Showing posts with label 2004. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2004. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

September 29, 2004 -- Cubs Fade in the Stretch

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September 29, 2004 – Still in the hunt in the National League wild-card race, the Chicago Cubs are drooping like end-of-summer marigolds.  There is still hope despite the team’s losing four out of five games to the New York Mets and the Cincinnati Reds, teams with losing records that, when combined, place them 55 games out of first place.  The team has scored only 11 runs in 44 innings, but still is only a half-game out of the lead for the wild-card position.  Manager Dusty Baker says, “We have no choice.  We either keep fighting or roll over and die.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 30, 2004].  On this day, riding on a strong effort by starting pitcher Glendon Rusch, who leaves the game in the seventh inning with a 1-1 tie, the Cubs take the lead in the bottom of that frame when Moise Alou’s sacrifice fly gives them a 2-1 edge.  LaTroy Hawkins is impressive in the ninth as he gets Cincinnati’s first two batters, and goes 0-2 on D’Angelo Jiminez, before surrendering a triple, followed by a game-tying double by Austin Kearns. The score is still tied as the Reds come to bat in the twelfth when relief pitcher Jon Leicester walks Jiminez and Kearns hits a home run.  Catcher Michael Barrett says, after the Cubs are unable to score in the bottom of the inning, “I can’t imagine a more frustrating loss than this one.”  With only four games left in the season, things look bleak for the team, which has played 26 games in 24 days.  On September 25 the Cubs had led San Francisco by 1.5 games in the Wild Card race with only nine games left in the season, but the weary warriors lost six of the final eight games, and the Houston Astros won the Wild Card.  In the last game of the season slugger Sammy Sosa requested that Baker allow him to sit the game out, and when Baker refused, Sosa left the locker room in the early stages of the game.  It was the last time he would wear a Cubs uniform.



September 29, 2003 – The new Soldier Field opens to a national audience as the Chicago Bears take on the Green Bay Packers. The renovated stadium is the product of years of wrangling about what an appropriate venue would be for the Monsters of the Midway and exactly how much taxpayers should be expected to pay for it. As the stadium welcomes its first fans, reviews are mixed.  Joe Antunovich, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Council, says, “We’re stuck with what we have, which I believe is much less than we could have had. It’s an eyesore of the Nth degree. It’s just awful.” [Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2003]  Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic for the New York Times, disagrees, writing, “If your commitment is to classicism, you will find a more authentically classical urbanism in the recast stadium than was present when the concrete colonnades stood alone.  And if your commitment is to conflict, as a city lover’s ought always to be, the field’s controversial reception will not let you down.” [New York Times, September 30, 2003]  The new Soldier Field will hold 61,500 fans, 3,500 fewer than the old stadium, and in the second largest market in the National Football League, it will be the second smallest stadium.  However, 60 percent of the new venue’s seats will be on the sidelines; in the old stadium that number was just 40 percent.  A unique feature of the stadium is that all of the suites and club seats are on one side while all the general-admission seats are on the other. As a result, the west grandstand is 20 feet higher than the east side, which will have four levels of $300,000-a-year luxury suites.  The renovated stadium will also have twice the number of concession stands as its predecessor and more than twice as many bathrooms.  On this night a crowd of 60,257 watches as the Green Bay Packers, with Brett Favre at quarterback, score 17 unanswered points in the first quarter, ultimately defeating the Bears, 38-23.


September 29, 1915 --The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that the Municipal Art Commission has accepted a design for a colonnade or peristyle that will be built on the southeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street.  In the middle of the colonnade will be a fountain, the entire design provided by architect Edward H. Bennett.  The peristyle, finished in 1917, lasted until August 20, 1953 when the Speedway Wrecking Company quickly razed it with the debris used as fill in a northerly extension of Lake Shore Drive.  For more on the original peristyle and its modern replacement, you can turn to Connecting the Windy City and check this entry out.

 

September 29, 1906 – On a “rainy, chilly, and generally disagreeable” day [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 30, 1906] the South Shore Country Club opens its doors for the first time with 92 cases of champagne on hand to warm the 600 people in attendance.  Everyone is on edge as there are intimations that Arthur Burrage Farwell and the Hyde Park Protective Association might try to storm the festivities in an effort to stop the serving of alcohol, but at 4:30 p.m. the club’s president, William Thorne, the president of Montgomery Ward and Company, opens the first bottle of champagne on the club’s wind-swept veranda and calls one of the 200 waiters on hand to serve his guests.  “Here’s defiance to Farwell,” is the toast that follows.  Mr. Farwell’s organization is dedicated to removing the perils of alcohol from the area. “Their arguments – the sanctity of the family, the selling of liquor to minors, the perceived threat to land values and suspicions of gambling and prostitution – were used to garner community support for closing of the taverns.”  [Hyde Park Herald, February 20, 2014]  The association didn’t stop the festivities on this evening.  As the Tribune reported, “Outside the angry surf beat against the shore and the wind moaned above the strains of the orchestra, but in the dining room, where 600 were served, in the reception hall, and the spacious parlor, where the dark green furniture appeared in pleasing contrast against the white woodwork, the scene was of good cheer.” 

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Sunday, September 20, 2020

September 20, 2004 -- Spertus Institute Announces New Headquarters

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September 20, 2004 –Chicago architects Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton and the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies unveil a plan for the Institute’s new home on Michigan Avenue.  The plan will be the first test of whether a contemporary building will meet the design guidelines of the Michigan Avenue Historic District. Frist reactions are favorable. Jim Peters, the Director of Planning for the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, says, “It adheres to many of the more key design guidelines for the district, including height, proportions and mild projections.” [Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2004] The proposed building, projected to cost $49 million, will contain a 400-seat lecture hall, a library, museum, and public facilities and will stand on what had previously been a vacant lot in the 600 block of South Michigan Avenue, just north of the Spertus Institute’s current home at 618 South Michigan Avenue.  Early in 2018 the Spertus Institute’s new building was named as one of Illinois’ 200 Great Places by the Illinois Council of the American Institute of Architects.  The structure’s window wall is built from 726 individual pieces of glass in 556 different shapes.  The multi-faceted planes of the window wall bring light into the building, an important factor on a couple of levels.  According to the Spertus website, “This emphasis on light echoes the Spertus logo, a flame accompanied by the biblical phrase “yehi” or, Hebrew for ‘let there be light,’ symbolizing both physical light and the light of learning.” [https://www.spertus.edu/610at10]


September 20, 1992 – Big commotion on Wacker Drive east of Michigan Avenue when the Michigan Avenue bridge turns into a slingshot, shooting a 70-foot crane into the gap between the span and Wacker Drive. The crane’s boom falls across Wacker Drive with the iron ball and hook at the top of the crane bouncing off Wacker Drive and through the rear window of Jesus Lopez’s Ford Escort.  Says Lopez, “I guess I was just lucky. I’m glad I wasn’t sitting in the back seat.” [Chicago Tribune, September 21, 1992] Jeff Boyle, the city’s Commissioner of Transportation, says, “The southeast leaf of the Michigan Avenue bridge was the last of four leafs under construction. The bridge, which is out of balance during construction, started to rise and went up into a straight vertical position.  What stopped the bridge from going any further or falling back down was the crane that got wedged in there.” Diana Morales, a police officer directing traffic at the time of the accident had just stopped a CTA bus in an effort to divert it to the Wabash Avenue bridge just to the west. “I was behind the bus directing traffic and trying to get the bus out of the way, but [the driver] said he couldn’t move so I told him to just stay there.  [The Northwest leaf] was coming down and the Southeast side started coming up really fast and I just ran the other way.”  Six passengers on the bus are injured as flying debris come through the open windows.  The accident closes down the bridge indefinitely and ultimately leads to an acknowledgement on the part of the city that none of its inspectors had the experience or training to determine the proper balancing of weight on a bridge that is under construction.


September 20, 1915 – Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis orders the steamer Eastland sold with bids to be opened and the sale to take place on December 20, 1915 in the United States marshal’s office in the Federal Building.  The order is issued in order to cover the costs of the Great Lakes Towing Company, the firm that raised the hulk from the river bottom after the ship capsized on July 24 with a loss of life approaching one thousand souls.  According to Jay R. Bonansinga’s The Sinking of the Titanic:  America’s Forgotten Tragedy, “. . . only two bidders showed up at the macabre auction held on a cold December morning." One of them was an attorney from Boston, who represented an East Coast steamship company.  The other was Captain Edward A. Evers of the Illinois Naval Reserve.  Evers won the auction with a bid of 46,000 dollars, taking possession of the hulk on December 28.


September 20, 1889 – Miscommunication between Captain James A Brown, in command of the steamship E. P. Wilbur, and his engineer lead to the big ship of the Lehigh Valley Line slamming her 5,000 tons of dead weight into the closed Rush Street bridge.  At 8:00 a.m. the bridge was crowded with teamsters guiding their horse-drawn loads into and out of the Loop as well as men and women hustling to their jobs.  When the ship struck the bridge, it “reeled under the blow, and then settled back upon the solid abutment,” [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 21, 1889] recoiling again into a partially open position.  Horses were frightened, reacting violently and “could only with the utmost difficulty be prevented from plunging into the river from the ends of the bridge now hanging over the murky waters below.”  The iron girders of the bridge are bent and twisted by the collision, and the bridge tender appears later in the day before a judge to swear out a warrant for the captain’s arrest.  The error seems to have occurred when the captain sounded two bells to the engineer below who mistook the signal to go astern as a signal to move forward.  Another day on the river.  The photo shows the Rush Street bridge and the Chicago River as it would have appeared at about the time The E. Wilbur tried to get through the draw.


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Thursday, December 26, 2019

December 26, 2004 -- Jeanne Gang Receives Critic's Praises


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December 26, 2004 – The architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, writes  a glowing appraisal of 40-year-old architect Jeanne Gang and her firm, Studo/Gang, which employs a dozen people.  He writes, “Gang designs in a modernist idiom, but unlike the abstract steel-and-glass boxes of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, her work usually has some recognizable feature that invites non-architects to explore it.”  [Chicago Tribune, December 26, 2004]  He cites as an example the Kam Liu Building in Chicago’s Chinatown, noting that it “flaunts a skin of titanium shingles that resemble the scales of a dragon.”  Gang and her husband and co-principal, Mark Schendel, are about to embark upon what might be, for some, an intimidating transition as the firm has been tapped to design residential towers in the Lakeshore East development, rising on what was once a freight yard for the Illinois Central Railroad and, more recently, a nine-hole Par 3 golf course on the lakefront just south of the Chicago River.  Five years after Kamin’s article runs, Gang’s Aqua, an 82-story mixed-use tower, opens with James Loewenberg of Loewenberg and Associates as the Architect of Record.   These days the Vista Tower is nearing completion.  The 101-story hotel and residential building, consists of three sections and, according to Kamin in a September, 2019 article, “Vista’s snaking curves stand out in a city where the right angle has long been king.  So does its sleekness which contrasts with the muscular X-bracing of the former John Hancock Center and other high-rises that boldly express the hidden heavy lifting.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 3, 2019]  In the same article the editor of the journal of Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Daniel Safarik, says of Vista, “For lack of a better word, luxury is communicated by smoothness or sleekness as opposed to musculature.”  Gang stands in front of Aqua in the above photo.

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December 26, 1998 – The Sky Pavilion, the $30 million addition to the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, opens and Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin calls it “the most daring building in years along a shoreline dotted by gleaming white museums based on the temples of antiquity.” [Chicago Tribune, December 30, 1998]  The new addition, dubbed “the bra” for the way its C-shaped expanse wraps around the 1930 building, will add a new theater, additional exhibit spaces and a 200-seat restaurant, throwing exceptional views of the city’s skyline into the experience.  Kamin makes the point that the new pavilion teaches a lesson – “The present doesn’t have to parrot the past to respect it … [the pavilion] is both a sensitive expansion and a spectacular addition to the lakefront – every bit as much an expression of its era as its distinguished predecessor. Designed by Dirk Lohan and Al Novickas of Lohan Associates, the addition adds a stunning new space while it subtracts alterations that have taken “some of the luster off this diminutive gem.”  Kamin makes the point that the engineering that developed the addition would not have been possible without a computer that could calculate the complex angles in the new structure, a structure he calls “one of the finest meldings of space and structure in Chicago since Jahn’s masterful United Terminal at O’Hare International Airport was completed in 1988.”


December 26, 1911 – As the machinists’ strike on the Illinois Central Railroad continues, five dangerous incidents of vandalism take place between the Parkside and Grand Crossing stations of the railroad.  At 3:10 p.m. the Blue Island Express runs through an open switch at Grand Crossing, and the engine is thrown off the tracks.  At 7:00 p.m. a south bound freight train is broken in two near Grand Crossing with two freight cars derailed.  An hour later a five-coach South Chicago local train hits an obstruction near Seventy-First Street, and the engine and the first trucks of the following coach are derailed.  Ten minutes after that a south bound passenger train derails just fifty feet west of the South Chicago train.  At 8:30 p.m. two men are seen tampering with a switch at Seventh-Fifth Street, near the South Shore station, but they make their escape before police can be informed.  Reached at his home, F. S. Gibbons, the Vice-President and general manager of the railroad, says, “I don’t believe the strikers would deliberately plan to wreck trains.  I believe an investigation will disclose something else as the cause.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 27, 1911] Despite his assertion, Chicago police place an officer at every switch between Seventy-First and Ninety-First Streets.  The strike, which began in June of 1911, was not fully resolved until the middle of 1915.


December 26, 1951 – The holidays are stressful times, and motorists on Michigan Avenue on the day after Christmas back in 1951 have ample reason to be stressed as a result of a standoff between representatives of two city agencies.  Traffic policeman Phil Tolan arrests a CTA bus driver, William Wilson, at Michigan Avenue and Ontario Street in the height of the evening rush hour.  It starts innocently enough when Wilson, with a green light, moves his bus into the intersection of Michigan and Ohio.  You see this all the time today -- traffic is backed up and the bus blocks the intersection.  Officer Tolan approaches the window on the driver’s side of the bus and tells the driver he should have waited, and Wilson closes the window in the copper’s face.  “Well, I couldn’t let him sass me like that so I told him he was under arrest and ordered him to open the door and get out and show me his license,” Tolan says.  [Chicago Daily Tribune, December 27, 1951]  He orders the bus driver off the bus, but Wilson won’t open the door until Tolan threatens to break it.  A paddy wagon is called, Wilson is taken to the East Chicago Avenue station, and the CTA is left with the task of transferring passengers to another bus and getting the stranded bus out of the intersection, a process that takes close to 45 minutes.  The humor probably would have been lost on all of the motorists jammed up on Michigan Avenue that evening, but before he was a cop, Tolan drove a bus for the CTA.  The photo above was taken about a half-mile south of Ontario, but you get the idea of what a 45-minute blockade of a key intersection might have been like.


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Thursday, September 20, 2018

September 20, 2004 -- Spertus Institutes's New Home Unveiled

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September 20, 2004 –Chicago architects Ron Krueck and Mark Sexton and the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies unveil a plan for the Institute’s new home on Michigan Avenue.  The plan will be the first test of whether a contemporary building will meet the design guidelines of the Michigan Avenue Historic District. Frist reactions are favorable. Jim Peters, the Director of Planning for the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois, says, “It adheres to many of the more key design guidelines for the district, including height, proportions and mild projections.” [Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2004]The proposed building, projected to cost $49 million, will contain a 400-seat lecture hall, a library, museum, and public facilities and will stand on what had previously been a vacant lot in the 600 block of South Michigan Avenue, just north of the Spertus Institute’s current home at 618 South Michigan Avenue.  Early in 2018 the Spertus Institute’s new building was named as one of Illinois’ 200 Great Places by the Illinois Council of the American Institute of Architects.  The structure’s window wall is built from 726 individual pieces of glass in 556 different shapes.  The multi-faceted planes of the window wall bring light into the building, an important factor on a couple of levels.  According to the Spertus website, “This emphasis on light echoes the Spertus logo, a flame accompanied by the biblical phrase “yehi” or, Hebrew for ‘let there be light,’ symbolizing both physical light and the light of learning.” [https://www.spertus.edu/610at10]


September 20, 1992 – Big commotion on Wacker Drive east of Michigan Avenue when the Michigan Avenue bridge turns into a slingshot, shooting a 70-foot crane into the gap between the span and Wacker Drive. The crane’s boom falls across Wacker Drive with the iron ball and hook at the top of the crane bouncing off Wacker Drive and through the rear window of Jesus Lopez’s Ford Escort.  Says Lopez, “I guess I was just lucky. I’m glad I wasn’t sitting in the back seat.” [Chicago Tribune, September 21, 1992] Jeff Boyle, the city’s Commissioner of Transportation, says, “The southeast leaf of the Michigan Avenue bridge was the last of four leafs under construction. The bridge, which is out of balance during construction, started to rise and went up into a straight vertical position.  What stopped the bridge from going any further or falling back down was the crane that got wedged in there.” Diana Morales, a police officer directing traffic at the time of the accident had just stopped a CTA bus in an effort to divert it to the Wabash Avenue bridge just to the west. “I was behind the bus directing traffic and trying to get the bus out of the way, but [the driver] said he couldn’t move so I told him to just stay there.  [The Northwest leaf] was coming down and the Southeast side started coming up really fast and I just ran the other way.”  Six passengers on the bus are injured as flying debris come through the open windows.  The accident closes down the bridge indefinitely and ultimately leads to an acknowledgement on the part of the city that none of its inspectors had the experience or training to determine the proper balancing of weight on a bridge that is under construction.


September 20, 1915 – Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis orders the steamer Eastland sold with bids to be opened and the sale to take place on December 20, 1915 in the United States marshal’s office in the Federal Building.  The order is issued in order to cover the costs of the Great Lakes Towing Company, the firm that raised the hulk from the river bottom after the ship capsized on July 24 with a loss of life approaching one thousand souls.  According to Jay R. Bonansinga’s The Sinking of the Titanic:  America’s Forgotten Tragedy, “. . . only two bidders showed up at the macabre auction held on a cold December morning." One of them was an attorney from Boston, who represented an East Coast steamship company.  The other was Captain Edward A. Evers of the Illinois Naval Reserve.  Evers won the auction with a bid of 46,000 dollars, taking possession of the hulk on December 28.
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Sunday, June 24, 2018

June 24, 2004 -- Runaway Truck Nails a C.T.A Bus


June 24, 2004 –A driver of a 25-ton concrete pump truck parks the vehicle on an elevated portion of Monroe Street while he asks for directions to the location in Millennium Park where the truck is required, and the truck begins to roll west down Monroe Street toward Michigan Avenue.  It collides with a passenger van and a taxi before pinning a C.T.A. 151 bus against a traffic light.  “I looked like a scary movie,” a passenger on the bus says.  “It hit us, and people screamed and a couple hit the floor.  The bus was shaking.” [Chicago Tribune, June 25, 2004]More than 50 emergency personnel respond to the accident, and Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford says, “With an accident like this, it’s remarkable there were not more people hurt.” Thirteen people on the bus are injured with three sustaining serious injuries.  The construction of the Lurie Garden, where the truck was headed, is shown in the above photo.


June 24, 1930 – The first scoop of dirt is dug at the southwest corner of Addison Street and Western Avenue, and the construction of the $5,000,000 Lane Technical High School is under way.  Ten thousand people are on hand as Alderman John J. Hoellen of the Forty-Seventh Ward pulls a lever in a steam shovel to get the work started.  High schools represented at the ceremony include Tilden, Crane, Austin, Lake View, Senn and Schurz.  Lane Tech Principal Grant Beebe says, “Lane has taken a place in the educational system that is national and international.  We long ago outgrew our facilities and now our needs have been answered.  The place a technical school fills in American civilization is shown by the records of our graduates.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 25, 1930] The school replaces an earlier school that stood at Division and Sedgwick and is named after Albert Grannis Lane.  Born in Chicago in 1841, Lane became the youngest principal in the history of the Chicago public school system, later serving as Superintendent of Schools in Cook County and as the President of the National Education Association.  The photo above shows the great school under construction as the 1930's begin.


June 24, 1942 – The State’s Attorney files a foreclosure suit against the Auditorium building at 430 South Michigan Avenue as plans move forward to auction the building’s art and furnishings.  The building, with its combined hotel, theater, and offices, owes $1,346,584 in county taxes and penalties.  Plans are for the property to be sold to the highest bidder within 60 days.  If no buyer is willing to buy the building for a significant portion of the amount owed in back taxes, the county controller is authorized to bid on the building for the amount of those taxes.  If that occurs and the owners do not repay that amount within two years, the property can then be sold to the highest bidder who will receive a clear title.  Everything will go – theater scenery, 3,665 seats, glassware from the bar, even the chairs from the boxes where the elite of Chicago society once sat to escape the smoke and the smell of the city.


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