 1947 -- Randall H. Cooper, executive secretary of the State Street Council, asserts that redevelopment of Chicago's "blighted areas" is a necessity and that the Loop is "faced with more problems than ever before in its history." The continuing flight of families to the suburbs and the resulting loss of tax and business revenue have the merchants feeling blue. They would get bluer. The 1947 photo above was taken at Wells and Madison.
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Thursday, October 31, 2019

October 31, 1982 -- State Street Survey Gives Little Cause for Optimism


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October 31, 1982 – The Chicago Tribune reports the results of “a comprehensive survey of people on State Street” [Chicago Tribune, October 31, 1982], compiled by the architecture firm of Perkins and Will at the request of the Greater State Street Council.  The survey is based on the interviews of 839 people on the State Street Mall between Washington Street and Jackson Boulevard during three days in June.  After analyzing the results of the survey, the president of Friends of Downtown, Edward Lawrence, says, “State street is not the shopping center for the rich … [it] is not going to take the carriage and high fashion trade away from Michigan Avenue and I don’t think it should try.”  The survey is yet another attempt to determine how effectively the $17-million pedestrian mall on State Street, opened in 1978, is working. Of survey respondents who said they are not downtown after 6:00 p.m., 33 percent believed the area was unsafe and 29 percent said there was nothing to do.  South Side residents, with median incomes 8 percent below the city average, comprise close to 50 percent of mall users, according to the survey.  West Side residents with incomes 25 percent below the average make up another 25 percent of mall users.  North Side residents make up 22 percent of mall users, but, despite having incomes 3 percent higher than the metropolitan average, spend almost the same amount as West Side shoppers.  Only 15 percent of weekday users are from the suburbs.  The study recommends that advertising be aimed at people from “small, older households in the downtown area and North Side” and that more office buildings be built.  Lawrence disagrees with the second recommendation.  “There already is an oversupply of offices downtown,” he says.  “We must try to attract those suburbanites who already are downtown.”  Re-opening the street to traffic in 1993, an influx of close to 70,000 college students attending downtown colleges and universities, and the opening of Millennium Park in 2004 are the principal factors in creating the vital and bustling artery that State Street is today.  The photo above shows State Street as it appeared in 1987.

October 31, 1982 –The Columbus Drive bridge over the Chicago River is opened to traffic.  The first car to cross is driven by the widow of Chicago police officer William P. Fahey, for whom the bridge is named.  He was killed in the line of duty on February 10 as he attempted to make a traffic stop at Eighty-First and Morgan Streets.  According to the chicagoloopbridges web site, the William P. Fahey bridge is unique in two respects.  It is the first of the trunnion bascule bridges in the Loop to use box girders to span the river instead of trusses, and it is also the first to have its trunnions set back far enough from the river so that pedestrians can walk under it at the level of the river.  The bridge has a clear span of 180 feet and cost $33 million to construct. Although it was a controversial plan when proposed – many thought that it would flood the north side of the river with traffic that streets were ill-equipped to handle – no one can argue with its importance today while surveying what Streeterville looked like in the 1980’s and what it looks like today.



 October 31, 1902 – Harlow N. Higinbotham, the president of the board of trustees of the Field Columbian museum, holds forth about the museum’s future, saying, “All that stands in the way of a magnificent $10,000,000 building for the Field museum is a site downtown just across the Illinois Central tracks at Congress street, and that site the city of Chicago ought to provide.  The people of Chicago should have easy access to the museum.  At present persons visiting the city who have only limited time at their disposal cannot visit it.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, November 1, 1902] Higinbotham’s comments come as he hosts 30 of the  “highest authorities in the world on American anthropology … men from Germany, England, Sweden, Holland, France, Mexico and the South American countries.”  The scientists tour the home of the Field Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park, the building that served as the Palace of Fine Arts during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a museum that “even in its present quarters … the visitors thought … compared favorably with the museums of Europe and with those in the eastern states.”  The visitors spend the morning at the museum, take lunch at the Del Prado, then go for a drive through the parks and boulevards of the south side before spending the evening as guests of University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper at his residence.  The above photo shows the Field Columbian Museum, the former Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition -- and today's Museum of Science and Industry -- as it appeared at the time of Higinbotham's plea.



October 31, 1935 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that the eight bridges between Michigan Avenue and Franklin Street have opened more times in a nine-month period than they have opened in most twelve-month years.  According to Harbormaster William J. Lynch in the first nine months of 1935 the bridges opened 9,320 times between January 1 and September 30 with the average time a bridge stood open a bit less than four minutes.  It is hard to imagine a situation today in which traffic in the center of the city is completely stopped over two dozen times a day as bridges are raised and lowered.  According to Lynch these eight bridges blocked traffic a total of 546 hours – more than 68 eight-hour days – in the first nine months of the year.  If one looks at all sixteen bridges that cross the river on the north and west side of the Loop, the number of openings came to 15,088 with motorists and pedestrians spending a total of 866 hours waiting for the bridges to do their work.  At the south end of the North Branch of the river the little Kinzie Street bridge was opened 2,424 times in the first nine months of the year.  Alderman William A. Rowan, the chairman of the council committee on harbors, wharves and bridges, reacts to the figures, saying, “The question involved is the convenience of millions of individuals as opposed to the convenience of a relatively few owners of vessels.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 31, 1935]  He estimated that over 70 per cent of the openings of the eight bridges on the main stem of the river occurred to accommodate noncommercial vessels.  The above photo shows the main stem of the river in 1930, looking west from State Street, with the four-year-old Wacker Drive on its south side.

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