Showing posts with label 1983. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1983. Show all posts

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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Sunday, July 26, 2020

July 26, 1983 -- State-Lake Theater Signs Television Deal

cinematreasures.org
July 26, 1983 – An agreement is signed between the city and the American Broadcasting Company in which ABC will convert the State-Lake Theater into television studios.  According to the deal the theater’s impressive marquee will be removed and the theater auditorium will be divided into two levels for broadcasting studios, one of which will hold an audience of 250 people.  Although the Chicago City Council still must approve the agreement, ABC plans also to obtain the 12-story office and retail building at 190 North State Street in which the theater is located.  The company plans to remodel the building, including the terra cotta façade and retail space on the State Street and Lake Street sides of the structure in an effort that will cost over $11 million.  The renovation will also include the elimination of the fire escapes on the south side of the building, the creation of new sidewalks along the Lake Street side and landscaping along State Street.  Dennis Harder, the city’s deputy planning commissioner, says, “ABC’s proposed renovation will be a first-class rehabilitation effort, giving the building an economic life comparable to new construction which will occur in other parts of the North Loop renewal zone.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1983].  A good retrospective of the 190 North State building and its site can be found here.


July 26, 1940 – A grade separation in Lake Shore Drive north of North Avenue opens although the $750,000 project will not eliminate traffic problems in Lincoln Park immediately.  Ramps onto and off the drive are now open, but work still continues on Lake Shore Drive north of the bath house at North Avenue while the connection to Clark and La Salle Streets to which the Lake Shore Drive ramps will lead is not scheduled to open for another two weeks.  The pedestrian bridge over Lake Shore Drive at North Avenue is also still under construction.  Basically, the roadway that opens on this day will only allow motorists access to the parking area at the North Avenue beach.  Otto K. Jelinek, traffic engineer for the park district, says, “The capacity of the pavement has been reduced by about a third, so it’s impossible to get the efficiency that we had when Beach drive was in service.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 27, 1940] The 90,000 motorists trying to find their way through Lincoln Park during rush hour look forward to the end of construction.

July 26, 1902 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that the People’s Gaslight and Coke Company has purchased a building and leasehold interest of the property at the northwest corner of Adams Street and Michigan Avenue for $200,000 from the Lake Hotel Company.  This will be the site of the company’s new headquarters, a 21-story building designed by Daniel Burnham and Company, to be finished in 1911.  Although People’s Gas moved out in 1995, the building still makes a statement across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago with each of the columns at its base made out of a solid piece of granite that is 26 feet tall, four-and-a-half feet in diameter, weighing 30 tons.  The photo above shows the new skyscraper going up in April of 1910.  The building was built in two sections with a hollowed-out middle, the north section being completed first.



July 26, 1885 – A reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune writes a summary of a day he spends with Health Inspector De Wolf. Beginning on La Salle Street, what was then Pacific Avenue, between Harrison and Polk Streets, “the Inspector led the way past a number of those disreputable resorts whose lawlessness has already given a name to the locality.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 26, 1885] The Inspector leads the way into a two-story frame building near Polk Street. In “a subterranean region, of whose existence no one viewing the premises from the street would have guessed” the group finds one room, twelve-feet square, in which the landlord lives with his wife and nine male boarders.  They all sleep in the same space.  Across the hall a widow is living with her three children, who “lounging on chairs about the room looked in need of fresh air and better food.” Her husband was a merchant who died in unfortunate circumstances and left her nothing. She takes in washing to make ends meet, and the Inspector laments, “It seems hard that a decent woman should have to rear her children in such a place, surrounded by vicious and depraved people.”  The group moves on to a tenement on the corner of State and Twelfth Streets.  The frame and brick building is packed with tenants and, until an earlier Health Department inspection there was not a single water-closet on the second or third floor.  The article states, “The consequences of this were during the summer months horrible to contemplate.  Not only the back-yard but the roofs of the surrounding sheds were knee-deep in garbage, which needed only the returning spring to make it a veritable mine of disease.”  Despite some of the conditions, though, the trip ends optimistically as the reporter praises the work of the health inspectors, writing, “Every yard was already cleaned or being cleaned and all the rubbish under the houses gathered into heaps and carted off.  In some places the garbage had lain four or five feet deep, and the exhalations from this bulk when it was stirred up by the men were deadly.”  Still, there was much work left to be done.



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Friday, July 26, 2019

July 26, 1983 -- ABC Television to Purchase and Renovate State-Lake Theater

cinematreasures.org
July 26, 1983 – An agreement is signed between the city and the American Broadcasting Company in which ABC will convert the State-Lake Theater into television studios.  According to the deal the theater’s impressive marquee will be removed and the theater auditorium will be divided into two levels for broadcasting studios, one of which will hold an audience of 250 people.  Although the Chicago City Council still must approve the agreement, ABC plans also to obtain the 12-story office and retail building at 190 North State Street in which the theater is located.  The company plans to remodel the building, including the terra cotta façade and retail space on the State Street and Lake Street sides of the structure in an effort that will cost over $11 million.  The renovation will also include the elimination of the fire escapes on the south side of the building, the creation of new sidewalks along the Lake Street side and landscaping along State Street.  Dennis Harder, the city’s deputy planning commissioner, says, “ABC’s proposed renovation will be a first-class rehabilitation effort, giving the building an economic life comparable to new construction which will occur in other parts of the North Loop renewal zone.”  [Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1983].  A good retrospective of the 190 North State building and its site can be found here.


 July 26, 1885 –A reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune writes a summary of a day he spends with Health Inspector De Wolf. Beginning on La Salle Street, what was then Pacific Avenue, between Harrison and Polk Streets, “the Inspector led the way past a number of those disreputable resorts whose lawlessness has already given a name to the locality.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 26, 1885] The Inspector leads the way into a two-story frame building near Polk Street. In “a subterranean region, of whose existence no one viewing the premises from the street would have guessed” the group finds one room, twelve-feet square, in which the landlord lives with his wife and nine male boarders.  They all sleep in the same space.  Across the hall a widow is living with her three children, who “lounging on chairs about the room looked in need of fresh air and better food.” Her husband was a merchant who died in unfortunate circumstances and left her nothing. She takes in washing to make ends meet, and the Inspector laments, “It seems hard that a decent woman should have to rear her children in such a place, surrounded by vicious and depraved people.”  The group moves on to a tenement on the corner of State and Twelfth Streets.  The frame and brick building is packed with tenants and, until an earlier Health Department inspection there was not a single water-closet on the second or third floor.  The article states, “The consequences of this were during the summer months horrible to contemplate.  Not only the back-yard but the roofs of the surrounding sheds were knee-deep in garbage, which needed only the returning spring to make it a veritable mine of disease.”  Despite some of the conditions, though, the trip ends optimistically as the reporter praises the work of the health inspectors, writing, “Every yard was already cleaned or being cleaned and all the rubbish under the houses gathered into heaps and carted off.  In some places the garbage had lain four or five feet deep, and the exhalations from this bulk when it was stirred up by the men were deadly.”  Still, there was much work left to be done.


 July 26, 1940 – A grade separation in Lake Shore Drive north of North Avenue opens although the $750,000 project will not eliminate traffic problems in Lincoln Park immediately.  Ramps onto and off the drive are now open, but work still continues on Lake Shore Drive north of the bath house at North Avenue while the connection to Clark and LaSalle Streets to which the Lake Shore Drive ramps will lead is not scheduled to open for another two weeks.  The pedestrian bridge over Lake Shore Drive at North Avenue is also still under construction.  Basically, the roadway that opens on this day will only allow motorists access to the parking area at the North Avenue beach.  Otto K. Jelinek, traffic engineer for the park district, says, “The capacity of the pavement has been reduced by about a third, so it’s impossible to get the efficiency that we had when Beach drive was in service.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 27, 1940] The 90,000 motorists trying to find their way through Lincoln Park during rush hour look forward to the end of construction.


 July 26, 1902 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that the People’s Gaslight and Coke Company has purchased a building and leasehold interest of the property at the northwest corner of Adams Street and Michigan Avenue for $200,000 from the Lake Hotel Company.  This will be the site of the company’s new headquarters, a 21-story building designed by Daniel Burnham and Company, to be finished in 1911.  Although People’s Gas moved out in 1995, the building still makes a statement across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago with each of the columns at its base made out of a solid piece of granite that is 26 feet tall, four-and-a-half feet in diameter, weighing 30 tons.  The photo above shows the new skyscraper going up in April of 1910.  The building was built in two sections with a hollowed-out middle, the north section being completed first.

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Saturday, August 25, 2018

August 25, 1983 -- Gateway IV Asks for Heliport

Photo Courtesy of Google.com
August 25, 1983 – Another great idea that didn’t fly … On this day the developers of the Gateway IV building on the Chicago River ask the Chicago Plan Commission to approve a private rooftop heliport.  Alan Goldboro, the president of Tishman Midwest Management Corporation, the developer of the four Gateway buildings near Union Station, asserts that the other necessary approvals are all in place for what will be the first such rooftop flight deck since the city toughened safety regulations 21 years earlier. Goldboro emphasizes that the heliport will be used only by office tenants and police and fire helicopters with no common-carrier service to O’Hare or Midway Airports. One hurdle that has been cleared is the approval of the Friends of the River, a group that managed to shut down a plan for a commercial heliport at Wolf Point in 1980.  The coordinator of the group says of the Gateway plan, “From street level it shouldn’t make as much noise as a passing bus. From the drawings we’ve seen, the pad won’t even be visible from the street.  It’s completely different from Wolf Point.  

August 25, 1955 – John J. Mack, the owner of a five-story building at the southwest corner of State and Monroe Streets, announces that the building will be torn down to make way for a new structure.  The building to be razed was built in 1872 by E. S. Pike and called the Pike Block.  It later assumed the name of the Ayer Block, and over the years it had been remodeled at least six times.  The loss of the building is significant because the Art Institute of Chicago called the building home when the Academy of Fine Arts, as the Art Institute of Chicago was known at the time, when it was established in 1886.  The corner today is seeing yet another transformation as New York-based Tishman and an investment partner paid $35 million for the 60-year-old property in March, 2015 in order to carve 70,000 square feet of retail and office space out of it and an adjoining structure.  The rendering of the new space is shown above.


August 25, 1972 – Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackman refuses to block the merger of the Illinois Central Railroad and the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad.  The Missouri Pacific Railroad had claimed that the proposed merger would create a near-monopoly that would cripple it.  The merger, which had occurred on August 10 gives the new Illinois Central Gulf Railroad control of 13,532 miles of track.
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Sunday, May 13, 2018

May 13, 1983 -- Chicago River Proposal for Beautification of Six Sites


May 13, 1983 –The Chicago Tribune, in its “Community News” column, reports that a six-month project by Friends of the Chicago River has culminated in detailed designs for enhancing six sites along the river with all six proposals under study by the city’s Department of Planning. David Jones, the chairman of the group’s steering committee, names the six areas under consideration for beautification.  The first proposal involves lighting of 18 Chicago River bridges between Michigan Avenue and Congress Parkway. The proposal states, “Think of the effect.  From Wolf Point you would see the whole necklace of lights.” [Chicago Tribune, May 13, 1983] The second location for improvement is Rush Street where a “bilevel, glass-front café behind the Wrigley Building that could seat 80 persons inside and another 150 outside” is proposed. Wolf Point is next where a boat ramp and dock are proposed along a landscaped bulkhead. Part of the plan includes a “small café, an outdoor amphitheater and a floating concert stage” with a high-rise building to be developed.  A “cleaned-up, greened-up turning basin” is proposed for North Avenue where “flowering trees, evergreens and ground cover could keep the basin colorful year-round and could act as buffers against unsightly industrial storage areas.” The fifth site is located on the North Branch of the river where it meets the North Shore Channel, the site of the city’s only waterfall.  “Paths could be landscaped along the bank,” according to the proposal. “Footbridges could be built, providing complete access to the area.  Boat docks could be added, and a sloping terrace on the east bank would allow an unobstructed view of the dock from an existing field house.” Finally, there is Bubbly Creek, located on the South Fork of the South Branch of the river between Thirty-First and Thirty-Ninth Streets.  It “could be developed into a heritage park capitalizing on the history of the site where Father Marquette camped one winter and where ships once unloaded their cargos of lumber … Water quality could be improved with installation of stationary bicycles, which when pedaled, could aerate the water.” Although not a whole happened as a result of the report – there are no aerating bicycles at Bubbly Creek -- it was a beginning, an acknowledgment that the river is a resource as important to the city as its beautiful lakefront.  Thirty-five years later the Main Stem of the river is a showcase with its Riverwalk connecting the lake with Lake Street and the South Branch. Projects are still being floated, such as the North Branch Industrial Framework Plan, drafted by the city’s Department of Planning and Development and unveiled a year ago.  Part of that plan can be seen in the above rendering.


May 13, 1950 – At the Eighty-Second annual convention of the American Institute of Architects, Lewis Mumford, for 30 years the architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine, tells the audience, ‘The age of the big city is over … A balanced community, limited in size and area, limited in density, in close contact with the open country, is actually the new urban form for our civilization.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 14, 1950]


May 13, 1889 – The Secretary of War, Redfield Proctor, visits the site of Fort Sheridan, accompanied by a party of officers and gentlemen of the Commercial Club. The group is transported to the barren outpost by a special train that leaves the Northwestern station at Wells Street at 9:00 a.m. and returns at 1 p.m. The post commander, Colonel Lyster, meets the delegation at the north suburban station with an ambulance drawn by four government mules. The Chicago Daily Tribune writes, “The visit . . . was under circumstances most disadvantageous, the day being raw and the roads muddy.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 14, 1889] There isn’t much to see – “. . . one story frame barracks – shanties – and other buildings”. On the north end of the post the visitors are shown the proposed site for the commandant’s house. “Notwithstanding the gloomy day,” the paper reports, “the scene was inviting. The grove was blooming with wild flowers, and the angry swash of the turbulent lake many feet below was a recommendation of the spot superior to anything which had met the Secretary’s view during his Western visit.” If first impressions are everything, the new post falls woefully short. The report continues, “. . . it became apparent that construction of the post was not to be on that magnificent plan at first contemplated. The terra cotta pressed brick, the fine hardwood floors, the frescoed walls, and magnificence of palatial quarters had dwindled to plain yellow brick and papered walls. The commandant’s mansion had had a shrinkage from $30,000 to $15,000 and the contracts awarded yesterday called for only $2,000 more than the first appropriation.” The architects involved, Martin Roche and William Holabird, made it all work, though, and the Town of Fort Sheridan is a showplace today. The former quarters of the commandant appear above.



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Saturday, September 30, 2017

September 30, 1983 -- Wacker Drive Bandits Hold Up Bus




September 30, 1983 – The Wild West comes to Wacker Drive as three men waylay the 121 Wacker Express bus and hold up the 27 passengers aboard, relieving them of “about $500 in cash, miscellaneous jewelry and wallets and purses.” [Chicago Tribune, October 1, 1983]. The bandits board the bus at State Street and announce a hold-up after stuffing a few dollar bills in the fare box. Police say that the bills will be dusted for fingerprints. This is the third bus robbery of the year. On October 28 a 23-year-old South Side man is indicted on charges of armed robbery in the commission of the crimes.


September 30, 1990 – The Chicago White Sox defeat the Seattle Mariners, 2-1, in the last game the team will play in Comiskey Park, the oldest baseball park in the major leagues.  The last pitch is thrown by Bobby Thigpen who gets Seattle’s Harold Reynolds to hit a grounder to Sox second baseman Scott Fletcher who throws to Steve Lyons at first for the out.  Tickets for the final game sell out in two hours when they go on sale on June 9, and a crowd of 42,849 is on hand to bid farewell to the old ball yard.  These are the last of the 72,801,381 fans who have watched the Sox compile a record of 3,024 wins and 2,926 losses in Comiskey since it opened on July 1, 1910.  Said Sox pitcher Wilbur Wood, “It’s a shame they’re closing it down . . . It’s like with all of the older parks, not for the players but for the fans.  The new parks are so symmetrical that you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.  And the fans are so far away.  I hope the fans are close at the new park like they were at Comiskey.”  [Chicago Tribune, October 1, 1990]
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