Showing posts with label Halsted Street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Halsted Street. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

September 8, 1969 -- Reverend Jesse Jackson Jailed on Trespassing Charge

religionnews.com


September 8, 1969 – The Reverend Jesse Jackson, leading a group of 600 protestors, is arrested on charges of criminal trespass at a construction site at the University of Illinois Circle campus after refusing to leave the site.  Jackson, along with two other men arrested for the same offense, refuses to make bond of $250 and is held in custody.  The demonstration is the result of Jackson’s effort to fight racial segregation in the city’s trade unions, an effort that was born of the belief that public construction contracts should include Black workers.  In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, Jackson says, “It’s not understood.  The same people who call us lazy lock us out of trade unions.  We’ve had to fight to get the right skills ot work … In the fight to rebuild where we live, there are countless jobs.  There are probably more jobs than people.  People ask how can you police poverty.  You can’t police poverty.  But you can develop people where you live so there’s less need for police.”  [New York Times, September 23, 1969].  In marching to the site at Halsted Street and Newberry Avenue where an $18 million science and engineering building is being constructed, the protestors defy an injunction issued on August 14, limiting the number of pickets at a construction site to six.  The injunction had been dutifully observed, but on the previous day, according to coalition leaders, union leaders walked out of talks scheduled between them and Black leaders.  It is a day of contrasts for Reverend Jackson as earlier in the day he had been honored as one of Chicago’s 10 outstanding young men at a luncheon at the Palmer House.  This evening he would spend the night in jail.  In the above photo Reverend Jackson uses a police microphone in the back of a police squadrol in an attempt to quiet demonstrators at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus.


September 8, 1973 – Led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, more than 8,000 people march through the Loop from a starting point at State Street and Wacker Drive, headed for a rally in Grant Park.  A spokesman for the Coalition for Jobs and Economic Justice, the sponsor of the march, says, “We are facing a crisis of everyday living.  It is the story of the jobless at the employment gate. It’s 40 million school children facing the loss of milk.  It’s the crisis of the welfare mother trying to fend off malnutrition at supermarket prices, the closed down factory, the bus line that died.”  [Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1973] Jack Edward, the Vice-President of the United Auto Workers says at the Grant Park rally, “In 1963 we had a friendly wind at our backs—John F. Kennedy. Now we have adversity at our faces—Richard M. Nixon, whose interest in economic and social justice was clearly demonstrated by his veto this week of a bill that would have raised the minimum wage in steps to $2.20 an hour and extended the protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act to about 7 million workers.”  Organizers had predicted a turn-out of 50,000 protestors, an estimate that was clearly optimistic.  As the above photo shows Reverend Jackson is still at it in 1975 as he leads a rally in favor of the Humphrey-Hawkins act that advocated using government-paid positions to combat the ravages of inflation and unemployment. 

September 8, 1929 – Gompers Park at the corner of Foster and Pulaski Avenues, a 39-acre expanse of green space that is divided by the Chicago River, is dedicated.  Originally a part of the Park District of Albany Park, one of 22 independent park districts that were brought into the Chicago Park District in 1934, the park’s plan was the work of landscape architect Henry J. Stockman. Clarence Hatzfield, a Chicago architect and member of the Albany Park board, designed the park’s fieldhouse.  The park was originally named after Samuel Matson, who had been the Superintendent of Albany Park’s Park District.  According to the Chicago Park District’s website, “Albany Park District President Henry A. Schwartz, an official of the shoemakers’ union, soon convinced the park board that it was inappropriate to name the park for a living person.” Therefore, on this day in 1929 the district renamed the park in honor of Samuel Gompers, who had served as the president of the American Federation of Labor from 1886 until his death in 1924.  A major donation from the Edward M. Marx Foundation led to the dedication of a life-sized statue of the labor leader on Labor Day of 2007.

September 8, 1860 – The schooner Augusta sails into Chicago, reporting that sometime during the night she had collided with the Lady Elgin on the lake.  The Lady Elgin, with somewhere between 400 and 700 passengers aboard, most of them members of Milwaukee’s Irish Union Guard, is holed below the waterline when the Augusta strikes her amidships in the midst of a lake squall, and within 20 minutes she sinks.  No one will ever know how many drown in the lake off Winnetka or die on the rocks just off shore.  Bodies continue to wash ashore well into December, some of them almost 80 miles from the wreck. Many of those aboard the Lady Elgin are never found.  Those who could be identified are returned to Milwaukee for burial, but a number of the unfortunate souls onboard the ship are buried in a mass grave In Highwood, not far from the Port Clinton lighthouse, a place that has since been lost to time.




Posted by Chicago Old and New at 12:30 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , ,

Monday, September 7, 2020

September 7, 1948 -- Brach Candy Explosion Kills 15

Chicago Tribune Photo


September 7, 1948 – An explosion and fire rips through a building of the massive Brach Candy plant at 4656 Kinzie Street around 3:00 a.m., killing 15 workers and injuring 18 more.  It is fortunate that day shift workers had not reported for duty when the explosion occurs, so there are fewer than the 2,400 workers that would have been at the site five or six hours later.  Most of the damage is confined to two rooms on the top floor of the three-story building that covers an entire city block.  Fire Commissioner Michael J. Corrigan says that the explosion could have been one of the greatest disasters in recent years if it had occurred when all employees were on duty.  One employee says that there was no warning of the explosion which blows out a portion of the building’s north wall, temporarily blocking the Chicago and North Western Railroad tracks on one side of the building.  Investigation reveals that a fire preceded the explosion, and that the explosion, probably caused by suspended corn starch in the air, killed several men who were fighting the fire along with a dozen others who were in the vicinity.



September 7, 1968 – Mayor Richard J. Daley releases “The Strategy of Confrontation,” a 77-page report that chronicles the disturbances that took place in the city during the Democratic convention two weeks earlier.  The report claims “to point out the nature and strategy of confrontation as it was employed in Chicago,” [Chicago Tribune, September 8, 1968] It pinpoints the origin of the disturbances as November 16, 1967 when Jerry Rubin, the leader of the Youth International Party, issued a call to demonstrators to come to Chicago and “Bring pot, fake delegates’ cards, smoke bombs, costumes, blood to throw and all kinds of interesting props.  Also football helmets.”  Others blamed for the violence were Rennie Davis, Chicago coordinator for the National Mobilization Committee to end the War in Vietnam; David Dellinger, national chairman for that committee; Tom Hayden, one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society; and Abbie Hoffman, an associate of Rubin’s.  The report also indicts the news media for aiming “malice to the authorities while presuming good will and sincerity on the part of the protestors,” leading to “ugly and distasteful scenes … reported all over the nation and the world without sufficient explanation to allow the reports to be placed in perspective.”  The city’s Corporation Counsel, Raymond F. Simon, with the help of the police, the United States attorney’s office, and the city law department, is responsible for the report that concludes that the ultimate goal of the protestors “was to topple what they consider to be the corrupt institutions of our society, education, governmental, etc., by impeding and if possible halting their normal functions while exposing the authorities to ridicule and embarrassment." 


September 7, 1939 – In the space of a day 75 million gallons of raw sewage are diverted from the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to a new southwest side treatment plant in Stickney.  The transition occurs through the removal of a wooden bulkhead at the Western Avenue sewer at Thirty-Eighth Street, an action that diverts the sewage into the southwest side intercepting sewer leading to the new plant.  This sewer drains 12.5 miles of the city, including half of the waste from the stockyards.  Prior to the transition to the Stickney plant, the sewer had dumped 40 tons of solid waste into the canal each day.  Within a few weeks all of the sewage from the area between the canal and Eighty-Seventh street will be diverted to the plant.  The Stickney plant is just one part of a $162,000,000 sewage disposal program begun after the U. S. Supreme Court ordered a reduction in the diversion of water from Lake Michigan earlier in the decade. Today the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant is the largest wastewater treatment facility in the world, serving 260 square miles, including the central part of Chicago and 46 suburban communities.  It covers 413 acres with nearly 400 employees managing the treatment of up to one million gallons of water every minute.


September 7, 1934 – At a time when the city and its occupants swelter in the summer heat with little they can do about it, the Chicago Daily Tribune prints a glowing article that touts its super-swell air conditioning system, installed during the cold weather months, a system that has already provided 1,358 “air cooled hours” for employees and tenants of Tribune Tower.  Holmes Onderdonk, the manager of the building, says, “The whole idea was to make working conditions better for employees and tenants . . . When the air cooling system was first contemplated there was an opinion that a building already erected couldn’t be air conditioned.  The working of this system shows it can be done.  The refrigeration machinery will be built into new buildings in the future, but it was an accomplishment to install the system here.” 

Chicago Tribune photo
Chicago Tribune photo
September 7, 1928 – Mobster Antonio Lombardo is shot dead at the corner of Madison and Dearborn Streets, one of the busiest corners in the Loop, at 4:30 p.m.  One of two bodyguards accompanying Lombardo receives a fatal shot in the back while the other slips into the crowd and escapes.  Police on the scene chase the attackers, and crowds jamming the streets at the beginning of rush hour panic as “policemen and gunmen ran through crowds with menacing revolvers.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, September 8, 1928]  Lombardo and his two bodyguards had just left the offices of the Italo-American National Union at 8 South Dearborn Street, just three blocks from City Hall and walked 50 feet west on the south side of Madison Street when they are attacked.  A “crowd of thousands” had already gathered in the area, watching an airplane intended as a display at the Boston Store being hoisted to an upper floor window. Born in Sicily in 1891, Lombardo came to Chicago as a teenager, building a lucrative grocery business in his early adulthood while also working in various mob-influenced bootlegging operations until in 1925 he became president of the 15,000-member Unione Siciliana, an organization that “involved substantial political influence over an important voting bloc … [creating] the opportunity for the one who held that position to become a ‘fixer’ with connections to city hall.”  [chicagocrimescenes.blogspot]  A rival for the position, Joseph Aiello, became enraged at the slight and threw his allegiance to the North Side gang, plotting to avenge the perceived injustice by killing Lombardo.  Aiello did become president of the organization for about a year while Al Capone was in a Philadelphia prison.  Shortly after Capone returned to Chicago, Aiello, too, was gunned down. One man was arrested in the shooting of Lombardo – Frank Marco “a New York hoodlum and a known acquaintance of Aiello’s,” but before street justice found him, the law did, and “his bullet-riddled body was found on East Nineteenth Street in New York City” in February, 1930.  The top photo shows the crowd gathered around the murder scene while the second photo shows the plane that was being lifted into the Boston Store, an event that had attracted a massive crowd to the location of the assassination.
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 12:30 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

June 10, 1962 -- University of Illinois, a Connection to the Chicago Plan of 1909

uicarchive.library.uic.edu
June 10, 1962 – The Chicago Daily Tribune publishes an article on development that is beginning in an area where Congress Street intersects Halsted Street, making the point that this area is the same one that was featured over a half-century earlier in the Chicago Plan of 1909, the space that would relate to the city, according to the plan as “the Acropolis was to Athens, or the Forum to Rome, and what St. Mark’s Square is to Venice – the very embodiment of city life.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 10, 1962].  It was to be a “center of gravity, so to speak, of all radial arteries entering Chicago.”  There would be no great civic center at this location, no great civic building with a dome that could be “seen and felt by the people.”  Instead, beginning in the fall of 1962, construction would begin on the $60-million University of Illinois campus with a prediction that 20,000 students would be attending classes on the campus by 1969.  It was a site that had been chosen after a seven-year search, and according to the city’s planning commissioner, Ira Bach, “It was not until the Congress-Halsted site had finally been chosen for the campus that anyone realized that Burnham and Bennett were the original proponents of using this area for a great public purpose.” 

J. Bartholomew Photo
June 10, 1958 – The park board reaches a decision on a request from the Civil War Round Table that the 3,500-ton statue of General Ulysses M. Grant be moved from Lincoln Park to Grant Park.  Noting that it would cost $230,000 at a minimum to move the statue, the park board decides to take no action.  When the statue was placed in its current location in 1891 Grant Park did not exist, in name or in fact.  It was noted architect William Le Baron Jenney who suggested that “a monumental, Romanesque arched structure” [www.chicagoparkdistrict.com] carry the statue of Grant.  The massive base of rusticated stone was the work of a Cincinnati artist, Louis T. Rebisso, who also created the 18-foot tall equestrian statue of the great general and U. S. president.  Over 200,000 people attended the dedication ceremonies for the work in 1891.

June 10, 1949 – John T. McCutcheon, 79, a cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune, dies at his home at 1272 Green Bay Road in Lake Forest. McCutcheon began his career as a newspaper artist at the Chicago Record, later the Chicago Morning News, in 1889.  He worked in various iterations of that paper until he moved to the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1903.  The Online Comics Journal summarizes the jobs of newspaper artists such as McCutcheon at the turn of the century in this way, “Newspaper artists furnished all the illustrative material for the papers of the day.  The halftone engraving process for reproducing photographs had been perfected in 1886, but it was not adapted successfully to the big rotary presses until the New York Tribune did it in 1897.  Until the turn of the century, newspaper sketch artists were graphic reporters, covering all the events that photographers were to cover later.  McCutcheon drew pictures of everything.  He illustrated major news events, often working from sketches made on-the-spot. A typical day might include a trial in the morning, a sporting event or crime scene or a local catastrophe in the afternoon, and an art show opening or a flood or fire in the evening … he was more illustrator than cartoonist, and he also wrote occasional feature pieces and newsstories [sic].”  Without a doubt the most famous of the thousands and thousands of illustrations and cartoons that McCutcheon produced is “Injun Summer,” first published on September 20, 1907, in which a small boy and an older gentleman look over an Indiana corn field as shocks of corn turn into an Indian campground.



June 10, 1946 – A monument to Louis Pasteur, originally dedicated in a 1928 Grant Park ceremony, is rededicated at a new site in a park near Cook County Hospital at 1800 West Harrison Street.  Dr. R. B. Allen, the Dean of the University of Illinois Chicago colleges in the medical district, makes the presentation with the principal address given by Dr. Edwin P. Jordan, the Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The monument is officially handed over to Cook County during the ceremony, and the president of the Cook County Board, Clayton F. Smith, makes the acceptance speech.  The monument was originally erected as a result of a collaboration of civic leaders in 1926, led by Dr. Frank Billings, who had studied under Pasteur.  The park just to the north of the old Cook County Hospital is an appropriate setting for the county’s monument; its creator, Leon Hermant, who was awarded the French Légion d’honneur for the work, was also responsible for much of the architectural sculpture on the Cook County building on Clark Street between Washington Boulevard and Randolph Street.  On the rear of the sculpture’s base, a bronze plaque reads, “One doesn’t ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says, You suffer. This is enough for me. You belong to me and I shall help you. – Louis Pasteur”  When the sculpture was dedicated on October 27, 1928 the ceremony was so important that United States Vice-President Charles Dawes and the French Ambassador to the United States Paul Claudel. were present.  You would not guess that today, as the monument sits largely ignored and deteriorating in a small plot of green space, surrounded by expressway noise and sirens, with a helicopter landing pad between it and the old hospital. The top photo shows the statue at its dedication just west of the Field Museum in 1926.  The photo below that shows the monument as it exists today.

June 10, 1923 – The Chicago Tribune prints the following announcement, “On this June morning, which brings its diamond jubilee day, The Chicago Tribune takes the first step toward the creation of a monument which shall commemorate three-quarters of a century of achievement and shall be to this community and this newspaper an inspiration for the future.”  [Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1943]  With prizes totaling $100,000 the paper opens “to the architects of all countries" an opportunity to design “the most beautiful building in the modern world” to be constructed on North Michigan Avenue just west of the paper’s existing printing plant.  For a reasonably concise explanation of the competition and how it came out, you can head to this entry in Connecting the Windy City. 

The goals of the contest are four in number.  They include:

1.  The erection of a structure of enduring beauty which shall be at once a glory to journalism and to the city, and a model of practicality.  The Tribune seeks, in short, artistic nobility and business effectiveness.

2.  The providing of new quarters for the rapidly extending demands of a newspaper which, though it looks back this morning on 75 fruitful years, lives in an unparalleled present.

3.  The offering of financial encouragement so emphatic and so prompt that it will give fresh impetus to the great cause of commercial architecture in America.  Whether this encouragement will discover and develop new talent, or give added recognition to men whose fame is already established, the result of this competition will show.

4.  The addition to the assured architectural splendors of the new North Michigan boulevard of a building which will give the tone and tendency to a thoroughfare that soon will be the most impressive street in the western world.
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , ,

Saturday, January 4, 2020

January 4, 1967 -- International Amphitheater Arson Fire


January 4, 1967 –A fire is discovered in the south end of the International Amphitheater at Forty-Third and Halsted Streets at 9:00 p.m. with the initial alarm quickly upgraded to a 5-11 alarm fire with two specials.  It takes two hours to bring the blaze under control as 2,000 people stand on the east side of Halsted Street, watching the flames that shoot out of the building’s second story windows. The main section of the building is saved, but the 12-year-old addition known as Donovan Hall is extensively damaged.  Chief Investigator for the Fire Department arson unit, Edmund Voliquet, says the fire is “definitely an arson job.” [Chicago Tribune, January 5, 1967] The International Amphitheater opened at the end of 1934 after its predecessor burned to the ground in May of that year in one of the largest fires in the city’s history, a blaze that spread over eight city blocks and caused eight million dollars in damage.  The 1934 fire is pictured above.

January 4, 1946 – Brigadier General John T. Pierce, commanding general at Fort Sheridan, announces that the North Shore army post has processed 217,707 men and women during 1945, handling the transition from military to civilian life for individuals at the rate of 1,400 a day.  The post has handled 196,633 enlisted men, 21,756 officers and 9,328 members of the Women’s Army Corps.  The busiest month was October, during which 43,001 men and women were processed.  With a maximum amount of time for the handling of paperwork approaching no more than 48 hours the base expects to work at this rate seven days a week for at least several more months.

January 4, 1913 -- Two big events that would have major consequences in the way Chicago moved through the twentieth century. First, U. S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson approves the double-deck bridge on Michigan Avenue that would furnish a boulevard link between the north and south sides of the city. (See Photo for what the area looked like in 1915, five years before the bridge was completed.) AND Circuit Court Judge Lockwood Honoré enters an order confirming agreements that would give the city the riparian property between 53rd Street and 55th Street, leaving only two small tracts between Grant Park and Jackson Park to which the public had no clear title. Ride along this route on a bright, sunny summer's day and think about how huge this was.

January 4, 1898 – A committee of the Chicago Commercial Association and three members of the South Park Board of Commissioners spend two hours at the Union League Club, discussing the possibility of building a permanent exposition building on the Lake Front Park (today’s Grant Park) east of the Illinois Central right-of-way.   The bulk of the time was spent debating whether the South Park Board has the power to acquire title to the submerged land necessary for the structure.  One commissioner asserts that a contractor has already been lined up to do the work of filling in the necessary segment of the lake from the south side of Jackson Boulevard to Congress Street and eastward to the breakwater, a total area of 900 feet by 1,300 feet.  Another commissioner says, “I expect to see the permanent exposition building completed in the Lake Front Park before the end of 1899 and in time to enable Chicago to secure the big political conventions of the following year.  I believe such an enterprise could be made to pay a profit of $250,000 a year.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, January 5, 1898]  The idea, of course, never got beyond the discussion phase. It was doomed as soon as Montgomery Ward heard about it.  His response comes less than two weeks later as can be seen in this entry in Connecting the Windy City.  Yet, it is one more reminder of how close the city came to having a lakefront crowded with structures of all descriptions in what is now arguably the city’s finest attraction.  The site of the proposed exposition center is pictured above.
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , ,

Saturday, July 20, 2019

July 20, 1863 -- Palmisano Park, the Early Days

jbartholomewphoto
July 20, 1863 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports of a gruesome accident at the lime quarry of Stearns and Company, about a half-mile west of Halsted Street.  At about 5:00 p.m. a foreman, Michael Gaven, makes preparations to blast a section of wall, calling workers away from the area and setting the fuse.  After waiting nearly ten minutes, he moves to the site of the intended blast to figure out what has gone wrong.  Just as he reaches the area, the explosion comes, “tearing Mr. Gaven’s body into fragments.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 20, 1863].  The 45-year-old leaves a wife and three children.  The 27-acre site was used as a limestone quarry from 1833 to 1969 by the Illinois Stone and Lime Company, after which it was used as a landfill for clean construction waste from 1969 to 1974.  During its run as a limestone quarry, enough rock was removed to carry the space 380 feet below the street level.  After the dump site was shut down the City of Chicago and landscape architecture firm Site Design Group began planning an “environmentally-sustainable design … inspired by the natural history of the site.” [www.chicagoparkdistrict.com]. The landfill was capped with more than 40,000 square feet of clean topsoil, culminating in a 33-foot hill that offers spectacular views of the city to the northeast.  The new park was named after Henry Palmisano, the owner of a bait shop at 3130 South Canal Street, who passed away in 2005 during construction of the park.

July 20, 1984 – Strolling through Millennium Park today, it is difficult to imagine what the area was like before the transformation began.  Back in 1984 Cindy Mitchell, the president of Friends of the Park, had this to say about the area east of Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Monroe Streets, “This could be the premier spot of the downtown area, a real tourist attraction and a place for Loop workers to enjoy a lunch, but it needs a great deal of work and some creative thinking.  [Chicago Tribune, July 20, 1984] In a stroll through the garden with a Tribune reporter and photographer, Mitchell pointed out that “The flower beds have no flowers.  Benches are in need of paint.  Workmen were trying to start up the two large decorative and long-dry water fountains. When the water was turned on in the first fountain, a huge leak sprang through the deteriorated masonry.  The second fountain proved more of a challenge and refused to flow.”  That wasn’t the worst of it.  Grass along the Michigan Avenue sidewalk is nonexistent; what little grass there is in the “park” is parched.  Stairways are deteriorating at an alarming degree and most of the wiring in the park lights is so far gone that few of them work.  “Deeper in the park, the pigeons munch on piles of debris and share the lawn and benches with dozing derelicts, bag people and other itinerant-looking characters, some of whom frequent the back reaches of the park along the balustrade esplanade and dissuade visitors from using the area.” Commander Robert Casey of the First Police District says of the park that, although it is generally safe, “Office workers go there to smoke marijuana, and the bums sleep there during the night.  We run the wagons in there early in the morning to get rid of the rummies.” Mitchell asserts, ‘When you’ve got a problem, you can’t just throw up your hands and say, ‘It’s impossible.’ You have to say, ‘Let’s attack this problem. We can lick it.’ It takes some vision, some planning, some creative thinking. It takes determination. After all, Chicago’s motto is, ‘I will.’” Two decades later creative thinking paid off when Millennium Park opened and the city received a beautiful new front yard. The before and after pictures tell the story.


 July 20, 1881 – The Directors of the Board of Trade receive assurances that an ordinance vacating a portion of LaSalle Street between Jackson Boulevard and Van Buren Street will be valid and, based upon this information, vote to purchase the property at this location for $10,000.  The next step will be to organize a Building Association since Illinois law prohibits the Board from erecting a building exceeding $100,000 in valuation.  It is anticipated that the new building will cost at least $800,000, but the matter of the building itself is left for another day.  The Chicago Daily Tribune summarizes the results of the meeting in this way, “The Board of Trade purchases the property for $10,000.  This it leases to a Building Association for a term of fifty or one hundred years at a fixed rental.  The Building Association erects the edifice, and leases to the Board of Trade what may be required at a certain rental, yet to be determined upon.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 21, 1881] This would be a decision that would produce a huge impact on this area. According to Homer Hoyt in his One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago, "From 1881 to 1883 the value of land on Jackson, Van Buren, Wells, and LaSalle streets near the Board of Trade advanced from $200 and $400 a front foot to from $1,500 to $2,000 a front foot .. the total increase in the value of land and buildings within half a mile from the Board of Trade from 1881 to 1885 was estimated by current observers at from $20,000,000 to $40,000,000."  The first Board of Trade building to stand on this site is pictured above.  Barely visible above the front entrance at the base of the tower are the two statues of Agriculture and Industry that still stand in the plaza outside the present day Board of Trade building.
July 20, 1913 – The Chicago Daily Tribune’s art critic, Harriet Moore, writes an opinion piece in which she supports the City Club in its campaign against billboards.  Her argument begins with a single question, one she asked at a previous hearing in which a City Council committee was listening to testimony from both advocates and opponents of the signs, “Is it your opinion that beauty has neither health value nor financial value in a modern metropolis?”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, July 20, 1913]  She then answers the question with three separate responses:  that beauty is a health producer (“Hideous objects and harsh sounds, assaulting eyes and ears in a manner not to be escaped, destroy the harmony of life by introducing discords, and reduce the joy of life by insulting the senses with ugliness.”); that beauty is a commercial asset in any community (“Without beauty a city is merely a place to make money in and get away from.”); and, beauty is a great investment (“Why does the whole world flock to Italy, spending there millions every year?  Because, a few centuries ago a few hundred artists builded and carved and painted beautifully.”)  Moore concludes, “Chicago has the opportunity to become one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  The lake, the long stretch of park which is to border it, Michigan avenue widened to the river and adequately connected with the Lake Shore drive, the widened Twelfth street, the new railway terminals, the enlarged business district—these and other conditions and projects will create a beautiful metropolis.  Along with these large plans for civic beauty should go eternal vigilance against all kinds of defacement and in favor of all kinds of minor improvements.  The fight against billboards is an important detail of the general campaign.”
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , ,

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

June 18, 1895 -- Shufeldt Distillery Fends Off Night Assault

chicagology.com
June 18, 1895 --  A daring raid is made at 1:00 a.m. on deputies guarding the Shufeldt distillery at Chicago Avenue and the North Branch of the river.  With the distillery in receivership, 25 deputies have been guarding the grounds since June 15, split into two crews, a group of 16 guarding the plant during the daylight hours, and nine taking the night shift.  On this night a boat approaches the distillery in which a “tall man, plainly distinguishable by his white straw hat”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 17, 1895] orders the rest of the men in the boat to fire on the distillery.  The deputies standing watch return the fire as the boat heads for the west bank and its crew “beat a hasty retreat.”  The bridge tender at the Halsted bridge, Joseph Piskowski, states that he saw “a large scow” rowing toward the distillery at 12:52 a.m. and also observed shots being fired from the men in the boat.  A deckhand on the steamer Clyde, docked opposite the distillery is more specific.  He states six men in the boat fired a total of ten shots before running away across Halsted Street.  The Shufeldt distillery was a Chicago whiskey producer that was involved for over a decade in a battle with the Distillers and Cattle Feeders’ Trust, a combine of 64 distilleries led by the Great Western Distillery of Peoria.  The idea of the trust was a midwestern O.P.E.C. – to limit production in the industry in order to reduce competition and protect profits.  Shufeldt’s plant was partially destroyed by dynamite on December 10, 1888, and another attempt to blow up the plant was made in February, 1891.  Several attempts were also made to burn the place down. Shufeldt finally caved in and sold its operation to the whiskey trust in 1901.  Predictably, that was the end of the company.  Catalog merchant Montgomery Ward bought the property, and constructed his immense warehouse there in 1908. 


June 18, 1949 – Chicagoans get an eye-full and an ear-full as 40 Air Force planes buzz the city for 30 minutes at noon to open a public information campaign aimed at an estimated 76,000 people with syphilis in the city.  There are fireworks over Grant Park and skywriters spelling out “K.O.V.D.” over the Loop.  The Junior Association of Commerce in association with the Chicago Health Department and the Federal Public Health Service sponsors this kick-off of a 45-day campaign to “K.O.V.D.” – “Knock Out Venereal Disease.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1949] This is the local contribution to a national effort that will begin on June 30 and will include “billboards, signs, posters, and car cards” to “urge everyone to find out about syphilis and to obtain treatment, if necessary.”  Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, the President of the Board of Health, says, “We want every person in Chicago to know that untreated syphilis is dangerous … With an estimated 75,000 infected persons in the city, no one should take a chance.  Treatment has been reduced from 18 months to 8 days during the last six years, and a one day treatment looks promising. Untreated, the disease may lead to blindness, insanity, and death.”


June 18, 1968 – Executives from the International Business Machines Corporation announce plans to build the city’s third highest office building, rising 52 stories on the north side of the Chicago River between State Street and Wabash Avenue.  Architects involved in the project will include the offices of Mies van der Rohe and C. F. Murphy Associates.   I.B.M. vice-president H. W. Miller, Jr. says that the structure will be the largest office building that the company has ever constructed, and that the firm will occupy half of the building with an estimated 8,000 people working there when it is completed.  The company opened its first office in the city in 1916 with a dozen employees.  The new mid-century modern structure will bring some 4,500 I.B.M. employees scattered around the city in over a dozen locations into one location on the north side of the Chicago River.


June 18, 1931 – Here is a parade I would like to have seen . . . stretching down Michigan Avenue and State Street for more than two miles, with Illinois Governor Frank O. Lowden and the United States Assistant Secretary of Agriculture R. W. Dunlap on the reviewing stand, the parade seeks “to convince the public that meat prices are the lowest in years.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1931]  That’s right . . . It’s a Meat Parade!  There are “100 cowboys, 14 bands, several hundred farm boys and girls of Four-H clubs, 500 butchers with cleavers from the stockyards, floats designating various carcasses and cuts of dressed meat and comparative prices with a year ago, trucks of hogs, sheep and beef on the hoof and at the rear a drove of sheep ambling along the boulevard and into the loop”.  One of the truckloads of steers carries a banner proclaiming “Chicago buys more than $500,000,000 worth of live stock annually.”  A placard accompanying a float composed of a giant hot dog informs spectators that 5,000,000,000 hot dogs were consumed during 1930.  The Tribune photo above shows the drove of sheep being herded past the Michigan Avenue entrance to the Art Institute.
Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , ,

Sunday, May 19, 2019

May 19, 1934 -- Stockyard Fire Burns Eight City Blocks

chicagology.com
May 19, 1934 – A ferocious fire burns for more than four hours at the Union Stockyards on the city’s South Side.  Before it is brought under control it destroys eight city blocks – approximately 80 acres – and 1,200 people are injured.  Hundreds more lose their homes.  Nearly all of the buildings in an area bounded by Halsted, Emerald, Forty-First, and Forty-Second Street are destroyed, along with about a quarter of the pens and barns in the stockyards.  Over 2,200 firemen battle the flames in a fire that Mayor Edward Kelly says is “the worst fire Chicago has known since the great one of 1871.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 20, 1934].  Although firemen manage to save the great packing concern of Armour and Co., many landmarks in the stockyards are destroyed, including the International Amphitheater, the Stockyards Inn, the Saddle and Sirloin Club, Drovers National Bank, and the Livestock National Bank.  Six fire department pumpers are destroyed as they sit attached to hydrants.  It is believed that a carelessly tossed match or cigarette began the blaze, which quickly burned out of control due to winds of up to 60 miles-per-hour and a lack of rain during the spring.

May 19, 1862 –The first regular meeting of the newly elected Common Council is held, and the alderman get off to a big start.  Alderman Hoyt presents an ordinance regulating cows … “providing that no person should drive cows in herds to pasture, who lives east of Clark street on any street west of Clark street, and vice versa.”  [Chicago Tribune, May 20, 1862] From the looks of it this burg is becoming civilized, and Clark Street seems to be turning into a pretty big deal. 


 May 19, 1893 -- The battle for the city’s lakefront, which continues to this day, commences as a judge issues a restraining order that prevents the city from leasing any part of the Lake-Front Park “to a circus or to any party or parties for any purpose except as a public park.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 20, 1893] Although the judge says that he will allow the circus to continue in the park until the end of its run on June 5, he orders that all other parties leasing space in the park must get the heck out. Elbridge Haney, attorney for Montgomery Ward and Co., says, “The city authorities have rented the property at ridiculously low figures to circuses and other shows. This year they have rented it for two weeks for $5,000. Then the city has for years maintained a yard for storing paving blocks, tar wagons, stones, old lumber, and all sorts of rubbish, and lately it proposes to add another objectionable building for stabling sixty garbage horses and wagons. Last Monday it commenced the erection of such a building, and I compelled the city to quit work as soon as I discovered it.” The battle over the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts, pictured above, a plan that has now been abandoned, is just one more episode in a 125-year narrative about how best to use the city's lakefront.


 May 19, 1908 – A plaster of paris model goes on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, showing landscape architect Frderick Law Olmsted’s vision for Grant Park. The Chicago Daily Tribune reports rapturously, “From the sooty network of railroad tracks and the malodorous wastes of mud and garbage, there will rise, according to the model, a magnificent plaza, beautiful buildings, broad meadows, great trees, swimming pools, boat houses, brilliant flower gardens, impressive boulevards and winding drives.  Above all, Chicago will regain its heritage, the lake, which will be bordered by high wooded banks, surmounted by promenades and drives.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, May 20, 1908] The focal point of the plan will be the Field Columbian museum, situated in the center of the park on Michigan Avenue, dwarfing the Art Institute’s building just to the north.  The plan locates the Crerar library to the south of the Field Museum, balancing the Art Institute to the north.  Other amenities include a gymnasium, natatorium, “a monster playground,” boat houses, restaurants, rest houses and “airy piazzas.”  The chairman of the South Park Commissioners, Henry G. Foreman, says of the plan, “Chicago has become so used to a front yard filled with smoke, and cinders, and railroad tracks, and ugly freight cars, and mud, and refuse, that any plan to change it seems to many people a mere dream.  It is hard to wake people up to the fact that we not only have great opportunities, but that we are making the most of them, and soon will have adjoining the loop a great and beautiful park.”

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)