Showing posts with label Railroads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Railroads. Show all posts

Saturday, September 26, 2020

September 26, 1979 -- Rock Island Reaches the End of the Line

 

September 26, 1979 – The Interstate Commerce Commission rules that the bankrupt Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad will be taken over and operated by a management group selected from 14 other railroads.  Following the decision, a federal judge denies a request by the railroad to delay action on the commission’s decision.  Vice-President Walter Mondale announces the ICC decision, saying that restoration of service on the strike-bound Rock Island is critical to Midwest farmers who are in the middle of bringing in the annual soybean and corn crops.  The members of the striking United Transportation Union agree to go back to work after the ICC announces that they will be paid “prevailing industry wage rates”. [Chicago Tribune, September 27, 1979]  The ruling of the ICC marks the first time in U. S. history that the federal government has ordered a major railroad taken over because it is failing.  It is estimated that the federal government will be paying $80 to $90 million to operate the Rock Island for the ensuing eight months.  The railroad traces its history back all the way to 1847 when a charter was granted to its predecessor, the Rock Island and La Salle Railroad Company. At the height of its operation the railroad extended as far west as New Mexico, as far north as Minnesota and as far south as Louisiana and Texas.  Chicago was its eastern point of origin.  The railroad was ultimately liquidated in 1980 although most of The Rock’s principal routes still exist today under the control of other lines.

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September 26, 1953 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that work has begun on the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Fountain at Brookfield Zoo.  It will be located at the intersection of the zoo’s east-west and north-south pedestrian malls and is expected to be completed by May of 1954.  The fountain will shoot water over 60 feet into the air, and it will fall into a pool that is 215 feet in diameter.  Mrs. Clay Judson of Highland Park, the wife of the president of the Zoological society which operates the zoo, will sculpt four animals’ heads that will sit atop six-foot columns around the fountain, donating her services free of charge. The sculptures will celebrate Roosevelt’s achievements as a statesman, naturalist, hunter, and soldier.  The architectural firm of Olsen and Urbain and Russell Read design the fountain’s layout and mechanical systems.  The same firm will also design the Seven Seas Panorama at the zoo, which will open seven years later.  The cost of the fountain will come from a memorial fund in the name of the late president that is administered by the Ferguson Fund at the Art Institute of Chicago. The fountain was dedicated on May 14, 1954.


September 26, 1949 – Chicago learns that the architectural firm of Vitzhum and Burns has won a competition for the design of a church and Franciscan friary to be located at 108-116 West Madison Avenue, the site of the La Salle Theater.  The church, St. Peter’s, will replace one that has stood at 816 South Clark Street since just four years after the Great Fire in 1871.  The Franciscan Fathers made some darned good deals in the process of arranging for their new place of worship.  In 1942 the order bought the ten-story Woods Theater building from the Marshall Field estate for $600,000, property that it sold in June of 1949 for $1,200,000.  At the same time the order bought the site for the new church from the Marshall Field estate for $515,000.  The plans for the new building include a 1,600-seat auditorium, a chapel above the main auditorium that will seat 300, with the two upper floors serving as the friary.  Some heavy hitters participated in the competition, including Edo J. Belli, Nairne W. Fischer, Hermann J. Gaul, Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, Rapp and Rapp, and Shaw, Metz and Dolio.  Due to the scarcity of building materials in the post-war years it took awhile to finish the new St. Peter’s, but the church finally opened in 1955.


September 26, 1925 – Three construction workers die and two others are seriously injured as a steel concrete scoop breaks away from the fourteenth floor of the Metropolitan Building at Randolph and La Salle Streets.  The three men who die are all working on scaffolds below the scoop.  Two of three workers on the highest of the two scaffolds manage to hang on and survive as the scoop kills the third man on the platform, suspended 25 feet below it.  The crash occurs when hundreds of workers are flooding the Loop on their way to work. The intersections are jammed with people, and police reserves are summoned to clear enough room to permit the dead and the injured to be removed from the area.  The Metropolitan Building as it appears today is shown above.
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Monday, March 2, 2020

March 2, 1872 -- Chicago Tribune Editorial: Let the Railroads Have the Lakefront

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March 2, 1872 – In an editorial the Chicago Tribune proclaims that a resolution put forth by the Committee of the Judiciary of the Common Council “in favor of letting the three railroads have the three lake-front squares lying east of Michigan avenue and north of Monroe street for depot purposes” is “the unanimous wish of the people of the city.”  [Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1872]  The editorial points out that since Michigan Avenue south of Monroe Street “is to be inevitably devoted to business purposes” the railroad’s acquisition of the three city blocks from Randolph to Monroe “will increase, by a large percentage, the value of all the lake-front property in the vicinity.”  The appropriate disposition of the area has been tied up in federal court in a dispute over the rightful ownership of the property.  The area was originally part of land that the federal government set aside for the purpose of building a canal from Lake Michigan to the interior waters of the state and was designated as an area to be kept open, clear and free of buildings.  In the 1870’s, though, it was a mess, with an Illinois Central Railroad trestle running north and south and a heavily polluted body of water lying between the trestle and Michigan Avenue.  There was no thought of it ever amounting to much of anything … certainly no thought that it would become the world-renowned urban park that it is today.  At the time of the editorial, in fact, the city was seriously entertaining the idea of selling the three blocks to the railroad for $800,000 (about $18,000,000 in 2020 dollars).  Fortunately, that scheme fell through in the mid-1870’s, but the feeling in the city was captured in the final section of the editorial, which stated, “It is exceedingly desirable that the muddle which has existed in regard to the title to these squares should be thus finally disposed of, and that the squares themselves should be applied to a purpose as advantageous to the people of the city, and to the interests of commerce, as to railroads.”  The above photo shows Michigan Avenue in the 1870's from approximately the location of today's Congress Street.  Note the railroad trestle, running diagonally across the top right corner of the photo and the body of water covering what today is the Art Institute, Grant Park and Millennium Park between Michigan Avenue and the trestle.


 March 2, 2014 – Joining a crowd of several thousand at the edge of an icy Lake Michigan to raise money for Special Olympics Chicago, Jimmy Fallon, clad in a suit and tie, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, wearing a Chicago Public Library tee-shirt and shorts, take to the water in the annual Polar Plunge.  An hour before the event the temperature stands at ten degrees, and Chicago firefighters in wetsuits head into the lake to clear ice from the area before the event begins.  During the preceding summer the Mayor had promised that if the city’s children read two million books as part of the Chicago Public Library program called “Rahm’s Readers,” he would participate in the plunge.  When he heard that Fallon wanted him to appear on the show that the late-night host had taken over from Jay Leno in February, Emanuel made his appearance part of a deal that required Fallon to head for the lake as well.  “If you hear a scream like a little girl’s … know that Jimmy Fallon is swimming in Lake Michigan,” the comedian tells the crowd before running into the icy water. [talkingpointsmemo.com] The dip doesn’t last long; it was in and out for Fallon who emerges from the 32-degree water to the sound of cheers and music from a group of bagpipers, standing calf-deep in the water in yellow boots and kilts.

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March 2, 1971 – About 1,500 students at Lane Technical High School walk out of classes and march over seven miles to the Loop to protest the school’s plans to admit girls in the next school year.  At Board of Education headquarters at 228 North La Salle Street the young men ask for a meeting with school board members and, while waiting for an answer, chant “We Don’t Want No Girls at Lane”. [Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1971]  A spokesman for Lane Tech says that the students “… don’t want their physical education program interfered with by girls who will take over one of the school’s three gyms – and the newest one, at that.  New showers will have to be installed, as well as hair dryers, and the boys are having a fit.”  A thousand students walk out of the buildings when the first period of the day concludes at 9:00 a.m.  A fire alarm is pulled two minutes later, and the remainder of the students leave the building.  The majority of the 5,500 students return to class once the fire department determines the alarm to be false, but a significant number begin their trek along Addison Street to Clark on the way downtown.  Nine representatives of the group do manage to meet with the assistant to the deputy superintendent of schools, Robert Zamzow, who says "It was a good meeting.  There will be no difficulties.  These are gentlemen.”


Alderman Archibald Carey
March 2, 1949 – Mayor Martin H. Kennelly reads an eight-page statement to the city council in which he rips a proposed ordinance that would ban racial and religious discrimination in the selection of tenants for proposed public housing projects. The projects are scheduled to be developed by a land clearance commission that would “acquire and clear slum areas and resell the land at a loss to private investors for housing development.”  [Chicago Tribune, March 3, 1949] “Let those people speak who live in the slums,” Kennelly says.  “Those are the people I am trying to benefit and to help, and I feel that they will be helped if we can provide decent, comfortable homes instead of the slums where they are now forced to live.”   The ordinance, introduced by Third Ward Alderman Archibald Carey, proposes that all housing built on land that the Chicago Housing Authority or the Chicago Land Clearance Commission conveyed to private interests will be made available for ownership or occupancy without discrimination or segregation of any kind.  Detractors, including the mayor, decry the ordinance, suggesting that it will dissuade private interests from participating in the project.   After Kennelly finishes his address, the City Council goes on to defeat the Carey ordinance by a vote of 31 to 13.  Alderman Carey is the subject of the above photo.


 March 2, 1900 -- Just two months after the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, the massive project that was to solve all of the city's sewage problems is opened, marine insurance men and the managers of the city's tug boat lines make a trip up the river, concluding that unless something radical is done the river will not be navigable if any current is running in it. One participant observed, "With a current I do not see how traffic of big boats can be carried on it at all. The boats will be driven away from Chicago. It is not a discrimination against marine men, for they have plenty to do elsewhere, but it will injure shipping interests." As if to prove the point the schooner Armenia grounds itself on the Washington Street tunnel that afternoon.

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Friday, February 28, 2020

February 28, 1909 -- Chicago and North Western Railroad Terminal Begins Its Rise

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February 28, 1909 – The Chicago Daily Tribune prints a feature article on the construction of the new terminal for the Chicago and North Western Railroad on the west bank of the river at Madison Street, a project about which the paper crows, “No other single building operation in Chicago has approached the magnitude of this new station …”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 28, 1909]  A total of 172 caissons, four to eight feet in diameter, will support the building that will stretch a block wide and a quarter-mile long, covering 13 acres.  All but 72 of those caissons will go down to bedrock, 115 feet below the surface.  The superintendent of construction for the Fuller Construction Company says, “Things went all right for a hundred feet down.  Then without warning we ran into sand … Ordinarily we strike sand ‘pockets’ under the Chicago downtown district, but they are small pockets and never at such a depth as we’ve found over here.  This sand deposit … is unusually large and at unheard of depth.”  Every caisson is dug by hand with one man in a caisson working for eight hours with a 15-minute lunch break.  The work goes on around the clock.  Each caisson digger begins with a pick, spade and hoe, mucking out a hole until it reaches a depth of five or six feet at which point carpenters drop into it to install lumber “after the manner of barrel staves” after which an iron ring is placed to secure the wall.  Then the digger starts again, digging another five or six feet at which point the carpenters repeat the process of securing the caisson.  The work continues down to about 100 feet at which point an air lock must be installed to protect the digger as he digs toward bedrock. The average wage for workers is around $2.40 a day. It will take 10,000 wagon loads to carry away the mud, clay and sand from the caissons.  At the foot of Fulton Street, four blocks to the north, the debris is loaded on ships that carry it out into the lake where it will be dumped.  The new terminal, finished in 1911, is shown above.
  

 February 28, 1970 – Ten thousand demonstrators line both sides of State Street opposite the Palmer House, jeering French President Georges Pompidou, as he arrives to address a group at a dinner sponsored by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the Alliance Francaise. The protestors voice loud objections to France’s recent announcement that it will sell 100 Mirage jets to Libya.  Among the protestors is U. S. Representative Roman Pucinski who says he considers the sale of the jets “a unilateral escalation of the Mideast conflict.” [Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1970] Chants of  “Poo, Poo, Pompidou,” “France Oui, Pompidou No” reverberate over bullhorns as protest marshals work hard to keep crowds from spilling into the street.  Mayor Daley’s special events director, Colonel Jack Reilly, praises the orderly protest, saying, “If the city had it this easy in all demonstrations it would be easy.”  As the French delegation leaves from O’Hare on the following day, an official says that the Chicago police “’either thru incompetence or design,’ relaxed security to the point where it was impossible for Pompidou to avoid embarrassment.”  [Chicago Tribune, March 2, 1970] At the airport Pompidou himself, speaking in French, says that the protestors “placed a stain on the face of America” and that “the immense majority of the Chicago population … is ashamed of it all.” The French President is especially upset about an incident that occurred inside the lobby of the Palmer House in which six individuals jumped in front of him and his wife and shouted, “Shame, shame on you!”  An official says, “The police assured us this would not happen. They said the lobby would be clear.  Yet there were these people, accosting the president of France on an official visit.  The French delegation cannot understand how this was permitted to happen.  Tempers are running very high.”

February 28, 1955 – The Chicago Housing Authority awards a $7,998,700 contract to Corbeita Construction Company for the first stage of an addition to the Frances Cabrini public housing project just north of Chicago Avenue and east of Larabee.  The contract calls for eight high-rise buildings with 859 apartments along with a heating and service building.  The chairman of the C.H.A., John R. Fugard, states that a contract will be let later in the year for seven more buildings with 1,066 apartments.   The work at Cabrini will be just one part of the biggest program of public housing construction in the city’s history.  It is anticipated in 1955 the C.H.A. will break ground at six different sites for 4,500 apartments.  All of the projects, which were approved in 1949, will be subsidized by the federal government and will be rented to low income families.

February 28, 1939 -- The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that owner P. K. Wrigley has taken matters into his own hands "in moving the spring flair of Diz (Dizzy Dean) as problem child." When Wrigley's personal representative comes upon the Cub pitcher "pitching full blast at the full pitching distance [he] broke up the display in the name of the Cub owner, following full instructions from the Chicago throne room." [Chicago Daily Tribune, March 1, 1939] Dean, a pitching phenom for the St. Louis Cardinals between 1933 and 1937, was injured by a line drive in the 1937 All-Star game. In 1938 Wrigley paid $185,000 to put the compromised pitcher on the Cubs roster. In September of that year, in what he called the greatest game of his career, Dean pitched the second game of a series with the Pittsburgh Pirates, winning 2-1, pulling the Cubs within a half-game of the league leading Pirates, a team from which the Cubs would wrest the National League championship the next day. Dean pitched Game Two of the World Series, pitching admirably until he gave up a two-run homer to Joe DiMaggio in the top of the ninth, ultimately losing 6-3. He struggled along with the Cubs until 1941 when he retired. Wrigley's interest in protecting his investment was certainly understandable, but ultimately it would not matter.

February 28, 1903 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that a new bridge across the river at State street has been opened to decidedly negative reviews.  H. D. Dean, a construction engineer from Benton Harbor, Michigan, in town to provide his expertise to a subway subcommittee, says that the new bridge “is not wide enough by fifty feet.  It was a mistake to build so narrow a bridge there on account of the awkward bend in the river at that point.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, March 1, 1903] Present at the dedication of the new bridge a day earlier are members of the South Water and State Street Business Men’s association “who have seen their business dwindle much more rapidly than the bridge grew during the last year.” Mrs. Adelaide Smedberg of 184 North State Street breaks a bottle of wine on the bridge. The Tribune explains how Smedberg ended up with the bottle in her hand, noting that association president J. T. Keane “corked his eloquence, chased the woman, explained to her that she was the first to cross the river, and took her back to break the bottle of wine. “I christen thee State street,’ said Mrs. Smedberg, and the dedicators hurried away to a banquet at which there was more oratory and spilling of wine."  On May 29, 1949 a new bridge was dedicated at State Street in a far more dignified ceremony, one that honored the men from the Chicago area who fought and died in the battle of Bataan and Corregidor and who suffered through the “death march” that followed that battle.  The bridge closest to the bottom of the photo is the 1903 bridge.  
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Sunday, October 6, 2019

October 6, 1906 -- Chicago and North Western Announces New Station


October 6, 1906 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that W. A. Gardner, the Vice-President of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, has announced the company will build a new railroad station between Madison, Lake, Canal and Clinton Streets.  The paper says that the new station “will take its place among the great transportation centers of the world.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 6, 1906] With two-thirds of the property for the new station already in hand and the remainder in negotiation, it is anticipated that construction will begin in spring of 1907.  The railroad has spent $2,000,000 on the property, in one of the oldest sections in the city with many structures dating from just after the Chicago fire in 1871.  Another $2,000,000 to $3,000,000 will still be spent on the remainder of the property with between $12,000,000 and $15,000,000 needed to build the great station itself.  The plans, drawn up the architectural office of Frost and Granger, will “bring to the patrons of the railroad the conveniences and the facilities which they have been without and always would be without on the present Wells Street site.”  The station on Wells Street north of the river was built in 1882 when the railroad had only four dozen or so trains arriving in or leaving the city, carrying about 4,000 people a day.  In 1906 the road carried 45,000 passengers a day or 24,000,000 people a year.  A singular advantage of the new station will be its location on the west side of the river, which means that trains will no longer be delayed by the raising of bridges and passengers will be able to access the station from five different streets, rather than having Wells Street and the bridge across the river as the only path to the trains.

October 6, 1977 – Four city groups – the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council, Friends of the Parks, the Open Lands Project, and the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects – come together to propose a large park, featuring a 10,000-seat outdoor music venue, to be located in a new 20-acre lot east of Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Monroe Streets.  Part of the park, it is anticipated, will be built over the Illinois Central commuter tracks with another section over the extension of Columbus Drive under construction at the time.  The proposal for this “Lakefront Gardens for the Performing Arts” contradicts a proposal that the Chicago Park District has made for a new performance space in Butler Field to replace the existing Petrillo band shell.  The photo above shows Grant Park in 1979 close to where Jaume Plenza's Crown Fountain stands today.


October 6, 1981 –The fireboat Fred A. Busse makes its way down the Chicago River for the last time, headed for a south side dry dock where it will be retired. When the boat came to Chicago in 1937 from Bay City, Michigan where it was built, it was hailed as the largest fireboat in existence.  The boat, 92-feet long and weighing 157 tons, continually proved itself over the years. Just two years after the Fred A. Busse came to the city, its crew pumped 32.5 million gallons of river water for over 50 hours as it fought the four-million-dollar fire at the Rosenbaum-Norris grain elevator on the South Branch. The Fred A. Busse still exists. In fact, you can actually ride the boat. After a stint in Door County, Wisconsin the Fred A. Busse returned to Chicago this summer, where you can book yourself a nice cocktail cruise on an authentic part of Chicago history.  The top photo shows the fireboat at the Rosenbaum-Norris fire.  Below that is the Fred A. Busse in its latest incarnation.
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