Connecting the Windy City

Friday, August 14, 2020

August 14, 1972-- Bridgeview Disaster Narrowly Averted

Chicago Tribune photo

August 14, 1972 – During the evening rush hour, the temperature in the Chicago area drops quickly from 94 degrees to 71 as winds from the west at over 60 miles-per-hour kick up.  As the dark storm clouds move quickly toward the city, 800 people in Bridgeview are gathered in a circus tent, watching the elephant act of the Rudi Brothers Circus. Fortunately, officials at the site spot the storm moving toward them, and order the tent cleared before winds topple four 50-foot poles onto the empty bleachers, covering the area with torn and twisted canvas.  Bernard Mendelson, one of the managers of the circus, says, “When you’ve been around a circus as long as I have, you develop a sixth sense about these things.  I told [my partner] Rudy, ‘Get those people out now, right now.’”  [Chicago Tribune, August 15, 1972]  The ringmaster, Charles Cox, is alerted and announces, “Ladies and gentlemen there’s a little wind blowing up.  Would you please leave the tent by the front entrance because the elephants will be going out the other way.  Please walk, don’t run.”  As people file out, the musicians continue to play as the tent begins to shudder in the wind.  Circus performers spend most of the night, clearing the debris so that the circus, sponsored by the Confederation of Police as a fund-raiser for drug abuse information programs and a legal defense fund for its members, can go on the following day in an improvised setting.

August 14, 1960 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that a building at 739 North State Street has been raised, and the rubble is made up of the remains of the flower shop that Dion O’Banion ran, a place “where murders, boot-legging, and hi-jackings were planned amidst flowering plants and the scent of roses.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 14, 1960] Ironically, at the time “the same building that once served as the headquarters of a bloody band of killers during the guzzling decade of the twentieth century” was most recently used as a meeting place for the Young People’s club of Holy Name Cathedral.  In April of 2017 it was disclosed that JDL Development had agreed to pay $110 million to the Archdiocese of Chicago for the 90,000 square-foot property three blocks west of North Michigan Avenue.  On January 18, 2018 the Chicago Plan Commission approved a project to build two towers on the site, the taller of which will be the eighth Chicago "supertall" building at 1,011 feet. The killing of Dion O’Banion in the shop in 1924 touched off a gang war that lasted for five years, pitting the North Side gang of O’Banion against Al Capone’s gang from the South Side.  The black and white photo shows the flower shop.  The second photo shows the future of the site -- it will hold the sixth tallest building in the city, One Chicago Square.

August 14, 1936 –Nathan Goldblatt signs a contract for the purchase of the residence built by Benjamin Marshall in Wilmette on Sheridan Road opposite the Baha’i Temple. It is reported that Marshall, the architect who designed the Drake Hotel, the South Shore Country Club and the Blackstone Theater and a host of other impressive buildings, had reportedly spent over a million dollars on the home and its furnishings.  The Spanish-influenced home commanded a view of Lake Michigan … the Sheridan Shores Yacht Club used the home’s basement as its clubhouse. Marshall’s work studio had a space for 45 draftsmen.  The home had a 50-foot-high, 75-by-100-foot tropical garden with palm and banana trees. The home’s swimming pool was lined with turquoise tiles from Algiers. Goldblatt reportedly paid $60,000 for the home but did not stay there long, and in 1950 Wilmette had the home razed.  Only the wrought-iron gates remain on the property, which is today owned by the Baha’i Temple.

August 14, 1933 – Joseph Hastings, a Chicago policeman married for only four months, is shot to death during a gun battle with two thieves who rob a city office on Navy Pier.  He is the eleventh policeman to die in the line of duty during 1933.  The money that is stolen was intended for men on emergency relief who were employed by the city to do work at the pier.  Thomas B. Rawls, an official of the West Englewood Currency exchange, used it to cash checks from the workers at a fee of 15 cents a check.  It is unclear why a representative of a private enterprise is cashing checks in an office of the city street department.  Hastings, hearing a shot fired, runs into a second floor office at the west end of the pier. One of the dozen clerks in the office, Charles Eddy, outlines the ensuing events, “Hastings came in the door with his revolver drawn . . . The man at the side wall opened fire.  The policeman fell to the floor and fired two shots in return.  The robbers ran to the door.  Hastings got up, and one of the robbers turned and shot him as he rose.  The robber then grabbed Hastings’ gun and ran out. . .” [Chicago Daily Tribune, August 13, 1933]  Morris Cohen a barber, is captured 30 minutes later at 1331 North Clark Street.  His two companions remain on the lam.  The above photo depicts Navy Pier as it appeared in 1933.

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 12:30 AM 2 comments

Labels: 1972, Chicago Event, Weather Events

Sunday, February 2, 2020

February 2, 1927 -- Lake Shore Drive Closed by Massive Snowstorm, 900 Cars Abandoned

February 2, 2011 -- It's hard to believe that it has been nine years! On this day in 2011 Chicagoans were watching the end of the world as it unfolded. Beginning during rush hour the evening before, a brutal winter storm brought 70 m.p.h winds to the lakefront, along with thunder, lightning, and massive waves. Some snow drifts reached ten feet. Schools were cancelled for the first time in 12 years, and Lake Shore Drive was completely shut down with at least 900 cars and buses stuck there overnight and hundreds of motorists and bus riders afraid to abandon their vehicles in near white-out conditions. In excess of 19 inches of snow fell from late January 31 through February 2, the third largest storm in the city's recorded weather history.

February 2, 1954 – Here is something Daniel Burnham and William H. Bennett did not have in mind when they completed the Chicago Plan of 1909 for the Commercial Club of Chicago.  On this date in 1954 the Cook County Board approves plans to build a rocket storage depot on a 20-acre plot that would be set aside as part of a 600-acre forest preserve purchase on the western edge of Busse Woods.  The 20 acres of farmland are located south of Higgins Road and west of Salt Creek.  The general superintendent of the forest preserve system, Charles G. Sauers, says that there is only one farmhouse in the area, and that it will be vacated since U. S. Air Force requirements dictate that there must be no human habitation within 2,100 feet of the proposed depot.  Colonel Harry Woodbury of the Army Corps of Engineers says that there is little danger of an explosion at the site since the rockets will not receive fuses until they are brought to O’Hare.

February 2, 1914 – United States Secretary of War Lindley Miller Garrison approves the Mann Bill, allowing Chicago to carry out Daniel Burnham’s plan for the improvement of the lakefront.  Garrison says, “The bill appears to make such ample provision for protection of present and future navigation that I know of no objection to its favorable consideration by congress so far as those interests are concerned.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 3, 1914] Garrison issues one proviso with the approval – plans for developing the lakefront as parkland must not interfere with any potential the area has for supporting an outer harbor when the time comes to begin such a project, one that at this point in the city’s history seems a necessity.  Garrison states, “A lake front harbor to be of proper availability must be of large area, with good connections to all railroad lines entering the city, and with free and easy communication behind extensive breakwater protections for barge and tug travel to and from Chicago and Calumet rivers and adjoining waterways.”  As a result of this stipulation the park cannot be expanded by filling in the lake between Grant Park and Fifty-First Street and from Ninety-Fifth Street to the south of Calumet Park. Garrison’s approval concludes, “It is understood that the present bill is intended to safeguard fully, as is thought by this office not only desirable but necessary, the future interests of navigation, so that the area in question may be readily available for harbor purposes when the time of need arrives.  If this be done there seems to be no serious objection to the temporary use of the submerged area for other purposes.”  The above photo shows the lakefront in the first decade of the twentieth century from just south of the Chicago River to Twelfth Street.

s3.amazonnews.com

February 2, 1861 – Thomas B. Bryan, a wealthy Chicago businessman, along with other investors that include the city’s first mayor, Willliam B. Ogden, obtains the charter for a new cemetery to be developed by Bryan’s Graceland Cemetery Company.  Cathy Jean Maloney writes of Bryan’s choice for the 120-acre cemetery, “Graceland’s location was ideal: readily accessible from Green Bay Road (now Clark Street) and later the Chicago and Evanston Railroad, yet far enough removed from the city to avoid health and sanitation issues. The company chose the high ridge area along what is now Clark Street, which once was an old Indian trail.  The site offered good drainage with its strong drop-off to the east and slightly to the west.  In the sandy soil here, plants thrive better than in Chicago’s typical clay soil.”  [Maloney, Cathy Jean. Chicago Gardens:  The Early History.  University of Chicago Press, 2008]  Today Graceland is operated by the Trustees of the Graceland Cemetery Improvement Fund and is open to the public.  The Graceland Cemetery website states, "Graceland Cemetery is the final resting place to many prominent Chicago figures, including athletes, politicians, industrialists and many of the finest architects of the last century ... Graceland both serves as a glimpse into the past and a beautiful place for the future." [Gracelandcemetery.org]

Posted by Chicago Old and New at 2:30 AM 1 comments

Labels: 2011, Highways, Lake Shore Drive, Transportation, Weather Events

Friday, October 11, 2019

October 11, 1954 -- Rainfall Eclipses 70-Year-Old Record

pubs.usgs.gov

October 11, 1954 – The rain finally stops.  On October 9, 1954 rain begins to move into the Chicagoland area, and from that Saturday afternoon until Monday morning, the storms continue, bringing 6.21 inches of rain, surpassing a record that has stood for nearly 70 years.  The Chicago Sanitary District orders the locks at the mouth of the river opened at 6:25 p.m. on October 10 and “A gigantic swell of water roared into the lake as the river for a time returned to the original direction of its flow before it had been reversed by canals to the Illinois waterway.  Water flows into the counterweight pits of most of the downtown bridges, immobilizing them, and traffic on the river is halted.  The new Edens Highway is closed, and the Racine Avenue pumping station is put out of commission with four feet of water on its main floor.  Before the locks are opened the Chicago River rises five feet, overflowing in several locations, including the area around Union Station where stormwater pours into the basement of the main post office, where it short-circuits pumps that could have helped keep the water level lower.  Flowing through drains, the floods enter two sub-basements of the Chicago Daily News building, today’s Two Riverside Plaza, where 42 feet of water eventually collects, destroying paper stock valued at a quarter million dollars and shorting out electrical circuits to the paper’s pressroom.  The Chicago Tribune prints seven editions of the Chicago Daily News while fire boats and several fire engines pump the water out of the basements.  the above photo shows the railroad yard near Van Buren Street under water that has also flooded the counterweight pits of the bridge.

October 11, 1926 – Machine guns spread a wave of death across the street from Holy Name Cathedral as two mobsters are killed and three others are wounded.  The sniper targets his victims from the front room of a second-floor apartment at 740 North State Street, a building next door to William F. Schofield’s florist shop, about which you can find more information in this entry at Connecting the Windy City.  One of the men killed is Earl “Hymie” Weiss, a member of the North Side Gang that controlled bootlegging and other illegal activity on the north side of the city, a rival to a gang controlled by Al Capone.  Also killed is Patrick Murray, a known bootlegger.  Weiss holds in his pocket a list of all the men called for jury duty in the trial of Joe Sallis, a south side gang leader who is charged with the murder of another mob captain.  Weiss also has $5,300 in walking-around money on his person.  This is the fifth in a series of gang-related murders in the space of two years, beginning with the murder of mob boss Dean O’Banion in the florist shop on Sate Street.  Police search the rented room from which the shots were fired and find 35 empty .45 caliber shells near the window and “a hundred or more” cigarette butts, “indicating a long period of watchful waiting.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 13, 1926] The Chicago Chief of Police says, “We knew it was coming sooner or later.  And it isn’t over.  I fully expect that there will be a reprisal, then a counter reprisal and so on. These beer feuds go in an eternal vicious cycle. I don’t want to encourage the business, but if somebody has to be killed, it’s a good thing the gangsters are murdering themselves off.  It saves trouble for the police.”

October 11, 1969 – A march through the Loop by 300 members of the Students for a Democratic Society breaks bad as police face off against “demonstrators, using tire chains, clubs, railroad flares, and their fists smashed windows and fought a running battle … in the three-block area from La Salle street to State street.” [Chicago Tribune, October 12, 1969] When things finally wind down 105 demonstrators are under arrest, 27 police officers have been injured and two corporation counsels are hurt with one of them, Richard Elrod, suffering permanent paralysis when he attempts to tackle a demonstrator fleeing police. The march is supposed to proceed down La Salle Street to Jackson Boulevard, but it breaks apart a half-mile north at Madison Street and marchers head east, smashing windows in 15 buildings as they run.  After the Loop is cleared, Governor Richard Ogilvie calls 300 Illinois national guardsmen into the area, but by 7:00 p.m., concluding that the trouble is at an end, he releases all 2,600 guardsmen on alert in the city since they had been summoned earlier in the week.

October 11, 1918 – A city commission passes a resolution that all public dancing must be stopped in order to check the influenza-pneumonia epidemic.  Dr. C. St. Clair Drake, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, says, “The order will take effect at once.”  [Chicago Daily Tribune, October 12, 1913]  The commission also adopts a resolution that “attendance at all funerals, contagious disease or otherwise, shall be restricted to the immediate relatives, close friends and necessary attendants.”  In the 24 hours before the commission adopts its resolutions 124 people in the city have died of influenza and 89 from pneumonia.   The commission orders the cancelling of all dances as a necessary step “because of the close contact of the dancers, the exercise of the dance and the frequent chilling of the body that is apt to follow.”  The 1918 pandemic, believed to have begun in a French hospital processing soldiers wounded in the war, led to the deaths of between 50 and 100 million worldwide.  According to the digital encyclopedia at http://www.influenzaarchive.org  “Between the start of Chicago’s epidemic on September 21 and the removal of restrictions on November 16, the Windy City experienced a staggering 38,000 cases of influenza and 13,000 cases of pneumonia . . . Yet, despite these numbers, Chicago actually did fairly well for a city of its size.  In fact, with a population of 2.7 million, Chicago’s epidemic death rate for the period was only 373 out of 100,000, not much worse than much its long-time rival St. Louis.”

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Labels: 1954, Chicago RIver, Lake Michigan, Weather Events

Saturday, March 4, 2017

March 4, 1961 -- F2 Tornado Rips through South Side

March 4, 1961 – An F2 tornado strikes the city’s south side at around 5:00 p.m.  It develops over Ninety-First Street and Hoyne and carves out a corridor of destruction as it moves northeast across the city until it dies out over the lake off Sixty-Eighth Street.  One person is killed and another 115 people are injured as over 3,000 homes are damaged or completely destroyed.  The greatest number of injuries occur at the Melody Lane Drive-In at 1425 West Eighty-Seventh Street where about 25 customers and 20 employees are dining and working.  One of the restaurant’s owners says that “the whole building began to shiver, the walls started crumbling, and the roof came off.”  [Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1961] At the house next door a family with eight children huddle in the basement as the structure is lifted off its foundation and moved several feet.  Miraculously, no one is injured there.  A resident at 8808 Justine Avenue says, “My brother and I saw cars being tossed around like toothpicks.  They were just rolling around.  It only lasted a few minutes.  Then we went outside and it was horrible.”

March 4, 1953 -- Demolition begins on the mansion once occupied by Harold and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, a once-grand residence at the corner of Oak Street and Bellevue Place. Edith McCormick was the fourth daughter of John D. Rockefeller, who in 1895 married Henry Fowler McCormick, the son of the mechanical reaper magnate, Cyrus McCormick. She divorced him in 1926 and spent much of her last years in the 41-room mansion on Lake Shore Drive until she died in 1932. She is buried in Graceland Cemetery. The photos above show the mansion as it was and the residential tower that replaced it -- what is now One Thousand Plaza.

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Labels: 1961, Chicago Event, Weather Events